> My view is that expecting humans to stop making mistakes is much less effective than fixing the systems that amplify those mistakes into large, irreversible impacts.
This is applicable to almost any activity: "Sure he was driving drunk, but the car's manufacturer should have prevented that from causing any damage!" I agree that GitHub should improve the design here - privating a '10 star / 1 week old' repo shouldn't be treated the same as privating a '50k star / 10 year old' repo. I don't mean to diminish the fact that GitHub's UI should be improved here.
But the author needs to take some responsibility and realize they were ""driving distracted"", and not act like GitHub is 100% at fault here. Just because GitHub didn't act perfectly doesn't mean the author didn't make any mistakes.
Neither the author, nor anybody that I can see here, is saying that the author didn't make any mistakes.
But what you are saying is that marginal effort to prevent mistakes is not worthwhile.
Cars, to take your example, would not be as safe as they are today if they followed the principles you've shown in this post and the grandparent. And yes, even when driving drunk, which is illegal, is safer too - stay in lane, adaptive cruise control, automatic braking, etc. have all incrementally made even extremely ill-advised behaviours safer.
This is applicable to almost any activity: "Sure he was driving drunk, but the car's manufacturer should have prevented that from causing any damage!" I agree that GitHub should improve the design here - privating a '10 star / 1 week old' repo shouldn't be treated the same as privating a '50k star / 10 year old' repo. I don't mean to diminish the fact that GitHub's UI should be improved here.
But the author needs to take some responsibility and realize they were ""driving distracted"", and not act like GitHub is 100% at fault here. Just because GitHub didn't act perfectly doesn't mean the author didn't make any mistakes.