mspcommentary

Although ethics are involved, the abstract says that the conflicting importance does not come from ethics vs KPIs, but from the fact that the ethical constraints are given as instructions, whereas the KPIs are goals.

You might, for example, say "Maximise profits. Do not commit fraud". Leaving ethics out of it, you might say "Increase the usability of the website. Do not increase the default font size".

They aren't pestering the developers; they made a comment on HN about what, to them, is an essential feature of a note-taking app. The developers may never see it.

I happen to agree with them. The single most important aspect of a note-taking app is that I must own my notes. That means that I must be able to take them elsewhere if I want. Including, in fact, especially, if the company hosting them goes out of business or simply chooses to discontinue the app (looking at you, Google).

If I can take the plain text but lose the formatting or the cross-linking, that isn't good enough (hello Google Keep export).

But if lowercase can find enough customers who don't feel this way, all power to them.

About 10 years ago I joined a new company, and I looked at their code and thought "what idiots wrote this?", which was strange, because everyone there was very bright. A little while later, some more new devs joined, looked at the code, and thought "what idiots wrote this?", and I was a bit annoyed, because some of that code was mine. They did a big rewrite. A little while after that, some more devs joined, looked at the rewrite and thought "what idiots wrote this?".

Fundamentally, no-one likes working with other people's code or solutions. They always think that they'd have done it better if they'd had the chance.