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Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#31

Post by chrisseaton »

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-...

I've never understood this idea.

If you believe we should never use nuclear weapons, then don't have them at all.

If you believe there is a case where it may be moral and rational to use nuclear weapons, why would you want to put a potential barrier in the way of their use? You could have a situation where everyone was agreed to use them but the president was physically unable to harm the aide to use them.

You can know that something is the right thing to do but not have the courage to physically harm someone to do it.

An interlock that you may not be able to unlock for reasons unrelated to the task at hand is a bad interlock.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#33

Post by pwinnski »

nemo1618 wrote: post #32

Notably, Discord does something like this when you @everyone in a large channel: "You're about to push a notification to 12,000 people, are you sure you want to do that...?"

Sounds like a yes/no answer is expected? If so, that is exactly what Rachel is suggesting is not enough.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#34

Post by gumby »

xamuel wrote: post #3

I wish it were possible for similar prompts to appear before all sorts of policy-makers and bureaucrats. "It appears you are about to institute a policy which will require 400 million patients to sign an additional waiver every time they visit a clinic, this will waste a total of 354,921 human hours within the next year alone. Please type 354,921 to proceed."

The motivations are different: the cost to the rule maker of the effort by all those people is nil. While the cost of not adding the paper is the risk of something happening in the future which could cost them their job. This is why the shoe removal theatre was added to flying: the risk of something happening is essentially nil, but if it did, heads would roll.

This is not a criticism of bureaucracy or regulation BTW (I'm a fan of both, in general). It's simply a recognition that there's a misalignment of objectives.

Not sure how to analyze the calculus in the case of rachaelbythebay's observation. Certainly there is one misalignment which is if the tool has sharp unprotected edges (e.g. can take the company's whole site down) the person who ran the program will be blamed, not the person who wrote it. Unless they are the same person, it's hard to get a proper feedback loop in place. The only tools we have are coding standard and code reviews: bureaucracy!

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#35

Post by jerf »

pwinnski wrote: post #33
nemo1618 wrote: post #32

Notably, Discord does something like this when you @everyone in a large channel: "You're about to push a notification to 12,000 people, are you sure you want to do that...?"

Sounds like a yes/no answer is expected? If so, that is exactly what Rachel is suggesting is not enough.

In this case, usually the very fact that a popup unexpectedly popped up is enough. I use Konsole as my main shell, and like several other shells now it has a "You're about to paste 100KB, yes/no?", and I don't mindlessly click "yes" because it is already a "cache miss" to see that dialog at all.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#36

Post by notacoward »

jaclaz wrote: post #25

Side question. How many/which companies have more than one million Linux machines?

At least Facebook (where OP worked), Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Probably Netflix, maybe Apple. There might be a couple more, but no more than that because we've already accounted for a pretty high percentage of worldwide shipments for servers, disks, etc. Fun fact: when you're that big, your demand creates its own inflation and you have to consider that in projections.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#37

Post by gumby »

chrisseaton wrote: post #31
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-...

I've never understood this idea. If you believe we should never use nuclear weapons, then don't have them at all. If you believe there is a case where it may be moral and rational to use nuclear weapons, why would you want to put a potential barrier in the way of their use? You could have a situation where everyone was agreed to use them but the president was physically unable to harm the aide to use them. You can kn…

> I've never understood this idea.

It's an attempt to make an abstraction concrete. Think of it as the trolley problem in real life.

Stalin is famously supposed to have said, "one death is a tragedy, 100,000 is a statistic". Cynical or not it is how humans think.

> If you believe we should never use nuclear weapons, then don't have them at all.

Strategic game theory and Mutual Assured Destruction depend on the possibility that the other guy will use them if you do, and may be the only way to prevent their use. Interestingly this is one reason why you want the other guy to know your procedures, capabilities, deployments etc. Secret weapons have no deterrent value.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#38

Post by nemosaltat »

staunch wrote: post #29
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.

And pilots will even callout that their action had the desired effect: "Flaps up selected" "Flaps are indicating up" There's a lot to learn from the way airplanes are engineered and operated.

Prior Navy Nuke here. We called it PRO (Point, Read, Operate)- we’d point at the thing we were going to manipulate, state what we were manipulating, and announce the completed action.

For certain procedures we had a second party (“reader”) observing and acknowledging each part of each step.

Operator (Gesturing anti-clockwise while pointing at valve XYZ) Operator: Opening valve XYZ. Reader: Opening valve XYZ, aye. Operator: Valve XYZ is open. Reader: Valve XYZ is open, aye. Operator: Indications of flow Reader: Indications of flow, aye.

People can still get complacent, and things can still get missed but the deliberate mentality goes a long way. Now when GitHub makes me type out the repository name before I can delete it, I sometimes copy/paste... YOLO.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#39

Post by chrisseaton »

gumby wrote: post #37
chrisseaton wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood this idea. If you believe we should never use nuclear weapons, then don't have them at all. If you believe there is a case where it may be moral and rational to use nuclear weapons, why would you want to put a potential barrier in the way of their use? You could have a situation where everyone was agreed to use them but the president was physically unable to harm the aide to use them. You can kn…

> I've never understood this idea. It's an attempt to make an abstraction concrete. Think of it as the trolley problem in real life. Stalin is famously supposed to have said, "one death is a tragedy, 100,000 is a statistic". Cynical or not it is how humans think. > If you believe we should never use nuclear weapons, then don't have them at all. Strategic game theory and Mutual Assured Destruction depend on the possib…

> Think of it as the trolley problem in real life.

Well exactly... doesn't that show you that it's a bad idea? People don't know if they could bring themselves to throw the switch even if everyone thinks it makes rational sense.

You're taking a rational, well-considered, strategic decision... and making the interlock a messy personal emotional one unrelated to the actual issue at hand. That sounds like the wrong way around to be doing things?

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#40

Post by dheera »

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 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.

The concept makes sense, though I don't quite fully get how to translate it to other contexts besides train driving where unexpected and unpredictable events come up all the time. Let's say you're driving a car and the traffic light turns red. Do you point at the traffic light, say "red", point at your brake pedal, say "brakes", and then hit the brakes?

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