Years ago, when I was an undergraduate student at McGill, I took a software engineering class, and as part of that class, I heard the infamous story of the Therac-25 computer-controlled radiotherapy machine. Long story short: a software bug caused the machine to occasionally give radiation doses that were sometimes hundreds of times greater than normal, which could result in grave injury or death. This story gets told in class to make an important point: don’t be a cowboy, if you’re a software engineer and you’re working on safety-critical systems, you absolutely must do due diligence and implement proper validation and testing, otherwise you could be putting human lives at risk. Unfortunately, I think the real point kind of gets lost on many people. You might hear that story and think that the lesson is that you should never ever work on safety-critical systems where such due diligence is required, and that you’re really lucky to be pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year working on web apps, where the outcome of your work, and all the bugs that may still remain dormant somewhere in your code, will never harm anyone. Some people work on safety-critical code, and these people bear the weight of tremendous responsibility, but not you, you’re using blockchain technology to build AirBnB for dogs, which couldn’t possibly harm anyone even if it tried. I’d like to share three stories with you. I’ve saved the best story for last.

Back in 2016, I completed my PhD, and took my first “real” job, working at Apple in California. I was joining a team that was working on the GPU compiler for the iPhone and other iDevices. While getting set up in California prior to starting the job, it occurred to me that showing up to work with an Android phone, while being part of a team that was working on the iPhone, might not look so great, and so I decided to make a stop at the Apple store and bought the best iPhone that was available at the time, an iPhone 6S Plus with 128GB of storage. Overall, I was very pleased with the phone: it was lightweight, snappy and beautiful, with great battery life, and the fingerprint sensor meant I didn’t have to constantly type my pin code like on my previous Android phone, a clear upgrade.

Fast forward a few months and I had to catch an early morning flight for a work-related conference. I set an early alarm on my phone and went to sleep. The next day, I woke up and instantly felt like something was wrong, because I could see that it was really sunny outside. I went to check the time on my iPhone. I flipped the phone over and was instantly filled with an awful sinking sense of dread: it was already past my flight’s takeoff time! The screen on my phone showed that the alarm I had set was in the process of ringing, but for some reason, the phone wasn’t vibrating or making any sound. It was “ringing” completely silently, but the animation associated with a ringing alarm was active.

I did manage to get another flight, but I needed my manager’s approval, and so I had to call him and explain the situation, feeling ashamed the whole time (I swear it’s not my fault, I swear I’m not just lazy this bug is real, I swear). Thankfully, he was a very understanding man, and I did make it to the conference, but I missed most of the first day and opening activities. It wasn’t the first or the last time that I experienced this bug, it happened sporadically, seemingly randomly, over the span of several months. I couldn’t help but feel angry. Someone’s incompetence had caused me to experience anxiety and shame, but it had also caused several people to waste time, and the company to waste money on a missed flight. Why hadn’t this bug been fixed after several months? How many other people were impacted? I had a cushy tech job where if I show up to work late, people ask if I’m doing alright, but some people have jobs where being late can cause them to be fired on the spot, and some of these people might have a family to support, and be living paycheque to paycheque. A malfunctioning alarm clock probably isn’t going to directly cause a person’s death, but it definitely has the potential to cause real-world harm.

The point of this blog post isn’t to throw Apple under the bus, and so I’ll share another story (or maybe more of a rant) about poor software design in Android OS and how it’s impacted my life. About 3 years after working at Apple, when the replacement battery in my iPhone 6S Plus started to wear out, I decided to try Android again, and so I got myself a Google Pixel 3A XL. This phone also had a nice fingerprint scanner, but the best differentiating feature was of course the headphone jack. Unfortunately, Android suffers from poor user interface design in a few areas, and one of the most annoying flaws in its user interface is simply that the stock Android OS doesn’t have flexible enough options when it comes to controlling when the phone rings, which is one of the most important aspects of a phone.

Being a millenial, I don’t particularly like phone calls. I would much prefer to be able to make appointments and file support tickets using an online system. However, my deep dislike for phone calls probably stems from a more personal issue, which is that my mother is an unmedicated schizophrenic. She doesn’t respect my boundaries. She has done things such as randomly call me in the middle of the night because her irrational paranoia causes her to be worried that shadowy evil figures are coming after me. Thankfully, Android now has “bedtime mode” feature, which allows me to make it so that phone calls won’t cause my phone to ring between 10PM and 8:30AM. If my mom happens to die in a hospital in the middle of the night, I’ll just have to find out and be sad the next day. My sleep is sacred, and bedtime mode allows me to enforce some basic boundaries using software.

