Iāve spent my career working in industrial and power generation control systems. They are absolutely not state-of-the-art, on purpose, and sales reps who show up with ācutting edgeā products very quickly become members of the Order of the Gate. We donāt need it bug-free, but we absolutely need to know where the bugs are, and things that go āboomā and leave a crater are not the beta testbeds.
And in our industry, dangerous as it is, cutting off the power is almost always the safe answer. āAh shit, I give upā is fine. Encouraged, even. The same is not true of aviation.
I once made a coding mistake that caused someoneās manufacturing line to shut down. They claimed it cost them over $1m in losses (which could have been a completely inflated/made up number). I felt bad about it, of course, but in the end I got over it. The mistake was in something that was explicitly not licensed or intended for use in industrial or safety-critical applications. They also clearly rolled out this change without bothering to validate it first. Shit happens and people make mistakes. Thatās why when youāre dealing with software, especially in applications where mistakes can be very costly in terms of money or lives, you donāt just blindly roll stuff out without validating it first.
At one site, I talked to an operator who absolutely made a mistake that legitimately cost the company about $40 million in early-90s dollars. Once he figured out what heād done, he thoughtfully composed a resignation letter and dropped it off with HR. Shortly after, he was called into the site managerās office.
āWhatās this for?ā
āHonestly? Iām hoping that if I donāt cause a fuss now, youāll go easy on me and Iāll be able to work again, somewhere.ā
āThe way we see it, if you go, weāll have to hire someone who is at risk of making the same mistake. Put another way: we just spent $40 million on your training. If you stay and teach the other operators, that reduces the per-head cost of training. If you go, itās money weāve wasted.ā
I thought that was a remarkably clear-thinking manager.
Iām curious why the other billionaires donāt seem concerned that Musk is making this power grab. If Muskās looking to further increase his ludicrous wealth, youād think throwing other billionaires in the gulag and seizing their accounts would be a quick way to make the numbers go up. Yeah, he already has more than he could ever spend, but they should know from personal experience that for a billionaire, enough is never enough.
Iāve wondered that too
Every billionaire should be required to get one of these implants.
Reminds me of the scene in Batman Returns where Dr Crane (Scarecrow) made billionaires walk out on the thin ice.
There was a lot of cheering in the theater during that scene. I was one of them.
Isnāt Swift a billionaire? Because the thought of her taking muskās head is making me feel a little happy.
We can all take some solace that we werenāt responsible for Therac-25:
I have a theory about what is happening with the information that Elon is stealing from us.
When Trump first ran for president, there was a very good article about how when he became the Republican nominee, he got access to the Republican database. In the article, they talked about how he set up a very sophisticated system of microtargeting people online using that database (via Cambridge Analytica).
He also had all that data mirrored for his personal use, which he uses for his many, many grifts.
I think that he is going to cross-reference the 2 databases, eliminate non-Republicans and also use the data for more grifts and more campaign fraud, as well as scrubbing the government of anyone but his lackeys.
The Global Software Cabal requires me to mention this one:
Yeahā¦ this is why I have no desire to work on anything life or safety critical.
If I make a mistake at my job, people may lose money (maybe a lot of it) and time. Iād rather have that on my conscience than knowing I made a mistake that got someone maimed or killed.
Iāve worked on software that related to safety. We also validated the hell out of it, including looking at the consequences if the software should fail anyway. It made development slow and some of the ācoders shouldnāt need to understand the program, just write codeā people really did not appreciate it but they hadnāt taken over yet.
Safety-critical systems donāt depend on one person. Theyāre done by several people, representing several different viewpoints and interests. So if thereās a mistake, a whole bunch of very different people have to miss it. Iāve made mistakes on safety-critical systems, and they were caught in one of the many layers of review.
The key is to run a safety project not as a place where good ideas are born, but where bad ideas die. And to do that, you need to be humble enough to freely admit bad ideas. Which brings us back to the idea of Elno having anything to do with air traffic controlā¦