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A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

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Re: A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

#361
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got it exactly right. There are a lot of people here who are completely deluded into the "move fast and break things" mindset not realizing that sometimes you really do not want to move fast, because you REALLY do not want to break things. A corrupted file throwing up panics like this is a good thing, because you don't want corrupted files to pass through like everything is fine.

People like to think that the alternative to "move fast and break things" is "move slowly and not break things" but it's not, it's "move slowly, break things anyway, then take days to resolve the problem because you never learned how to move fast".

Change is the most common reason for breaking things. Moving fast means more broken things, hence the slogan. The alternative is indeed move slow, break things less often. It's a bad strategy when you NEED a LOT of change. But if you don't NEED a LOT of change, and you do need a lot of stability, it seems perfectly valid?

Re: A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

#362
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know what it's like in software because we have e.g. the example of how the Space Shuttle's flight control software was developed and audited. It's weeks of meetings, tests and change processes etc. obsessing over changing a single instruction in assembly. Which also suggests to me that the problem isn't per-se the glacial progress & approval processes, but that they're using the wrong glacial processes. If this F…

I would settle for the government moving bureaucracy from safety-theatre to actual safety.

[deleted]

Re: A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

#363
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as I said, people think the alternative to "fast, full of bugs, 0 planning" is automatically "slow, no bugs, lots of planning" but it's often "slow, lots of planning, just as many bugs"

When you are in a complex spiderweb you simply cannot move fast. If you are moving fast you are not looking at everything and it will blow up in your face.

True.. which is why you want simple systems that are easy to understand and iterate on.

Re: A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

#364
post #179
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My intuition on that is that two is also a bad number to choose in that case. One could fo full lunar mission on the thing and have three models and in case of inconsistency the majority wins.

It is but it doesn't matter if it is the input message that crashes it. You just need 3 bad message (sooo a message and 2 retries) to crash it whole

In the end you get never around getting some parts of a system bulletproof and reliable. The question is just how big those parts are.

Re: A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

#365
post #271

You all seem to think this is similar in value or operation to a web app. It is not. It is a safety-critical system that requires very stringent operational and development guidelines ON PURPOSE. The idea that the FAA shouldn't be risk averse in this system is absolutely ridiculous. The complexity of operating the airspace of an entire nation is nothing to scoff at and the importance of the NOTAM system should not be…

You've got it exactly right. There are a lot of people here who are completely deluded into the "move fast and break things" mindset not realizing that sometimes you really do not want to move fast, because you REALLY do not want to break things. A corrupted file throwing up panics like this is a good thing, because you don't want corrupted files to pass through like everything is fine.

Software falls into two buckets: stuff that directly injures and kills people when it fails, and everything else.

Re: A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is unreasonable to expect that government pay in a world where the government is a welfare program with a governing hobby might have less purchasing power than UBI in a world where we prioritize effective governance over beaurocracy. It's not a zero sum game.

There are just under 3 M federal (civilian) employees. I think it's entirely unreasonable to think that we would pay a UBI to ~210 M adult citizens (a 70x multiple) at levels that would represent a greater amount of purchasing power than to the people nominally working for the federal government. If you're firm in your view that that's reasonable, I'd like to learn more about the proposal as to how the math would wor…

OK.

I'm not going to code up a simulation because the research hasn't been done to confirm my choice of constants, but I can sketch it. Each workday is a function of the macroeconomic climate and some set of cultural norms during which we exhibit some blend of the following personae. As we'll see, introducing UBI reduces the prevalence of the bureaucrat persona which has knock-on effects leading to surplus.

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The Missionary - has a mission and is working towards it. Cares more about the mission than prestige.

The Worker - doesn't have a plan, but likes to be a part of something meaningful. Will gamble with prestige in order to ensure that the work stays meaningful.

The Bureaucrat - willing to tolerate or create waste in favor of preserving prestige. Sometimes manages to trick a worker into believing they're a missionary.

