In that situation of using someone else's device, I've had to move windows half off the screen to be able to concentrate on an article when the ads on the side were constantly distracting me.
Not only that, but you're wrong on a technicality too - > and every single one of those ads were programmed by... a software engineer!
Many ads are designed by creatives and placed and run by dedicated non-software engineering people, including deciding how many are run and their placement (i.e. bombardment or not). Sure engineers programmed the platform, but then you're just blaming the post office for the content of the mail, or the ISP for the content of the internet. What do you expect the software engineers to do? Limit 1 ad per page programatically and then every software engineer on earth must agree to enforce that limit and no matter how much pressure their superiors put on them, everybody holds the line?
This is not a rhetorical question, How do you expect all software engineers to be unified on a single solution to ad bombardment, given the internet is international, driven by market dynamics and capitalism and a non-trivial number of programmers are beholden to tyrannical managers because of their life situation (it can still be a minority, and ad bombardment emerges)?
By developing a consensus that it is not ok to do that type of behavior (bombardment of ads, surveillance capitalism, etc) and changing the culture
Changing bad behavior by corporations (esp. adtech/advertisers) is likely to be about as successful: it's not going to be done by "changing" the culture, but only by changing the laws, and then enforcing those laws and punishing offenders. Just like a rapist sees nothing wrong with raping a person, or a serial killer sees nothing wrong with murdering many strangers, or a "porch pirate" sees nothing wrong with stealing your Amazon delivery, an ad-tech corporation sees nothing wrong with feeding you psychologically manipulative advertising and blatant malware in search of profit.
No. They did not. They explicity said "mostly works".
> but this is blatantly false:
Of course it is. You set up a blantantly false strawman. Please don't use obviously piss weak rhetorical tactics, they make you look bad.
> every country has prisons with many criminals
And every country has varying incarceration rates, they are not all equal.
What should be looked at is countries by cultural attitudes towards crime and incarceration rates .. and the harder question of just how innately criminal imprisoned people are in various countries and whether they are just there from systemic features of a culture.
Again, there are no one size fits all answers and people aren't homogenous.
That was my exact point with the previous post blaming "software engineers" for ads.
Who said that police are not part of the culture?
I'm not arguing whether or not we need police, I'm arguing that if we come to a consensus (i.e., we agree that surveillance capitalism, etc, is not ok), then we can stop the problem. That may mean we even criminalize certain behaviors if we believe it is necessary. But the foundation is consensus. So let's do that- I firmly believe that surveillance capitalism and the bombardment of ads is not ok. What about you?
That sounds cool...but such coordinated, idealistic behavior never occurs in human beings.
See? That logic doesn't work so well. "Software engineers" are not a singular entity nor a homogeneous group. To maintain the status quo, it doesn't take more than just a few SWEs willing to implement ads and/or invasive tracking.
The people on this site are a group of humans uniquely equipped to actually speak and interact with the people responsible for this bullshit.
> The people on this site are a group of humans uniquely equipped to actually speak and interact with the people responsible for this bullshit.
There's not any method whatsoever for the people on this site to force all ad software developers to stop developing ad software.
I guess all the cybersecurity engineers should just quit because they're the ones to blame for all the malware...
Similarly, the only reason humans work as police is because humans commit crimes. So humans are really to blame for this problem.
I feel the same way about software for war fighting, which obviously has higher stakes. The profession itself doesn't push back on the ethics of it AND individual practitioners are actively developing death-dealing software.
You're acting like the profession has some kind of central authority. It does not. It's like asking for agreed-upon ethical standards for dog walkers; you're not going to get it, because there's nothing resembling a centralized organization, nor any kind of licensing for this profession.
>I feel the same way about software for war fighting,
If you want to eliminate software for war fighting, this is a fool's errand. Weapons for war are absolutely necessary, unless you want to be a victim to some dictator who doesn't agree with your ethical principles. History is full of examples of peaceful people who couldn't withstand an assault by other people who didn't believe in peace. In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that eliminating warfare (and the military apparatus for it: armies and navies etc.) is impossible as long as separate countries exist. Only if we manage to either conquer everyone or get everyone to agree to join a single planetary government can war really be eliminated. And that assumes that hostile aliens won't ever be a problem.
Even if there was some centralized group that created an ethical standard for conduct, do you really think that that would escape the influence of software companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. that have a vested interest in advertisement? Or that every software engineer would follow such a standard of conduct?
Members of a minority group, such as race or religion or sexual orientation are generally members of that group by birth, not by choice.
Members of the group 'software engineers' are members of that group by (career) choice.
Your key point here is a tautology; it doesn't really lead to any insight.