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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

#371

Post by [deleted] »

nerdsniper wrote: post #155
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem! Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote…

[deleted]

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

#372

Post by WalterBright »

tremon wrote: post #327
WalterBright wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Free markets are also designed around participants of equal or comparable power. As long as market power is as skewed as it currently is, there are a lot of things wrong with making money that way.

> Free markets are also designed around participants of equal or comparable power.

No, they are not. No matter how big your company is, if customers don't like your product, you are going bust. Small companies regularly replace large ones. See the book "The Innovator's Dilemma".

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

#373

Post by WalterBright »

shmeeed wrote: post #319
WalterBright wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sa…

When was the last time you were forced to buy something you didn't want?

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

#374

Post by badpun »

Hugsbox wrote: post #353
marcosdumay wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked at a building that decided it was a good safety practice to test the fire alarms every 3 months.

My job does it weekly. It's a massive factory too, so the alarms are absolutely ear-splitting. They make a big deal out of safety, and wearing ear protection out on the production floor when I go out there, and all this other stuff, yet on a weekly basis they're absolutely shattering my ear drums. Love it.

Maybe they must be so loud because people wear hearing protection?

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

#375

Post by yuye »

milesvp wrote: post #351
Espressosaurus wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had an interview once for a firmware position dealing with (relatively) high wattage transmitters. They wanted to know how I’d deal with some conditions where I’d need to turn off the power quickly. After talking a bit about my experience with hard real time deadlines, I sheepishly asked why they didn’t have diodes to mitigate the problem. I think it was one of the questions that got me an offer. Apparently having…

>Apparently having firmware engineers with even minor EE background and will think about analogue design is a little uncommon.

They often don't have to know how the nitty-gritty of the HW works. HALs are used everywhere, and some of them abstract a lot away. I've interviewed embedded SWEs that couldn't explain how the tri-state buffers work within GPIO.

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

#376

Post by cactacea »

boomlinde wrote: post #210
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…

I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue…

To go deeper than just alarming this is more accurately referred to as normalization of deviance

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

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

#377

Post by cwmoore »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #358
inigyou wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone studied why homeless people refuse help? It's usually because the "help" isn't help. E.g. "you can sleep here but only if you haven't used drugs in the last week, so we'll test your blood before we let you in"

That is help. A drug addicted homeless person has two serious problems, and it's not generally viable to try to solve the homelessness problem without solving the drug addiction. Even if you were to straight up give each drug addict his own house, a lot of them will wind up selling the house to buy more drugs because it's that hard to resist the temptation when you're addicted. So, in order to help with the homelessn…

So an enterprising drug-dealer can buy the house for a little baggie, hire the junkie to shovel the sidewalk, and rent it out, now everyone is employed, housed, and the free market actually absorbed the cost. The dealer will pay property taxes, to keep eyes off of the other business, the junkie will be safe and motivated to contribute, what else? Oh, social services jobs don't get to practice measured goodness to Skinner Box Volunteers, and it might hurt the cause to see photographs of the yard.

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

#378

Post by 0xffff2 »

nerdsniper wrote: post #155
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem! Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote…

I mean, that happened one time and made national news. It's not nearly the same problem in terms of frequency.

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

#379

Post by cwmoore »

inigyou wrote: post #273
Otterly99 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you supposed to help a person like that thought? I understand that you cannot reason too well with an addict, so it might be surprising to some that somebody would refuse shelter if it meant being clean. Still, what should be the approach then? Unconditional help?

Are you saying that drug users deserve to be homeless?

The question was "unconditional help", and one answer is "yes, if you can afford to, and want to".
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