I'm talking about a poll that raises awareness across the entire student population, in a low-cost way, with no incentive to cheat nor to do anything other than give honest answers.

Regarding whether awareness of ethics would penalize those with any ethical tendency:

We can already see the last 2 decades of rampant unethical behavior throughout tech companies. Virtually every tech company knowingly sells out its users to data brokers, for example. Sociopaths already dominate, and have conditioned everyone below them to behave in an at least compliant way even when doing something unethical.

It's too bad we're starting late on that absolutely pervasive ethics problem, but we can't make the problem any worse by trying an education intervention now. And it's the traditional job of colleges to do this -- not to pump out oblivious worker drones.

Annually poll all the students, to get rankings of how the ethics of well-known companies/brands are perceived by the students.

Then publish the results to students, in a timely fashion, before they're deciding job offers and internships.

I speculate that effects of this could include:

1. Good hiring candidates modifying what offers they pursue and accept -- influenced by awareness, self-reflection, and/or peer-pressure.

2. Students thinking and talking about ethics, when they didn't before. Then some of them carry this influence with them, as part of their character and intellect, going forward (like is one of the ideals of college education).

Also, maybe the second year of the poll, the sentiments are better-informed, because a lot more people have started paying more attention to the question of ethics of a company.

The perception breakdowns by college major would also be interesting, but maybe don't publish those, to reduce internal incentives to game the results. (Everyone knows some majors tend a bit more towards sociopathic than others, but some would rather that not be officials.)

But how would (hypothetical) more formidable DRM constitute even more control over the ebook market?

(Do you mean more control by preventing more piracy? Or by preventing more good-faith circumvention? Or more control because ebooks might be published even more Amazon exclusive than they already are, because of superior anti-piracy protection?)

If this is a hint at much more formidable DRM coming out, could a silver lining for authors and publishers be more sales?

Or is mass piracy going to just continue, full steam ahead?

(Authors and publishers need any bit of good news they can get right now.)

Before: https://planet.racket-lang.org/package-source/neil/roomba.pl...

After: https://docs.racket-lang.org/roomba/

You still have to be careful not to invest in imbeciles, but unethical is OK.

The easy way is to search for ones for which the seller explicitly says "OEM" or "bootloader" unlockable/unlocked (or seller says it already has "grapheneos", "graphene", "calyxos", etc., installed).

For awhile, I came up with some tricks to try to get a better price by identifying ones that were bought directly from Google (rather than through a carrier, which are who has been disabling bootloader unlocking thus far), but decided it wasn't worth the effort.

Of course, you can also just buy a new one from Google.

A lot of the people once called weirdos -- a term now partly taken back, as fairly positive, such as in "weird nerds" -- are our hackers, creative thinkers and artists, progressives slightly ahead of history, etc.

The massive problem with tech industry "leaders" is not weirdos/nerds. It's greedy sociopaths, narcissists, and nepo baby halfwits who merely stumbled into way too much power.

Some prominent ones are now openly and proudly presenting themselves as toxic for society/humanity, and even as ruthless fascists.

Call the bad people what they are, but let's be nice to the good weirdos.

Could this be the backstabbing surveillance capitalism incident that finally gives pause to tech executives?

I was a teenage intern at a very serious software engineering company, which was doing bespoke high-end in-circuit emulators, integrated into a full-lifecycle software engineering platform.

One time I wandered into the hardware engineering area, there was a customer box looking a bit like the later-model photos in the article, just sitting on an EE bench. (Though my vague memory is that it might've been something like Honeywell or Rockwell?)

As a teen, with so may things to learn about workstation networks and software engineering, and working professionally for the first time, and becoming an adult... It was awhile before I slowly learned who were the customers for all this platform the company developed. It was for people who make complex, critical systems -- mainly military, aerospace, and datacommunications. So it was just further overwhelming wonder: people use our stuff for aircraft and spacecraft?! So cool!

Later in my career, I have more context, to decide the kinds of things I want to work on. I'm also often involved when we start with the understanding of the customer, and the building cool stuff tends to follow that. Some of the AI toys recently elicit some of that earlier wow of everything being new and cool, but now knowing more context, and seeing through some of the current marketing noise.

Recently, a good human recruiter found me an interesting AI startup opportunity. But they were "we're AI-first!" using an AI call scheduling thing instead of Calendly, and it seemed to mess up, so I emailed a quick heads-up about that.

Spent 2 days prepping on their market niche before the call with CTO, and then he no-showed. I got an AI-sounding email from the CTO, after I waited 10 minutes in the call, saying I no-showed, and California-nice offering to reschedule. I replied immediately that I'd been waiting in the call, referenced my earlier heads-up about the AI scheduling, and would continue waiting there in case now was still good. No response...

