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Comment by pas | Hacker News Reader

because the whole industry [and by extension the whole world] is built on a throne of lies, shit, pain, and weapons-grade idiocy.

there's absolutely no safety mindset for anything behind the cover.

if it's industrial, just put a big sticker on it, write something about it in the mandatory occupational hazards training kit, maaaaaaaybe consider adding a fence, but it's fine anyway.

if it's consumer stuff? well, as long as kids won't choke on it, it's A-OK. especially if it comes to electronics. just write in the user's guide that always disconnect it from the mains when not in use, if used improperly that's on you, and don't ever think about opening it. that only for professionals who are trained in the dark arts of handling this exact piece of immanetized hell-forged eschaton housed in a convenient beige plastic.

adding a voltage limiter between the LCD panel and the input would cost money. designing it would cost money. adding an analog limiter on the regulator would cost money (plus setting it mechanically is very expensive compared to flashing on some firmware), compartmentalizing the software - by having a segment that's set at assembly that contains the physical properties of connected parts, which communicates the operational limits, and the other segment which can be set via software - would also cost a lot of money.

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The risk of my home catching on fire each year due to any electrical issue is 0.04%. The risk of me dying or being injured due to such an issue is 0.00004%. That includes not just home electronics but every possible wiring and electrical insanity.

For comparison, my risk of getting into a car accident is north of 1% and the risk of dying in a car accident is around 0.02%.

So in other words compared to all the other risks out there home electronics are very safe.

I would like to know where you got the hat you are pulling those numbers out of

You're free to Google the numbers yourself or provide your own rather than starting with insults. For the record the fire numbers are roughly the same between the ESFI, NFPA and FEMA.

Assume you have 30 electrical devices in operation. Assume the cost of your house is $1mil. Then avoiding that fire should be worth ~$13 per device. However, the device manufacturer would not need to bear that cost, meaning it goes unpaid.

You'd be correct if every house fire totaled the property and the average house price was a million. It seems house fires cause $1.5billion in property damage per year in the US and there are 360k of them. Assuming electrical fires are twice as damaging as the average fire we end up with a cost of $10k per fire. That works out to around 15 cents per electronic device in your example. Even that is a high estimate since I believe only a minority of electrical fires are due to consumer electronics (versus things like faulty or old wiring).

Narrator : A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Woman on Plane : Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

Narrator : You wouldn't believe.

Woman on Plane : Which car company do you work for?

Narrator : A major one.

Meanwhile in reality, cars undergo multiple recalls every year to fix a myriad of issues.

Reputational damage is so high from consumer deaths now days, the balance sheet comes out in favor of fixing issues.

Cost of settlements went way up too.

replace cars with drugs and it's the same old story

The first rule of recalls is we don’t talk about recalls.

Do you have inside knowledge of how the recalls are done? It's a lot more complicated than that: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-engineers-...

Even to the point where an actual horrific accident doesn't necessarily mean that vehicle is any more dangerous than other vehicles on the road, they just don't have that exact failure mode but do kill people nonetheless.

And no amount of money is going to buy perfect safety either. As always, engineering is all about tradeoffs, no way around it. Car companies have dropped the ball on safety in several cases, but just because somebody died, doesn't mean they did.

(For folks who didn't catch the reference, this quote is from the movie Fight Club - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA2EBWFCULg )

And that scene is almost certainly referring to Ralph Nader’s best-selling book, Unsafe at any Speed:

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

They're still broken. Not an argument.

See that's a "feature" though. Now you need to buy another device.

There's not as large of an incentive for product durability and repairability today as there was or should be.

Who defines broken? Thats a feature, not a bug.

> getting into a car accident is north of 1%

1% of what?

Of the trips you’ll have.

Or “one in a hundred”.

It means that in out of a hundred trips, it’s pretty certain one will involve an accident.

Which is completely fabricated. Quick Google search has 1/366 for every 1000 miles you drive.

https://ehlinelaw.com/blog/odds-of-being-injured-car-acciden...

Note: marcinzim was referring to the probability of "getting into an accident". It's not clear what the law firm you link is referring to since their source doesn't cite their sources properly, but it looks like they might have been referring to the probability of being injured in a car accident. Even so, I'm not sure where they get their numbers or exactly what the numbers are supposed to refer to. See the sibling comments for some references to statistics that are very different from those that the law firm seems to have gotten from an insurance company.

If you're a mediocre to average inexperienced driver, think one in ten. Well trained and experienced drivers don't crash.

