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Comment by zachthewf | Hacker News Reader

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zachthewf

Heh, is this a Therac 25 joke?

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I really hope it is a joke.

Didn't know this story. Wow that sucks.

Yes

Please don't do this here. The topic deserves serious discussion.

Humor is a very sophisticated form of communication. Think of how much was said in so few words, by just poking at shared common knowledge.

Tragedy is for those that feel and comedy is for those that think.

Lots of comedy more or less proves it needn't be thoughtful as opposed to emotional. Laugh tracks, or the particular speaking style of a standup comic, are riding on the feelings they invoke. Being surrounded by real laughter also makes things "feel" funnier. Laughter is contagious. Fart jokes and home-video genital injuries get laughs with no real "thinking" component.

Perhaps you're making a point (that eludes me, BTW) by writing clever sounding twaddle. I hope so.

At least we can conclude: Dark humor is for those who both feel and think

Humor is fine, but when several readers don't recognize it as such, the joke obviously isn't based on shared common knowledge. Some people walk away with wrong information, and that isn't helpful.

Serious discussion deserves sparse contextual humor.

Therac 25 is so serious that jokes are one of the very few ways to discuss it at all, eh?

AI? Or medical equipment malfunctions?

This joke is how you separate people who know what they’re talking about from the hopeless optimistic crowd.

People who just take that joke as serious clearly haven’t thought through the consequences of using code you don’t completely understand and has no real author. Therac 25 is often a key topic in any rigorous computer science education.

Exactly, but is it a good thing to separate people into groups? How does that help?

Sometimes satire is the most effective way to make a serious point.

I cannot step in one of those machines without wondering if there is a hardware cutoff.

I went with a mechanic in a chair lift once. He was very nervous, saying he knows the kind of people who maintain these things, and he knows the kinds of things that can go wrong. I feel the same way about automation, whether it be self driving cars or an X-ray machine. I know the kind of people that program them, and the vast number of ways things can go wrong.

How many CV engineers own a self driving car becomes the AI equivalent question?

I work in the medical device field. Funny you should say that because just yesterday I was looking at some really crappy (but still safe, mind you!) code and wondering how I'd feel if I were being wheeled into the OR, knowing "how the sausage is made."

Do we at least still use hardware interlocks? I hope we still use hardware interlocks.

Hardware "interlocks" are used when the risk cannot be reduced to an acceptable level by software alone.

With self-driving cars, you also need to consider the kind of people who might be driving them manually. Drunk, sleepy, prone to road rage, distracted by noisy kids in the car, thinking about their financial or relationship problems... there's a terrible amount of death and shattered lives to consider there.

If I remember right, during the height of the most recent Iraq war, a U.S. soldier had a higher probability of being killed in a traffic accident while in the United States than being killed while actively deployed in Iraq.

If a (so-called) self-driving car screws up and kills some people, it's headline news everywhere. If Joe Blow downs five shots of scotch after being chewed out by his boss and crashes into a carload of kids, it barely makes the local news.

>he knows the kinds of things that can go wrong

Sounds like he didn't know nearly as much as he thought. Chairlifts are remarkably safe.

https://newtoski.com/are-chairlifts-safe/

I get the point you're making though.

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