E.g. NVH has been getting better pretty much every year despite the fact that car companies have been working on it for decades

(1) Marketed to investors as a tech company

(2) Valued by investors based on the premise that they are or will become oligopolists in their market

There are maybe a few of other factors (some touched on in the article) that amplify the criticism if they aren't causal. The rate of change brought about by tech feels faster than others before it. Houston grew into a square of choking freeways with the oil industry; while SV has old roots the explosion happened in a couple of decades. The other factor is the concentration of the industry makes it a more tangible issue to the people effected. You can understand Big Oil is destroying the world but it's harder to picture than a Google bus in front of you in traffic.

You're right though the biggest issue is still anticipating what other drivers are going to do. You need to override the system to stay out of people's blind spots or else you'll get cut off or worse. When you stay at a steady speed other drivers seem to forget your presence quicker.

I do agree that people are a little too fearful of using bare pointers for optional references, if you're using a linter that will catch possible null dereferences it's often the most sensible technique.

This might be nitpicking but vtables in C++ are created per type with instances having a pointer to it.

I've been working on a relatively simple real time music/audio processing project on an Arduino (identifying tempo and using it to create interesting lighting effects for a Halloween costume) and it's an interesting challenge. Extracting any kind of useful information about the underlying musical structure from polyphonic audio is an incredibly hard problem. Add to that limited hardware and the kind of sampling rate you need to capture music (upwards of 40kHz if you want to capture everything you can hear) and you have to get creative.