[Link] Chips, Cars & Computers

John Naughton’s contrasts the implications of Lean/JIT in two industries, cars & computers:

… both had found themselves caught in a perfect storm that one had weathered and the other hadn’t. This storm bought three forces simultaneously to bear on an unprepared world: the fragility of a global supply chain on which both industries critically depended, the exigencies of US-China geopolitics and a pandemic that, more or less overnight, transformed the way large parts of the industrialised world worked.

 

Everyone does NOT need to learn to code [Article]

Programmer Chase Felker disagrees with the flavour of our times – the need for everyone to learn to code. He thinks that there is a different, and more pertinent need – the need to think.

 I wonder why people are comfortable with thinking of computers as a scary black box in the first place. Computers do only what people tell them to do, and yet it is absurdly common to hear, “Windows crashed again! Call over the IT guy—it’s so complicated!” So many users do not feel empowered to understand how to use computers well, and I think that the urgency to spread programming is a symptom of this feeling. Perhaps if everyone had some practice telling computers what to do, tech intimidation wouldn’t be so prevalent.