Two rules for anyone reading: [1]: never, ever, be in the way of anyone - don't ever be an obstacle to traffic flow; [2]: if you abide to [1], consider you're the only sain person on the road who really knows how to drive, all others don't - everyone around is a danger to you, so be hyper vigilant, always.

Solid advice, which has gotten me out of more than one right spot.

In general, be polite and out of the way (both on the road and in life), and you’ll avoid most scratches and crashes.

And presuming everyone (else) is probably nuts doesn’t hurt either :)

Are you sure? If I drive once a day, to and from a single place, that suggests I’m involved in (365*2/100)= 7 car accidents a year. That seems high, no?

Per a quick glance at NHTSA’s summary figures [1] I wonder if the previous poster is referring to the “1000 injured per 100,000 drivers” figure. Which divides out to 1% I guess, a little more in past years. But that’s a little awkward to express in plain language, in that one wreck can injure lots of people, and people can get injured who are not drivers (drivers comprise around half of the injuries, it looks like, from higher up in the table).

Although the total number of crashes (including the large majority that don’t involve injuries) still looks pretty wild as a proportion of licensed drivers. If I were trying to raise concern about cars, I’d point to that ratio of 1 collision (of any sort) for every 43 licensed drivers every year.

[1] https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf

> Are you sure? If I drive once a day, to and from a single place, that suggests I’m involved in (365*2/100)= 7 car accidents a year. That seems high, no?

That's partially because MonkeyClub didn't do the math correctly. If the accident rate is really 1% of trips (which seems doubtful), there is a 99% chance of an accident free trip, a (99%)^N chance of N accident free trips, and a 1 - (99%)^N chance of one or more accidents occurring in N trips. For N = 100, this is 63%, and for N = 365*2 this is 99.9%.

As you mention, the data from the NHTSA seem to indicate a much lower accident/injury rate. Based on this data from the NHTSA [0], and going back to 2018 to avoid any pandemic-related effects on the statistics, it looks like there was on average only 1 (police-reported) crash per 481 thousand vehicle-miles, or one crash involving an injury or fatality per 1.7 million vehicle-miles.

[0] https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf, other formats and more data available here: https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm

> That's partially because MonkeyClub didn't do the math correctly.

Or at all, since it’s just how possibilities work. I wasn’t calculating the annual possibility.

> I wasn’t calculating the annual possibility.

When I wrote: > For N = 100, this is 63%, ... I was responding to your comment: > It means that in out of a hundred trips, it’s pretty certain one will involve an accident.

Whether or not 63% == 'pretty certain' is another matter I suppose.

> Are you sure?

Yep, totally.

Remember the counter resets with every ride: it’s the first of the hundred, with 1% possibility of (any) car accident.

Assuming each collision involves two parties, 1 in 43 means about 1 in 21 people are driving during a collision each year.

That seems about right. It’s one (probably minor) car accident per driver every 20 years.

Probability pedant here. This is not entirely incorrect, at least to the extent it suggests that there's a matching relationship between the two 100s in 1/100 chance and 100 trials.

If there is a 1% chance of something happening during an independent event, then to calculate the probability of it happening at least once across N events, you must use the formula 100% - 99%^N, where the 99% was derived from 100% minus the "1% chance" in the original scenario.

So a 1% chance across 100 trials is 63.4% likely to happen.

Look up the Birthday Paradox for more.

What is more, these are all things that would befall _you_, rather than the manufacturer, so as GP said, it’s A-OK.

>The risk of my home catching on fire each year due to any electrical issue is 0.04%. The risk of me dying or being injured due to such an issue is 0.00004%.

You mean you'll only die or get injured in one out of a thousand home fires? That seems really low. But I'm picking nits.

Lots of real time, safety critical, and control systems rely on software and don't have mechanical or hard wired electronic interlocks or fallbacks. That doesn't make it worse than alternatives.

You could hack the firmware and make the device behave out of spec, but you could also hack the hardware. If you bypassed your voltage limiter on the board then you could blow it up too.

And there is the crucial difference: you would need to bypass the voltage limiter on purpose, your display wouldn't be ruined by mistake just by putting a slider to the maximum possible value.

It won't be ruined by mistake just by putting a slider to the maximum possible value unless you first bypass the firmware on purpose and install your own one that allows voltage limits to be disregarded.