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Obviously people are more complex than this. Also, I'll use dollars to indicate productive output even though I think that most of the time collapsing such things to a single dimension is a slippery slope to somewhere awful. All this to say: gimme a break, it's model.

Here are my totally made up constants, note that X is a parameter which will depend on UBI:

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Missionary creates 100$ of output always, plus a 1% daily chance to inspire a worker to become a missionary, a 1% chance to inspire a bureaucrat to become a worker, and a 1% chance to burn out and become a worker.

Worker creates 80$ of output if they're following a missionary and -20$ if they're following a bureaucrat because it's likely that they're causing more harm than good. They have an X% chance of burning out and becoming a bureaucrat.

A Bureaucrat creates -$20 of output, because they're definitely doing more harm than good.

Now lets say that everybody consumes $5 each day to stay alive.

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So X is our worker burn-out rate.

As with most systems of this kind, it's very sensitive to initial conditions. If you start with a high enough concentration of workers and missionaries, your bureaucrat rate will be very low and you'll have a surplus. Too many bureaucrats and most of your workers are doing more harm than good, the system is carried (if it survives at all) by the missionaries and the minority of workers following them.

Critically, X is a function of risk tolerance. The worker becomes a bureaucrat because they cannot tolerate the risk of pointing out the wastefulness of the bureaucrat above them.

Introducing UBI does two things. It makes standing up to your Bureaucrat less risky, reducing X, and it creates a fourth type, the Video Gamer, who consumes $5 to stay alive but doesn't sabotage the output of any workers like the bureaucrat does.

Some percentage of the Bureaucrats will become Video Gamers if UBI is implemented. That percent depends on the size of the surplus. If the surplus gets big enough, UBI can be so comfortable that there's no reason to be a bureaucrat, because it doesn't afford a significant quality of life increase.

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So to answer your question about the 3M and the 210M, I'd guess that today we've got 213M people living on the positive output of maybe 50M--the rest are bureaucrats or are following bureaucrats. They're busy fighting over their slice of the pie instead of baking it. Bureaucrats sort of expand to consume available resources, so as automation improves worker output, that ratio will get worse unless we find a place to put them.

We'd have to do research to come up with better constants and run that model for real to be sure, but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that reducing both the bureaucrat concentration and the worker burnout rate by 50% would triple the system's output once you let the personae conventions find a new equilibrium. I'm not sure how much more federal employees will get paid above UBI, but I think there's room for the end result to be that future UBI is cushier than today's government work.

Re: A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

#367

It sounds like the kind of problem that blockchains were invented to prevent. Important systems should not blindly replicate data, they should validate it.

Data validation is a basic expectation in many technology stacks. I don't understand why blockchain would be uniquely positioned to resolve this problem.

Re: A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

#368
post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make the statement any less ridiculous. What was the ultimate reason for the 737 MAX debacle? That airlines want to save money on type rating training. Look at accident reports, and half the time the airline's safety culture (or lack thereof) is at least a contributing cause. The FAA may be in many ways dysfunctional, but so are the airlines, and it's sure as hell not them who are pushing for better safe…

point was that if FAA software policies around safety were actually effective we would not have had the 737 max issues.

On the other hand, if Boeing actually cared about safety instead of profits they wouldn't have done their utmost to hide the fact that they were avoiding the FAA's safety regulations to improve profits.

Re: A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd never heard of it, and doubt that there's any other explanation than pandering.

> I'd never heard of it, Now you did. > doubt that there's any other explanation than pandering. The airplane doesn't care about the gender or sex of the pilot. There is no pandering in that observation.

Wow, airplanes are writing FAA regs now? I hope the 737 Max opts out of those duties.

Re: A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system

#370
post #182
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't block inserts with invalid data? I thought that was the whole point of telling the database what types you're using

It does and poster above is incompetent

I have had customer production sites go down due to this issue when emojis first arrived. It was a common issue in 2015. I would hope it is fixed by now!
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