#poll for all you beautiful hard working professional computer touchers out there:

@aeva I'm not curing cancer or anything, but people having fun counts as "better", right?

@aeva the company is not exactly Good but the product is

@lina god big mood

@TomF as but a humble toy maker living a simple life, i certainly like to think so

@aeva

At least, I haven't yet been convinced that the evil uses of the product might outweigh the good.

@aeva “worse” and my mental health would be better if I weren’t aware of that or believed otherwise, surely…

@aeva @TomF I'd say yes, it is better for people to have fun, but I'm also very concerned about the ecological impacts of the video game industry (especially the hardware manufacturing side, which is fueled by power hungry games). If we have fun now, to discover in a few years that we have depleted all useful natural resources, destroyed vital ecosystems, and modified the climate at the same time, maybe we'll not be so happy we had that fun.

@aeva @TomF Of course these problems are not specific to the video game industry, but it's certainly doing its part to make things worse.

So in the end I'm not convinced at all I'm helping to build a better world.

Maybe an exception is games designed to run on 10 years old hardware. If nobody buys hardware to play the game, then ok, its ecological impact is low.

@aeva great poll

@aeva

I think the secred third adjective should be "irrelevant". My work is in fact overall irrelevant in terms of world condition.

@aeva I've spent most of the last 8 years trying to crack a monopoly on submitting dental insurance claims. It only reduces the cost of a dentist visit by about $1, though.

@aeva Gotta love invasive health insurance marketing.

@aeva they started telling me to do what I was told, so I stopped being able to provide value. I'm fine with the situation.

Following instructions from incompetent leadership is indistinguishable from sabotage.

@aeva Tricky... on one hand, our product is used in healthcare. On the other hand, the higher ups are really into AI...

@aeva it depends on what my clients do with the buildings I plan. in most cases I hope good things are being done in those places, like children learning and people having homes. at the same time, I have no idea if some of the money from those buildings are going to corruption. well, one of my clients got into the most well known newscast in the country. a building I designed was shown to millions… in a corruption scandal news report

@aeva I guess the adjective is maybe "more energy efficent", which is of course a good thing, but I hesitate to use better due to it being a kind of indirect thing with it being more about monitoring energy and water usage.

@aeva wow, um face value i didn't expect that's where this poll was headed. i browsed through some of your other responses to replies to this poll and you are just out there blasting much-needed hope and positivity into the inferno. you're awesome and thank you

@angelikatyborska do you use their tool to make their website?

@aeva "...less technologically dependent on the US/China." is probably correct right now. A while ago it was "better". A while while ago it was "reliable", I guess. Though c-suite people didn't want reliable they wanted corruption (I guess that's what the c stands for).

Lot's of the tech is quite indifferent and too low level to be either as it facilitate both. Only one project was for pure good but no one wanted to finance it, so it was paused.

@aeva As a system administrator in a university (in a CS department) I feel my day job is probably somewhere around neutral. I would like to think I am making the world ever so slightly better by keeping the lights on and helping researchers and graduate students learn new things but I'm not sure I can be that optimistic about the typical output of academia.

I mostly settle for 'at least my work isn't clearly making the world worse'.