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Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

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Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#171

Post by benlivengood »

roydivision wrote: post #12

Reminds me of the proposal to keep the nuclear launch codes inside the body of an innocent volunteer, so the President would have to kill the person to get the codes. https://boingboing.net/2015/12/11/proposal-keep-the-nuclear-...

Too bad sociopaths and narcissists are more common in positions of power. All it would do is uselessly kill a volunteer.

Time is also of the essence for MAD; known delay only makes MAD less effective if e.g. sub-launched cruise missiles are faster than dissection. And do all the fallback commanders need their own willing victim to mount a response?

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#172

Post by spoopyskelly »

shuntress wrote: post #66
chrisseaton wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reasoning behind this proposed interlock is that any logic which concludes that it is moral and rational to harm hundreds of thousands of people must also conclude that it is moral and rational to harm the "interlock" individual. Yes, but you can know it's the right thing to do, but not be able to physically do it. The president's ability to physically cut someone open is not relevant to whether it's a good ide…

>The president's ability to physically cut someone open is not relevant to whether it's a good idea to use nuclear weapons or not I'm sure if the president was physically incapable of wielding a knife, she would have someone on hand to do that for her.

> president

> she

> her

Cope.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#173

Post by temporallobe »

This is similar to a UI solution a colleague and I came up with. The action the user could kick off was unstoppable and irreversible (a large batch job), and it seemed like even a confirmation prompt was too easy to simply click through. So we had the UI present a modal dialog asking the user to type in a specific word in all caps to confirm the action. Worked like a charm.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#174

Post by aqme28 »

Nitpicking

> "This might be as simple as printing the number with your locale's version of numerical separators, like "123,456" or "123.456" or "123 456" or whatever else you might use where you are. The trick is then to NOT accept that as input, but instead demand that they remove the separator and jam it in as just digits. "

It's easier to just strip non-digit characters than to parse the input for them and respond accordingly. This is a confirmation step with basically a checksum, so you're not going to get many false positives.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#175

Post by BalinKing »

brlewis wrote: post #143
brundolf wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only been in the job field for six years, and yet: My first boss accidentally deleted our QA database, meaning to delete a local copy A later boss accidentally deleted our production database, thinking it was the clone that he had just made (which luckily we still had) Both of them were very experienced developers in their 40s. Nobody is beyond this kind of mistake.

>very experienced developers in their 40s I'd say they were experienced developers. Only after accidentally deleting databases were they very experienced developers.

This may not have been their first time, though :-P

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#176

Post by BalinKing »

morty_s wrote: post #65
blantonl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch and listen to pilots as they complete checklists. They point and callout each item, switch setting, etc.

Came here for this. A: “Passing control” B: “Taking control” A: “You have control” B: “I have control” This is how I remember it (6174, UH-1Y).

As a fun fact, I was taught a shorter version (during private pilot instruction):

"You have the control."

"I have the control."

IDK if it changes between aircraft types, commercial/private/military cultures, or if it's just coincidence.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#177

Post by Symbiote »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #121
wruza wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always using the "phone keys cigarettes money" mantra together with patting on my pockets before opening any outside door.

I wake up in the mornings with "Shit Shower Shave" and leave the house with "Wallet Watch Testicles Spectacles". Simple mnemonics work, doubly so if you actually say them out loud and check them each off.

It is normally "spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch", since that would traditionally make the Catholic sign of the cross.

But maybe you're a Satanist, in which case the reverse order probably makes sense.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#178

Post by morelisp »

js2 wrote: post #99
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth mentioning that, assuming the single study on the matter can be believed, the pointing and calling method is extremely effective in reducing the incidence of silly mistakes (that is, mistakes made in simple routine tasks, by competent individuals). Unfortunately, it strikes many as looking rather silly, so it hasn't been widely adopted.

I learned a technique from a gray beard[0] when I worked as a student sys admin for the CS dept over two decades ago. Whenever typing a destructive command, he'd take his hands off the keyboard and drop them to his side, re-read the command, then put his hands back to press enter. I do this whenever I'm on a production server (which is rare anyway). I use different colored prompts for local and remote shells. [0] Tec…

A similar tip I picked up long ago: If you're typing a dangerous command, first type a `#` (or `--` if it's SQL, etc.), then the command. Then read it. Then go back to the start of the line and remove the comment and run it.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#179

Post by morelisp »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #13
csmattryder wrote: post #8

I've seen this called "pointing and calling" [1], Japan's train drivers use the technique to force themselves to perform actions and take notice of the current environment. I personally took it to heart, it's a good system for forcing a cache miss in the brain - make sure you're on "database production" or "database localhost" etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

Worth mentioning that, assuming the single study on the matter can be believed, the pointing and calling method is extremely effective in reducing the incidence of silly mistakes (that is, mistakes made in simple routine tasks, by competent individuals). Unfortunately, it strikes many as looking rather silly, so it hasn't been widely adopted.

I've done this for several years (also after seeing a video about Japanese railway operations). It doesn't seem to catch on.

It's also not perfect; it does not catch mistakes concerning "non-local" state, e.g. configuration files in /etc merging with one in . merging with some command line options. (Personally I try to avoid writing tools with defaults of this sort, but especially Java developers seem have different opinions.)

Unfortunately if you do P&C and still make the mistake due to the aforementioned tooling, you look even stupider.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#180

Post by jlmorton »

brundolf wrote: post #127
csmattryder wrote: post #8

I've seen this called "pointing and calling" [1], Japan's train drivers use the technique to force themselves to perform actions and take notice of the current environment. I personally took it to heart, it's a good system for forcing a cache miss in the brain - make sure you're on "database production" or "database localhost" etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

I've only been in the job field for six years, and yet: My first boss accidentally deleted our QA database, meaning to delete a local copy A later boss accidentally deleted our production database, thinking it was the clone that he had just made (which luckily we still had) Both of them were very experienced developers in their 40s. Nobody is beyond this kind of mistake.

War story time. Long ago, I worked for an interesting company that insisted on running its entire business on Linux desktops, all the way back between 1999-2002. Imagine running StarOffice/OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Netscape Navigator, etc, for your entire business back in 2000, including your executive team, marketing teams, everyone, most of whom had never even heard of Linux before.

Anyway, this being Linux, everyone's home directory was mounted on NFS. All our builds were standardized with a tool called SystemImager, which we could use to push out updates to everyone's desktop whenever we wanted. If there was a new version of KDE, we could pretty easily push that change out.

Sometimes it was convenient for me to work on updates to these images by chrooting into a directory containing the "image," which was really just an rsync tree. And sometimes, when updating these images, it was convenient to mount our NFS home directories in this chroot environment, so I could access things like an archive I had just downloaded on my own desktop.

And eventually we had lots of different images, and the old ones were using up a lot of disk space, so I decide to clean up some space removing the old images. And these are fairly large images, with lots of small files, and this was before SSDs were a thing, so it made sense that deleting them was taking a while, and I stepped out to grab something to eat.

As I was eating lunch, I started getting the tech support escalations. But this wasn't that unusual, our users routinely had problems with the environment we had provided. They hated it, because it was in many ways terrible, and they made sure we knew it. So I wasn't terribly alarmed. I didn't think any major changes had been made, so I didn't hurry back.

By the time I leisurely returned from lunch, half the NFS home directories for our users were gone, along with all their documents, emails, bookmarks, or whatever else. Suddenly it hit me what had happened: at some point, perhaps months earlier, I had left our NFS home directories mounted within one of these image chroots. And now I had sudo rm -rf'd it.

We had backups, but they were on tape, and it took several days to restore, with about a day of data loss.

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