“Bad Code Will Get People Killed” Always insightful points from Benedict Evans: This partly reflects the current political moment in the USA, but more fundamentally comes from ongoing concerns about the reliability of machine-learning-based systems in what can be life-or-death situations (especially with US cops’ tendency to shoot first). These
When the Sum of Two UX Improvements Becomes a Huge Problem On their own, each “solution” makes sense. Together, they lead to unintended consequences: Turns out the combination of 1) Showing only one product if possible (and pointing it out very clearly, causing me to lower my guard), 2) Not
This is the story of how I fixed a long-standing bug in one of the U.S.’s systems for detecting nuclear explosions, the ARDU (Advanced Radiation detection capability Data Unit) This is the story of how I fixed a long-standing bug in one of the U.S.'s
There’s a lot of thoughts percolating around this. The most interesting to me is that these sorts of things are common – and totally fine! – in software, especially enterprise software that caters to developers. It’s pretty common in terms of agile software development as well. It’s not as
The consortium behind New York City’s LinkNYC kiosks is ‘delinquent’ and owes the city millions I actually came across this back in March and it’s a nice bookend to my post on LinkNYC in general. Key quotes: Only about 1,800 of more than 4,500 kiosks that