• Frank [he/him, he/him]
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    4 years ago

    EDIT: Nope, never mind, turns out I was the one who misurderstood the context. Preserved for posterity

    If I understand the context she wrote some software to allow a commercial camera drone follow it's operator. Like, if you bought a DJI Phantom, drones like that have a feature where you can designate a person and the drone will attempt to follow them at a fixed altitude like it was on a big leash.

    Could that code be weaponized? Yeah. Was it? Idk. Is it reasonable to believe that the code you wrote for a commercial camera drone tether program was somehow re-worked for military surveillance or targeting purposes? Eh... not really, no.

    It's a bit like the difference between a laser pointer and a laser weapon system. They both have laser in the name, and they might appear superficially similar, but they're not actually that similar and you can't really turn one in to the other.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
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        4 years ago

        I mean, that reads like what she's trying to say is "I, a trans, wrote software for the military industrial complex, while Trump is bad" to shut someone up about Trans people in the military being a problem for the military, with the point being that Trans people don't hurt the military, rather than the work she did being good.

        And actually, looking back through the context, I'm intended to go back to my original statement. "making a drone chase a person" probably refers to writing code to create a "tethering" function for a commercial drone, not writing software for Predators.

        Idk, this reads as more of a problem of a lot of research being funded by the MIC. I know a bunch of engineers who have talked about the moral peril of being an engineer. You can't do anything in aerospace without your job contributing to Raytheon or Boeing or someone. A lot of mathematics ties right back in to the MIC. Fuck, even Anthropology had a whole thing where they were recruiting anthroplogists to be spies in the Middle East, and it was a serious problem because "Getting a job in your field" isn't really a thing for anthropologists, so the temptation to use your powers for evil is very real.

        Looking through that bundle of screenshots my read is that Emily did coding shit at a university where the research arm is funded by the MIC, which is most of them, got some kind of government contracting job for a while, and then decided to become an angry leftist. Similar path as Chelsea Manning, or Snowden, or like most leftist vets.

        I know there's an ongoing struggle session about leftist veterans, but this doesn't read as any more or less damning than any other person who took a paycheck for doing Evil Empire shit at some point in their past.