It truly is just a handful of unscrupulous, malignant narcissists that have ruined everything (including the planet) for everyone else.

No, that was a much larger group effort. You and me can’t wash our hands of it. Like, even if you ignore the majority of stuff they don’t own, we let them do that.

<3

It’s not clear what goalpost you mean, exactly. Any consequentialism being bad, or pure consequentialism?

I was pretty careful not to set a goalpost of any kind on pure consequentialism, if you go back and double check, exactly because it has well-known problems.

Go bootlick a billionaire if you want to but don’t come here try to convince anyone that they are in any way good people

Don’t flatter them with the evil genius shit either. That’s how they want to be seen.

The fact I know what deontology means should suggest that I’ve heard of the trolley problem.

Also, leg[al] isn’t moral!

Correct. But, you’d have to figure out an alternative system of rules that he broke. And it may very well capture people you like as well. Most people would have no problem killing a technical standard for a very large sum of money.

I can’t say it’s impossible to do reasonably, but I can’t say it is possible either. Most people just acknowledge that sometimes the ends justify the means.

People also say he’s putting microchips in the COVID vaccines, so pardon me if I’m skeptical about all that. It appears to be a philanthropic project. Maybe not the best possible one, but one nonetheless.

good should be done for the improvement of humanity and bad people should be held accountable for their crimes.

Wouldn’t the “holding accountable” itself involve some bad actions?

Hey, it’s a pretty popular ethical philosophy. Generally, people like to leave caveats, but fully rejecting all consequentialism is similarly uncommon.

If you’re going to be a pure deontologist, you have to pick out single actions he’s done that went against your chosen rules. One hurdle there is that most of his activities were legal in their time or place. Another is that seeking personal profit is almost universal and often commended.

Almost certainly, he’s saved far more lives than he’s taken at this point.

He scalped Western technophobes pretty hard and tried to hobble a lot of early FOSS efforts (although we came through in the end). Few of the idiots buying Windows XP licences needed that money more then the recipients of the Gates fund, though, so if that’s his lifetime transaction it’s based.

so what’s your threshold for being a scumbag piece of shit?

It’s not clear good people exist at all.

I’m probably one of the people OP is thinking of. Before my time he was apparently a massive bastard, and he even admits to it. These days, as far as I can tell, he rescues Africans and doesn’t do much else. Every other famous billionaire is higher on my shit list.

Has he actually given up on the Metaverse thing at this point?

These are all Eastern European software developers, per the article.

Yeah, it’s a bit complicated. They retain some level of sovereignty within the UAE as I understand it, unlike Califonia, which since the civil war has basically been just a subnational division.

There’s a set of “official” countries that legally recognise each other, but in practice any group that has a local monopoly on the use of violence (so, trapping people in jails without going to jail for it, basically) can be equivalent. In fact, some of these have partial recognition, like Kosovo, or the non-official half of Libya.

Israel, Latvia, Belgium and Dubai

That’s such a mixed bag.

Dubai is part of some kind of confederation (the UAE), and doesn’t even claim to be a full country. Israel exists, but there’s a lot of controversy about how it’s managed that. Belgium exists, but doesn’t have a unified cultural identity the same way as most European countries. Finally, Latvia exists but Russia doesn’t want it to, although I might be missing something about how distinct it is from Lithuania.

It’s both.

I’m picturing something like Slenderman arriving and dragging me off to the land of model failures forever.

The critical detail being that you don’t actually know what’s inside (and it’s definitely bad). Just using LLM assistance for a your boilerplate code doesn’t count.

Because if not, I feel like this could get the team in legal or at least financial hot water with investors.

Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, just that it’s not normal and okay.

Pretty much.

Well, that’s too far in the other direction. Zero is a very small number, and Derek Chauvin is in jail.

I think we all know the practice of that is a little hit-and-miss.

If it was identifying Lemmy users, it definitely would be. But, it’s a tool that reveals identities of a small, supposedly accountable group during real-life interactions, and we’re just mentioning it, so it seems like there’s at least an argument to allow it.