Wojtek Borowicz interviews David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework: Wojtek Borowicz: Software methodology is an industry of its own. There is Scrum, and Agile, and coaches, and books, and all of that. But you and your team at Basecamp don't follow these practices. Why? DHH: First of all, our approach to software development is heavily inspired by the Agile Manifesto and the Agile values. It is not so much inspired by the Agile practices as they exist today. A lot of Agile software methodologies focus on areas of product development that are not where the hard bits lie. They are so much about the procedural structures. Software, in most cases, is inherently unpredictable, unknowable, and unshaped. It's almost like a gas. It can fit into all sorts of different openings from the same basic idea. The notion of trying to estimate how long a feature is going to take doesn't work because you don't know what you're building and because humans are terrible at estimating anything. The history of software development is one of late or cancelled projects. If you were to summarize the entire endeavor of software development, you'd say: 'The project ran late and it got canceled.' Planning work doesn't work, so to speak. What we do at Basecamp we chose to label Shape Up, simply because that is where we find the hard work to be. We're trying to just accept the core constraint that it is impossible to accurately specify what software should do up front. You can only discover what software should do within constraints. But it's not like we follow the idea that it's done when it's done, either. That's an absolute abdication of product management thinking. What we say instead is: don't do estimates, do budgets. The core of Shape Up is about budgets. Not how long is something going to take but what is something worth. Because something could take a week or four months. What is it worth? [...] Wojtek Borowicz: So the problem with those methodologies is they put too much focus on estimating, which is inherently impossible with software? DHH: I'd go even further and say that estimation is bullshit. It's so imprecise as to be useless, even when you're dealing with fixed inputs. And you're not. No one is ever able to accurately describe what a piece of software should do before they see the piece of software. This idea that we can preemptively describe what something should do before we start working on it is bunk. Agile was sort of onto this idea that you need running software to get feedback but the modern implementations of Agile are not embracing the lesson they themselves taught.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Researchers at Israel's Ben Gurion University of the Negev have spent the last two years experimenting with "phantom" images to trick semi-autonomous driving systems. They previously revealed that they could use split-second light projections on roads to successfully trick Tesla's driver-assistance systems into automatically stopping without warning when its camera sees spoofed images of road signs or pedestrians. In new research, they've found they can pull off the same trick with just a few frames of a road sign injected on a billboard's video. And they warn that if hackers hijacked an internet-connected billboard to carry out the trick, it could be used to cause traffic jams or even road accidents while leaving little evidence behind. In this latest set of experiments, the researchers injected frames of a phantom stop sign on digital billboards, simulating what they describe as a scenario in which someone hacked into a roadside billboard to alter its video. They also upgraded to Tesla's most recent version of Autopilot known as HW3. They found that they could again trick a Tesla or cause the same Mobileye device to give the driver mistaken alerts with just a few frames of altered video. The researchers found that an image that appeared for 0.42 seconds would reliably trick the Tesla, while one that appeared for just an eighth of a second would fool the Mobileye device. They also experimented with finding spots in a video frame that would attract the least notice from a human eye, going so far as to develop their own algorithm for identifying key blocks of pixels in an image so that a half-second phantom road sign could be slipped into the "uninteresting" portions. And while they tested their technique on a TV-sized billboard screen on a small road, they say it could easily be adapted to a digital highway billboard, where it could cause much more widespread mayhem. "Autopilot is a driver assistance feature that is intended for use only with a fully attentive driver who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any time," reads Tesla's response. The Ben Gurion researchers counter that Autopilot is used very differently in practice. "As we know, people use this feature as an autopilot and do not keep 100 percent attention on the road while using it," writes Mirsky in an email. "Therefore, we must try to mitigate this threat to keep people safe, regardless of [Tesla's] warnings."

