The three most important things I learned this semester were it’s a lot easier to find information on a person once you find their traffic violations, design your resume for the job you’re applying for (don’t include information about how good of a cook you are when applying for a software engineer position), and research the companies you’re applying for before an interview. My best piece of advice is to do the assignments as they’re given, despite being due at the end of the semester. A lot of the time you’ll have discussions based on what’s assigned earlier in the week.

As I’m doing a presentation about setting federal laws for AI, I’m really interested in hearing about what the other AI presenters are going to bring to the table about how they think it should function, and the sort of implications that come with it. The moral sides of AI will be very interesting to hear about as well, such as “If a self driving car has to crash into one of two groups of people, how does it pick?” As for myself my focus will be on having the federal government discuss implementing a set of rules while AI development is still in its early stages of becoming popular, and prevent any potential risks that would come with an unregulated market.

Before the class, I had zero knowledge on what blockchain actually is and found it to be a very interesting way to put more power into the people, rather than 3rd party avenues. What I liked the most about this technology is that every action is immutable, and can only have additions to it if both parties agree. This also makes it an extremely easy way to track the progression of a product and see where something may have gone wrong in the line. I think small businesses will definitely start picking up blockchain more as time goes on and they start seeing the benefits it has for their company, as most usually have a tighter allowance to deal with than larger businesses.

As a kid when this all happened, I never actually saw any of news reports of what he was doing at the time, however as time passed I learned more and more about it. I never knew about his personal life and how he had a family to worry for while doing something like this. I think it was extremely bold of him to do this, despite the family not knowing a thing about what he was doing, as they could still be put into danger over it. Before and after the documentary, I still believe what he did was the right thing to do and that the government should at the very least take ownership in what they’re doing, rather than denying it.

The TED talks didn’t really bring anything new to the table for us, as anything they said were already discussed in our class. Their main goal was just to bring awareness to the issue of every company is doing something shady with your data and we should know that it is happening to be more conscious with our decisions when doing anything online. This was similar to how I felt about privacy policies when we first started talking about them, as I already knew companies were collecting as much information as they could about its users.

What I found most interesting was when we were asked to find all the information we could on another person in the class. It definitely made me feel dirty going through it, even though I didn’t find a whole lot, and what I did find I had no clue if it was accurate. Despite this feeling, I was still appalled to find next to no information on my partner, and him on me. What gave the most information was actually the state records, as we both managed to have previous traffic tickets.

I enjoyed the conversations that were sparked from reviewing the certain privacy aspects of your website, and haven’t previously considered the fact that sites can and do store data from users that no longer exist. In addition to this, I wasn’t aware as to how easy it is to find people’s locations online, associated with tons of personal information tied to that location. Albeit what you showed were only for bee keepers, it was still a revelation to me to see how easy it would be to theoretically say, find where my competition stores their hives and either steal or destroy them.

You also brought up in class how any data sent to a third party service doesn’t have to follow the same privacy policies that the original collector has. This can clearly lead to some very shady practices, where potentially a person could own multiple companies that they send data to with different privacy policies to skirt around the rules. This of course is just in theory, as I’m not sure on the exact laws concerning this, but as long as the only tie between the two companies is that they share the same owner, I believe they’d be able to do this.

It seemed like everyone agreed on the simple fact that don’t do what hurts others, and this is the simplest “good” ethical discussion anyone can make. However, I differed where I wouldn’t do something if it ends up hurting myself to a point where my own value passes how I view that person. As I listened to most people saying they’d be self-sacrificing, I was wondering how many people would actually align with that belief when in the situation. In a real world scenario, you don’t have a whole lot of time to think about your reaction in most cases. That gut reaction someone makes in time sensitive situations, is always going to be what that person believes in the most, whether or not they feel bad about it afterwards.

Our 102 section loved to joke about the trolley problem during everyone’s presentation and it occasionally brought some good discussion with it about what it exactly means or how we should define it. Most people said they couldn’t answer it without being in the moment, which I found to be perfectly fair, it can be an extremely tough question to ask someone if they’d sacrifice 4 strangers or 1 loved one. Although I personally didn’t like the answer of “do nothing, so then it isn’t my fault”, it seemed like an odd coping mechanism to deal with the fact that they had a choice to kill (irregardless of who or how many) and would rather ignore the problem. There was some debate if inaction is itself an action, and I would agree with that it is, because a choice has to be made on who to kill. Ignoring the situation is a choice to kill whoever is in the current line, ignoring it doesn’t make it go away because you’re right there and can choose to pull or not at no cost to yourself.

Inside of Class
My best computing experience due to a class project is when I had to program a memory cache for Computer Systems 2. The first week (of two) was a challenging hurdle to figure out how exactly the cache is supposed to function, but once I fully understood it the cache became an accomplishing project that cemented my joy in systems. I ended up spending a majority of my time in the second week working long hours each day putting it together, as the design was mainly up to us.

Outside of Class
My best computing experience in an out-of class project is whenever I’m building PCs, either for myself or friends. It’s a satisfying process to find parts that work together, and then to build it and watch it boot for the first time. A close second when it comes to satisfaction in PC builds would be setting up good cable management and admiring how nicely it’s all wired together.