Bedtime mode is quite useful, but I still have the other problem that my mom could decide to randomly call me in the daytime as well, and unfortunately I rarely want to take her phone calls. However, I also don’t want her to end up homeless or in jail (which has happened before, but that’s a story for another time), and so I don’t want to block her and completely lose the ability to receive her calls. This results in me having to almost always have my phone set to “do not disturb”, so that I don’t have to be disturbed at random times by unwanted phone calls. I wish that Android had an option to set a specific person to never cause the phone to ring, and it seems like that should be an easy feature to implement that would have a real positive impact on the quality of lives of many people, but I digress.

The real problem is that, although I hate phone calls, our society is still structured in such a way that sometimes, I have to receive “important” phone calls. For instance, my doctor recently placed a referral for me to see a specialist. I’ve been told that the hospital is going to call me some time in the next few weeks. I don’t want to miss that phone call, and so I have to disable “do not disturb”. However, because the stock Android OS has only one slider for “Ring & notification volume”, disabling do not disturb means that my phone will constantly “ding” and produce annoying sounds every time I get a text message or any app produces a notification, which is very disruptive. The fact is, while I occasionally do want my phone to ring so I can receive important phone calls, I basically never want app notifications to produce sound. I’ve been told that I should go and individually disable notifications for every single app on my phone, but you tell me, why in the fuck can’t there simply be two separate fucking sliders for “Ring volume” and “Notification volume”? In my opinion, the fact that there isn’t simply highlights continued gross incompetence and disregard for user experience. Surely, this design flaw has caused millions of people to experience unnecessary anxiety, and should have been fixed years ago.

This is turning out to be a long-ish blog post, but as I said, I’ve kept the best story for last. I’m in the process of buying a new place, and I’ll be moving in two weeks from now. As part of this, I’ve decided to do some renovations, and so I needed to get some construction materials, including sheets of drywall. This is a bit awkward, because I’m a woman living in the city. I don’t have a car or a driver’s license. Sheets of drywall are also quite heavy, and too big to fit in the building’s elevator, meaning they have to be carried in the stairs up to the third floor. Yikes.

In Montreal, where I live, there are 3 main companies selling renovation supplies: Home Depot, Rona and Reno-Depot. Home Depot is the only one that had all the things I needed to order, so I went to their website and added all the items to my cart. It took me about 45 minutes to select everything and fill the order form, but when I got to the point where I could place the order, the website gave me a message saying “An unknown error has occurred”. That’s it, no more details than that, no description of the cause of the error, just, sorry lol, nope, you can’t place this order, and you don’t get an explanation. I was really frustrated that I had wasted almost an hour trying to place that order. A friend of mine suggested that maybe she could try placing the order and it would work. I printed the page with the contents of my cart to a PDF document and sent them over. It worked for her, she was able to place the order, and so I sent her an electronic payment to cover the costs.

Since my new place is on the third floor, we had some time pressure to get things done, and heavy items would have to be carried up the stairs, we paid extra specifically to have the items delivered inside the condo unit and within a fixed time period between noon and 3PM. The total cost for delivery was 90 Canadian dollars, which seems fairly outrageous, but sometimes, you just have no choice. I was expecting my delivery before 3PM, and the Home Depot website had said that I would get a text 30 minutes before delivery. At 2:59PM, I received two text messages at the same time. The first said “Your order has just been picked up”. The second said “Your order has just been delivered, click here to rate your delivery experience”. Again, I was filled with a sense of dread. Had they tried to reach me and failed? Had they just dumped the construction materials outside? I rushed downstairs. There was no sign of a delivery truck or any of the materials. I figured there must be another software bug, despite what the second text message said, the delivery clearly hadn’t happened yet.

Sure enough, at 3:27PM, 27 minutes after the end of my delivery window, I received a phone call from a delivery driver. He was downstairs, and he was about to dump the construction materials on the sidewalk. NO! I explained that I had paid extra to have the materials delivered inside the unit. I could show him the email that proved that I had paid specifically for this service. He argued back, according to his system, he was supposed to dump the materials at the curb. Furthermore, they had only sent one guy. There was no way he alone could carry 8 foot long, 56-pound sheets of drywall up to the third floor. I raised my voice, he raised his. After a few minutes, he said he would call his manager. He called back. The delivery company would send a second truck with another guy to help him carry the materials upstairs. I felt angry, but also glad that I had stood my ground in that argument.

