Ask Slashdot: Ambitious Yet Ethical Software Jobs?

First time accepted submitter hwaccaly writes "I'm a mid-career developer with a fair amount of experience working on data-intensive, mathematically ambitious software projects for fun — things like physics and systems simulations, written mostly in CUDA, targeted at Tesla GPUs and small clusters. Ideally, I'd like to get paid for this kind of work, but I've found little call for these skills outside of the financial and defense industries. My conscience won't allow me to accept money from either. The medical/pharmaceutical industries undoubtedly require complex software, but the unavoidable animal testing at the end of the pipeline probably lifts its body count higher even than the defense industry's. And academia pays in degrees, not dollars. So what's left? Do any ethical businesses have a pressing need for high-performance computing, or is it basically a hobbyist niche?"

Here's one...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a new industry with opportunities pertaining to your expertise right now...

the exciting world of Bitcoins! :D

Re:Medical

[Anonymous Coward]

The universe can only be experienced through a single life, no more, no less, so the destruction of any one life is the destruction of an entire universe of experience. For that reason, the "badness" of that death is infinite.

10,000 x -infinity + 10,000 x infinity = NaN.

Simple subtraction falls short of capturing the destruction of 10,000 lives.

But on the other hand, they're mice, and they were just going to poop on mazes anyway.

Re:About medical...

[busyqth]

I say a little atheist prayer every night thanking the FSM for the existence of Big Pharma, because without them I'd be in a sanitarium (or whatever they're called now) having almost continuous seizures.

A lifetime of your continuous seizures isn't worth the death of one mouse.
On the other hand, if killing a million people in painful, humiliating fashion could save the lives of the last few bolivian chinchillas, well that would totally be worth it.

Re:Medical

[busyqth]

Animals are innocent, they don't know any better. We, as humans, do not have that excuse.

Actually, animals do know better, but they think that ripping other animals to shreds is a sacred calling.
After careful consideration, and soul searching, carnivores have come to the realization that failing to kill is highly unethical.

Re:Everything you have now had a price.

[Hognoxious]

On one hand, you know that chicken have to be killed to make McChicken sandwiches

If you'd tasted one you wouldn't be so sure.

Re:Ex-Gaming

[WrongSizeGlass]

Yes, that would have been a ridiculous decision and also pointless; that was the point.

At the very least the /. pedantic asshattery dialect translation module should have been developed so he wouldn't have missed the point.

Re:Medical

[MalachiK]

Right on. I set traps for all sorts of rodents and pests around my garden. I even used chemicals to kill an ant nest once. For no other reason than they were annoying me. If I could have got some better shampoo out of it then that would have just been a bonus.