I think the argument is less related to hacking, as that would be like making something tamper proof which is a much higher bar. But more like if software can cause hardware damage, that means software bugs can cause hardware damage and potentially pose a safety risk, which should be seen as a critical hardware bug

For example the safety critical systems you mention should absolutely fail-safe at the bare minimum, all kinds of things can adversely affect running software like equipment generating EM noise nearby or someone tripping over the wrong cable

> I think the argument is less related to hacking, as that would be like making something tamper proof which is a much higher bar.

I meant hacking as-in messing around, poor choice of word.

> But more like if software can cause hardware damage, that means software bugs can cause hardware damage and potentially pose a safety risk, which should be seen as a critical hardware bug

Hardware bugs can cause hardware damage.

> For example the safety critical systems you mention should absolutely fail-safe at the bare minimum, all kinds of things can adversely affect running software like equipment generating EM noise nearby or someone tripping over the wrong cable

They're just not. The ABS, stability, and collision avoidance systems in your car can't fail safe if the software fails because the software is required to control the dynamic situation. It can't just say stop everything. Same as control software in airliners. Or industrial control and monitoring systems (although they can have mechanical interlocks in more cases, not all).

And very little that can be _absolutely_ fail-safe, not even purely mechanical devices. How do you make a fail safe bridge?

> Hardware bugs can cause hardware damage.

That's true, although I think the original point was that if software can damage the hardware it's running on then that should be seen as a fault/bug, but with cost reduction/market pressures/etc. it is often ignored

And fail-safe doesn't necessarily mean everything turns off because that can be just as dangerous, I take it more as a systems mindset where thought, care and attention are paid to failure conditions and making sure those outcomes pose the least risk. Again something which can often be ignored for cost or expediency reasons

Perfection is probably an unattainable goal but I've been around software long enough that I wouldn't want someones safety to depend solely on one piece of software

> if software can damage the hardware it's running on then that should be seen as a fault/bug

It is.

And I'm still waiting to hear how that absolutely fail-safe bridge is going to work...

Easy. You set your safety factor in excess of expected everyday load.

The fact is, Engineering has become the Art of specifying the worst (read: cheapest) implementation one can get away with.

Building in a high safety factor is not a failsafe. A failsafe requires that in the event of failure, the system goes into a safe state.

If you're not practicing defense in depth, especially for safety critical systems, that is a big problem.

I didn't say you're not.

It can involve software though.

Of course it should involve software, that's one line of defense. A problem in software should have a second line - hardware.

Same the other way round, just because the hardware shouldn't allow setting a value to X, doesn't mean the software should request the setting.

> there's absolutely no safety mindset for anything behind the cover.

As a counter-point: One persons "safety" is another persons "limitation". Sometimes it's good that things are generally protected but you can break through the protections somewhat.

I'm not advocating for filling out the whole insides with epoxy. (Quite the contrary, I think it'd be great to have better markings on components, and have data sheets - and schematics - for them readily available. I mean it's ridiculous that the whole IP protection legal machinery is justified in the name of incentivizing invention and new works, but in practice all we got is cheaper and cheaper copies/derivatives of the same noname things.)

facts, if there was a regulator some hackernews would be on here complaining about how it's "not hackable" or whatever.

Nintendo sells a product that includes hardware and software. As a product it is safe. They are no more responsible for the damages caused when you modify the product than they would be if you took the Switch and bludgeoned someone across the head repeatedly.

I think you are conflating quality and safety. While quality control can certainly help with ensuring safe operation of industrial equipment, I don't think a laptop LCD panel breaking is a safety hazard, although it is still a quality issue.

Right, good point.

My main argument is that the consumer electronics as small systems are so so sooo optimized for cost. (Which is good, people can afford them.) But somewhere along the way the components inside them stopped being useful by themselves. (Of course a direct consequence of optimization of integrated parts.)

This basically resulted in custom parts for custom systems. And now as software is eating everything custom software is also part of the system. (Though at least it brought back some general parts!)

Safety as a system level property is still there, but completely lost in the parts. And similarly many other desirable properties have been optimized out. (Like reliability, serviceability, etc.)

Sooo much truth has been spoken!

The quality of consumer goods is decaying everyday. It is all about the last millionth of a cent to be spared.

Just nobody cares.

To be fair, the price of consumer electronics is falling through the floor too. A routine living room television (say a 60" 4k panel) is literally 50x cheaper in real value the 16" color set my family bought in 1982.

You need to look at both sides of that equation. Would you be willing to pay, say, $4000 for a laptop where all the quality engineering was top notch? (It's a reasonably informed guess as to what that would cost.) Maybe some people would. Probably not many. Most people want the $700 laptop which is "just as good", even if the display sometimes fails.

