The early twenties intermediate dev on my team was explaining the other week that if you remember a time before smartphones and broadband, you are old

I personally am familiar with 2 organisations with millions of dollars in annual revenue that deploy critical line of business applications like this in 2024

Dealing with this at the moment - in an org that’s been pretty lax at writing anything down about what and why as far as internal software goes, trying (with support from C-suite) to get people to actually write up any amount of detail in their requests is like pulling teeth.

I tend to take that position as well; if it’s not defined, I get to define it. If I ask for feedback or review and get silence, that means you approve.

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The year is 2031.

The first AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA game launches.

I think the conclusion is that as a population of people grows the average behaviour stays pretty much fine, but the extremes of the bell curve become more apparent

Yeah, not even slightly true. Know a few people who work support for a major piece of financials software. Company has a written procedure for dealing with death threats that gets exercised multiple times per year

Do this specifically so a judge has to rule if someone is being a dick or not. File amicus briefs on the definition of being a dick. Assemble a jury of peers to decide if the defendants are being a dick. Appeal to the supreme court to rule if the court erred in their judgement of the dickishness at question in this matter.

how many good small acts does it take to overcome a Khmer Rouge?

Ok, take the counter argument then - if I am an average person in, say, Russia right now, how much personal risk am I morally obliged to take in order to fight against the Russian state and the war in Ukraine? Stacking up the abstract evil being done elsewhere against the very concrete reality of my own mortality, if the angels are fighting and nothing I can do can have any real impact, then what good is it me getting in the middle of it?

I’ve kinda stretched this beyond the absurd, and tbh I do think that individuals have some responsibility to not stand idly by and watch evil happen.

To actually address your original question, I don’t think Smith’s characterisation of humans as a virus is terribly apt - viruses are mindless, selfish and greedy; they arrive in an area and consume and consume until there is nothing left, even if it kills them. Humans behave like this some times, but they are also capable of peace and cooperation and can learn - the fact that you have access to the internet using equipment and systems that took the collective efforts of hundreds of millions of people working across centuries, the fact that you didn’t die of smallpox or TB as a child, and the fact that on average you as less likely to die violently than you ever have been in history proves this.

Smith’s argument conflates humanity and society as being the same thing, because as a machine he has no concept of individuality - to him, humans as a single unit blighted the planet, and therefore are a plague, because he can’t conceive of the idea of free will.

Things can be fucked up on a macro level, with war and selfishness and greed and destruction, while still being comprised on a micro level of essentially good, unique, interesting people who care for each other. Smith doesn’t see this, because in his eyes humans are all the same - just like him. He is arguing against his own existence

I had a client once who used to be obsessed with this. By his logic, if a potential customer visited the website and had a bad experience because the site didn’t work properly in their browser, they’d think the company was unprofessional and wouldn’t come into the store and we’d lose them as a customer forever. Analytics showed that 99+% of people would visit in one of the big three, and he wouldn’t pay for someone to test the site on the less popular browsers, instead he insisted on fingerprinting logic that broke all the time and probably caused more bounces than any possible rendering quirks from niche mobile browsers would have caused

If you are using them for baking I’d be worried that freezing will screw with the protein structure and mess up the bake. Might be able to get away with it for basic cakes, but anything where you are relying on the egg protein for structure (meringue, genoise, buttercream, etc) then I’d expect trouble

Also, typically trespass wouldn’t be a felony

Baking is applied chemistry. Cooking is jazz

Typically, you’d need to maintain at least an A- average GPA to be accepted into the next year of study.

Suppose it is - suppose that you can know for sure that your entire perception of reality is just noise being generated somewhere and being fed into your consciousness, and that no action you take has any impact on this meta-reality.

How would that affect your choices?

Caveat: depending on if you are getting a loan from a financial institution or taking private investment, they will either want collateral (if the business fails, we will sell your house to cover the debt) or will want a pretty big chunk of the equity (we’ll take the risk that the business fails as we loose all our money, but in return we want to own 50+% of the business, have the final say on decisions, and take a good chunk of the profit if you are successful)

We live in a society, and all must do our part to enforce the social contract.

It should be legal for anyone to key the shit out of cars that park like this

No, in general the code quality in large open source projects is just as good as in proprietary programs - for large projects, the majority of contributions come from professional software developers being paid to work on the project either by their employer or via grant funding, and those that aren’t still get their changes reviewed by professionals, same as everyone else.

Smaller projects tend to be a mixed bag - the internet has a “one guy who has been maintaining this absolutely critical piece of infrastructure unpaid on evenings and weekends for the past decade” problem, but even then open source has one major advantage - transparency.

If the code is open source, it’s relatively easy for anyone to look at the code and spot bugs - even if the first person to find a bug is a bad guy who keeps the bug secret, the odds are pretty good that someone else will also find the bug and tell the developers about it so they can fix it, and tell the programs’ uses about it so they know that they need to take action to protect themselves.

For proprietary programs, there is a much stronger incentive to keep bugs secret, both for bad guys (it’s harder to find bugs if you can’t look at the code, so the odds of your useful bug being publicized is lower) and for the developers (bugs are bad for business and cost us money, so we’ll sue you if you publish). Some larger players have “bug bounties” - if you find a bug and report it to us under embargo so we can fix it before you publish, we’ll pay you - because being perceived as having a secure, trustworthy product is worth the cost, but these are often more marketing tools than actual security features

Don’t know about Google specifically, but lots of places don’t accept them, especially for subscriptions