Of course maintainability is important. It's almost like saying good code is important (duh). The issue is that what is or isn't maintainable depends on the problem at hand. Sometimes you need to build heavier abstractions or refactor existing code when implementing a feature because it will pay off later. Other times, that exact same approach is horrible over-engineering because a simple, direct fix was all that was needed, so in fact you introduced a maintenance burden. You cannot reliably decide whether a patch is "bloated" or "tasteful" when looking at a diff without knowing where the project is headed.

>You can write extremely poor code that has no bugs, it doesn't make it tasteful.

You can, but it becomes increasingly hard to do so as you try to add features and maintain it. Taste, whatever that is, should ultimately lead to a measurable increase in the quality of the final product; if it doesn't, then your definition of "taste" is irrelevant. What I'm proposing is to skip trying to measure this ill-defined concept and only assess the quality of the final product, after the agent spent a significant amount of time working on it, and a reviewer spent a significant amount of time testing it. Agents should be assessed on their ability to build entire projects (e.g., many large features or even an entire app), not just a single feature. If an agent has no taste, then its bad decisions will compound and result in it stalling, or its output having more bugs and performing worse, given a sufficiently large scope.

(Full disclosure, I'm not a software engineer.)

Prove that the human brain does symbolic computation.

I don't think this happens nowadays. Android will either block by default or give you a million prompts and warnings before it allows you to install an apk from an unknown source. It's far, far easier to install it from google play. I don't think any grandmother would manage to accidentally ignore the first 3 pages of genuine links on google and then push the right buttons that enable sideloading.

Sounds like it has absolutely nothing to do with gender inequality and everything to do with a teenager's spiking hormones.

People are taking this for granted but I have yet to see an actual case. Every time this topic appeared on HN it also turned out that the offender had real CSAM on his devices as well.

That's not an easy thing to study, not many pedophiles would be willing to participate in studies. Existing research mostly examines just the ones who have offended. There's some research about non-contact offenders though: https://sci-hub.se/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

TLDR

> while some have argued that exposure to child pornography may promote contact sexual offending by validating and reinforcing attitudes surrounding the sexualization of children (Bourke & Hernandez, 2009), others have argued that child pornography acts as a substitute for contact offending, thereby preventing the direct sexual victimization of children (Riegel, 2004). Although plausible, such causative positions are yet to be directly examined or established within the existing empirical literature base, limiting the strength of these arguments.

> Nonetheless, the available evidence does not appear to support the idea of a direct causal relationship between child pornography and contact sexual offending, at least in the short-term. This is consistent with the findings of McCarthy (2010), who reported that the majority of dual offenders in her sample (84%) had committed contact sexual offenses prior to, rather than following, their involvement with child pornography. Furthermore, if child pornography directly promoted contact sexual offending, one would reasonably expect rates of contact sexual offending to have similarly increased over the last two decades (Glasgow, 2010). Fortunately, official crime statistics indicate that this has not been the case (Brennan, 2012; Motivans & Kyckelhahn, 2007; Victoria Police, 2014).

> Taken together, these findings suggest that although some CPOs do go on to commit sexual offenses against children, engaging in child pornography offending does not inevitably lead to the direct sexual victimization of children.