The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

Given the stakes of an “edge case” in a war machine, not to mention their cost, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect the number of such cases to be zero.

> However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.

When it comes to safety-critical systems, the right engineering choice is to lean towards a 'safe' default. For example, the safe default would be to always slave the cursor:

> Once "hooked," the contact would be tracked by Aegis. But critically, unless the operator took the additional step of "slaving" the cursor to that contact, as the contact moved away the cursor would not follow it.

And here, don't reassign a tracking number, at least not within in a short timeframe:

> Vincennes assigned her the tracking number 4474; Sides assigned her 4131. Aegis unified the contacts under the number 4131. 4474 was then available for re-use, so Aegis assigned it to a US A-6 bomber, which happened to be descending.

Nothing beats it, really? Not even the tragedy that cut 290 human lives on which you are commenting?

It is actually only the mastodon implementation that forces the size limit. It can actually be any size. I forked the original repo and had to change 2 variables to be able to toot 5000 characters instead of 500.

Everything's possible, but there would be no debate about UI mistakes if it was Iran shooting down a US plane. They would've done because they are evil by nature, or at least perceived as such. In that case the media and the public buys into its own reality, but of course the UI discussion could be a distraction from the public maybe starting to question if that's actually the reality.

Also from the Wiki page about this shootdown:

In 1991, political scientist Robert Entman of George Washington University compared U.S. media coverage of the incident with the similar shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviet Union five years earlier by studying material from Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS Evening News. According to Entman, framing techniques were used to frame the Korean Airlines incident as sabotage while framing the Iran Air incident as a tragic mistake,[67] stating "the angle taken by the U.S. media emphasized the moral bankruptcy and guilt of the perpetrating nation. With Iran Air 655, the frame de-emphasised guilt and focused on the complex problems of operating military high technology."[68][a] By "de-emphasizing the agency and the victims and by the choice of graphics and adjectives, the news stories about the U.S. downing of an Iranian plane called it a technical problem while the Soviet downing of a Korean jet was portrayed as a moral outrage."