I am curious why you avoid ads - personally I view them as a tremendous good for the world, helping people improve their lives by introducing them to products or even just ideas they didn't know existed.

I tend to view ads as the perfect opposite of what you mentioned; it’s an enormous waste of money and resources on a global scale that provides no tangible benefit for anyone that isn’t easily and cheaply replaced by vastly superior options.

If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product decisions), we’d have popular websites dedicated to ad viewing. What we have instead is an industry dedicated to the idea of forcefully displaying ads to users in the least convenient places possible, and we still all go to reddit to decide what to buy.

We do have such sites though, like Tom's Hardware or Consumer Reports or Wirecutter or what have you. Consumers pay money for these ads to reduce the conflict of interest, but companies still need to get their products chosen for these review pipelines.

Tom's Hardware and Consumer Reports aren't really about ads (or at least that's not what made them popular). they were about trying to determine the truth about products and see past the lies told about them by advertising.

Strictly speaking, isn't advertising any action that calls attention to a particular product over another? It doesn't have to be directly funded by a manufacturer or a distributor.

I'd consider word-of-mouth a type of advertising as well.

To me advertising isn't just calling attention to something, it's doing so with the intent to sell something or to manipulate.

When it's totally organic the person doing the promotion doesn't stand to gain anything. It less about trying to get you to buy something and usually just people sharing what they enjoy/has worked for them, or what they think you'd enjoy/would work for you. It's the intent behind the promotion and who is intended to benefit from it that makes the difference between friendly/helpful promotion and adversarial/harmful promotion.

Word of mouth can be a form of advertising that is directly funded by a manufacturer or a distributor too though. Social media influencers are one example, but companies will pay people to pretend to casually/organically talk up their products/services to strangers at bars/nightclubs, conferences, events, etc. just to take advantage of the increased level trust we put in word of mouth promotion exactly because of the assumption that the intent is to be helpful vs to sell.

> If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product decisions), we’d have popular websites dedicated to ad viewing.

There was a site dedicated to ad viewing once (adcritic.com maybe?) and it was great! People just viewed, voted, and commented on ads. Even though it was about the entertainment/artistic value of advertising and not about making product decisions.

Although the situation is likely to change somewhat in the near future, advertising has been one of the few ways that many artists have been able to make a comfortable living. Lying to and manipulating people in order to take more of their money or influence their opinions isn't exactly honorable work, but it has resulted in a lot of art that would not have happened otherwise.

Sadly the website was plagued by legal complaints from extremely shortsighted companies who should have been delighted to see their ads reach more people, and it eventually was forced to shutdown after it got too expensive to run (streaming video in those days was rare, low quality, and costly) although I have to wonder how much of that came from poor choices (like paying for insanely expensive superbowl ads). The website was bought up and came back requiring a subscription at which point I stopped paying any attention to it.

Back when I was a professor I would give a lecture on ethical design near the end of the intro course. In my experience, most people who think critically about ethics eventually arrive at their own personal ethics which are rarely uniform.

For example, many years ago I worked on military AI for my country. I eventually decided I couldn't square that with my ethics and left. But I consider advertising to be (often non-consensual) mind control designed to keep consumers in a state of perpetual desire and I'd sooner go back to building military AI than work for an advertising company, no matter how many brilliant engineers work there.

To me, ads are primarily a way to extract more value from ad-viewers by stochastically manipulating their behavior.

There is a lot of support in favor. Consider:

- Ads are typically NOT consumed enthusiastically or even sought out (which would be the cases if they were strongly mutually beneficial). There are such cases but they are a very small minority.

- If product introduction was the primary purpose, then repeatedly bombarding people with well-known brands would not make sense. But that is exactly what is being done (and paid for!) the most. Coca Cola does not pay for you to learn that they produce softdrinks. They pay for ads to shift your spending/consumption habits.

- Ads are an inherently flawed and biased way to learn about products, because there is no incentive whatsoever to inform you of flaws, or even to represent price/quality tradeoffs honestly.

Products (and particularly ideas) can be explored in a pull pattern too. Pushing things—physical items, concepts of identity, or political ideology—in the fashion endemic to the ad industry is a pretty surefire way to end up with an extremely bland society, or one that segments increasingly depending on targeting profile.

I also believe advertisements are useful! However, by this definition, the ad industry is not engaged in advertisement.

>I am curious why you avoid ads - personally I view them as a tremendous good for the world, helping people improve their lives by introducing them to products or even just ideas they didn't know existed.

I would agree with you if ads were just that. Here's our product, here's what it does, here's what it costs. Unfortunately ads sell the sizzle not the steak. That has been advertising mantra for probably 100 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW6HmQ1QVMw

Ads are most often manipulation, not information. They are pollution.

