My thoughts on ethics in computing (and beyond)
September 14, 2025
I had a conversation yesterday where I talked about this, so I think it’s about time I make another blog post.
To start, I enjoy building open-source software, although this should be obvious if you know anything I’ve built.
When I think of an interesting engineering challenge, or some sort of interesting concept, it usually doesn’t take long for me to try to make it into a reality.
In general, I do not expect any of that to go anywhere. It’s very uncommon that anyone/anything other than me (and other code of mine) actually uses what I make, but there are few things I enjoy more than seeing that happen.
For example, I have stated that in Iron devlog 1: Some history:
Within ONLY A FEW DAYS after releasing it, someone sent me an email about goserver (you can imagine my excitement when I read it), and that person is not only the first ever real user as far as I know but is also still in contact with me, although less frequently.
As well as later on in Goodbye, Gimkit too:
I publicly announced gimhook 8 days later, on May 30, 2023. At the time, I seriously underestimated how much people would care about that sort of thing. Two people quickly noticed it and were seriously interested in the project: TUX and Blackhole927. […] For the first time, it felt like a lot of people were actually enjoying something I made - and I was really happy about that.
However, I usually don’t expect that to happen. Most of what I build ends up being random experiments, like a speech recognition based teleprompter. (although I think that one might deserve a blog post in the future, especially given the interesting origins of it…)
Regardless of what it is though, whenever I talk to people in person about what I’m making, I often get one of 3 responses roughly:
I could never figure out how to do that.
You would make so much money off of this.
You’ll be the next Bill Gates / Steve Jobs / [some other famous tech company CEO].
I absolutely understand the first one, but the other two annoy me in every possible way.
But, to understand why, we have to recognize that this wasn’t always the case.
The version of me (well, “me”) from a few years ago is virtually unrecognizable from who I am now in many ways.
I used to be a terrible person. I now recognize that what I used to do is probably not that bad from an absolute perspective, but I am never going to pretend that what I did was acceptable.
The exact details are complicated, and not really what this blog post is about, but the long story short is that when 2020 hit I started acting selfish and egotistical.
One of the biggest things that I did to improve, which is the fundamental philosophy of everything I do now, is I decided that I had to do the right thing as much as I could to counteract the bad things I did.
Every time I built something, I published the code openly, or at least planned to once it was ready. Because it’s the right thing to do.
Code is knowledge, and knowledge should be for all, never to be gatekept.
So, I kept building new things. I did what I enjoy the most, and I did it as well as I could.
The fundamental philosophy never changed. I continued to build openly and focus on doing what is right.
When I look back at who I used to be, I say: Never again.
Never again will I do that.
Never again will I be like that.
And I’ll do everything that my older self would hate, out of spite.
Whenever someone asks me why I always give my code away, I say it’s because it’s the right thing to do.
We all know what dealing with large company software / websites feels like. Privacy nightmare, no transparency, and designed against you, not for you.
I refuse to fall into that trap. I want to build code that does not take advantage of those who use it. I want to build code that is helpful, just as it should be.
If I do make a significant amount of money off of my code, I have failed.
If I do become the next Bill Gates / Steve Jobs / [some other famous tech company CEO], I have failed.
It’s not who I am. It’s not who I want to be.
Large companies have normalized the weaponization of computing as a way of being user hostile, but it never had to be this way. Together, as users, we can build for each other, just as it should be.
So, my recommendation to the reader?
Find your passion. It could be writing code, writing things other than code, making music, drawing, or any other creative thing.
Then, keep building. Meet new people. Discover new things.
There is light at the end of the tunnel, and the only way left to go is forward.
So keep walking towards it. Keep building what you want to build.
Because, once you reach the light at the end of the tunnel, you will end up far better than before.