I honestly think a lot of the people pushing this stuff know very well that they don’t need it to succeed. They don’t really care if the general public hates it, and it flops. As long as they can convince investors, they’re pulling yearly paycheques and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. If it flops, some thousand employees (thralls) will be layed off. If it fails catastrophically, they might need to step down themselves, and move to a different company that “appreciates their ability to be a visionary”.

These people are only capable of failing upwards, and they know it. The name of the game for them is waving their arms and blabbering about something to draw in investor money.

I think it makes sense to be flexible: In a table, or other bureaucratic contexts, it makes sense to put the family name first. In daily speech, it’s rather common that I’m in contact with family members (even more so historically), and it makes most sense to use the distinguishing name (first name) first.

If I’m with a group that includes siblings or parents/children, I can usually distinguish everyone by first name, while many people share last names.

You may be right, but as with the trucks, I would expect a much less sharp minima: Smartphone and instant messaging adoption didn’t happen all at once, but from this graph we see that we’re going from a substantial year-on-year decrease directly to a large year-on-year increase. A change that is gradually adopted over the course of several years can’t really cause that kind of effect.

The minima at 2009-2010 is absurdly clear though. You undid 20 years of progress in about 10 years. I’m honestly shocked - what happened in 2009 to cause this? I would think increasing truck sizes would cause a much more shallow minima, since truck sizes don’t suddenly increase from one year to the next.

This is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. You can confirm the structural integrity of the wings with a rather simple visual inspection. Same goes for the windows and landing gear.

Try confirming the integrity of (tens- or hundreds of) thousands of lines of code with a similar kind of inspection…

While I see what you’re getting at, I still like this XKCD. I work as a developer, and have also worked in more “handy” fields. The thing with planes, elevators, and basically all other physical things is that they’re limited by physics. A steel beam can’t suddenly decide to spontaneously fail or disappear.

With code, that can feel pretty different. With experience, I’ve basically learned to assume that there is always some edge-case I haven’t considered, that could trigger a bug. In a building, you can have redundant bolts, and over-dimensioned supports. A small mistake somewhere, a single missing bolt, won’t cause a catastrophic failure. With code, it’s different: A tiny, hard to notice mistake, can bring the whole think crashing down. Imagine if a plane could crash because the paint had a slightly non-uniform thickness…

I had idiocracy on my list for a while. After watching it, I can confirm that it’s easily one of the best movies ever made.