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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

#41

Post by gumby »

chrisseaton wrote: post #39
gumby wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Well exactly... doesn't that show you that it's a bad idea?

I don't think so, no. Sometimes we think too abstractly and make what turn out to be poor decisions. Emotions are really valuable heuristics and should be harnessed at a time like this.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#43

Post by Timpy »

dheera wrote: post #40
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. D…

Whenever I have something in my hand that I'm about to put down for a second in the exact absent minded kind of way that would leave me searching all over the house for it 5 minutes later, I say it out loud. "Headphones on the table by front door."

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#44

Post by kube-system »

dheera wrote: post #40
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. D…

Repetitive tasks are exactly what pointing and calling helps with. The intent is to prevent the brain from going on autopilot for a task that happens exactly the same way 99.9% of the time, in order to prevent disasters that last 0.1% of the time.

Traffic lights are a lot more random (and therefore mentally engaging) than the types of things train conductors are pointing and calling.

An automotive equivalent of a situation that would benefit from pointing and calling is something like this: https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/guide-to-rear-sea...

eg.: "Car parked, ignition off, get child"

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#45

Post by uranusjr »

dheera wrote: post #40
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. D…

I believe the trick is to anticipate failure, and call out the normal thing instead. So you’d always slow down at every light, and only speed back up after calling out green. This is what all drivers are actually supposed to do, although I fully realise nobody practically does that, which is why we get so many automobile accidents all the time.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#46

Post by jaclaz »

notacoward wrote: post #36
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.

Thanks, so a handful at most, and the "usual" ones, I always thought that those companies keep their machines connected in (redundant) "sets" and that a command affecting all of them was more a case for "never" rather than "once in a while".

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#47

Post by hrktb »

dheera wrote: post #40
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. D…

It can be used for exactly the same purpose: checking the environment before doing the action.

E.g. force yourself to read the “production” part of your prompt before running the command. Point at the user name before deleting its record. Read aloud the version name before sending it to deploy.

It really makes a different between just glancing at the info, and having to parse it as part of an action.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#49

Post by jasonpeacock »

Raskin talks about the futility of this in his book The Humane Interface.

Basically, what happens is the brain switches operating context from "I want to do something" to "resolve this interruption (confirmation box)" and you don't relate the one to the other - you're so focused on getting rid of the interruption that the original task is forgotten until after the interruption is gone.

Then you switch back to the original task that had been interrupted by the confirmation box and then you realize you made a mistake.

It's much better to engineer "undo" ability into systems - like delaying commands (GMail's "Undo Send" does this), or caching previous state, etc.

Re: Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

#50

Post by shuntress »

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…

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

In this specific case the "thing to do" is literally to harm hundreds of thousands of people.

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. Otherwise, it is likely that dropping the bomb would be a mistake.

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