We would be able to find a balance between quality and price if the Fed stopped creating new money to erase lower prices. Your argument is only apparent for high technology because computing advances so fast that it has been able to outrun the policy of inflation. For example, appliances are being designed ever cheaper while also costing more. Consumers end up anchored to the bottom of the market based on sticky expectations of price, the market as a whole never develops a sense of wealth, and economies of scale make it so straying from the herd is very expensive.

(edit: changed "printing" -> "creating" since the former is a tribalism trigger)

> We would be able to find a balance between quality and price if the Fed stopped printing new money to erase lower prices.

That is... a weirdly revisionist interpretation. People have been complaining about consumer electronics quality consistently and pervasively for decades and decades. Absolutely nothing about that point is "modern" or "new". Yet... you really think it's due to events of the last few months? And not even just any events, politically charged events interpreted and explained using partisan language[1]. Really?

[1] Seriously, one of the easiest ways to tell whether or not to pay attention to an economics argument is whether it includes the phrase "printing money".

Erm, no. I'm not talking about the past two months, rather I'm talking about the past several decades. For example, all that offshoring was supposed to "lower prices" thereby giving consumers more purchasing power to make up for the loss in income. But the Fed has drawn a feedback loop around prices and asserted they must always go up, so the net effect of offshoring was only to wreck the manufacturing economy.

Politically, I call the current price inflation "Trumpflation", since that is when the monetary inflation that's driving much of it occurred. We'll see how the Biden administration did in a few years. And while being an Austrian-leaning libertarian, I think the Democrats are at least honest in that they want to use some of the newly created money to compensate for the financial damage that monetary inflation causes, whereas the Republicans want to give it all to the banks while preaching austerity for everyone else.

Inflation has been at historic lows over the past several decades. I don't see how that follows, sorry.

Yes, price inflation measured by the CPI, which consists of a changing basket of goods from the lower end of the market, has been low.

Let's say a given widget costs $10 to produce, and look at what happens over 4 years. Say offshoring, cost optimization, and technological progress would allow it to be produced for $7. The Fed creates enough new money that the new price is $11. The Fed calls this "2.5% inflation", whereas the actual inflation has been 12%. The sticker price reflects the 2.5%, and the remaining 9.5% is reflected in the item being made cheaper, not supporting the local economy, and the gains of technological progress accruing to the central bank rather than being distributed throughout society.

At the larger level, this does not happen uniformly to every component of CPI. Instead, prices for things that can be bought with new money increase more. So manufactured goods still have relatively low price inflation, where things that the consumer can finance (housing, education, healthcare, vehicles) shoot through the roof.

Bringing this back to the original topic - since the median consumer's expenditure is expected to be ~fixed (slightly rising) for a basket of goods that are decreasing in quality, they're unable to afford the previous baseline quality that is now considered luxury. Rather than seeing a choice between buying what they know and saving money with a lower-quality item, they're given a choice between paying slightly more for the lower quality one or paying much more for the quality that they were used to.

Wow, OK. Your point seems to be "If you discount economic growth, then inflation has been high". Well... OK. Granted. But let's game that out:

It's true, that if you correct for all the inventions and economies that have made its production possible, the relative "cost" of, say, a nice new five-burner induction range is indeed extremely high in comparison to, say, the bow drill your ancestors would have used. Probably in the billions or so, if not higher.

But that's not telling you anything! In point of fact the "cost" measured in hours of labor[1] of collecting fuel and starting fires over the course of a decade or so[2] is VASTLY higher for the paleolithic toolkit. And it's not even remotely close, which is why no one chooses to cook with an open fire and a bow drill except as an amusement.

Basically: you're bending yourself around and measuring the wrong thing to try to make a point about inflation in an area that has nothing to do with it.

[1] Which is, at the end of the day, all we really care about optimizing. We live one life and we want to live it well doing as little work as possible. Frankly this is sort of "postulate zero" of the whole field of economics.

[2] Just assume the range will last for a decade. I don't know what the real average is but it's in that range.

Its not about discounting growth, but rather correctly accounting for growth. Why should the financial benefit of growth accrue to the central bank rather than remaining distributed throughout society? In these terms, decades of high growth have allowed the centralized government (including Wall Street) to balloon. Now that growth has slowed (the low hanging information technology and offshoring fruit has been picked), the costs of those policies will increasingly show themselves.

