#poll for all you beautiful hard working professional computer touchers out there:
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#poll for all you beautiful hard working professional computer touchers out there:
"my day job has me making the world a ____ place"
(be honest, don't just repeat what your CEO says)
@aeva I... don't know.
I work on a software for compliant archiving. That kinda sounds like it should make the world a better place, but it's also a bunch of boring legal stuff that I wish we wouldn't need and everybody was just nice and trustworthy to each other. -
@aeva I'm not curing cancer or anything, but people having fun counts as "better", right?
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@aeva @TomF I'd say yes, it is better for people to have fun, but I'm also very concerned about the ecological impacts of the video game industry (especially the hardware manufacturing side, which is fueled by power hungry games). If we have fun now, to discover in a few years that we have depleted all useful natural resources, destroyed vital ecosystems, and modified the climate at the same time, maybe we'll not be so happy we had that fun.
@youen @TomF about a decade ago a friend made a compelling argument that the reciprocal relationship between the games industry and GPU manufacturers was directly responsible for driving the development of cheap powerful general purpose vector processors, which in turn enabled medical and scientific research to advance significantly faster. obviously much more recent developments make this observation more complicated, but ai data centers don't erase that past progress
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@youen @TomF about a decade ago a friend made a compelling argument that the reciprocal relationship between the games industry and GPU manufacturers was directly responsible for driving the development of cheap powerful general purpose vector processors, which in turn enabled medical and scientific research to advance significantly faster. obviously much more recent developments make this observation more complicated, but ai data centers don't erase that past progress
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#poll for all you beautiful hard working professional computer touchers out there:
"my day job has me making the world a ____ place"
(be honest, don't just repeat what your CEO says)
@aeva it depends on what my clients do with the buildings I plan. in most cases I hope good things are being done in those places, like children learning and people having homes. at the same time, I have no idea if some of the money from those buildings are going to corruption. well, one of my clients got into the most well known newscast in the country. a building I designed was shown to millions… in a corruption scandal news report
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#poll for all you beautiful hard working professional computer touchers out there:
"my day job has me making the world a ____ place"
(be honest, don't just repeat what your CEO says)
@aeva Improving government software systems in ways that makes life better for employees and citizens without intrusive spyware? Good! Being employed by a contractor that probably way over-charges and has a horrible impact on influencing the acceptability of the way it treats its employees? Very bad. Overall, I say slightly good, but it's edging on neutral.
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#poll for all you beautiful hard working professional computer touchers out there:
"my day job has me making the world a ____ place"
(be honest, don't just repeat what your CEO says)
@aeva the place i do computer-touching for makes vegetarian food and tries to get non-vegetarians into it (and it tastes pretty good)
i picked "better" but it's more like "not worse, with the potential for better" and perhaps "nowhere near the hell of most computer-toucher jobs"
that has been great for my mental health, but it's still not a co-op or a nonprofit or doing significant direct work on fighting looming existential threats
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@aeva where does "just barely keeping our heads above water sustaining a vital piece of public knowledge infrastructure which if we're honest is also sort of deeply implicated in the contemporary crisis of knowledge in various ways" fit on this scale
@brennen probably option 4
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@aeva the place i do computer-touching for makes vegetarian food and tries to get non-vegetarians into it (and it tastes pretty good)
i picked "better" but it's more like "not worse, with the potential for better" and perhaps "nowhere near the hell of most computer-toucher jobs"
that has been great for my mental health, but it's still not a co-op or a nonprofit or doing significant direct work on fighting looming existential threats
@pho4cexa normalizing vegetarian food and developing compelling alternatives to meat is a good cause, especially considering the significant environmental impact of meat production. I give you permission to feel unambiguously good about your job.
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@aeva it depends on what my clients do with the buildings I plan. in most cases I hope good things are being done in those places, like children learning and people having homes. at the same time, I have no idea if some of the money from those buildings are going to corruption. well, one of my clients got into the most well known newscast in the country. a building I designed was shown to millions… in a corruption scandal news report
@qgustavor architecture is probably morally neutral most of the time? i guess it would be kind of hard to miss if you were being asked to design a prison and a mass grave
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#poll for all you beautiful hard working professional computer touchers out there:
"my day job has me making the world a ____ place"
(be honest, don't just repeat what your CEO says)
@aeva I guess the adjective is maybe "more energy efficent", which is of course a good thing, but I hesitate to use better due to it being a kind of indirect thing with it being more about monitoring energy and water usage.
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@pho4cexa normalizing vegetarian food and developing compelling alternatives to meat is a good cause, especially considering the significant environmental impact of meat production. I give you permission to feel unambiguously good about your job.
@aeva wow, um face value i didn't expect that's where this poll was headed. i browsed through some of your other responses to replies to this poll and you are just out there blasting much-needed hope and positivity into the inferno. you're awesome and thank you
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@aeva I make a website that helps the company sell their tool for making websites. I guess the hidden adjective is "more website-y"? I find the whole situation to be morally neutral.
@angelikatyborska do you use their tool to make their website?
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#poll for all you beautiful hard working professional computer touchers out there:
"my day job has me making the world a ____ place"
(be honest, don't just repeat what your CEO says)
@aeva As a system administrator in a university (in a CS department) I feel my day job is probably somewhere around neutral. I would like to think I am making the world ever so slightly better by keeping the lights on and helping researchers and graduate students learn new things but I'm not sure I can be that optimistic about the typical output of academia.
I mostly settle for 'at least my work isn't clearly making the world worse'.
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@aanee well, moving chairs around on the deck is good exercise at least right
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@aeva As a system administrator in a university (in a CS department) I feel my day job is probably somewhere around neutral. I would like to think I am making the world ever so slightly better by keeping the lights on and helping researchers and graduate students learn new things but I'm not sure I can be that optimistic about the typical output of academia.
I mostly settle for 'at least my work isn't clearly making the world worse'.
@cks yeah CS department makes it tricky to say
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