Interesting Links for 28-09-2017

[andrewducker]

Google's self-driving car genius - and his fall from grace

(tags: Technology cars intellectual_property google )

"I Spent a Week Using Only the Alt-Right's Vision of the Internet"

(tags: internet racism politics usa )

Bulgaria passes law requiring government software to be open source

(tags: bulgaria opensource software )

An Oxford medical student stabbed her boyfriend with a bread knife. So why did she not go to prison?

(tags: law crime uk )

What happens after a defendant is found not guilty by reason of insanity?

(tags: crime mentalhealth usa )

Uber's London woes boost rival taxi apps

(tags: London taxi apps )

8 Gaslighting Techniques to Use at Work

(tags: satire work awful viaNWhyte )

What You Call a Color Depends on How You Use It

(tags: colour language psychology )

Saudi school minister fired after textbook shows Yoda at UN signing ceremony

(tags: saudiarabia StarWars photoshop history fail )

The trailer for "Annihilation" looks really good

(tags: movies trailer video scifi )

Oxytocin, Vasopressin, and aggression in dogs

(tags: dogs hormones aggression behaviour )

Why you shouldn't worry about your personal IQ score

(tags: iq Intelligence psychology success )

Earth's creation was a 'cowboy-building job' that means this planet is unique

(tags: earth space )

Germany is successful and happy because its values are the opposite of Silicon Valley's

(tags: society germany politics economics happiness )

Why do we put up with software being so badly written?

(tags: regulation software engineering epicfail security )

Comments

Why do we put up with software being so badly written?

[jack]

For the first 40% I honestly thought this was about bridges. I really hope that *now* we're quite good at building bridges that don't fall down. But I think there's plenty of physical structures that are built really shoddily, until we've accepted the necessity of "a lot of bureaucracy".

[calimac]

Self-driving cars: Wow, yet another long feature article about a totally sinister and amoral high-tech creep.

Stabbed her boyfriend: The tenor of this article is that she didn't just get off because she was well-off and white, that there were good reasons for it. But that proves nothing by itself: some lawyer could make an equally good argument that some other otherwise identical perp who happened to be poor and black deserved to have the book thrown at her. The real question is equity between cases, and if the writers don't address that, they're missing the point.

Taxi apps: I saw some other article on the Uber ban that listed about 6 or 8 London taxi apps that I'd never heard of. One of them didn't even require a smartphone: you could also book using a website.

Gaslighting: Another one that was actually used on me was, "Invent unwritten norms out of thin air and tsk at your colleague for being unaware of them."

Software: I too really thought this was about bridges. But it's true of bridges. I mean, given enough time, an untended bridge will eventually fall down. The author intends it as an outrageous metaphor, but it doesn't really work.

[agoodwinsmith]

Just reading about gaslighting makes me completely furious. This is partly because I am not verbally nimble enough to respond in kind. I've worked with people who can respond in kind and carry on with their original statement, shutting out the gaslighter. It is very satisfying to witness.

[heron61]

Earth's creation was a 'cowboy-building job' that means this planet is unique

I'm not that convinced - I could easily see this reflecting the fact that as a planet grows during formation, its composition changes, and because Earth has a mass equal to more than 9 times that of Mars, the composition is quite different. Also, Mars is (we think) in the outer edge of the Sun's habitable zone, while Earth is (we think) near the inner edge, which I would presume would make notable differences in composition. It's not like we have anything remotely like a useful data set for any of this.

bridges

[darkoshi]

A part of me wants to argue that software is not at all like bridges. And that most of it works fairly well for most use-cases, considering how many different things it has to do. Even when it doesn't work well, it generally doesn't have fatal consequences. Software that can have life-and-death results does have to go through much more rigorous testing and verification (at least, I hope it does). Criminals don't generally go around trying to make bridges fall down or catch on fire, or to intercept and hijack the vehicles traveling on them. During wars, when the military wants to make them fall down, it isn't usually that difficult - drop a bomb. So it's not like bridges are hack-proof either.

But in spite of all that, I do agree that a lot of software could use a lot of improvement. But are consumers willing to pay for the extra quality? Especially when the user interface and functionality would be mostly the same either way, with only the behind-the-scenes parts different? And considering that most software that people use, they don't directly pay for anyway? I just don't see it happening. Although there is a good argument that cleaning up spaghetti code makes software easier to maintain and cheaper in the long run. And that some security requirements might be mandated, if there was a standard way of testing software for those requirements. But the requirements and standards would be constantly changing, so it wouldn't be simple to implement such mandates.