Can you define a harm suffered by the people that the FTC represents? What about the EU beneficiaries of the GDPR? This is sincere, it is meant to advance to a real and interesting conversation.
I think privacy violations are a harm in themselves, but you seem to have already dismissed this issue, so I'll move on. How about behavioral manipulation via microtargeting, economic harm via price discrimination, reselling of the data via monetization to unscrupulous aggregators or third parties, general security reduction (data and metadata sets could be used for APT, etc), or the chilling effect of being tracked all the time in this way?
> How about behavioral manipulation via microtargeting...
I don't know. Ads are meant to convince you to buy something. Are they "behavioral manipulation?" Are all ads harmful?
> ...economic harm via price discrimination...
Should all price discrimination be "illegal?" This is interesting because it makes sense for the FTC and for anti-trust regulators to worry about consumer prices. Price discrimination in software services - the thing I know about - helps the average consumer, because it gets richer people to pay more and subsidize the poor.
> reselling of the data via monetization to unscrupulous aggregators or third parties
"Unscrupulous" is doing a lot of work here.
> ...general security reduction...
Gmail and Chrome being free ad subsidized has done a lot more for end user security than anything else. Do you want security to be only for the rich? It really depends how you imagine software works. I don't know what APT stands for.
> chilling effect of being tracked all the time in this way?
Who is chilled?
I guess talk about some specific examples. They would be really interesting.
I agree. Let me tell you about what just happened to me.
After a very public burnout and spiral, a friend rescued me and I took a part time gig helping a credit card processing company.
About 2 months ago, the owner needed something done while I was out, and got their uber driver to send an email. They emailed the entire customer database, including bank accounts, socials, names, addresses, finance data, to a single customer.
When I found out, (was kept hidden from me for 11 days) I said "This is a big deal, here are all the remediations and besides PCI we have 45 days by law to notify affected customers."
The owner said "we aren't going to do that", and thus I had to turn in my resignation and am now unemployed again.
So me trying to do the right thing, am now scrambling for work, while the offender pretends nothing happened while potentially violating the entire customer base, and will likely suffer no penalty unless I report it to PCI, which I would get no reward for.
Why is it everywhere I go management is always doing shady stuff. I just want to do linuxy/datacentery things for someone who's honest... /cry
My mega side project isn't close enough to do a premature launch yet. Despite my entire plan being to forgo VC/investors, I'm now considering compromising.
>Why is it everywhere I go management is always doing shady stuff.
Well here's a cynical take on this - management is playing the business game at a higher level than you. "Shady stuff" is the natural outcome of profit motivation. Our society is fundamentally corrupt. It is designed to use the power of coercive force to protect the rights and possessions of the rich against the threat of violence by the poor. The only way to engage with it AND keep your hands clean is to be in a position that lets you blind yourself to the problem. At the end of the day, we are all still complicit in enabling slave labor and are beneficiaries of policies that harm the poor and our environment in order to enrich our lives.
>unless I report it to PCI, which I would get no reward for.
You may be looking at that backwards. Unless you report it to PCI, you are still complicit in the mishandling of the breach, even though you resigned. You might have been better off reporting it over the owner's objections, then claiming whistleblower protections if they tried to terminate you.
This is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, etc.
The problem isn't society or profit motivation. It's people. Humanity itself is corrupt. There aren't "good people" and "bad people". There's only "bad people." We're all bad people, just some of us are more comfortable with our corruption being visible to others to a higher degree.
> We're all bad people, just some of us are more comfortable with our corruption being visible to others to a higher degree.
If the GP's story is true (and I have no reason to suspect otherwise), then there are clearly differences in the degree of "badness" between people. GP chose to resign from his job, while his manager chose to be negligent and dishonest.
So, even if we're all bad people, there are less bad and more bad people, so we might as well call the less bad end of the spectrum "good". Thus, there are good and bad people.
I understand your perspective, but I maintain that "good" (morally pure) isn't a category any of us belong to. We're all lying, hateful people to one extent or another, and lying hateful people aren't "good", even if we haven't lied or hated as much as other lying, hateful people. "Less evil" isn't synonymous with "good".
The argument that profit motivation is the origin of shady business practices ignores the existence of those businesses which pursue profit in an ethical manner. The company I work for, for instance, is highly motivated to produce a profit, but the way we go about obtaining that profit is by providing our customers with products that have real value, at fair (and competitive) prices, and by providing consistently excellent customer support. Our customers are *very* satisfied with our products and services, and they show their satisfaction with extreme brand loyalty. The profit we make year over year allows us to increase the quality of life for our employees, and keeps our employees highly motivated towards serving our customers. We pursue the good of our customers alongside our own, and we avoid shady business practices like the plague.
>As described in more detail in the program guidance, the information must relate to one of the following areas: (1) certain crimes involving financial institutions, from traditional banks to cryptocurrency businesses; (2) foreign corruption involving misconduct by companies; (3) domestic corruption involving misconduct by companies; or (4) health care fraud schemes involving private insurance plans.
>If the information a whistleblower submits results in a successful prosecution that includes criminal or civil forfeiture, the whistleblower may be eligible to receive an award of a percentage of the forfeited assets, depending on considerations set out in the program guidance. If you have information to report, please fill out the intake form below and submit your information via CorporateWhistleblower@usdoj.gov. Submissions are confidential to the fullest extent of the law.
Why would you resign? You could have reported it yourself and then you would have whistleblower protections - if the company retaliated against you (e.g. fired you), you then would have had a strong lawsuit.