I wondered whether the CTO wasn't seeing my email due to broken AI managing his inbox, or if he had just blown me off and ghosted after a mess-up on their end that he didn't want to deal with. So I asked the recruiter to make sure employer knew what happened with the AI, and that rescheduling wouldn't just repeat the no-show and ghosting.

No joy after a few days, so I bowed out.

Don't use bad AI; or if you accidentally do, fix the situation when it messes up.

Almost everything about LinkedIn is miserable, not just the feed, and we need a much better competitor that people actually use.

One of the challenges to making it much better will be the same problem that most 'social media' apps/sites have: some of the awful is institutionalized and automated, and will go wherever there is incentive to gain advantage.

(My dating startup is mothballed partly for this reason. Our secret sauce approach to being great, rather than awful, was killed by ChatGPT. Moving forward pretending it wasn't would just turn us into yet another awful, with a flimsy gimmick, that hoped to be bought by the behemoth of awful.)

Those of us who weren't networking in big tech still need to hear from good recruiters, or have some other way to matchmake with the right employers.

A lot of people are thinking, "I know, I'll replace the sourcer/recruiter with AI!" The naive solutions here are just more-automated and more-deceptive versions of the same awful: sourcing via the old standby of random keyword searches and spamming, pushing for call, just wanting the resume to pass on, the employer having low trust in the validity and alignment of the recruiter's recommendations...

(They also had an engineering executive who had been a computer engineer from a major CPU company. In one engineering reporting meeting, when a team mentioned they needed to do something with a particular facility of the off-the-shelf CPU, the executive volunteered that he could help with that, since he designed it. Everyone laughed.)

Hardware companies are a mixed blessing for us software people, but I wonder whether hardware engineers are more likely to keep it real (old-school high-powered engineer style) than software people?

At age 21 (and accomplished, since I'd started working in my teens), I mentioned the book to my girlfriend, who was getting into software. As a serious English major, she immediately went and closely read the whole thing. I stupidly hadn't realized that of course she was going to that. And I'd neglected to mention that parts of it are a frustrating slog, as the reader suffers along with the characters/subjects. As a reader with empathy, she came out of the book fatigued and somber.

(But she'd said "an artist needs a craft", so she stuck with the field, was very successful, retired early, and has a second/third career doing something brilliant but much less lucrative.)

Despite learnings from the book and experience, I've had a few such unpleasant project slogs. But more projects that I was able to help make non-unpleasant, because I could anticipate and avert some of the problems.

I think the book probably contributed to my tendency to commit seriously to projects. That's been good and bad. It's good, in that you can learn and do things that you otherwise couldn't. It's bad in that it takes you longer to understand that other people are not you, and the ways that they aren't as committed to the project.

Many/most people are about putting in their hours with some standard of professionalism, such as satisfying whatever metrics (e.g., Jira tickets, sprint tasks, KPIs, OKRs, bonus/promotion criteria) they're told are their job. Those, you can work with, once you know that's their mode. You can also try to improve the company incentives that determine outcomes.

(But occasionally you'll encounter people who are misaligned with project/team/company success in a way you can't find common ground with. You have to recognize that hopelessly toxic situation before it's too late, and get them out of the way of the team of aligned people.)

This book of Tracy Kidder told the story of some early computer industry engineers doing something great, through brains, effort, and perseverance -- and that's a great accomplishment for a book. But an additional accomplishment I think was that a lot of us kids who read it then signed up to "play pinball", with an informed idea of what we were sometimes getting ourselves into, and we signed up anyway.

* Given access to more people or other ways.

* Bypassed any logging that might be used during crime investigation.

* May have increased the likelihood of the system failing.

* (more theoretical) Increased the attack surface, and invited more crimes of digital opportunity.

So they may be partly or wholly responsible for some bad things that happen.

And also may be held responsible by others, with criminal and civil liability.

> [...] so if you’re in the same position as Frank, give it a try!

Don't, if you're in the same position (i.e., sneakily doing it to landlord's access control box, which is relied upon by multiple other neighbors).

But if you're in some different position -- such as it's your own property, and there's some kind of informed consent of all legitimate parties affected -- then kludging the system, by splicing a solenoid wire, might be good and appropriate.

I've heard the latter theory at least a couple times about US Navy SEALs.

The first time, it was a retired SEAL I knew (well over 6', and a brick wall) who one day out of the blue said something like, "You shouldn't feel bad about being short. The best SEAL I knew was a short guy, and he could kick my ass."

Later, I heard a similar anecdote in a speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxBQLFLei70&t=440s