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Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

arstechnica.com

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Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#601

Post by slushh »

csb6 wrote: post #541
javajosh wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It is simply unbelievable that the company was even able to get to the point of diving to such depths with humans aboard. As I get older, I see this sentiment as very naive. The tacit assumption seems to be that there is an agency, a government, an organization, that would review and approve such endeavors. But that's just not how the world works. You can't stop people from going to sea, or sending contraptions to t…

> You can't stop that, and personally, I don't think its a good idea. To get it you'd need a nanny state that snoops on everyone and steps in to stop you "for your own safety". It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand. Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety. I seriously doubt the passengers onboard were aware of OceanGate’s whistleblower lawsuit or the claim…

>it could be carried out by classification societies

So everything already worked as intended. The tourists didn't bother to check the classification or if they did, were willing to dive anyways.

The 737 MAX shows that government involvement is not enough. Likewise doping shows that a legal framework is not enough to prevent advanced cheating.

>Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety. I seriously doubt the passengers onboard were aware of OceanGate’s whistleblower lawsuit

Wouldn't it be better to establish a verification culture? There are always businesses that lie. The law only works retroactively while the tourists would be alive if they had checked.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#604

Post by bboygravity »

zarzavat wrote: post #583
csb6 wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't stop that, and personally, I don't think its a good idea. To get it you'd need a nanny state that snoops on everyone and steps in to stop you "for your own safety". It's easy to imagine scenarios where this gets out of hand. Personally, I think it ought to be illegal to misrepresent your service’s safety. I seriously doubt the passengers onboard were aware of OceanGate’s whistleblower lawsuit or the claim…

The founder is likely dead and paid the ultimate price for his negligence. There’s simply not much you can do about people who are willing to die and take other people with them, whether intentionally or negligently. You can’t put a dead person on trial. I believe that the GP’s point is that there’s no omniscient agency that can preemptively stop people from doing stupid things. There’s not enough resources to watch…

> There’s not enough resources to watch everything that everybody is doing all the time.

Have you ever heard of the name "Edward Snowden"?

What everybody is doing is already literally being watched all the time and it has been that way or at least decades and has gotten worse with technological evolution.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#605

Post by nijave »

kamranjon wrote: post #215
nycdotnet wrote: post #110

With all the talk about failure modes of carbon fiber, the scariest part of this article is the photo of the display and light held up by screws drilled into the side of the pressure vessel.

I heard an anecdote at one point that when a submarine depressurizes that deep, everything inside gets pushed through whatever hole caused the depressurization, like squeezing the contents out of a tube of toothpaste. Might have been from the Byford Dolphin accident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin "Hellevik, being exposed to the highest pressure gradient and in the process of moving to secure the inner…

There's a thread floating around on Reddit somewhere that said the implosive force had the same energy of 114 sticks of dynamite fwiw

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#606

Post by iancmceachern »

komadori wrote: post #135

I read "No Time on Our Side" by Roger Chapman a few months ago on the recommendation of HN commentor /u/z991 [1]. It recounts the 1973 rescue of a damaged submersible on the ocean floor from the perspective of the crew trapped inside [2]. Mainly their struggle with limited oxygen and rising CO2 levels. A fairly brief but gripping read which I also recommend. Of note, I recall even though the sub in question had a wor…

Thanks for posting, this is nuts. They were rescued with 12 minutes of oxygen left

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#607

Post by moondev »

thepasswordis wrote: post #270

I am blown away that there is any overlap between HN readers and people getting gotten by this clickbait. The controller is sending control signals to the computer which controls the motors. The controller itself is basically irrelevant . It’s not actually doing the control, the motor controllers are. Using off the shelf stuff like this is also common since it’s extremely well tested and usually very physically robus…

We should just use Logitech steering wheels in most cars then, after all they are just irrelevant input devices

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_by_wire

I do get what you are saying, and there is a "feel" difference when driving a car with a mechanical linkage. But I wouldn't go as far to say that makes the DBW input irrelevant. Ergonomics, materials and tactility could even be seen as more significant in these cases

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#608

Post by brutusborn »

xpe wrote: post #563
brutusborn wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely a difference, but it doesn’t really matter philosophically speaking. If people want to take huge risks, then so be it. Whether they build the sub themselves or pay and give that responsibility to a proxy, it is still up to them to make their own risk assessment.

>> There’s a difference between Jacques Cousteau building a janky submarine rig for himself vs. Creating a business model of selling tickets to random strangers on that janky submarine. > There is definitely a difference, but it doesn’t really matter philosophically speaking. I'm unconvinced. The phrase "philosophically speaking" is very vague. Which philosoph(y/ies)? > If people want to take huge risks, then so be i…

I admit I didn’t put much effort into that comment. I meant ‘philosophically’ as opposed to legally.

Fundamentally every risky decision is up to the individual. Even trusting the regulator is a decision (I don’t trust some regulators in my country because they have a bad record for competence, so I avoid/minimise using things that they regulate). Therefore the final ‘responsibility’ for your safety is always personal, unless you were forced on board, or lied to about the construction.

Legally it’s anyone’s guess who is responsible, that depends on the polity involved and the political philosophy it uses (libertarianism or authoritarianism being the 2 extremes).

I think we should protect those who truly cannot judge (children and mentally handicapped) but in this case it was grown men taking a risk for the chance of a reward. I hope they are found alive and well but I think they had every right to go aboard.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#609

Post by pryce »

brutusborn wrote: post #404
reaperman wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a difference between Jacques Cousteau building a janky submarine rig for himself vs. Creating a business model of selling tickets to random strangers on that janky submarine.

There is definitely a difference, but it doesn’t really matter philosophically speaking. If people want to take huge risks, then so be it. Whether they build the sub themselves or pay and give that responsibility to a proxy, it is still up to them to make their own risk assessment.

Libertarian students have a notoriously difficult time in philosophy departments because of these kinds of eager statements.

The question of whether or not organisations, businesses, states, armed forces, educational institutions, self-declared medical providers, and other entities incur some obligation to preserve peoples lives - and if so in which ways and to what extents - are far from settled questions. It helps no one to adopt a hard-libertarian position, omit the framework being employed, and imply the matter is settled.

A fair number of regulatory efforts trace their roots to a groundswell of public distress in the aftermath of preventable deaths; and questions such as "should I, a computer programmer, be undertaking my own untrained risk assessment of the particular type of cladding used in Grenfell tower" are perfectly fair objections to a libertarian free-for-all position.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#610

Post by marmakoide »

javajosh wrote: post #356
proggy wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is simply unbelievable that the company was even able to get to the point of diving to such depths with humans aboard. If they had encountered a program-destroying but non-catastrophic failure earlier on, it is possible we wouldn't be looking at one of the many horrific outcomes that this incident will likely resolve to. Looking at the accounts reported to date, the OceanGate engineering culture was basically non-…

>It is simply unbelievable that the company was even able to get to the point of diving to such depths with humans aboard. As I get older, I see this sentiment as very naive. The tacit assumption seems to be that there is an agency, a government, an organization, that would review and approve such endeavors. But that's just not how the world works. You can't stop people from going to sea, or sending contraptions to t…

I have a hard time to let people throwing themselves into danger with a "I don't need a nanny" attitude, and then see a state-run, massive and costly rescue effort when things go wrong.
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