Avoiding the use of AI is just going to get you lapped.

There’s no benefit to your ideological goals in kneecapping yourself.

There’s nothing morally wrong with using or building AI, or gambling.

There's a lot baked into that thought, but I wanted to extract this part:

> There’s nothing morally wrong with ... building... gambling.

Say you're building a gambling system and building that system well. What does that mean? More people use it? Those people access it more? Access it faster? Gamble more? Gamble faster?

It creates and feeds addiction.

I agree with you. It's also worth noting that this isn't unique to anything discussed here. EVERYONE has their line in the sand on a huge array of issues, and that line falls differently for a lot of people.

Environment, religion, war, medicine; everything has a personal line associated with it.

Lots of things create and feed addictions, including baking cookies.

Let’s not confuse the issue. Just because you find something distasteful doesn’t mean it’s bad.

I've never seen a homeless person in Atlantic City put his fist through an oven window because the cookies didn't come out right.

I’ve seen plenty of simple-carb-addicted people die of fatness. It’s a slow and painful death.

We let adults make their own choices.

1) I question how much choice an addict has.

2) If you were devising more efficient sugar delivery systems for those acquaintances as a means to take every last cent they had, knowing they'd be unable to resist, you're complicit in robbing and killing them.

The benefit is a clear conscience.

In what context? Code generation? Art exploration?

Wake me up when AI is able to compete with a software engineer with almost two decades in the field.

Hint: most of my consulting rate is not about writing fizzbuzz. Some clients pay me without even having to write a single line of code.

I also refuse to work on the war machine, blockchain, or gambling.

Unfortunately it looks like that might also be refusing to eat right now. We'll see how much longer my principles can hold out. Being gaslit into an unjustified termination has me in a cynical kind of mood anyway. Doing a little damage might be cathartic.

I’ve been gaslit, I ended up walking away from my company. It was extremely painful.

> Doing a little damage might be cathartic.

Please avoid the regret. Do something kind instead. Take the high road. Take care of yourself.

Kindness doesn't have any dev openings.

Of course. But at least try to minimise the damage. Don’t do anything you’ll regret.

Regret right now would be letting the stress of unemployment rip my family apart. I've got maybe a handful of door-slamming "what the fuck did you do all day then?" rants that I can tolerate before I'm ready to sign on with Blockchain LLM O-Ring Validation as a Service LLC: We Always Return True!™ if it'll pay the bills and get my wife to stop freaking out.

And this is how all unjust systems sustain themselves. You WILL participate in the injustice, or be punished SEVERELY. Why do the people doing the punishing want to punish you? Because they WILL participate in punishing, or be punished SEVERELY.

People have wondered how so many people ever participated in any historical atrocity. This same mechanism is used for all of them.

Yep. Hail Moloch, I guess. He shows up, which is more than we can say for other deities.

It probably doesn't help right now, but you should know you are not the only one in your situation. Perhaps it might help to write down your actual principles. Then compare that list with the real reasons you refuse some employment opportunities.

I think you have already listed one big reason that isn't a high-minded principle. You want to make money. There may be others.

It's always wonderful when you can make a lot of money doing things you love to do. It stinks when you have to choose between what you are exceptionally good at doing and what your principles allow.

If only somebody could figure out how the talents of all the people in your situation could be used to restore housing affordability. Would you take a 70% paycut and move to Nebraska if it allowed you to keep all your other principles?

As you say, kindness isn't hiring. I'd love to see an HN discussion of all the good causes that need founders. It would be wonderful to have some well known efforts where the underemployed could devote some energy while they licked their wounds. It might even be useful to have "Goodworks Volunteer" fill that gap in employment history on your resume.

How do we get a monthly "What good causes need volunteers?" post on HN?

> It probably doesn't help right now, but you should know you are not the only one in your situation.

You're right, it doesn't. It feels more like an attempt to minimize. The rest was you spitballing some unrelated idea.

> Refusing to work on something is not newsworthy.

One person, no. A hundred, who knows. Ten thousand programmers united together not to work on something? Now we're getting somewhere. A hundred thousand? Newsworthy.

The issue is quantifying this sentiment. How would you even identify programmers who are doing this? Yet another reason why software engineers really ought to organize their labor like a lot of other disciplines of engineering have done decades ago. Collective action like this would be more easily mustered, advertised, and used to influence outcomes if labor were merely organized and informed of itself.

You can do public pledges, e.g.: https://neveragain.tech

I would bet there are a hundred thousand people refusing to work in war, ai, ads, gambling, crypto etc. I certainly am. But all it means is that pay goes up and quality of engineering goes down a little in those sectors, but not much more.