[lfuller]

The quote was "ultimately some responsibility lies with us to think through how those tools will be used". It's saying that we as builders have a responsibility to consider and be mindful of the impacts of what we're building. It's not saying that the maintainer of wget is directly responsible for a system used to exfiltrate data from a database of political asylees.

To take your same point to its logical conclusion, no one is responsible for evil aside from the one who pulls the trigger.

[zahlman]

> It's saying that we as builders have a responsibility to consider and be mindful of the impacts of what we're building.

Yes, and my argument is that building those things doesn't have the "impact" referred to; using them does.

> To take your same point to its logical conclusion, no one is responsible for evil aside from the one who pulls the trigger.

Tools, by their nature, have explicitly designed uses, and potential cascading consequences of that use. This is one of the reasons that open-source licenses include a disclaimer of warranty: for the legal protection of the author, not just from claims by users, but claims by third parties injured by those users.

As far as culpability goes, I'm much happier drawing the line in a place where, if you keep applying the same logic you used originally, it will stay put rather than moving inexorably further. Contrary to what many have tried to tell me, intent does matter, a whole lot.

[sigbottle]

Good rebuttal, a lot of absolutes in philosophy you can just extrapolate out to absurd conclusions on both sides.

As an aside, one thing I notice a lot on internet forums is the tendency to immediately jump to these two extremes (often as a form of strawman). Might be projecting here, but I think it's an attempt to get internet points and seem smart, e.g. debate culture. Though I could totally see that maybe everybody can intuitively see these absurd conclusions, so it follows that there will probably be one genuinely disgruntled reader that that finally reaches their breaking point. I know I've certainly made similar comments.

How do we navigate this line? Ultimately I think the answer can only lie in human experiences, and thus I'm glad that the original article exists. It's another datapoint. (though this spawns a whole other discussion about how we get our data)