These two yutzes cause a crash on the freeway and they don't even bother to stop and check if the other people are injured?

They don't even bother reporting the crash to the authorities, they just driiive on back to HQ and hush it up?

"Former Top Waymo Engineer Altered Code To Go On Forbidden Routes" is not the headline I would have chosen for this story, folks.

Gracious me, that sounds like an Orwellian nightmare. You should definitely keep this one at the top of your talking points, as ordinary people will undoubtedly share your horror at the thought of living in a society that tries to minimize the number randos carrying deadly weapons.

I'll say it again:

Eventually, there'll be too many people with a personal stake in this for you to beat.

I learned about this when my mom texted me to let me know that she and my dad were both safe, her being out of town, dad being at home and hearing but not thinking much about the sirens down the way. My nephew's school was still on lockdown (despite it being miles away, better safe than sorry, I suppose.)

My parents live right near this place. They ride their bikes past it regularly. Middleton ain't a big place.

I can't decide if I'm relieved, livid, or just numb to it. Probably a bit of all three.

All you folks who get red in the face at the thought that maybe, just maybe, we could stand to have fewer guns in this country:

Eventually, there'll be too many people with a personal stake in this for you to beat.

Even if you decide to 'exercise your second amendment rights.'

I think a big part of it is how the rest of society keeps showering bonkers amounts of adulation and money on them. Why try to be a better person if it seems like everybody loves you? Heck, you probably are the better person, and all these SJW whiners who say otherwise are a) jealous of your awesomeness and b) can't comprehend the very unique and not-at-all-applicable-to-any-other-industry-out-there challenges and pressures of the tech world.

I'd imagine medicine faces similar pressures–I'm thinking particularly about the 'rockstar' surgical positions–and I know that science has similar issues, but neither of these disciplines seems to suffer from nearly the same degree of fandom as the tech world does...

I've had a personal epiphany

oh yeah and there may possibly also be a story about me and this subject coming out in a major publication in a few days too

There was a time in living memory where this argument would have applied perfectly to job postings for doctors, lawyers, accountants, and scientists. Advertising has long been used to define and amplify what you should be doing with your life based on your demographic peculiarities–regardless of what you actually want to do or are capable of doing.

Let me try: it is fundamentally wrong that the number of women in computing has plummeted even as the number of women in other major technical professions–including law, accounting, medicine, and scientific research–has approached parity. Women are excluded from programming not because they can't do the job–they're excluded because the community is comfortable prioritizing our abusive, "brutally honest" Mamet-esque dick-swinging over professionalism. That's evil.

You're exactly right! We are trying to unmake ourselves, if by "ourselves" you mean "society's long-standing tradition of blithely excluding entire swaths of people from consideration for professional roles based on wholly unrelated things like gender, race, or sexual orientation."

That is a good thing that society should do. We should want to fix this, not wallow in it.

This is great. Now other people in need can benefit from Bezos' magnanimity, just like his warehouse employees do.

It has a whole zero syllables more than "Galaxy Note 9"

Great job Apple

This is exactly how for-profit industries work.

Maybe instead of trying to find ways to make for-profit healthcare marginally less of a roiling tire fire for Americans, we should instead nationalize healthcare, like the rest of the civilized world.

:|

Whoever wrote this is a coward.

There are no "unsung heroes" in this White House. This is an escape hatch for the people who followed power for power's sake: "oh, sure, I was really fighting the good fight inside the White House, so you should be thanking me!"

Think there's a real problem here? Think the President is unfit for office? Then get to work on 25th Amendment proceedings if you're in a position to do so, or if not, resign and tell all of this to Congress. Don't stage a mini-coup and call it heroism. That's bull.

It's no secret the President is unfit for this office. It hasn't ever been a secret. This staffer, and their allies? They're complicit in everything. This is just a weak-ass attempt to make themselves look good.

...so basically, for any sufficiently complex venture involving human beings, never release it to the public.

The bigger you are, the more it costs. If you're a popular service, you're likely running many, many servers doing many, many things across a broad geographic area. You've carefully implemented your infrastructure to balance cost, stability, reliability, and performance. Adding just one new feature can completely upend this calculus. If you're running multiple server farms in multiple data centers, this gets expensive quickly.

You can't afford "aw shucks oopsie woos". Whoops! Your new feature caused some unexpected behavior for 15% of all users, resulting in 18 hours of downtime! If you're a small web operation, you're sending out a lighthearted email apologizing for the inconvenience and promising to do better. Maybe you're even offering a week's worth of free service. If you're a major player, you're in the world news. Your enterprise customers are screaming at you--or worse, they're not screaming at you and are looking for your replacement. You're working on figuring out just how much this will impact the bottom line, because if you're going to need to cut back somewhere, you want to know that as early as possible. Mess up hard enough, and you're looking at a subpoena from your governmental bodies of choice.

You can't afford to annoy your users. Ooooh, we've all had that time when we rolled out an awesome new feature and the user response ranged from "meh" to "change it back right now you gibbering twits." That's never fun, is it? Gotta roll back to yesterday's configuration, apologize, and try to figure out how to move forward. If you're a major player, "rolling back" may be nigh impossible, and if you've already reconfigured your infrastructure to accommodate your new feature, that's money already spent (and worse, your new configuration may even be sub-optimal in the absence of said new feature.) You're basically looking at the same outcome as the previous point, perhaps minus the subpoenas and plus a bit more global mockery on social media.

Messing up will cost you users, and those users are unlikely to return. If you're small, this can be weathered, and is almost expected. There are way more fish in the sea, and you if can iron things out, you've still got plenty of room to grow. If you're big, everyone already knows about you and what you do. You've got a lot smaller pool of "new" people to bring on compared to the people you've already reached. Big companies that mess up need to work to retain unhappy customers, because there aren't that many fish in the sea who haven't already heard of them.

I mean, there are entire fields of study (and industry) that have long been dedicated to understanding and catering to the educational needs of young learners, and there are more plain-English summaries of "what makes kids different from adults when it comes to learning" than I can list here.

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, children are not simply tiny grownups. What works best for an adult will rarely be what works best for a child, no matter what you're talking about. You can just throw whatever adults would use at them, and some kids will do just fine with that, but it won't be nearly as effective as a system that's been designed specifically with young users in mind.

If you're willing to drop a few bucks on a Raspberry Pi, Kano is an impressive project, acting as both kid-friendly desktop environment and programming education tool. Lots of built-in coding tutorials, a "learn how to use the shell" game, and a code-oriented version of Minecraft, to boot.

http://developers.kano.me/downloads/

Moving forward, I'd like to see browser makers offer the same kind of "click to allow" functionality for this sort of policy change that they currently have for Flash content.

So long as it isn't a security risk, there's little reason to not provide the user with an easy way to override this sort of quality-of-life policy change.