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Amazon.com has recklessly reinstated dangerous warehouse productivity quotas despite telling a judge that it was suspending them during the pandemic, workers said in a court filing. From a report: "Amazon has not been honest and forthcoming," employees at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, told the judge handling their lawsuit, which claims the company's "oppressive and dangerous" policies violated public-nuisance laws and exacerbated Covid-19 hazards. While Amazon says worker safety is its top priority, employees at several facilities in different states claim their well-being takes a back seat to quickly shipping customers' orders. In July, Amazon provided the court a message it had sent to employees and posted in bathrooms at the Staten Island facility, telling them they wouldn't be disciplined for falling short of the company's quotas for how many tasks they complete each hour. Workers were also assured that time spent on safety measures like washing their hands wouldn't be counted against them under Amazon's "Time Off Task" policy, which restricts the number of unproductive minutes allowed in their day. The company also submitted a statement by a U.S. human resources director that the more permissive policy dated back to March, when due to Covid-19 the company "ceased providing productivity rate feedback to associates and imposing any discipline related to low productivity rates."

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I have a theory why the Repubs are tanking in Georgia.

At least a few Republican voters in Georgia are pissed off about voter suppression of blacks. It might not be the final straw for a majority of Repubs, but it probably is for some.

This is based on something I learned in software in 1984. We shipped ThinkTank for the Mac in April. One of the first products to ship for the Mac. How did we do it so fast? We left out a lot of features, figuring we're getting a fresh start on the Mac. Nope.

Everyone knew what ThinkTank could do on the Apple II and IBM PC, and they felt ripped off that the ThinkTank they bought for the Mac was less capable. We rushed out another version by the end of the year that came closer to matching what they expected.

How does this apply to Georgia?

Well the Repubs never thought how some of their supporters would feel about voter suppression. Sure there aren't many blacks who vote Republican, but some of the whites don't want to vote for a party that would do what they're doing.

The thing to remember is that while Georgia didn't go for Obama, there were probably a fair number of Republicans who voted for him in Georgia in 2008 and 2012. People who had gotten over their fear of blacks enough to vote for one. The US is changing. As much as we emphasize that racism is still here, and it is -- we also had a black president for eight years. That is change.

That, and people know more than you think they do.

PS: WordPress should do a tool that goes the other way. Lets you write a blog post in a series of tweets. I know that probably seems counter-intuitive, but I learned today a fair number of users don't like the new block editor. And Twitter is, these days, a fairly fluid writing tool

Why isn't there a CAPTCHA for voice?

I wonder how many people saw Trump's last town hall.It was amazing in that he couldn't answer any of the questions actual voters have.

The German Research Vessel Polarstern has sailed back into its home port after completing a remarkable expedition to the Arctic Ocean. The ship spent a year in the polar north, much of it with its engines turned off so it could simply drift in the sea-ice. From a report The point was to study the Arctic climate and how it is changing. And expedition leader, Prof Markus Rex, returned with a warning. "The sea-ice is dying," he said. "The region is at risk. We were able to witness how the ice disappears and in areas where there should have been ice that was many metres thick, and even at the North Pole -- that ice was gone," the Alfred Wegener Institute scientist told a media conference in Bremerhaven on Monday. RV Polarstern was on station to document this summer's floes shrink to their second lowest ever extent in the modern era. The floating ice withdrew to just under 3.74 million sq km (1.44 million sq miles). The only time this minimum has been beaten in the age of satellites was 2012, when the pack ice was reduced to 3.41 million sq km. The downward trend is about 13% per decade, averaged across the month of September. "This reflects the warming of the Arctic," said Prof Rex. "The ice is disappearing and if in a few decades we have an ice-free Arctic -- this will have a major impact on the climate around the world."

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The trip took just three hours and three minutes – half the usual journey time.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The railroad tracks cut through Weyling White's boyhood backyard like an invisible fence. He would play there on sweltering afternoons, stacking rocks along the rails under the watch of his grandfather, who established a firm rule: Weyling wasn't to cross the right of way into the white part of town. The other side had nicer homes and parks, all the medical offices, and the town's only hospital. As a consequence, White said, his family mostly got by without regular care, relying on home remedies and the healing hands of the Baptist church. "There were no health care resources whatsoever," said White, 34. "You would see tons of worse health outcomes for people on those streets." The hard lines of segregation have faded in Ahoskie, a town of 5,000 people in the northeastern corner of the state. But in health care, a new force is redrawing those barriers: algorithms that blindly soak up and perpetuate historical imbalances in access to medical resources. A STAT investigation found that a common method of using analytics software to target medical services to patients who need them most is infusing racial bias into decision-making about who should receive stepped-up care. While a study published last year documented bias in the use of an algorithm in one health system, STAT found the problems arise from multiple algorithms used in hospitals across the country. The bias is not intentional, but it reinforces deeply rooted inequities in the American health care system, effectively walling off low-income Black and Hispanic patients from services that less sick white patients routinely receive. These algorithms are running in the background of most Americans' interaction with the health care system. They sift data on patients' medical problems, prior health costs, medication use, lab results, and other information to predict how much their care will cost in the future and inform decisions such as whether they should get extra doctor visits or other support to manage their illnesses at home. The trouble is, these data reflect long-standing racial disparities in access to care, insurance coverage, and use of services, leading the algorithms to systematically overlook the needs of people of color in ways that insurers and providers may fail to recognize.

