Development quotes of the week

I expect that the programmers for Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and Gooda (google voice needs a name and I am horrible with names) are having to deal with this daily. A person may ask a question which literally means one thing, but has a different contextual common meaning. Giving the literal answer would not be lying, but the person asking feels the computer did. Giving the contextually correct answer has the computer lying, but the person getting the 'honest' answer they expected. [And somewhere in England, they have hooked up Babbages spinning casket to a electrical motor to produce free electricity.]

Suckless makes a window manager: a part of a computer that human beings, with all their rich and varying abilities and perspectives, interact with constantly. Your choices of defaults and customization options have direct impact on those humans. [...]

With limited time and resources, you will have to make tradeoffs in your code, documentation, and community about which people your software is supportive and hostile towards. These are inherently political decisions which cannot be avoided. This is not to say that your particular choices are wrong. It’s just you are already engaged in “non-technical”, political work, because you, like everyone else here, are making a tool for human beings. [...]

There is, unfortunately, no such thing as a truly neutral stance on inclusion.