I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
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I’ve 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 “cutting edge” products very quickly become members of the Order of the Gate. We don’t need it bug-free, but we absolutely need to know where the bugs are, and things that go “boom” 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. “Ah shit, I give up” is fine. Encouraged, even. The same is not true of aviation.
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I once made a coding mistake that caused someone’s 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. That’s why when you’re dealing with software, especially in applications where mistakes can be very costly in terms of money or lives, you don’t just blindly roll stuff out without validating it first.
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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 he’d done, he thoughtfully composed a resignation letter and dropped it off with HR. Shortly after, he was called into the site manager’s office.
“What’s this for?”
“Honestly? I’m hoping that if I don’t cause a fuss now, you’ll go easy on me and I’ll be able to work again, somewhere.”
“The way we see it, if you go, we’ll 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, it’s money we’ve wasted.”
I thought that was a remarkably clear-thinking manager.
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I’m curious why the other billionaires don’t seem concerned that Musk is making this power grab. If Musk’s looking to further increase his ludicrous wealth, you’d 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.
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I’ve wondered that too
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Every billionaire should be required to get one of these implants.
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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.
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Isn’t Swift a billionaire? Because the thought of her taking musk’s head is making me feel a little happy.
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We can all take some solace that we weren’t responsible for Therac-25:
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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.
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The Global Software Cabal requires me to mention this one:
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Yeah… 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. I’d rather have that on my conscience than knowing I made a mistake that got someone maimed or killed.
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I’ve 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 “coders shouldn’t need to understand the program, just write code” people really did not appreciate it but they hadn’t taken over yet.
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