mosseater

It was a protest against the monetization of academic knowledge.

You can call that "theft" as much as you want. There are lots of people like Aaron out there that think this sort of information should be freely available.

Just because there is a law doesn't mean that that law is just and correct. Saying we "shouldn't support theft" is an over-simplification of the situation.

I dunno. Nowadays you can store the the conversation's history and use different RAG methods to pull relevant pieces into the LLM's context.

I mean, the person who is saying this stands accused of murdering him. I would take everything she says with a grain of salt.

That age group is pretty large, though. So many people had walk-mans in the 80s and 90s. I'd also venture to say most people who would go to a rave probably like music enough to own headphones.

I do agree though, the useage of Spotify as a given is annoying. Especially since everyone will never be perfectly synced up. I remember silent raves, back a decade ago, would use a FM transmitter mixed with cheapo portable fm receivers.

interestingly, if you still have an audio jack on your cellphone, attaching wired headphones to them allows you to use the phone as an FM receiver (with the proper app). Wire on the headphones acts like an antenna.

Wow! How did you get 300(+) data connections with such a small team?

I dunno. I've seen management be sketchy on transparency before. But when it comes to people's money getting into their hands, I've actually never had management do the "whoops, it will be there next week" thing. It's always been straight forward with what happened and with expectations. Which makes sense, as you said, people won't show up if they don't get there money.

It's all circumstantial anyway. I don't think it's fair to call this a case of a "typical startup". Although it's definitely a stereotype of startups.

I mean personally the company assuming liability means A LOT more to me than how much the system can do. It's one thing to say your system can drive down a slick and curvy mountain road, and another thing to say you'll cover all liability if the car drives itself off the mountain. It's easy to write software the runs most of the time. This is our lives that we're talking about.

I disagree with his opinion too, but he's not lying. The majority of the world has and still does hold those opinions. The world is still very anti-LGBT outside of the western culture bubble. And even in countries that are westernized, they are often still anti-LGBT even if their governments and media are pushing people not to be.

It's a very sad state of affairs. I mean, just 16 years ago I was marching for the right for gay people to get married in the US. We've come a long way but there is a long way to go.

It used to be a content recommendation system for a chinese media company. We monitored peoples movements through their phone and gave marketers a really easy way to directly target people. It's sort of rampant now, but years ago it felt like it was a dangerous step in the wrong direction.

But recently I found out that an algorithm that I was a crucial part in building ended up doing some real bad things. I don't really want to talk about it directly because I'm not sure I really want to be implicated.

The point is, I feel terrible. I played a role in negatively impacting a lot of peoples lives. Sure, I wasn't the only one who built it. Nor did I play a part in what it turned into, or made any decisions about how it should be used. I just built a thing.

But I think we as programmers, tend to look fondly on our systems that we develop. They are sort of like our children (in a very loose sense). I spent years thinking back to building it, and being filled with joy. Now I see what it's done, what I helped create, where it ended up.

I just feel sick. I talked to a peer who helped on it about it. They also feel the same. Just terrible. Burnt out. Ready to switch careers entirely.

I think I might be able to continue in this field, make the right decisions, and think through the true impact of what I'm building before I commit to it.

But then again, I think back at all of the work I've done in my career, and all of it was exploitative to people at least in some sense. I'm not sure you can profit without exploitation in tech, it might be inherent (I realize that's a negative statement. I'm in a mood).

So I'm thinking I may just switch into a career I can feel good about, unless I can find a job or project that will allow me to be ethical.

We really need to come together as a community and stand up for ethics. Every day a programmer out there is faced with an ethical dilemma, one that will probably get them fired if they don't comply. Plus, that won't even matter, because they will just get someone else to do it anyway. There's not a good way to save your source of income while also doing the right thing.

An NFT solution to ticketing seems like it would be trivial given how NFTs operate already. One ticket could be verifiably owned by one person. If that person wanted to resell the ticket, there could be restrictions on how much they could sell it for. If bots can't make a profit there's no use in buying out all the tickets. It would also decentralize the space. Sure you need a marketplace for the NFT tickets, but that could easily be a open source software suite that the venues themselves host. Gas price will probably be a lot less than ticketmaster fees.

Honestly it seems like the biggest problems here are that Ticketmaster in particular has a huge sway in the current venue and artist market, having contracts that require an artist or venue to exclusively use their ticketing system.