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Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?

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Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?

#321

Post by mustacheemperor »

msrenee wrote: post #201
Gravityloss wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some small metal pressing machines for example have two buttons, one on each side of the machine. You have to push them both for the machine to operate. This means your hands can't be squished. Or a dental x-ray machine has the final "run" button in the hallway so the nurse taking x-rays must go there to do it, so they don't get repeated exposure.

There's lots of safety mechanisms like this in manufacturing. I've also seen "light curtains" which are essentially 2 bars on either side of a hazard. If anything crosses that plane, the machine stops automatically. There are also pressure pads. For one type, you have to be standing on for the machine to operate so that you are in a safe location when it starts. For the other, the pad covers the danger area and the m…

>one type, you have to be standing on for the machine to operate so that you are in a safe location when it starts

Of course, the weakness of a system like this being if middle management is demanding unachievable timelines and/or people in the shop are willing to cut corners, someone can leave a box of heavy stuff on the pressure pad to "save time." Absolutely right that all these systems need to be resilient to operator tiredness etc

Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?

#322

Post by dharmab »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #305
namibj wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think parent was referring to taking wheels off, not torquing the nuts. And for that purpose, it does seem appropriate.

On second reading I see you may be right. However my point still stands, somewhat: if 300Nm is insufficient to undo your wheelnuts, they're way too tight.

Let me forward this advice to Mercedes AMG Petronas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUyUA91ILsE

Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?

#323

Post by mustacheemperor »

theli0nheart wrote: post #112

> Look at an audio file's waveform before playing it at max volume. This is important, but more broadly, practice good sound hygiene: wear headphones them around your neck until you know for a fact that it's safe to put them on your ears. Additionally, never play "new" sounds without remembering to set audio output to a tiny fraction of normal and increasing it after the sample is deemed safe. Musicians have this dri…

This was a practice I had to adopt for a period of time where connecting my Sony bluetooth headphones to my iPhone would reset the system volume to max, sometimes only after I had pressed play on Spotify. Numerous occasions where my ears were instantly blasted with whatever music I had last paused at maximum volume trained the habit.

It was finally fixed a couple updates ago, I think around when they introduced the health feature to track whether you've been listening to music too loudly. Go figure. It had been getting frustrating enough that I was ready to write a blogpost wondering how much cumulative hearing damage had occurred across the iPhone userbase as a result of that bug.

Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?

#324

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

8note wrote: post #39

I've melted a table once. Was testing a heat controller, and had the debugger left on. When the laptop the debugger was running turned off, it also stopped the code from running on the microcontroller, leaving the heater on without adding any new controls. It was a good learning to make sure there's a watch dog circuit, and that the microcontroller is much less trustworthy than the fpga

I've done this debugging a system with a pneumatic controller on one of the threads. Hit a breakpoint with the compressor still running and after a minute, hoses start blowing off. It happened often enough that we learned to not use hose clamps since losing a hose connection was a safe failure point.

However, I've read about the same thing happening to a couple guys testing a tank turret rotation controller. Controller is paused at a breakpoint, but a hardware counter is still accepting error pulses. Start running again and the error built up enough to command a full speed slew, sending the engineer who was sitting on the turret slamming into the wall, breaking a few bones.

Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?

#325

Post by mustacheemperor »

thih9 wrote: post #129

It's extremely easy to hurt yourself with audio, it almost feels like cheating. Just regular audio work provides plenty of opportunities to do that. Here's a random note from Supercollider, a platform for audio synthesis [1]: > CAUTION: macOS system volume doesn’t effectively limit audio applications’ maximum volume. Extra care has to be put in working on this platform, especially with headphones, because programs ca…

I just made a comment elsewhere in this thread regarding the absolutely awful behavior iOS had for 3rd party bluetooth headphone volume until a recent (~18 months or so) update. Every time I connected my Sony headset over bluetooth the system volume would reset to max, sometimes seemingly only after I had hit the play button in spotify. I am fairly certain this actually damaged my hearing after several occurrences of getting up, throwing my headphones on as I walked out the door, and blasting myself with max volume playback by accident. Even now that the issue has been fixed, I habitually check the device volume anytime I connect something on bluetooth. To this day I'm astounded Apple shipped such problematic behavior over the course of repeated iOS updates. I think it was fixed around the time they started to provide feedback about listening volumes in Apple Health.

Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?

#326

Post by ajford »

akiselev wrote: post #301
ArchOversight wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem with the saw stop is that wood when it is even slightly moist can set it off. So on a worksite if you are using lumber that hasn't had adequate time to dry the saw stop would trip even without any limbs being in danger. Each time it would destroy itself, you would have to take the saw apart and change it which would cause a work stoppage. What irks me the most is that the SawStop owner tried to cr…

Do you know what moisture level sets it off? I didn't even think about that - it's easy to take Southern California's weather for granted. Here it's either pretty much ready from the lumberyard or you got it right off the mill's truck so it has to sit for a few days/weeks. The lobbying is off putting, yes, but at least his greedy self-interest would do some actual good instead of extracting evermore capital from ever…

Or they went about developing their own systems. Bosch made their own system that didn't involve slamming a brake into the blade, but SawStop decided to throw some money around and get an injunction against it.

All the evidence I've found is super cloudy, but early reports indicated Bosch's variant predated SawStop's release.

Luckily SawStop's patents expire in a few years so hopefully we'll see other safety mechanisms similar to SawStop without the downsides and greed.

Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?

#327

Post by user-the-name »

mojuba wrote: post #277
user-the-name wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hit this bug just the other night, and I think what caused it was accidentally sending NaNs to the audio API. That bypassed whatever clamping functions were in place, and just produced an ear-piercing shriek. Very unpleasant.

No, it's not just NaN's, see my reply above.

Just tried it and yeah, I can reproduce. That is pretty bad!

Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?

#328

Post by ecpottinger »

How far back are we allowed to go.

Decades ago I had a Original Commodore PET 2001. It could only display white text/characters on a black screen. Foolish me having read a Byte magazine describing how a black & white colour wheel could make you see colours see: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-02/page/n45/m... so I tried to get my PET colour to display colours using this method.

Trying different timings, all the while staring at the screen. I did this all day looking at flashing lights all the time. Afterwards it turns out I could not see properly for hours.

Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?

#329

Post by ecpottinger »

akiselev wrote: post #288
msrenee wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots of safety mechanisms like this in manufacturing. I've also seen "light curtains" which are essentially 2 bars on either side of a hazard. If anything crosses that plane, the machine stops automatically. There are also pressure pads. For one type, you have to be standing on for the machine to operate so that you are in a safe location when it starts. For the other, the pad covers the danger area and the m…

Another awesome safety system is the SawStop which uses the conductivity of skin to monitor for contact against the blade in a tablesaw. If it detects contact a small explosive charge goes off, instantly sending a block of aluminum into the path of the blade, stopping it dead. Even a serious accident like leaning with an elbow against a moving blade is likely to result in little more than the scratch from hitting a s…

Is there anyway to do it magnetically using inducted currents? I doubt you can stop the saw that way, but you should be able slow the blade down so it does not do as much damage.

Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?

#330

Post by mfkp »

arionhardison wrote: post #223
mfkp wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, did you co-opt the term "Medicare" to use for your project? (medicare.dev) I'm not so sure the government would like that name.

Because I am "literally" trying to recreate a better version of medicare and Medicaid. Those terms are not trademarked. If you look at Medicare.gov and Medicare.com you can see, the term is actually used a ton and the gov does not care. They care much more about bad-faith actors. One of the main benefits is I don't have to tell "regular" people what I am trying to do. This is my "moon-shot project so even if it was a…

I'm not a trademark lawyer so take this as you will, but the term Medicare has been trademarked since 1957, assigned to the Executive Director of the US Army.

https://trademarks.justia.com/890/00/medicare-89000008.html

Just because you haven't run into a trademark issue yet doesn't mean that you will not in the future. And I don't think I'd want to be fighting the US Army lawyers for the naming rights.

I love your initiative, but you may want to look into the naming issue a bit further (since this is what trademarks are explicitly designed for, to prevent confusion about one product/service doing the same thing under the same name).

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