Furthermore, accounting for optimization via tradeoffs as if it's bona fide growth is doubly wrong. Cost reduction via quality reduction is actually the opposite of growth, but gets counted as increased efficiency for labor rather than reduced quality of life for humans.

Focusing on hours of labor and gradually reducing hours worked would have been a different way to keep the benefits of growth distributed throughout society. Instead full time employment has been fixed at 40 hours through a long period of high growth, with the new money feedback loop soaking up the individual's surplus.

> Would you be willing to pay, say, $4000 for a laptop where all the quality engineering was top notch?

Yes. This is also why I do exactly that. Thankfully there’s still one company making good laptops left, Apple.

Unfortunately, all the brands I used to buy from decided it was better to cut the cost by half by cutting the quality by 9/10s.

Thinkpads are still decent, and some other manufacturers do okay too.

Are they? I used to be a huge lover of Thinkpads. IMO, they've been going downhill since the T60, I had a T430 and I ended up getting rid of it. I kept my X32 still going though.

While I agree in spirit, honestly my T60 broke much more than my current X230. I replaced the T60's keyboard 4-5 times under warranty, while maybe once or twice for the X230 over a longer period of time. I did use the T60 more though (no-desktop phase). I've no experience with more recent models, since I prefer personal computers (ie no ME crapware).

They've been sold to Lenovo, it's just a matter of time

It’s been 17 years, they aren’t IBM quality, but they’re still very sturdy.

> Thinkpads are still decent

The ones from 2011 are.

Didn’t they face a class action lawsuit due to keyboard defects a couple year back?

Would you be willing to pay, say, $4000 for a laptop where all the quality engineering was top notch?

YES, please, I beg of the industry give me this.

In a loud, resounding voice.

Buying a new laptop takes days of investment to get it all set up just right. Maintaining the software and OS to keep it snappy is also a timesink. The initial cost of the hardware is a trivial portion of the TCO for me.

It's also an item I only carry around one of (lugging around a backup device would be too inconvenient even if it only cost a dollar), so reliability is paramount.

My current laptop (Dell Precision from ~2011) cost a little over your price point, and has been upgraded many times over the years. Finding something I'm happy to replace it with has been a conundrum, there's a ton of absolute garbage out there. (Framework almost does what I need and is a leading contender).

> lugging around a backup device would be too inconvenient

I kind of do this. I bought two used laptops a few years ago, one 13" XPS and a big bulky ~17" ThinkPad. The XPS is great for meetings, the other one is great for software development, and I have a backup ready and set up, ready to go. And if I travel for more than a day I sometimes take both. (So far the strategy seems to be flawless, as both work in well their own sub-par broken but reliable way, as Windows machines tend to, maybe each one is kept blinking by pride, or just to spite the other one. :D)

I'd definitely want to pay on quality on some stuff, the problem is that it is very hard to spot that quality and not just product being more expensive because of a bunch of features I don't need, or just plainly on brand name.

The other problem is that niche high quality stuff also would not benefit from economies of scale as much, and at some point buying 4 of the cheap might get you thru longer than one of the "reliable" one

The top-end electronics are maybe a bad example as (at least till now, it seems to slow down at last) the performance is also a big factor, so buying $700 laptop you will want to replace anyway in few years is sensible over "will never break" $4000 one that will just go out of date.

But on like, just about everything else ? Reliability and repairability please, I will pay extra.

Would you be willing to pay, say, $4000 for a laptop where all the quality engineering was top notch?

Isn't that what Emperor Linux is (nominally) about? Not that I have ever tried them out because that is way beyond my pay grade, but several of their machines are in that price range.

> Would you be willing to pay, say, $4000 for a laptop where all the quality engineering was top notch?

Absolutely. Yes please. That would mean I can use it for 10 years without major problems, I'm able to repair it, no Jail breaking needed... make it 5k. More than happy.

But I understand, I'm not the majority of the market.

Thank you for introducing me to the phrase "immanetize the eschaton."

Sounds like in this case they are monetizing it

btw, seems there's a small typo (see wikipedia article "Immanentize the eschaton", from adjective "immanent")

This person speaks the truth, and one would be wise to internalize his perspective. I've seen this first hand, for decades. Lies, half truths, and blind belief someone else's job is looking out for others. Someday in the not so distant future, a large scale automation is going to kill thousands while destroying our entire civilization's belief "the technology people" know what they are doing.

> built on a throne of lies, shit, pain, and weapons-grade idiocy

Obligatory xkcd post

https://xkcd.com/2030/

Are you allowed to make that joke anymore in 2022?

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