Rabbit hole time.
So there actually was some electrical research being conducted in 1705, but it was all static electricity. It could be argued that there was a non-zero amount generated and consumed, but it’s really, really small. ChatGPT threw out a value of “20 milliwatts” for this, citing that it was “about the power of a dim LED”.
There’s also diffusing responsibility across the organization. It’s easy to achieve unethical things, when the individual’s part of the job hardly seems “bad” at all.
I used to struggle with this, until I realized what’s really going on. To do conventional web development, you have to download a zillion node modules so you can:
All this dwarfs any code you’re going to write by multiple orders of magnitude. I once had a node_modules tree that clocked in at over 1.5GB of sourcecode. What I was writing would have fit on a floppy-disk.
That said, it’s kind of insane. The problem is that there’s no binary releases, nor fully-vendored/bundled packages. The entire toolchain source, except nodejs and npm, is downloaded in its entirety, on every such project you run.
In contrast, if you made C++ or Rust developers rebuild their entire toolchain from source on every project, they’d riot. Or, they would re-invent binary releases that weekend.
As one of the horde of neurodivergent folks that love Hank’s content, I kind of need it this way. Chris Boden is another one. Long, still, static shots, just punch me right in the attention span and are hard to get through. It takes way more effort than the occasional jump-cut to pull off.