Ethical Reflection on Ready Player One

Ethical Reflection

Morrow wrote in his autobiography that he’d left GSS because ... he felt that the OASIS had evolved into something horrible. “It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity,” he wrote. “A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.” (p. 120)

(Halliday speaking) “I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn’t know how to connect with people there. I was afraid, for all of my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.” (p. 364)


1.- Do you agree with the two previous quotations?

With the first one I agree, mostly the part that it is a place where people hide from a ever collapsing civilization, not that I see it as a prison, but indeed, OASIS users which use this alternate world more than real life, ignore the problems of the actual real world, even the problems on their own bodies, something that basically is prohibited if someone wants to keep living, while they have OASIS they believe that nothing else matters without knowing that maybe the building they are living on is going to collapse or that they will be kicked out of their houses due to some new law.

The second quote, I not particularly supporting it, yes, someone might lose their "real" life  if they are stuck on a virtual world, but that doesn't means that their life will be just a lie, that their happiness is fake, for me, they can truly be happy on that virtual world and that makes them physically, really, happy, maybe on a real environment they may not have that happiness and instead, feel sad, disconnected from reality, but that ain't a special case, even today and even before computers even existed, that kind of feeling existed, it may not be a pleasant feeling or even good, but with OASIS, that disconnected people have a chance to feel like a part of something, may feel happy, without the virtual world they may never feel happiness at all.

2.- Do you think our value system (personal and cultural values) could be altered if we spent most of our time in an OASIS like system?

Cultures come and go, so the cultural values may be altered but we can call it a natural process, something that shall happen one way or another, just another culture on a world filled with different cultures on a single house.

Personal values will have split into to categories, virtual and real values, and it is something that today is beginning to be noticed, we are ones on real life and we behave on a different on social media, however this difference seen today is not that radicall like the one that may arise with a completely different virtual world. We will end up with two different personalities on each individual, something wich will mostly be seen on individual who past most of their time on OASIS rather than the real world. This may be good or bad, there may be people that mix this two personalities bringing problems to this persons and the ones around them, it will depend on each person, on what personlities they have on this two worlds, personalities that can be similar or completely different.

3.- Do you think it’s possible, technologically speaking, to have something similar to the OASIS by the years 2040 or 2050?

A virtual world, yes, OASIS and all its characteristics, no, let me explain.

I would really like to see a virtual world, like a gamer it is like a dream to live on one of those virtual world that we use to play on. When I think about the possibility of a completely VR immersive world I see it possible and maybe even closer in time than 2040, I wouldn't be surprised (well, I would be surprised but not that much) if on 5 or 10 years we have something close to that technology.

The main issue will come with the things that made OASIS the alternative to a world, where everyone is free to do as they pleased. Governments (*coff *coff USA, China, North Korea *coff *coff) won't be happy knowing that their citizens are killing dragons while talking trash about them and they can't do something about it, they will implement control one way or another and they will motivate other governments to do it as well, such thing as OASIS and its free world without enterprises and governments won't exist, it will be owned and controlled by someone, will be prohibited or will be closed at some point.

For something like OASIS (and all what made it special) to exist may be possible but is something that won't happen in the near future, a LOT of years and changes must be done in order for such a world to exist. 

Hidden Figures (Finally I watched this movie)

Hidden Figures

Just when on my Programming Language course we had a blog activity about women programmers, we watched this movie (got ya there professor).

I never watched this movie however I always wanted to,  it is always interesting to see how people manage to overcome what society imposes, not only do our three protagonist did something outstanding, they did it first when it was considered impossible (and they managed to shut some mouths up).

However, what I most liked of this movie, is that they accomplished all of this, they showed what they were capable of without the need for protesting or showing off, they did it using only their knowledge and their actions. I love when someone accomplishes something simply by doing it, no need for telling everyone what they are doing, their actions spoke for themselves.

I consider this a perfect example of how things are made impossible because we think they are impossible, only when we really are engaged about doing something is that we start to see that such impossible things don't really exist, there is always a way to accomplish something, hard or easy, it is there.

I would really like to see a society where everyone just do what they can do best, without having to reproach about it.

A really good movie, I don't know if I would consider it one of my favorites but one that I would definitely recommend, I'm glad to know that these three women have been well remembered and that their accomplishments are recognized and appreciated. In fact, I'm glad to know that the many things that a lot of women (specifically, programmers and engineers) have accomplished are being recognized and that, even when some of them are gone, have the attention they really deserve after all their struggle.

The 4+1 View Model

The 4 + 1 View Model

I have some ugly flashbacks of my FIS (Fundamentos de Ingeniería de Software) classes and its subsequent related classes as well, basically this whole thing of architecture and UML diagrams are taught on those classes and, oh boy!, it was complete boredom although necessary even though I don't like it.

When we are told to do something (in this case to program) we like to have everything so the only thing that we worry about is that our code executes correctly but when we have to do all that stuff of documenting and making diagrams or when the program can't go on like it was told and oneself has to do the changes to the diagrams, it is at this point that we really notice how important is to correctly develop this whole understanding process with its related documentation, even more when you are not the only one in the team.

One has its own point of view of each thing and each problem, so on a team the chances that everyone agrees on some model grows smaller as the team grows bigger, like with that blind people examples.

There is bound to be chaos where there is no order, however with people, to have a completely ordered system of thoughts that everyone shares is almost impossible, a common understanding however, can be possible and only then, the beginning of a project can truly start.

The result of this understanding can be seen during the planification and design steps of a project development plan, a team made of one member of each of the teams that work on a project must work unified to develop the neccessary models that the project will be based upon, more precisely, the code models must correctly identify how the system is going to be implemented, related to other systems if needed, build upon and everything that it needs to be specified from the smallest component so that there isn't any room for misunderstandings.

Understanding the SOLID Principles

Understanding the SOLID principles

All of this thing of how to develop and write code starts to feel repetitive, I've seen it a lot of times along my college educations that it begins to feel obvious how this principles, recommendations, better practices and all of those thing work, it is obvious now to me what they try to tell.....maybe all this over-teaching accomplished one of its goals after all.

But it is funny to me how at some point all these points seem to contradict at some point and with the flow of time, first design, planning and a lot of diagrams were needed but from the shadows emerged agile programming and f*+ck all that. With these principles, specifically the Open/Closed and the Liskov Substitution principle, inheritance (one of the main things that makes object-oriented programming ... well ... object-oriented) is seen as the bad guy.

Nobody can deny that inheritance has its good side, it exists for one reason and in practice we can say that it is useful, however, for the actual demands I think it is needed way more or something different at all.

SOLID differentiates from the rest by being applied before coding not like refactoring that are done after that, I think that SOLID is a little concise, maybe because this reading is an extract but although this principles are good to have they don't deal with all the problems that may rise on a project, it is a nice beginning though.

While designing and developing software it is critical to determine what are we gonna do and how it is going to be done, because there are a lot of recommendations and principles for good design, a lot in fact that having a control to check if all of them are accomplished is almost impossible. Every programmer and team (or company) have its way of codding, they have a defined set of principles to follow may be or may not be SOLID or an abstraction of them but I think that SOLID is like a basic to understand and follow.