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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

shkspr.mobi

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Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#311

Post by bluGill »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #305
bluGill wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alarms were safety hardware interlocks. Nobody asked why and found the UI bugs that was causing this. The hardware interlocks were removed because the system had been working safely for so long. This was really feedback - nobody informed the developers that safety hardware interlocks were locking all the time. Edit: see replies, originally I wrote fuses, but hardware interlocks is more correct.

The Wikipedia article the previous commenter linked doesn't mention this, and I've looked at a few sources linked from it and they don't mention it either. They mention that previous Therac machines had "hardware interlocks" to prevent this sort of issue - maybe those are the safety fuses you're both talking about? - but it says they were never included in Therac-25 in the first place, because the software was assume…

It has been a few years since I last read the report. Hardware interlocks is likely what I remembered as fuses.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#312

Post by aprentic »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #301
rithdmc wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently unsubscribed from a grocery delivery service becuase they kept pushing adverts through their app. I gave them notification permission so I could see when my delivery is nearby, not so they could spam me. Voting with my wallet on this one. (For the curious, a subscription means free delivery. The subscription costs 10 euro a month, and if you don't have a subscription, the delivery fee is around 4 euro)

> For the curious, a subscription means free delivery It sounds like a subscription means ad-funded delivery to me though

That's clearly how it turned out but going in, I would have expected the a subscription to be a discount in exchange for a commitment of repeat business.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#313

Post by Espressosaurus »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #305
bluGill wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alarms were safety hardware interlocks. Nobody asked why and found the UI bugs that was causing this. The hardware interlocks were removed because the system had been working safely for so long. This was really feedback - nobody informed the developers that safety hardware interlocks were locking all the time. Edit: see replies, originally I wrote fuses, but hardware interlocks is more correct.

The Wikipedia article the previous commenter linked doesn't mention this, and I've looked at a few sources linked from it and they don't mention it either. They mention that previous Therac machines had "hardware interlocks" to prevent this sort of issue - maybe those are the safety fuses you're both talking about? - but it says they were never included in Therac-25 in the first place, because the software was assume…

Yeah, the lack of hardware interlocks are part of what makes it a (literal!) textbook case for software engineering ethics.

I remember talking about it several times over my college career, and for good reason.

To this day when people start talking about software in the loop in a safety context I get extremely twitchy. I don't let that shit happen on my watch.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#314

Post by mring33621 »

roenxi wrote: post #265
inigyou wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's zero I'll just buy the entire planets worth of oxygen, please and thank you. That'll be $0.00.

I'm sure you're just being silly, but ok. Take what you can. That is pretty much literally how it works. I'm not stopping you.

You say that now because you don't believe it's possible for someone to capture a large enough quantity of oxygen to impact you.

If that were to change, which it may, you would feel differently.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#315

Post by edent »

midtake wrote: post #221

This article is painfully shortsighted about Egypt's moment in the Arab Spring. (1) the problematic Vodafone message in question is presented as "without attribution" but it very clearly starts with the words "The Armed Forces asks"! (2) it makes it seem like the government was naturally unpopular in Egypt and clinging on to power in desperate ways when in reality the online anti-state dissent turned out to be astrot…

The author (hello) doesn't really have an opinion about Egypt and the situation in 2011.

Regarding attribution. As you can see from the linked images, the messages all have the sender "Vodafone". While they may genuinely be from the armed forces, the reader has no way to verify that. If you received a message saying "The armed forces requires you to pet a cat today" would you immediately believe it was from the army?

Regarding the government's unpopularity. I think you might be inferring something I didn't imply. All I've done is link to contemporary news stories and quote from press releases. I haven't expressed any thoughts on the situation at the time, because I wasn't there and am not a scholar of modern Egypt.

The point isn't about the Arab Spring per se - it is used as an example of when a network was forced to send messages to their subscribers. Regardless of whether the Government was right to do so, I think we can both agree that compelling speech through violence is not an ideal scenario.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#316

Post by hobo123 »

decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

In Germany there is the NINA warning app which filters based on region. You'll sometimes get warnings that there's is a fire somewhere, please keep windows closed, or if they found a WW2 bomb (every couple months) on a construction site. I'd say it works rather well.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#317

Post by District5524 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #150
decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment. Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are: Extreme Threats Severe Threats AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts) Public Safety Messages State and Local Tests

There are granular controls also in SK, but the messages themselves are not granular. The grades seem to be somewhat the same as in the US, so this might be set either at the GSM standard level or the device (Silent, Extreme, Sever, issing person, Public safety, test), but the senders do not care or have no control... A translation of my last EXTREME level warning from SK (before switching everything off as most citizens do): "A tropical night advisory is currently in effect. Please take precautions for safety, such as lowering indoor temperatures, staying well-hydrated before going to sleep, and calling the elderly to check on their well being." [Daejeon Metropolitan City] It was hot during the day (33C), but not THAT hot...

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#318

Post by the_other »

WalterBright wrote: post #307
sortoflog wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an ideal free market, but do you know of any large economies that actually meet this criteria? Happy customers are optional when you have regulatory capture.

The US for most of its history. Nothing is ideal. The more free market a country is, the more prosperous it is.

> Nothing is ideal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich#Pacific_Gas_&_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_(Bilott_book)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brian_Thompson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#319

Post by shmeeed »

WalterBright wrote: post #187
rmunn wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." Not only that, but you're also going to have people disguising their personal, selfish ambitions for power or money (or both, those two ambitions are usually found together) by pretending to other people that they want "the right thing". Most politicians operate this way. (I can't say "all" because there are some examples in history of politic…

> selfish ambitions for power or money Free markets are designed around a selfish ambition for making money. You can only make money by pleasing your customers. And hence free markets are the greatest mechanism for prosperity. There's nothing wrong with making money that way.

>You can only make money by pleasing your customers.

If only it were so.

Alas, in the real world enshittification, shrinkflation, skimpflation, dark patterns, planned obsolescence, vendor/platform lock-in, rent-seeking, regulatory capture and the like absolutely rule the day, due to a host of free market failures.

I don't claim to have a better alternative. But I find your take a bit strange. Are you as a customer satisfied with how all of this is working out?

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