[ipython]

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 led to discovering what is arguably one of the biggest attempted supply chain attacks since Solarwinds.

I don't understand what people wanted to be covered in this article? At what point would there be sufficient technical detail to suffice yet still keep the layperson interested enough to read the rest of the article?

On the other hand if you feel somehow slighted by the flippant attitude in the article, give it a rest! Why are you so sensitive? It's not like he's personally insulting you! The tech community is hardly the underdog any longer, so let's just take a joke once in a while, no? As President Eisenhower quoted[0], "Always take your job seriously, never yourself"

[0] https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/file/w...

[icambron]

Not every criticism comes from a place of personal offense, and it's unreasonable to cast things you disagree with as its author having a case of the vapors. He's not insulting me and I'm not insulted; instead I think the article is bad for the reasons I explained. I could just as easily point out that you seem strangely offended by criticism of an article you did not write.

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.

[ipython]

The point of the article though is not about the technical details, it's a human interest story. It's about a guy, working in obscurity on an unrelated topic, stumbling upon what is arguably the biggest story in tech so far in 2024. I still don't see how this shows "low standards" as I don't see any factual errors in the article.

As a technical person, I did not feel patronized by the article. My non-technical wife forwarded it to me, and she also did not feel patronized by the article. If he said "you're too stupid to understand", then, yeah, that'd be patronizing.

I'll just conclude this way- when I used to sit in IDA Pro all day reverse engineering malware, I didn't expect to carry on a conversation with a perfect stranger talking at length about the intricacies of static and dynamic analysis. I have myself made similar comments about how my job involves staring at thousands of lines of assembly code and that would probably be mindnumbingly boring for them. We both have a laugh. Sometimes they do have an interest, and I can make it sound really interesting by focusing on the outcomes of the work rather than the toil and frankly mindnumbing grind; but other times, they say, yea, that sounds crazy, and we move on.

Nobody ever felt insulted- it's as they say "different strokes for different folks." I have had folks in other fields say similar things to me about how I would find the details of their work boring. A lot of times I am intrigued and hold a conversation to learn more, other times I agree and move on. At no point am I offended or feel patronized, though, because I am confident that if I truly cared I could learn more myself or ask questions.

[juliusdavies]

"I wasn't that bothered by it." - Andres Freund, 3 minutes 41 seconds into the podcast, about the NYTimes article. :-)