The first guy waited, sitting on the side of the curb in the heat, looking angry, doing nothing, for about 30 minutes until the second guy showed up to help. When the second delivery guy showed up, he asked to see the email. I showed him proof that I had paid to have things delivered upstairs. He also stated that their system said they only had to drop things in front of the building, but that he believed me. The delivery company was a subcontractor, and this was a software bug they had encountered before. This bug had caused multiple other customers to be extremely upset. So upset, in fact, that one customer, he said, had literally taken him hostage once, and another one had assaulted him. Gross, almost criminal incompetence on the part of one or more developers somewhere had again caused many people to waste time and to experience stress, anger, and even violence. The most infuriating part of this though, of course, is that bugs like this are known to exist, but they often go unfixed for months, sometimes even years. The people responsible have to know that their incompetence, and their inaction is causing continued real-world harm.

The point of this blog post is that, although most of us don’t work on software that would directly be considered safety-critical, we live in a world that’s becoming increasingly automated and computerized, and sometimes, bugs in seemingly mundane pieces of code, even web apps, can cause real-world suffering and harm, particularly when they go unfixed for weeks, months or even years. Part of the problem may be that many industry players lack respect for software engineering as a craft. Programmers are seen as replaceable cogs and as “code monkeys”, and not always given enough time to do due diligence. Some industry players also love the idea that you can take a random person, put them through a 3-month bootcamp, and get a useful, replaceable code monkey at the other end of that process. I want to tell you that no matter how you got to where you are today, if you do your job seriously, and you care about user experience, you could be making a real difference in the quality of life of many people. Skilled software engineers don’t wear masks or capes, but they can still have cool aliases, and they truly have the power to make the world better or worse.

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Hovertext:
This also explains the abundance of normal matter in the universe is the result of a battle against the Diraculons.

Today's News:

Abe Shinzo has succumbed to his wounds.

Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, died on Friday at 67, after being shot while campaigning for a candidate ahead of national elections.

The police arrested a suspect, Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, on an initial charge of attempted murder before Mr. Abe’s death was announced.

The Japanese Fire and Disaster Management Agency said that Mr. Abe had been shot in his right neck and left chest. Footage on social media showed Mr. Abe collapsed and bleeding on the ground in the western city of Nara, near Kyoto.

I’m no expert in Japanese politics but Abe may have been the single most important figure in post-Cold War Japan, and arguably in Japanese politics since 1945. His influence on Japanese foreign and defense policy was enormous and dramatic.

Many will comment on Shinzo Abe in the hours and days to come. His death is shocking and hard to explain.
For my part, I’ve written about his role in changing Japan from a country that reacted to international events to a shaper of them.

— Alessio Patalano (@alessionaval) July 8, 2022

A bit on his legacy:

Abe built off Japan’s long-standing security alliance with the United States. Wary of an assertive China, he also developed close ties between Japan, Asia’s richest democracy, and India, the region’s most populous. Abe was a strong proponent of the Quad, an informal gathering of Japan, India, Australia and the United States that is a counterweight to Beijing. He also joined forces with Australia to save a major regional trade deal after Washington pulled out.

But relations with Tokyo’s closest neighbors were strained during his time in office. He bolstered right-wing nationalists by visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which honors, among others, World War II war criminals. Abe also enacted laws to allow Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to fight alongside allies overseas, in a move that alarmed South Korea and angered China.

Gun violence in Japan is extremely rare in large part because gun ownership is tightly controlled, which is probably why the shooter had to build his own gun.

It is absolutely insane to think that Abe may be the first person murdered by a gun in Japan in 2022, which is to say that it’s absolutely insane how we think about guns in the United States.

There’s no clear indication of the motive of the shooter, other than a claim that he intended to kill and that he was dissatisfied with Abe. Obviously there’s a lot more to come, including more thorough discussion of the assassin’s intent and of the impact of the murder.

There's a problem I've talked about before on this blog, of trying to review something really good and not knowing what to say about it beyond "it's really good, guys". When a work is bad, or even just flawed, you have an access point. When something works on all levels, though, it can be hard to tease out the threads that makes that success happen, to find the specific selling point that might

This essay takes as its starting point the people on the Internet — there are apparently a huge number — who are currently obsessed with the idea that Amber Heard is a manipulative liar, who is making Johnny Depp look bad to the public, which is why he was “forced” to sue her for defamation after she published a WAPO op-ed back in 2018 about how her marriage to him had been abusive in various ways (the more general topic of the op-ed was #MeToo).

But that’s just the jumping off point for a discussion of what could be called anti-fandom:

Some of the most active commenters aren’t so much determined fans of Johnny Depp as anti-fans of Amber Heard.

