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> As developers, we are often one of the last lines of defense against potentially dangerous and unethical practices.

> We’re approaching a time where software will drive the vehicle that transports your family to soccer practice. There are already AI programs that help doctors diagnose disease. It’s not hard to imagine them recommending prescription drugs soon, too.

> The more software continues to take over every aspect of our lives, the more important it will be for us to take a stand and ensure that our ethics are ever-present in our code.

Paywalled. What were the tweets?

One angle to look at this from is that if Slack or GitHub goes down, there's a good chance your competitors are being held up too. It's like an armistice on (your corner of) capitalism. Whereas if it's just your system, you've been put at a slight disadvantage.

Also, unless it's happening every week there's probably an element of, "well it doesn't make me regret the overall choice to use this service, so there's no sense being upset about it".

> this assumes that right-wing ideology is a pathogen that is uniformly harmful to the body politic (which it may not be)

In the context of the discussion I was treating "bad-faith participants" as the pathogen, which I would absolutely say are uniformly harmful to the discourse. Of course subjectively the far right seems to take this approach more often than the far left, but that's not at all clear-cut and isn't the point I'm trying to make here.

Ah that makes sense

But steroids only decrease the inflammation, they don't combat the original problem. If the inflammation is there because of a real pathogen, steroids are dangerous. Antibiotics decrease inflammation by tackling the original problem without a need to also increase inflammation.

(It is at this point I'd like to point out that I don't have a medical background and may be going out of my depth for the sake of analogy :P)

I've used this analogy in my head between bodily inflammation and social unrest for a long time. It's been very useful. And it explains some contradicting viewpoints that different people have on, say, riots.

If social unrest is inflammation then it's easy to see how it's neither good nor bad without context. It incurs a cost, but in many cases that cost is worth the change that it creates. But not always. A fever can help kill an infection, but it can also kill or otherwise damage the host if it goes too far.

> we had a huge ordeal converting our 32-bit space weather model to 64-bit because the change in precision changed our results, so we couldn't publish (in good conscious) without making sure the results weren't within a good margin of error

This is a really interesting dimension to the transition that I've never considered before. An actual change in correctness, not just compatibility. I would have thought for floats it would just add more decimal points

> "Cancel culture" [is an important tool] to defend against these bad faith exploitive uses of public communication

I would say it's more like a social cytokine storm. If distrust in general is an immune-system, we're reaching a point of autoimmune disease.

But I do think deplatforming is an important tool. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, it's more like antibiotics. It reduces inflammation instead of increasing it, and while some non-destructive entities may get caught up in it, they're generally nonessential, it's generally a small portion, and they'll recover.

The key is to decouple your inner self from how you present to the world. Your inner mental model of the world can acknowledge all apparent truths, even if some of them might upset various factions (the legitimacy of which varies; the offensiveness of sensitive topics to particular people is a real thing, but it also sometimes gets invoked inauthentically), without necessarily saying all of them. At the same time, if you're chronically contradicting everyone else you should still see that as a prompt for deeper examination of your beliefs.

It's always been a fantasy that the whole of society could accept all corners of a person's thoughts and feelings, as-is, laid bare. Before the internet, we could pretend the fantasy was true because of our mostly-local social spheres. But now the veil has been removed completely.

This isn't to say you should never vocalize controversial beliefs. But you should pick your battles. Ask yourself whether it really matters to society that X gets discussed - and that it's therefore worth risking offense and/or backlash - or whether you're just being pedantic.

I really liked this quote as a broader description of political correctness:

> Perhaps the solution is to appeal to politeness. If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't, it's only polite to take them at their word, instead of demanding evidence that's impossible to produce, or simply denying that they hear anything. Imagine how rude that would seem.

Pensions, social security, etc. The point is that the "active economy" will shrink beneath what was expected for those systems to function for the number of elderly they will end up having.

There's a short-term problem of society becoming "top-heavy", where there might not be enough young to pay for the continued care of the old. But in the long run this seems like a win. I wonder what impact it might have on climate projections.

I haven't used Go but I'm curious, how do core data structures like hash maps work without generics? Does everyone just roll their own for their particular use-case?