Agreed. The SWEs already receive a steady supply of conflicting demands from every possible business unit; the value add for these teams is a working PMO to prioritize the requests coming in.

Google bought out HTC 8 years ago to the day, and if I recall correctly that exacerbated a lot of the tension in the Android OEM space that the original Google Pixel rollout caused in the first place.

They also bought (and sold!) Motorola.

I've been a pixel guy since HTC was making them for google, and honestly jumping from the 6 to the 9 has made me think that pastures are greener someplace else.

Pixel 8 Pro was my only pixel and I've been very disappointed about it.

Anything keeping you from Graphene?

It is very much true for dogs in that case: (1) it is your dog (2) it is your car (3) it is your responsibility to make sure your car can not be started by your dog (4) the pedestrian has a reasonable expectation that a vehicle that is parked without a person in it has been made safe to the point that it will not suddenly start to move without an operator in it and dogs don't qualify.

You'd lose that lawsuit in a heartbeat.

what if your car was parked in a normal way that a reasonable person would not expect to be able to be started by a dog, but the dog did several things that no reasonable person would expect and started it anyway?

You can 'what if' this until the cows come home but you are responsible, period.

I don't know what kind of drivers education you get where you live but where I live and have lived one of the basic bits is that you know how to park and lock your vehicle safely and that includes removing the ignition key (assuming your car has one) and setting the parking brake. You aim the wheels at the kerb (if there is one) when you're on an incline. And if you're in a stick shift you set the gear to neutral (in some countries they will teach you to set the gear to 1st or reverse, for various reasons).

We also have road worthiness assessments that ensure that all these systems work as advertised. You could let a pack of dogs loose in my car in any external circumstance and they would not be able to move it, though I'd hate to clean up the interior afterwards.

I agree. The dog smashed the window, hot–wired the ignition, released the parking brake, shifted to drive, and turned the wheel towards the opposite side of the road where a mother was pushing a stroller, killing the baby. I know, crazy right, but I swear I'm not lying, the neighbor caught it on camera.

Who's liable?

I think this would be a freak accident. Nobody would be liable.

Your analogy has long since ceased to have any illuminating power, because it involves things that are straight up impossible.

You would not be guilty of a crime, because that requires intent.

But you would be liable for civil damages, because that does not. There are multiple theories for which to establish liability, but most likely this would be treated as negligence.

What was I negligent about?

Well at that point we might as well say it's gremlins that you summoned, so who knows, there are no laws about gremlins hot-wiring cars. If you summoned them, are they _your_ gremlins, or do they have their own agency. How guilty are you, really... At some point it becomes a bit silly to go into what-if scenarios, it helps to look at exact cases.

> I agree. The dog smashed the window, hot–wired the ignition, > released the parking brake, shifted to drive, and turned the > wheel towards the opposite side of the road where a mother was > pushing a stroller, killing the baby. I know, crazy right, but > I swear I'm not lying, the neighbor caught it on camera.

> Who's liable?

You are. It's still your dog. If you would replace dog with child the case would be identical (but more plausible). This is really not as interesting as you think it is. The fact that you have a sentient dog is going to be laughed out of court and your neighbor will be in the docket together with you for attempting to mislead the court with your AI generated footage. See, two can play at that.

When you make such ridiculously contrived examples turnaround is fair play.

Found the annoying kid in my lawschool class

You're stretching it. It's more like if you train your dog to start the car and accelerate, open the door and turn your back.

Everything an AI does is downstream of deliberate, albeit imperfect, training.

You know this, you rig it all up and you let things happen.

Legally, in a lot of jurisdictions, a dog is just your property. What it does, you did, usually with presumed intent or strict liability.

What if you have an email in your inbox warning you that 1) this specific bush attracts bats and 2) there were in fact bats seen near you bush and 3) bats were observed almost biting a child before. And you also have "how do I fuck up them kids by planting a bush that attracts bats" in your browser history. It's a spectrum you know.

Well, if it was a bush known to also attract children, it was on your property, and the child was in fact attracted by it and also on your property, and the presence of the bush created the danger of bat bites, the principal of “attractive nuisance” is in play.

what if my auntie had wheels, would she be a wagon?

