People who absolve engineers of all responsibility annoy me to no end. They're omnipresent on this forum and justify working for Facebook with things like "not my decision" or "someone else would do it" or "it's not that bad you just don't understand" or "I'm just following orders"

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flaunf221 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Good thing I didn't absolve him of "all responsibility" and even wrote explicitly that he is complicit.

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jjk166 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is an important subtlety which is that engineers are not responsible for which technical challenges get solved, they are responsible for how those technical challenges are solved. An engineer's ethical obligation is not to avoid working on something that could be used in a harmful way, it is to prevent incidental harm from its deliberate usage. There's nothing unethical about working on a fuel additive to prevent engine knock; knowingly using a poisonous compound which is going to create immense public health problems to solve the problem was the sin.

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hyperhello an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

People who say annoy me to no end annoy me no end. They’re different phrases.

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jjk166 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

They are not different phrases. "Annoy to no end" is the American English version while "annoy no end" is the British. Both are acceptable and mean the same thing.

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tux3 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That's ironic, because the "no end" form was already a relatively new idiom. But "to no end" has already overtaken it in terms of popularity. Of course I meant the word "ironic" like I mean the word "literally"; which is to say, figuratively.

Being a prescriptivist creates no end of everyday pains. Language just won't conform.

	▲	hyperhello an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The thing is that it’s always used in “annoy” or “frustrate” because they mistake the response as sympathetic annoyance or empathic frustration when it’s really just their misuse of language. I don’t want them to be responsible for their miscommunication in the future!