Secret police would probably have an interest in lists of people downloading an app tracking their movements no? Particularly if it was downloaded to a mobile tracking device they carry with themselves at most times.

The choice is between imprisonment/discharge and participating in the actions of the fascist war machine. Is obeying orders worth ruining the rest of your life with the knowledge and scars (physical + mental) that stem from them?

You do still have agency, the choice is just between being punished for doing the right thing, or participating in something illegal and monstrous with the slim chance of never being punished for it. Even if that punishment never comes, the internal torment and external judgement will be unavoidable.

Seriously, there is absolutely no disguising what is being defended here, the israelis have been starving, torturing, and murdering Palestinian children for over 600 days. There is no shortage of evidence of their heinous conduct. If someone is ordered to participate in an illegal war of aggression on their behalf, it is their moral and ethical duty to disobey those orders.

God damn this is bleak.

Mitch says the first signs of a deepening reliance on AI came when the company’s CEO was found to be rewriting parts of their app so that it would be easier for AI models to understand and help with. “Then”, Mitch says, “I had a meeting with the CEO where he told me he noticed I wasn’t using the Chat GPT account the company had given me. I wasn’t really aware the company was tracking that”.

“Anyway, he told me that I would need to start using Chat GPT to speed up my development process. Furthermore, he said I should start using Claude, another AI tool, to just wholesale create new features for the app. He walked me through setting up the accounts and had me write one with Claude while I was on call with him. I’m still not entirely sure why he did that, but I think it may have been him trying to convince himself that it would work.”

Mitch describes this increasing reliance on AI to be not just “incredibly boring”, but ultimately pointless. “Sure, it was faster, but it had a completely different development rhythm”, they say. “In terms of software quality, I would say the code created by the AI was worse than code written by a human–though not drastically so–and was difficult to work with since most of it hadn’t been written by the people whose job it was to oversee it”.

“One thing to note is that just the thought of using AI to generate code was so demotivating that I think it would counteract any of the speed gains that the tool would provide, and on top of that would produce worse code than I didn’t understand. And that’s not even mentioning the ethical concerns of a tool built on plagiarism.”