Would a reasonable person typically consider this an act that risk causing harm to kids?

In the USA, at least, it seems pet owners are liable for any harm their pets do.

Being guilty != Being responsible

They correlate, but we must be careful not to mistake one for the other. The latter is a lower bar.

I don’t know where you from but at least in Sweden you have strict liability for anything your dog does

I'm dubious, do you have any examples of this happening?

Prima facie negligence = liability

My favorite manager told me a similar analogy before I left, but with a caveat; a good manager has to provide cover for the team, but it's up to the team to hold the manager up - just like an umbrella.

Well that's clearly an example of putting the cart before the horse. You should be able to sleep at night so long as you remember that Git isn't what enables Palantir to power an army of federalized brownshirts; it's the people making the tools explicitly for an army of federalized brownshirts with Git that are morally culpable.

Okay, that's where you draw the line. But someone provides power to their data center and their offices. Someone provides hand-held devices. Someone provides network connectivity. Someone has a contract to house and feed these agents. Someone has the logistical and fleet services for their vehicles. Someone is likely the landlord to their buildings. Someone has a contract to clean the buildings. Someone is a deciding to buy a block of Palantir stock versus some other software company. Someone runs the private prison into which people are herded. An attorney has a choice to file a charge or not file a charge. A judge has the choice to bend over backward to give ICE/CBP the benefit of the doubt, or be skeptical.

Baking a roll of bread is not immoral. Baking bread as part of a contract to feed the gestapo, is.

There are people who would not sleep at night knowing that the tool they created was enabling such things. I believe some are looking to make "semi-open" source licenses that add more restrictions.

I found Blazor WASM to be extremely helpful if you have to start from the opposite side of the spectrum. I was working in a self-proclaimed gov agency "Microsoft Shop" whose head of development was adamantly opposed to any sort of JS-driven web app development, but kept accepting requesting apps that fit perfectly into the SPA model. .NET 6 released a few months after I started and with it came a huge amount of progress with Blazor WASM. I had plenty of experience with Vue and Typescript, so Blazor WASM and C# mapped really easily to my existing model of how to build. That similarity also made it easy to onboard new grads who had experience in web dev but weren't familiar with C#. After enough evangelizing, we built a critical mass of projects leveraging Blazor WASM to convince leadership to reconsider his position on Typescript. I can't say enough nice things about the work Steve Sanderson has done to bring Blazor to the public.

Well first off, it is very expensive. Vendors that supply to DHS and DOD have to be selective about who they sell their services to as well. Citizen-developed services to track ICE are routinely shut down by Apple and Google.

So make a real website and not an App.

> Another thing to consider, it seems JS devs use more AI for work than .NET devs for example, which might be in more old-school companies and industries.

Speaking from years of .NET work in state and federal government, the sort of dev groups that lean on Telerik or DevExpress have less leverage to build new things for themselves than you would expect, so the use of AI inside of them is predominantly for maintaining existing software. Decisions on how things get built at most public agencies still revolve around MS Access and WebForms due to a whole bunch of BS ordinances that legislators put in place; for those sorts of places a reliable vendor can absorb the blame if concerns surrounding accessibility, compliance, or security of your ancient web services crop up, while Claude and Codex put the liability back on your org.

Not to diminish your skepticism, but your reply comes off jaded in a way that might be hurting you. The author's suggestion for employees seeking promotion is to operate on a higher level than they're asked to and keep operating in that fashion for a sustained window of time. Show growth, in other words.

This reads to me like you translated GP’s cynical post into something more palatable to the politically-minded. You’ve said the same thing.

They're both correct, in different contexts.

Some workplaces see people going above and beyond and reward that. Promotions come from operating at the level you want to be promoted to.

Some workplaces see it as a signal that they don't need a promotion because they can get the higher level work from you without the need to pay you more.

Know which one you're in before you decide how to approach it. If you've been there a while you should be able to figure out how things work. It's important to see how they actually work and not how you think they should work, otherwise you can end up doing a bunch of extra work for free.

It’s a lot easier just to do enough to talk the talk and get another job…