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NASA has announced more than a third of a billion dollars worth of "Tipping Point" contracts awarded to over a dozen companies pursuing potentially transformative space technologies. The projects range from in-space testing of cryogenic tech to a 4G LTE network for the Moon. From a report: The space agency is almost always accepting applications for at least one of its many grant and contract programs, and Tipping Point is directly aimed at commercial space capabilities that need a bit of a boost. According to the program description, "a technology is considered at a tipping point if an investment in a demonstration will significantly mature the technology, increase the likelihood of infusion into a commercial space application, and bring the technology to market for both government and commercial applications."

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Video conferencing platform Zoom announced today plans to roll out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) capabilities starting next week. From a report: E2EE will allow Zoom users to generate individual encryption keys that will be used to encrypt voice or video calls between them and other conference participants. These keys will be stored locally and will not be shared with Zoom servers, meaning the software company won't be able to access or intercept any ongoing E2EE meetings. Support for E2EE calls will first be part of Zoom clients to be released next week. To use the new feature, users must update theri clients next week and enable support for E2EE calls at the account level. This green shield will contain a lock if E2EE is active. If the lock is absent, Zoom will use its default AES 256-bit GCM encryption scheme, which the company uses to secure current communications, but which the company can also intercept. Further reading: Zoom Adds Ability To Open Apps Like Dropbox And Slack, Event-Hosting Tools As Part Of Push Beyond Video Meetings.

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Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: Here's one of the weirdest aspects of Tuesday's iPhone launch event: Apple has been less than forthright about the real prices of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini. At the event, Apple referred to these products as starting at $699 (iPhone 12 mini) and $799 (iPhone 12), but those prices are not actually accurate unless you slap a big asterisk on there. (As Apple does on its marketing pages, because it must.) Here's what's actually happening, at least in the U.S.: Apple has cut deals with AT&T and Verizon that give existing customers of those carriers $30 off their purchases. The actual prices of the two models are $729 and $829, and that's what you'll pay if you're a U.S. subscriber to Sprint, T-Mobile, any smaller pay-as-you-go carriers, or if you want to buy a SIM-free model with no carrier connection at all. (The 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max are the same price on all carriers.) It's embarrassing that Apple is hiding the real price of the iPhone 12.

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Usually when we're watching a travesty happen in Washington, a gun massacre, starting a war, giving money to the rich, there isn't much we can do but say "Remember to vote two years from now." This time everyone gets to stick it to the Repubs in real time.

Apple has poached a key member of Google's Project Zero, a hacking team at Google that has found dozens of critical vulnerabilities in Apple's iOS and other critical Apple software. From a report: Last year, Apple and Google fought over a series of vulnerabilities that Project Zero discovered in iOS, with Apple suggesting that Google was overselling the vulnerabilities. About a year later, Brandon Azad announced on Twitter at the beginning of October that he was leaving Google's elite team of hackers to join Apple. "My teammates at Project Zero have been among the kindest and smartest people I've met, and I've learned so much from them," Azad wrote. "I'll really miss working alongside everyone on the team. Thank you all for these wonderful experiences, and keep on hacking!" Azad has been widely considered one of the best iPhone hackers who didn't work for Apple, being named by Apple in countless security advisories, and presenting highly technical findings on Apple's products at major cybersecurity conferences around the world. Last year, Motherboard profiled Project Zero and revealed that Apple had been trying to poach a colleague of Azad, Ian Beer.

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