Creations of human artifice In the twenty-first century, the question most of us ask when disaster strikes is not "How could God let that happen?" but "Who screwed up?" This is a salutary development: We take responsibility for the world we live in. Whether or not our world is the best of all possible worlds, it is a world we have made for ourselves. We live in an engineered landscape, on an engineered planet. Our cities and farms, our dwellings and vehicles, our power plans and communication networks—these are all creations of human artifice. If we don't like it here, we have only ourselves to blame. Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape humanityinfrastructuretechnologydisaster
When it goes wrong Kris: It's not my fault when it goes wrong. Jeff: Yes it is. Shane Carruth, Upstream Color lovedisaster
Features and complexity Niklaus Wirth of Pascal fame wrote a famous paper in 1995 called A Plea for Lean Software. His take is that “a primary cause for the complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want”, and “when a system’s power is measured by the number of its features, quantity becomes more important than quality”. Ben Hoyt, The small web is beautiful benhoyt.com A Plea for Lean SoftwareSpeed is a featureRequirements proliferation featurescomplexity