Post by @rnd@toot.cat

on one hand, a world in which programmers are expected to be as robust and rigorous about the quality of their work as other engineering disciplines is going to be way better than what we have now

on the other, i would be forever unemployed in that world

(i'm not even saying it in a "it would be impossible for me to improve my skills or switch to tooling that requires that kind of robustness by default" way, but rather as a "i would be extremely scared of doing anything under a level of responsibility other engineering fields require" thing)

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/dev/urandom

@rnd@toot.cat 2 hr. ago

but honestly, some of those bugs and errors that people are now suffering from are embarrassing even for me

"what do you mean you set your private key to the number 4?"

"what do you mean you built a network of large language models capable of acting on their own and didn't set up a heavily restricted and monitored environment and they now hacked a bunch of websites?"

this isn't merely "our testing wasn't exhaustive enough" or "we didn't predict this unlikely event would happen", these are both fails on most basic measures that most other software developers and information security newbies would tell you is a bad idea

i don't think we should shackle ourselves into a world where you need a certificate to write programs or where every segfault is a $1000 fine, but the fact that really big companies are doing this kind of bullshit means that there are eventually going to be enough angry people who would want put something like that into law, and they'd treat the (otherwise reasonable) response of "what you're about to do will break the tech industry and open-source software specifically" as irresponsible fearmongering

/dev/urandom

@rnd@toot.cat 1 hr. ago

back in the 1990s, a lot of people were very afraid of violent video games -- sure, a lot of these were puritan social conservatives and folks ignorant about gaming that they'd treat cartoonish violence in the first "mortal kombat" as if it were a realistic depiction of gore or completely misunderstand the point of "night trap", but the prospect of children being able to buy a game with blood and gore and perhaps even titties in the same place they'd buy mario and sonic was extremely scary to them

a few of the politicians even raised an idea of governments running some kind of censorship board -- granted, it would always be a farfetched idea given that the u.s. and most of europe protect free expression of ideas, but the gaming industry took the idea seriously and instead set up their own controlling bodies that would figure out which games should be sold to which age groups without meddling from politicians (and given how much politics change or how different things can be seen in more left- or right-leaning parts of any country, probably a good idea)

it also was, in practice, an entirely voluntary system that only applied if you wanted to sell your video game in retail stores, not blocking the amateur/indie game scene and leaving any future technologies, like digital distribution, open to interpretation

i feel like we're at a point where something similar should perhaps be happening with certifying software safety and security response practices, but at this point i'm pretty sure that if microsoft, apple and google were to raise the idea of some kind of self-regulation board that would also allow open-source devs to keep doing their thing, a lot of people would say "we don't trust you" for some very good reasons