tim-tday

1) Many people know and care. 2) some people lie for profit 3) other people are willfully ignorant and allow the liars keep at it because it’s more convenient.

And even among those who know and care there’s different amounts people are willing to do about it. I imagine you (who theoretically know and care) still drive, fly, use plastic, Eat foods grown with petroleum based fertilizers, buy products shipped long distances with petroleum. (As do I)

The key is to go after the liars so we can set sane policies based on findings of fact pursued in good faith.

I wonder what spacex will be worth when launching satellites is impossible for a couple hundred years.

Humans are notoriously bad at assessing their own understanding. There’s even a fancy name for it “the illusion of explanatory depth” is a mental failure humans experience where they think they understand something till they try to explain it, then they’re confused when confronted by the fact that their explanation makes no sense. The example often given is of a toilet.

I submitted code yesterday that I could explain but not replicate.

I could easily submit code I could replicate but not debug. (Frankly history shows that debugging code is often harder than writing it)

I could write tests for code I could neither replicate nor debug. I would argue that the testing part is of higher value than understanding, replicating or debugging. Because in a sense you’re proving that it does all the things the tests say it does.

I would argue that “Understand” is a word so broad as to be useless in this context. Perhaps you should not submit code (or in fact any work product) that has not been verified.

Tech companies love to push tech out before it’s finished. There’s a whole philosophy of doing that. Unfortunately for safety related things that means people will die.

Full Self Driving has killed half a dozen people that I know of. It was pushed out early and people died because of it.