Hilde Van den Bulck, a professor of communication at Drexel University, has studied the version of fandom that inverts its practices and creates a community of denigration. Where fandom tends to derive from a positive emotion (I love this actor; I love that character), anti-fandom draws from just the opposite, and nurtures negative feelings toward a famous person or character. Fans and anti-fans both express themselves through online sleuthing: They hang on the object of their fascination’s every word, and analyze every detail of that person’s wardrobe and hairstyling and self-presentation. “Anti-fans know as much about their object of anti-fandom as fans do about their object of fandom,” Van den Bulck said. Their relationship with the celebrity they despise is “often very deep, very emotional.”

Some anti-fans are disillusioned former fans (I used to love celebrity X, but now … ). Others’ hatred may be unprovoked (I just can’t stand celebrity X, and resent their place in public life). In many situations, as Van den Bulck explains it, anti-fans and fans are overlapping groups: The anti-fan of celebrity X hates celebrity X because celebrity X harmed celebrity Y, of whom the anti-fan is a fan.

I’ve come across this latter group before. In 2020, I reported on fandom communities that were fixated on theories that the male objects of their fandom were being manipulated and tortured by less-famous, female romantic partners. A faction of Benedict Cumberbatch fans believed that his wife, Sophie Hunter, was part of an international crime ring and had faked all of her pregnancies. (This is not true.) A faction of One Direction fans believed that the band member Louis Tomlinson was gay and forcibly closeted by the entertainment industry, and that his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child, Briana Jungwirth, was central to the conspiracy. (This is not true.) The anti-fans I wrote about tried to prove their claims by examining hundreds of photographs and video clips—just as the Depp fans and Heard anti-fans are doing now. They also hunted for evidence that their beloved celebrities were winking at them, offering tiny, secret rewards for seeing the truth. One Direction fans claimed that Tomlinson was posting things on certain dates or at certain times so that the digits would make a coded message, just for them. Similarly, Depp fans look for signs that he is grateful for their support, and that he is trying to entertain them from inside the courtroom.

These fans, who are also anti-fans, subject the women they hate to body-shaming and wild criminal accusations, and skewer them using sexist tropes. The targets of their anti-fandom are manipulative and ambitious, as a rule, but also stupid. They are glamorous and seductive, but also secretly disgusting. When I interviewed a Cumberbatch fan who was a firm believer in the conspiracy theories about his wife, she identified herself as a feminist. It was Hunter, she said, who was “setting women’s rights back [and] making everybody look bad.” Many Depp supporters now make the same argument. They insist that they are not a reactionary movement trying to undo the work of the #MeToo movement, and that questioning Heard’s claims does not make them misogynistic. If anything, she is the one who is making a joke out of #MeToo, and making things harder for “real” victims of abuse. Lady Victoria Hervey, a small-time British model and socialite with some 300,000 Instagram followers [jfc], has written that Heard “sounds like she would be more at home in a psych ward,” and referred in a recent Instagram story to “girls like these that constantly make things up.” “So many are sick of these fake me too movement victims who are ruining it for real victims of domestic abuse,” she wrote to me in an email, declining to speak further. (Hervey has also espoused “New World Order” conspiracy theories and described the pandemic as a “eugenics program.”)

There’s a lot going on here.

*The idea of inverted fandom seems to have a lot of saliency to contemporary politics. Many people have noted that the current version of the Republican party seems to have practically no positive ideological identity at all: it doesn’t stand for anything so much as it stands for being against whatever liberals/progressives/the “woke” etc. are for.

*Part of Donald Trump’s peculiar hold over American politics is, I think, a product of his ability to generate not only fanatical support but also fanatical hatred — well-deserved in his case. Nobody is neutral or indifferent about Trump, except people who are completely disconnected from politics altogether.

*There’s a kind of leftist or pseudo-leftist who isn’t a fan of any particular country or social system, or at least not of any that actually exist, but rather organizes his (this is almost always a man interestingly) identity around hating everything about the current social order. A lot of Bernie Bros were obviously anti-fans in this sense. Glenn Greenwald — who of course has never been a leftist but still sort of plays one on TV — is a classic version of this sort of anti-fan. The entire dirtbag left, see for example Chapo Traphouse, consists of overgrown boy-men with major Mommy issues who just want to bitch about how everything sucks.

*And then there’s the whole celebrity obsession/cyber conspiracy side of this issue, which is also intimately connected to larger political goings-on. (The people who scour the Internet for conclusive evidence that Amber Heard ingested a “bump” of cocaine on the witness stand are clearly the same kind of people who end up believing in QAnon, The Big Lie, and so forth).

*Then there’s the misogyny running through all this, as so many of the stories of anti-fans, at least in the celebrity cyberworld, seem to be about the obsessive hatred of women connected in some way to famous men.

As I said, there’s a lot to think about here, so I hope you do it for me.