Originally posted on 2019-11-05 on CodiMd

#articles

Hey Cool Kids! In case you haven’t noticed, we now have beautiful markdown instead of cranky email clients!

Why markdown?

Honestly, it’s pretty much the best format for writing human readable content. Sorry, I usually supply arguments for my position but this is pretty undisputable. I’m just helping you train your skills yo.

Alright, what’s popping?

Honestly, not much! It’s been a pretty slow week, but maybe it’s the fact I’ve buried my head in the sand with all the interviewing going around. I’ve also been getting approached by recruiters — I’ve heard some friends have positive and some negative stories of that. I’ll update once I have more experiences. But let’s go take a look at what happened

Bullet points:

Data classes? Sealed types? Why do they matter?

Because Java can now follow up on the good graces of Kotlin and Lombok

So essentially, this week, there is no news?

Well, that’s how it was going until about half-way through the week, a guy named Jack made an announcement

Paraphrasing one of my exes here but, this was big. Really big 
(she was talking about our issues tho)

Why?

This is a foundational shift for the tech industry in terms of involvement and financials. Let’s unwrap this puzzle down to two main things:

  • Money
  • Responsibility

Money

Unsurprisingly, political ads are what we would call $$$.

The budget involved is ridiculously huge (and that’s just the visible money btw), and Twitter shying away from that is no small deal. With legislation such as GDPR kicking in and if this move is followed by others, tech companies, especially social media, will be seeing reduced profit from their traditional sources of income (selling your private life) which will naturally give rise to new economic models. After we’ve sold all the products to people, and all the people as products, what’s there left to sell? Hold that thought, I’m sure we’ll be finding out soon.

Responsibility

Sigh, deep breath. So, this is the real kicker.

Developers have long since been looking the other way as their creations were used for whatever purpose. From attacking power plants to affecting elections and everything in between, what we built has been used to damage the lives and wellbeings of others for profit.

Do you know about the dark web sub-cult of voyeur webcam watching, using RAT software? Well now you do. You think they’re bad? They were disgusted at how arab governments used their tools to survey protesters during the Arab spring leading some prominent RAT creators to quit. No, I’m not gonna link that, feel free to do your own research. But hey, I gotta hand it to those folks who quit — at least they had some form of ethics. Have you seen what’s going on with Chinese surveillance over Hong Kong?

What are the rest of us doing? Slowly catching up to Bob Martin’s sayings that we should start feeling responsible if our fun project neural network for undressing people gets abused.

“Despite the safety measures adopted (watermark)”

Are you fucking shitting me? And this is still more effort than what the average developer putting out something would have done. Do we even care, really?

In Ancient Greek mythos, this would be the moment of “hubris”. We are far too arrogant with our power and the audience keeps waiting for our eventual punishment. And this is exactly the sentiment that has been manifesting in the States starting from the hesitant calls against glassholes to what has been evolving into a full grown anti-tech sentiment.

Sanders’ campaign has a core promise of taxing big tech companies. Warren has attacked Facebook and Twitter directly accusing them of nothing short of propaganda and deceit. The rest of the candidates follow similar lines and if you haven’t watched one of the Zucc’s many congress hearings, well, you don’t have to, but you can imagine how they go. Politicians, by profession, reflect the will of the people (sadly, not because they were chosen to, but because they choose to) which means that all, or most of, these politicians have received approval from their marketing people that attacking tech is the move that gets them more votes.

“It takes a lot of work to turn the sun”

This is an old Greek poem/song. We will have to do a lot of work to rebuild public trust and we might as well fail.

But this move by Twitter, one of the primary high profile and highly politicized platforms is a very strong step in the right direction, in my opinion. They are distancing themselves from this gigantic mess and accepting some responsibility for their actions. Let’s see how others follow. Let’s see how we follow.

Thoughtfully,
From one cool kid to another