Article text is also published here without paywall, but lacking the illustrations and interactive elements of the wsj version.

I wasn't defending Uber or suggesting they weren't negligent

Sure, it was facebook's stance that dev teams prioritise a fast development cycle over never breaking the flagship product in production - radical for a company that size. I said that usage was "way out of the context it was ever said genuinely" because Facebook motivational speeches about deprioritising the uptime of a website has nothing to do with a department of a different company who's developing driving software, NORAD certainly doesn't strike me as "move fast and break things" culture, Boeing's decision was clearly about training requirements, not moving fast, and even Facebook abandoned "move fast and break things".

It's possible the self-driving dev teams were following a "move fast and break things" mantra, but I doubt it, we have more mundane explanations like company structure and pressure at all company layers to demonstrate progress.

If you're using "move fast and break things" as a pithy description of aftermath of Silicon Valley companies, fine, but by repurposing a slogan for developers and saying "software folx" it came across as suggesting safety-critical development teams subscribe to this mantra and that's why there are problems.

(Not sure what the dig at Libra is about, I never paid much attention to Libra - surely it doesn't break anything that Bitcoin hasn't already?)

I don't think Boeing was software related, IIRC Boeing got rid of the failsafe because having it meant they couldn't sell the new model as not requiring pilots to receive extra training. That's not a decision the software departments got to make.

You're taking "move fast and break things" way out of the context it was ever said genuinely.

> I think this is what happens when socialization is dictated by people with CS degrees that never took psych 101.

Social networks initially worked well, and have changed society so much that I don't think psych 101 students from an era before they existed would have fared any better at predicting design outcomes. (and surely psych grads are used now)

But putting that asside, do you know of attempts to design social networks that won't cause harm? There's no anonymity on my Facebook feed for example, but it still seems to be doing bad things to many of my friends. Every social network seems to create its own unique kind of dysfunction - different for each platform.

You seem confident better social networks will happen, is anything happening now?

As a rule of thumb, privacy helps protect the weak from the powerful.

Perhaps you have nothing to hide, but journalists, activists, celebrities, whistleblowers etc all do, and many of them act as a balancing force in government in your favor. People who need privacy are thrown under the bus if we make privacy synonymous with "suspicious", and systems such as TOR are actually more effective at their job when used by plenty of people like us with nothing to hide.

Advocating against privacy in this age is becoming much like advocating for a "papers please" society, because the technology is allowing your "papers" to be automatically checked everywhere you go without you having to be physically stopped and made aware of what's happening.

There's also a constant stream of data being hacked - every personal detail of every US employee was recently stolen (i.e. there are no questions you can ask to tell the difference between the real person and the identity thief), nudes, every customer's details and credit card info was taken from Target and Home Depot, etc. So the tighter you are with your details and where they are stored, the better. Hopefully we can transition to not storing so much unnecessary detail about people, for the sake of security.

And similiar to protection from power, privacy also offers protection from the online bullies and mobs. Being "doxxed" is what they call having that protection taken away.

This is true, and people should be aware of it, but VPNs and TOR etc provide good protection against mass untargetted surveillance and a bunch of other things, so use should be encouraged - with the proviso understanding that if a government or other powerful actor targets you specifically, and cares enough, then such measures are not sufficient.

Much like books come in both fiction and non-fiction (recreational vs useful), programming needn't be about having real world purpose, it lets you be like Elsa in Frozen - creating and exploring your own worlds for your own enjoyment. I was going to recommend The Armchair Universe as a fantastic guide down the rabbit-hole for new programmers, full of "applications" you can attempt, but it appears to be out of print.

I assume that useful programming with real world application is the only reason you're looking to get into programming, but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway because non-programmers might not be aware of this aspect, and being sucked away by passion and creativity helps tremendously - you didn't learn how to read books as a child from a desire to read technical manuals or trade treaties.