231–240 of 432 posts
This thread would be incomplete without a link to the Therac-25: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 TL;DR: Software race condition caused radiation doses several hundred times higher than intended, killing several patients.
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Wow. That’s... bold. One suggestion, maybe have it email your dosing to a trusted person so a human being can at least establish whether the numbers look approximately right? Although that still doesn’t cover any mechanical failures unless you’ve got a rock solid redundant closed loop setup. To be honest, the whole thing sounds ill advised, but I guess you already knew that.
I'd imagine having a strict boundary between "software thing that calculates how much you need" and "robot thing that mixes stuff together" would help, and you'd set up guardrails and unit tests on the calculation part. Worst case you could have physical guardrails such as "can't take more than x mg per week" in the form of only supplying a certain amount of raw materials and topping off intermittently. If you run ou…
I’ve not been physically hurt but lessons were learnt : A friend of mine once gave me an old computer (I don’t remember exactly but it was some random Compaq running Windows 98 and this happened in ~2010). I installed some distro in it but tbh, it was barely usable. I decided it was a great opportunity to see with my own eyes what would happen when you intentionally « sudo rm -rf /* ». Well, no surprise, it erases ev…
> Including the network share of my other computer’s /home. TIL network shares also get deleted in recursive deletions.
They kill people [citation needed] due to off by one errors.
N00b.
Back in the ancient days, my friends and I would meet every Saturday and go to an Internet cafe for a few hours of playing multiplayer games over LAN. Mostly StarCraft: Brood War, with a mix of Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena. During the week, we'd all play these games alone, in single player, figuring out new tricks to unleash on each other the next time we met.
One of these weeks, I've learned how to properly play Terrans against the Zerg, and was about to demonstrate my knowledge by steamrolling my friend with an army of Marines and Medics[0]. In that game, my friend went for his usual tactic of harassing me with Mutalisks[1] - an effective technique, as long as he avoided the main body of my army. Well, on that day, he wasn't careful enough.
At one point, he accidentally flew his entire (by that time pretty big, I think 24+) swarm of Mutalisks straight into my M&M army, which was just staging to launch an attack. My units took about 5 whole seconds to destroy most of his force - but the overlapping audio of dying Mutalisks pretty much saturated my headphones with high-amplitude noise. This was so unexpected that I wasn't able to comprehend what's going on around me (both in-game and in real life) for good 30 seconds, my vision blurred and my head was spinning.
Having wasted his entire army, he lost that match. But I keep thinking that this could have been a viable stratagem. If he sacrificed half of his army like this to break my focus, he could've crippled me with the other half. And ever since that day, I kept my headphones at half the volume.
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[0] - M&Ms, aka "bio", was the usual Terran army composition against Zerg players in Brood War. Zerg armies consist mostly of weak but cheap units - compensating individually low DPS and health with quick, mass production. Terran Marines are also cheap and low DPS, but in 2:1 ratio with Medics, they're healed faster than Zerg units can kill them, so a big ball of M&Ms is unstoppable to an inexperienced Zerg player.
[1] - Weak, cheap, annoyingly fast flying units. Perfect for distraction, but their low DPS makes them completely useless in a straight fight against Terran "bio" army.
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Heh, you don't even need proper robotics. Back in 2002, I was getting a package with a brand new Pocket PC (smartphone without the phone, running Windows). And I really wanted to know when it was delivered, but the UPS guy would regularly leave packages on the porch without ringing the bell or anything. This was before you could get delivery alerts or anything like that. But I had a spare laptop with an integrated we…
This made me actually laugh out loud, it feels like some of the things I came up with as a teenager wanting to do robotics and automation but having no money or way to purchase things online, water bottles were actually a good way of powering things like opening curtains by dropping them on a string. Also I like that even after you came up with "knock something off the table" you felt you needed a seesaw catapult thi…
It totally doesn't make any sense! I think I might have been fascinated with the idea of Rube Goldberg machines or something at the time. Or maybe I thought I could build a "security system" with it? Also it was summer and I was a bored teenager.
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Not quite robotics, but some of our servers kept powercycling , had to plug in the physical terminal. It was close to lunch, so I kept eating. The finale was a jar of mayo spilled into the guts of a 50k server. Best mayo I ever had.
Is mayo mayonnaise? Do people eat mayonnaise by jars?
Not my code, but somewhat related: I almost hurt myself when my friend used a sonic weapon on me in StarCraft. Back in the ancient days, my friends and I would meet every Saturday and go to an Internet cafe for a few hours of playing multiplayer games over LAN. Mostly StarCraft: Brood War, with a mix of Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena. During the week, we'd all play these games alone, in single player, figuring o…
The sonic weapon, while accidental, feels similar to tactics used to disrupt concentration and logical thinking. E.g. taunting, trolling, cheese strategies, or your opponent getting tilted from something you didn't intend to annoy them with.
Often think of how keeping a cool head is incredibly important in games like this, specifically for the pros. IdrA comes to mind as a technically gifted player who was often his own worst enemy due to his temper. He never did crack into the top of the pro scene (hard to do as an American in general) but felt like he really held himself back.