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Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

arstechnica.com

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Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#981

Post by barrysteve »

wpietri wrote: post #962
barrysteve wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pushing regulation back to the point where someone dies, causes these problems in the first place. It's not hard to certify vehicles before use. We do it with cars on a daily basis. Measuring the necessity for regulation "in blood" is unbelievably cruel.

It's actually really hard to certify vehicles before use when they're novel vehicles. Try reading vehicle safety standards if you want proof of how complex it gets. Good regulation balances the need for innovation vs the need for public health and safety. We can argue about the right balancing point all day, and people certainly will. But there's no simple solution on either side.

I agree there is no simple solution. But I'd prefer not to die, to prove to you that experimental submarines need regulation.

How is this a deniable point?

We are conscious enough as humans to not require death to change beliefs.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#982

Post by detourdog »

vkou wrote: post #936
detourdog wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many jobs are dangerous and regulated but killing customers is different. somehow it is the insurance companies that are the first line of defense when some conjures up a novel scheme.

Dangerous jobs still require the employer to try really hard to make them as safe as possible. It doesn't sound like that was the case here.

This was out in the middle of sea not much jurisdiction. I think the crew would need a labor union and refuse to work to improve the working conditions. Consider the guy was on the sub I'm sure he did everything he could think of.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#984

Post by taneq »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #784
taneq wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have the old guard, NASA I thought the latest round of NASA missions were using commodity hardware and taking the fail-early-fail-often approach (at least compared to the old days)? And in doing so have delivered, all failures included, the most bang per buck of any NASA missions? Not saying I'd trust my life to a gamepad alone, but pragmatism is a virtue in engineering.

> Not saying I'd trust my life to a gamepad alone I’d trust it to an Xbox, PlayStation controller, they’re some of the most reliability tested input devices ever. Most people are freaking out because it’s some known glitchy budget gamepad.

From a functional safety perspective if you can't verify each step from the initial risk assessment to the final product, you can't prove the overall risk reduction and therefore don't know the overall residual hazard. From that perspective this sub would never have left dry dock (or possibly the CAD model).

In practical terms if push came to shove, an Xbox or PS controller is probably more reliable than most equivalent devices. My stock phrase when comparing normal functions with Safety Instrumented Functions is "I'd trust this with my car, but not my life."

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#985

Post by RajT88 »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #952
RajT88 wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far from the most egregious accent offenses committed by Connery. There's so many, it's hard to pick!

I'm also fond of the spanish Highlander with a Scottish accent. There can only be one (accent for Sean Connery).

Spanish/Egyptian. Where the person who was supposed to be a Scot had a Belgian accent.

I'm quite fond of the Bond film where he was disguised as a Japanese man, and all the actors pretended to be fooled. 6'2", with chest hair poking out of his kimono, an obvious wig, and speaking broken Japanese with his typical Scottish brogue. "Arigatoo gozzzimash"

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#986

Post by taskforcegemini »

tredre3 wrote: post #16
srmarm wrote: post #3

The US Navy uses an Xbox 360 controller in active service [0] Mass market has a lot of R&D to leverage so it makes sense. Nothing to say this is the cause of the fault and probably going to be more reliable than something hand rolled. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16333376/us-navy-military...

I personally believe using mass market makes sense. I don't understand the criticism I've seen on this website for using off the shelf controllers or camping lights (what do you expect, an LED strip magically engineered by a large aeronautics firm specifically for the sub? and what would that change?). That being said, the difference between a Microsoft controller and a third party is that Microsoft very certainly di…

the logitech controller has a switch to change between direct input / x-input

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#987

Post by htrp »

hef19898 wrote: post #671
finitemonkey wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apollo 1 has been too long ago. Collective memory fades. Each generation seems to need its own disasters to keep its safety standards up.

The general public does, for those in the respective fields those safety lessons are ingrained in proper procedures and constititional knowledge. That's why start-ups in those fields are risky, usually their founders have never witnessed said procedures and knowledge at work, never worked under those procedures. Employees, especially early on, tend to be young an inexperienced as well. As a result, those companies ne…

Institutional Knowledge needs to preserved and maintained once developed.

I imagine we'll see some of the large-cap tech companies dealing with this very soon.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#988

Post by xenadu02 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #301
xenadu02 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hardly think that is fair. Tesla hasn't re-invented the wheel on life-critical safety systems. They use off the shelf airbags and brakes. Their software on the steering, braking, etc control loops are more or less standard for embedded vehicle systems. The linux PC running the touch screen is not the system controlling the brakes. The failure modes for a vehicle are also a lot simpler than a sub. If the interior st…

> Tesla hasn't re-invented the wheel on life-critical safety systems. Haven't they? They've removed radar from their cars and now the AEB system uses image recognition. Does any other manufacturer do that?

I believe other manufacturers do use other sensors besides radar... but that's still a relatively pedantic question about the efficacy of a single safety feature. It still isn't an apt comparison to the reportedly sloppy design of the Titan sub.

If Tesla decided to make their suspension entirely out of carbon fiber despite knowing carbon fiber handles stress cycles differently and tends to fail catastrophically at the limit then you'd have an apt comparison.

Or you can look at the Boeing 787's carbon fiber body design as an example of how to do something completely differently. They deviated from the norm but that involved years of engineering and testing to identify potential failure points, how operating conditions impact the service life, etc. They designed inspection schedules and procedures for out of spec events like excessive G-forces, hard landings, explosive decompression, over-pressurization due to pack failure, and so on. All of these things are well known with aluminum airplane bodies but not for carbon fiber.

So a 787 operator knows if they have an explosive decompression event exactly what needs to be checked and how many flights to shave off the expected service life.

From what we know right now Titan had a unique hull design yet did absolutely none of the engineering or testing legwork before putting paying passengers inside. That is what makes them reckless and Boeing or Tesla not so much.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#989

Post by tl_donson »

jacquesm wrote: post #714
mcpackieh wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Logitech has orders of magnitude more experience in manufacturing peripherals than Microsoft. You know that saying that anybody can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands? From what I've seen and heard, Logitech has used their experience to make peripherals that barely last longer than the warranty/return period. FWIW my 22 year old optical intellimouse from Microsoft is still…

From what I've seen Logitech stuff is next to indestructible (believe me I've tried).

there’s a logitech bluetooth silent mouse i really like and would carry it on my laptop at work from meeting room to meeting room. i had 3 in 2 years, dropped each once, they were all broken on the first fall.

kinda wish they were able to withstand falls onto hard surfaces but it’s also a) my fault, and b) not an expectation i have of a mouse in general.

but it’s also a good reason to not just take any consumer device onto a sub, because functioning after a drop would absolutely be a requirement.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#990

Post by xpe »

balder1991 wrote: post #637
bboygravity wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s not enough resources to watch everything that everybody is doing all the time. Have you ever heard of the name "Edward Snowden"? What everybody is doing is already literally being watched all the time and it has been that way or at least decades and has gotten worse with technological evolution.

It definitely hasn’t worked then. How’s that approach any efficient?

When many people make the claim “it hasn’t worked” wrt some intervention they often miss the point: the key question is change relative to the counterfactual; i.e. having done nothing.

So, to evaluate action at t=0, we compare some metric at the real t=1 against the counterfactual at t=1.

It is logically invalid to evaluate the efficacy of an action by only comparing the metric at t=0 and t=1. That kind of reasoning error is incredibly common.

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