I've only had a chance to listen to the beginning of it, but I share their disgust with the NYT article [1]. In any other field, journalists feel responsible for simplifying and explaining. Professionals in science, law, or medicine are often critical of these explanations, because the journalists' understanding of the relevant background material is often flawed, and the simplifications either ignore crucial distinc…
I don't understand the hate for the article. The article is written for a layperson audience, where the technical details would absolutely be eye-wateringly boring . Instead, the article (imo, correctly) focuses on the human side of the story: the fact that a highly detail oriented developer, working on unrelated software, stumbled across a small discrepancy in their measurements, triggering a series of events that l…
Again, the job of a journalist is to simplify and explain. Think about general-audience articles on subjects you're _not_ deeply familiar with. They typically do not patronize you or tell you that the details are boring; instead they try to explain the issues at hand in the most accessible way they can. Software is no different from science, law, or medicine in having lots of arcane terminology and intricate technical detail; it is not somehow the case that those topics can be simplified and explained but that a software problem can only be understood, even in concept and imprecisely, by a special cast of techno monks. But we seem to pretend it is, because we have strangely low standards for technology journalism.