xJREB

joined 2 years ago
[–] xJREB@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I think you might be approaching this in the wrong way. There is no objective right or wrong when it comes to ethics. Life and humans are simply too complex to create simple, objective rules that would be interpreted in exactly the same way by a decent number of humans for a reasonably complex situation. And you don't even have to include ethical dilemmas for that, like deciding whether to shoot down a plane hijacked by terrorists or interrogating a kidnapper via torture.

Nonetheless, many homogeneous groups get to a decent degree of ethical alignment, and asking people for their ethical rules or guidelines is an interesting question to get inspiration and to find out how others try to navigate the complexity of the world. Just don't expect these rules to be objective.

[–] xJREB@lemmy.world 22 points 10 months ago

I recently read an interesting article proposing to get rid of the current peer review system: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review

The argument was roughly this: for the unfathomable (unpaid) hours spent on peer review, it's not very effective. Too much bad research still gets published and too much good research gets rejected. Science would also not be a weak-link problem but a strong-link problem, i.e., scientific progress would not depend on the quality of our worst research but of that of our best research (which would push through anyway in time). Pretty interesting read, even though I find it difficult to imagine how we would transition to such a system.

[–] xJREB@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Wow, these guys are even more awesome than I thought then...

[–] xJREB@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is Google Chrome fighting uBlock country-specific? I use Chrome on Win 10 with uBlock and haven't seen a YouTube ad outside of the mobile app in ages. For me, uBlock never stopped working in Chrome and I watch YouTube videos every 1-2 days.

[–] xJREB@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

An axiom is a statement that is accepted to be true, usually to serve as a foundation for further arguments. I assume OP meant that NGT would often make general statements without much justification and OP perceived these statements as not nuanced / "true" enough.

[–] xJREB@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

A few bad things in code for which we have fairly consistent evidence:

  • high nesting depth
  • meaningless or single-letter variable names
  • lots of code duplication
  • very inconsistent formatting
  • very complicated Boolean conditions with AND and OR
  • functions with a lot of parameters
[–] xJREB@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As a software engineering researcher, I strongly agree. SE research has studied code comprehension for more than 40 years, but for that amount of time, we know surprisingly little about what makes really high-quality code. We are decent in saying what makes very bad code, though, but beyond extreme cases, it's hard to come to fairly general statements.

[–] xJREB@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

While I agree with the general notion of this, there are still companies that are considerably worse than others. Choosing the lesser evil is still something that would overall help society and the planet.