I didn’t know that! I just subbed to their service for Make Some Noise so I kind of feel better about shelling out for it now.

We do. A24, for instance, is still making a couple movies by agreeing to work under the proposed terms by SAG. As far as I know, no one else has made such agreements yet. The more of such exceptions that get made, the weaker the AMPTP’s position will get.

Interesting. I’m not sure what the exact path forward would be, but a couple observations. The first is that I do think the lack of transparency into things like peer review hurts the scientific community overall. Often when I don’t fully understand why a piece of code is the way it is, reading the comments of the original PR can be really illuminating. Being able to see what sort of issues were raised about a paper during review and how the author handled them could, I imagine, add a lot of valuable context to the paper itself.

The next thing I’m noticing is something my academic friends complain about a lot: the vengeful, egotistic nature of many high-level academics. I don’t really know how to solve this problem when stuff isn’t anonymous, but I have to imagine that an author being able to see why their paper was recommended against and even being able to respond to it would be good for the author in the long run. In software you learn not to take someone deciding to reject your pull request personally, but also when someone rejects a good PR everyone else can also see that.

Overall I think the process helps blunt egos a little, and also shines a light on those that can’t get past their egos in a way that is also healthy for the community. But yeah, I hear you and don’t have a 100% good solution to egotistic retribution beyond vague noises about that being a cultural issue that needs to be changed and a vague sense I can’t back up with data that opening up the communication lines to public scrutiny might actually help shine a light on that culture and change it.

Referee reports. I’ll edit to be more clear.

I work in software, not academia. Would you mind giving me a quick overview of what referee reports are and how they apply? Most of the results on Google seem to assume you already know what they are, and the one concise answer I can find makes it seem like they’re job references?

How do they relate to peer review?

IMO open review is the way to go. Having reviews public goes a long long way towards auditing how trustworthy a process is and one of the main sources of trust in Open Source software.

It can be really nerve wracking having your work ventilated in public, but you get used to it. I also think it encourages more polite reviews in some people, as their interactions are also on public display.

There are a few famous developers who used to completely brow-beat people that have publicly started talking about how they are taking feedback to heart about moderating that and I don’t think that would have happened if they had only been giving feedback in private.

I think this was an Orville episode, wasn’t it?

Am I taking crazy pills? Except for 76, an MMO, Bethesdas record has been pretty good for single-player games, no?

I’ve played all of their games since Morrowind on Launch and always had a blast.

I could not disagree harder. Bethesda puts a ton of work into making their games as extensible as possible and I think that’s not a deficiency at all.

This but like, unironically

I don’t think a medical-focused Trek show would have to take place during war time. Medical Ethics in general is ripe for the sort of show Trek lends itself to.

Imo that’s still not enough. Plenty of crashes or failures happen in a way where loading screen animations still keep playing. Having a cursor you can move around to validate that the process is still responsive is important feedback.

I also remember lots of games that did exactly what you are saying and there was no way to tell if it had hung during loading or not because you couldn’t check if it was accepting feedback.

Formal licensing could be about things that are language agnostic. How to properly use tests to guard against regressions, how to handle error states safely.

How do you design programs for critical systems that CANNOT fail, like pace makers? How do you guard against crashes? What sort of redundancy do you need in your software?

How do you best design error messages to tell an operator how to fix the issue? Especially in critical systems like a plane, how do you guard against that operator doing the wrong thing? I’m thinking of the DreamLiner incidents where the pilots’ natural inclination was to grab the yoke and pull up, which unknowingly fought the airport and caused the plane to stall. My understanding was that the error message that triggered during those crashes was also extremely opaque and added further confusion in a life-and-death situation.

When do you have an ethical responsibility not to ship code? What about Dark Patterns? How do you recognize them and do you have an ethical responsibility to refuse implementation? Should your accreditation as an engineer rely on that refusal, giving you systemic external support when you do so?

None of that is impacted by what tech stack you are using. They all come down to generic logical and ethical reasoning.

Lastly, under certain circumstances, Civil engineers can be held personally liable for negligence when their bridge fails and people die. If we are going to call ourselves “engineers”, we should bear the same responsibility. Obviously not every software developer needs to have such high standards, but that’s why software engineer should mean something.

My experience has often been the opposite. Programmers will do a lot to avoid the ethical implications of their works being used maliciously and discussions of what responsibility we bear for how our work gets used and how much effort we should be obligated to make towards defending against malicious use.

It’s why I kind of wish that “engineer” was a regulated title in America like it is in other countries, and getting certified as a programming engineer required some amount of training in programming ethics and standards.

IMO it’s a good feature and it’s a good thing it’s required. I remember the days when I would boot up a game and never be sure if my system crashed or not.

This requires the game to start giving you feedback before you start wondering if you should do a power cycle.

I actually think the radio signal is an apt comparison. Let’s say someone was trying to argue that the signal itself was a fundamental force.

Well then you could make the argument that if you pour a drink into it, the water shorts the electronics and the signal stops playing as the electromagnetic force stops working on the pieces of the radio. This would lead you to believe, through the same logic in my post, that the signal itself is not a fundamental force, but is somehow created through the electromagnetic force interacting with the components, which… It is! The observer might not understand how the signal worked, but they could rule it out as being its own discreet thing.

In the same way, we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon. Fundamental forces can’t have parts or components, they must be completely discreet.

Your example is a really really good one.

American here.

Did we just become best friends!???

At a sketch:

• We know that when the brain chemistry is disrupted, our consciousness is disrupted

• You can test this yourself. Drink some alcohol and your consciousness will be disrupted. Similarly I am on Gabapentin for nerve pain, which works by inhibiting the electrical signals my nerves use to fire, and in turn makes me groggy.

• While we don’t know exactly how consciousness works, we have a VERY good understanding of chemistry, which is to say, the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism (fundamental forces). Literally millions of repeatable experiments that have validated these forces exist and we understand the way they behave.

• Drugs like Gabapentin and Alcohol interact with our brain using these forces.

• If the interaction of these forces being disrupted disrupts our consciousness, it’s reasonable to conclude that our consciousness is built on top of, or is an emergent property of, these forces’ interactions.

• If our consciousness is made up of these forces, then it cannot be a fundamental force as, by definition, fundamental forces must be the basic building blocks of physics and not derived from other forces.

There are no real assumptions here. It’s all a line of logical reasoning based on observations you can do yourself.

Why would you assume consciousness is a fundamental force rather than an emergent property of complex systems built on the forces?

My point was that Star Wars has been tied to the same characters for personal and business reasons, not inherently creative ones defined by the setting. The difference IMO is mostly down to who the creators and executives involved in the process of each IP have been, not the actual merits of the respective IP’s worlds.

If Gene Roddenberry has decided that Next Generation had to be about Kirk and his crew, and then Paramount also mandated all it’s other Star Trek projects to be about TOS crew, we’d be having the same discussions about “why can’t Start Trek get away from the original series?” even though it has nothing to do with the setting.