One notable fact that's missing from many of his obituaries. A few years ago, Lehrer released all his lyrics and music into the public domain. This is rare in the music industry. You can download lyrics and scores from https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftomlehrersongs.com.%2F

HBO Max has been rebranded as HBO Max Headroom.

Never mind that wearables are notoriously inaccurate. Try wearing several brands simultaneously. (We have.) They give wildly different results for how many steps you've walked, how much sleep you've had, etc.

The manufacturers also push pseudoscience, like claiming to detect your stress level from your heart rate. Duh. Hearts beat at various rates for all kinds of reasons.

Furrowed brows do not necessarily indicate anything about a person's mental state. They are just movements.

I'm gratified to see buttons returning to dashboards. It's a safety thing. Perhaps manufacturers will also reverse some other mistakes where greater technology has brought worse performance, at least in the US:

1. Thermostats replacing simple heat/cool settings. In the old days, you just set the interior heat with a simple dial. That meant in the winter, you could have warm air blowing on your hands all the time. Newer cars have thermostats that try to maintain the interior at a particular temperature. In winter, once the interior reaches the set temperature, the system begins blowing cold air on you. Grrr.

2. Intermittent wipers that set their own speed. These never work as well as intermittent wipers where you control the speed. I'm constantly turning my intermittent wipers on and off manually because some algorithm decides that the windshield is clear of water when it isn't.

3. Headlights. Newer headlights do a terrible job of illuminating the road. They are aimed to create a short halo of light in front of you, which is insufficient on dark country roads. This has been the case with the last ~20 rental cars I've driven, without exception. My 2017 car headlights work just fine.

And don't get me started on switching from heat to A/C. My car requires something like 8 button presses through a menu system. Stupid!

Irony: I was reading the link you posted about the Jeep bug, and in the middle of reading, a pop-up advertisement appeared, blocking the whole article until I closed the ad.

Is the metaverse "a legendary misadventure" or visionary? How many of us answered that question when Meta first announced their name change from Facebook? Raise your hands.

I thought so.

>Human Authored certifications will be listed in a public database that anyone can access

Did someone say, "AI training data"?

You are mixing up feeling versus action.

Feel whatever you want to feel. Nobody's arguing against feeling hate or disliking things. Nobody's advocating to ban emotions. (Your argument is a straw man.)

But actions affect other people. If someone says threatening things about you, or about an entire group you belong to, to the extent that you'd reasonably fear for your life or your safety, that is an action and a serious one.

Nonsense. I can't think of a more fulfilling job, after becoming successful oneself, than mentoring others to become successful.

Sure, the team had a spec as well. But specs aren't sufficient -- they don't account for all the ways that your code is called by others. For instance, callers may rely on behaviors that you didn't intend and didn't put in your spec. A few hundred million function calls provides a lot of confidence. :)

I've personally seen "total rewrite" software projects succeed. In one case, it was critical back-end server software responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year. Why did the rewrite work? The engineers ran the new software for months behind the scenes (no customer exposure), in parallel with the original, feeding it all input from production, and comparing its output to the production output of the original. Every discrepancy was treated as a bug. When differences stayed at zero for a long time, the rewritten version was released.

A second example was an interactive product design tool also responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The original was spaghetti code riddled with technical debt, but it ran. The new was clean, modern code. The new code gradually replaced the old code, component by component. The company ran both new & old versions in production at the same time and gradually exposed the new version to more & more users, fixing bugs as they came up. The whole process took several years.

Successful rewrites can happen, but they take a lot of planning and careful testing. Clearly this didn't happen at Sonos.

The modern version of this problem began with VCRs. Families learned that they could talk while they watched movies at home, and the habit extended into movie theaters. Smartphones made it infinitely worse.

Larn r00lz!

The killer AI app for phones should be Settings.

"Turn on Do Not Disturb."
"Flashlight on!"
"Make iCloud stop nagging me."
"Deny Camera access to all apps"