Development quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Naturally, while doing this it turned out that I was maybe the first person to use these gdb APIs in anger. I found some gdb crashes, oops!

— Tom Tromey

As developers, we are often one of the last lines of defense against potentially dangerous and unethical practices.

We’re approaching a time where software will drive the vehicle that transports your family to soccer practice. There are already AI programs that help doctors diagnose disease. It’s not hard to imagine them recommending prescription drugs soon, too.

The more software continues to take over every aspect of our lives, the more important it will be for us to take a stand and ensure that our ethics are ever-present in our code.

Since that day, I always try to think twice about the effects of my code before I write it. I hope that you will too.

— Bill Sourour (Thanks to Paul Wise)

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Development quotes of the week

Posted Dec 1, 2016 0:17 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

For what it's worth, Tom's experience is not unusual. That's what doing anything with the union of glibc and gdb, or glibc and GCC, or *any* combination of the GNU toolchain projects, is usually like. You'd think that things as heavily used and heavily tested as the GNU toolchain and libc wouldn't have too many dark corners, particularly given how enormous their testsuites are, but no: there is a *huge* amount of untrodden snow in there, subtle bugs and interactions that nobody has ever quite tested or that have only one user and the only real testcase is that the one user keeps working. (Heck, another thing in this week's issue is about the same sort of issue: malloc_set/get_state() and glibc/Emacs interactions.)

Development quotes of the week

Posted Dec 1, 2016 1:24 UTC (Thu) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

> The more software continues to take over every aspect of our lives, the more important it will be for us to take a stand

Yes, but I do wonder whether resigning over an unethical practice is the best way of `taking a stand'. If only because some other fellow is likely to take your job and do whatever it is that you refused to do.

There are two goals here which can be somewhat contradictory: preserving your personal integrity, and doing good for society. Resigning seems to be a way to accomplish the first goal, i.e. "I quit rather than fulfil this nefarious request," but the crashy self-driving car is still going to go into production without you. Is the alternative to stay and be as much of a pain in the arse to management as possible, in order to possibly get them to listen? Even if it means that you implement something slightly evil as a compromise?

I'm not claiming to have answers, though. I'm always interested to hear about personal stories like this, and how people resolve them.