Because I don't want to be associated with companies that break the law and violate regulations knowingly.
I've long had a reputation of integrity, and it's one of the few things I have left having almost nothing else.
So you would rather be known as someone who had an opportunity to report a violation, and chose not to? From my perspective it seem like you decided against acting with integrity in this situation - the moral thing would have been to report the violation, but you chose to look the other way and resign.
> it seem like you decided against acting with integrity in this situation ... you chose to look the other way and resign.
I agree with this statement.
This isn't a judgement, we all have to make choices; the "right" choice (the one that aligns with integrity) is usually the one that will be the least self-serving and even temporarily harmful. They did what was right for them, that's okay, but it was not the choice of integrity.
Because that is the choice they made for themselves.
How it plays out after is another matter entirely. But the choice was what they seemed to think was right, for them, at the time. Thus it was the right choice for them. It doesn't mean it was the right choice in terms of integrity, or the right choice for me, or you or anyone whose data got caught up in it. Nor was it right choice in receiving a paycheck the next week.
But the way it was explained, it doesn't seem like they went out of their way to pick a "wrong" choice, specifically. They picked what they felt was the right one, for them, at that time. There were less ethical options to choose as well, and those were not picked either.
You appear to be talking about the external consequences of choices, while I am talking about them making a choice based on what they believed was the inner rightness of their choice. They did not want to be associated with a company like that, so they made the choice to not be -- because it aligned with their inner knowing of not wanting to be a part of that company. The right or wrongness in terms of external consequences is not what makes the choice, right or wrong -- for them
Yes. The owner is old, and going blind, but refuses to sell or hand over day to day ops to someone else, and thus must ask for help on almost everything. I even pulled on my network to find a big processor with a good reputation to buy the company, but after constant delays and excuses for not engaging with them, I realized to the owner the business is both their "baby" and their social life, neither of which they want to lose.
Ops dude here. I agree.
I recently was doing some digging on the real future of AI in dev/ops, and I found that the higher the complexity, the less capable the AI (oh god, I've turned into one of those that is now saying AI instead of ML/DL).
Operations is the height of big picture complexity - exactly what AI is not good at.
That said, I think it could do a lot to assist with finding anomalies that get missed in the flood of data. I've done some fun log stuff on this using Z values before but it took mental effort!
So I do think it could help a lot with the queries/searches, but it is unlikely to be able to do "whole system" observability across DC/stacks very well in current iteration.
PS: I hate how many "agents" already have to run on systems. Especially when the prod stuff is core starved already. I can't tell you how many times I've found an agent (like crowdstrike) causing some strange cascade issue!
My problem is with the obvious compromised assets who continually pop up on threads like this always pushing certain narratives. Look for yourself who has the most posts.
This is a passion and pet peeve of mine. Here are my takeaways:
1) Technical documentation should be coupled with code, so devs will update it as services change (especially in a large or microservice oriented company), and that documentation is pulled into the general purpose system (read: non-tech, mgmt) This also vastly helps with versioning and finding old info (confluence versioning sucks)
2) Diagrams should be diagrams as code, for the same reasons, especially the versioning part. Can you tell me what your infra looked like exactly 3 iterations ago? This helps in problem solving when you've had long-tail undiscovered complications.
3) Make it part of product ownership, KPIs and OKRs. Product managers are the literal worst at this, and will try to push stuff to prod without it otherwise. Coming from the Ops end of things, I can't tell you how infuriating it is to get told "this product is going to prod next week" and when I look there are no ops docs!
4) Management really has to support these efforts, up to hiring someone just to manage documentation. Not just that, but the culture. One thing I've seen repeatedly, especially in high-speed/low-drag places full of PHDs and heavy engineers, is using no docs as a way to judge prod teams. I've made much progress explaining in detail why when an ops engineer is at the tailend of a shift and a sev1 happens, they don't have time or the right mental clarity to go read the code to understand your bullshit!
5) All that said, the biggest division is between the non-tech and tech teams. Do not forget to give non-techs good usability and visiblity into these systems, or management will eventually stop supporting it.
6) Some people will have a passion for documentation, despite being in teams that might not be related to it. Utilize them, and reward them!
Bonus) Include lack of documentation in your after-actions/post-mortems, to keep it relevant to uppers in a concrete way.
Maybe do a README at least before posting to HN? I compile Godot daily, but have been ignoring everything but GNU/Linux as a target platform. I don't see anything particularly unique about this being for mobile besides some pretty basic joypad and screendrag stuff.
Here's the script for the first half of the video; second half kind of needs the video to make sense:
Hey, it's Lucky. Sorry for disappearing on you guys, but I've returned bearing gifts. This is my first project in Godot 4.3, called Pocket C. It's a small collection of touch-based controllers for mobile devices, which I think are a great starting point for building mobile SL touch-based games.
In this project, there are three demos included: a first-person demo, a third-person demo, and a top-down demo. These demos are inspired by popular mobile games like PUBG, Call of Duty Mobile, and League of Legends: Wild Rift. All these controllers are based on a joystick-touchpad combination, where the joystick is on the left side and a touchpad is on the right side. This layout is commonly used in many viable mobile games today, and it's at the core of all these demos.
We'll run through the code and the project so you can get started on making your own mobile games. All the source code and assets are included in the video description, along with a GitHub repository link. There's also a built APK, so if you want to test it on your mobile device, it's available there as well.
Ex-NSA Chief: 'We Kill People Based on Metadata'...
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