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I agree they should have done better, but I think the article's comparison of relatively minor localized damage, versus the completely ignored potential, makes the line of argument of the author quite unreasonable.

Most outages are caused by engineers shipping code. We still ship code. We try to minimize damage and we still fail. Most times the fail was obviously preventable in insight.

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That’s true, but if you shipped code that caused ecological damage due to a failure to follow correct procedures, there would be corrective measures. For example:

- You might not be allowed to ship code without oversight

- You might have to complete a post mortem and analysis of what went wrong

- If you were negligent (e.g., you skipped protocol to ship on a 4/20 joke), you might be fired

The FAA is basically saying “Something went way outside parameters here and you caused a lot of damage. Take a pause and figure that out”, and the parent poster is mad about that

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