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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

T&Cs aren't ironclad.

One in which you sell yourself into slavery, for example, would be illegal in the US.

All those "we take no responsibility for the [valet parking|rocks falling off our truck|exploding bottles]" disclaimers are largely attempts to dissuade people from trying.

As an example, NY bans liability waivers at paid pools, gyms, etc. The gym will still have you sign one! But they have no enforcement teeth beyond people assuming they're valid. https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/general-obligations-law/gob-sec...

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So I can pass on contact breaches due to bugs in software I maintain due to hallucinations by the AI that I used to write the software?? Absolutely no way.

"But the AI wrote the bug."

Who cares? It could be you, your relative, your boss, your underling, your counterpart in India, ... Your company provided some reasonable guarantee of service (whether explitly enumerated in a contact or not) and you cannot just blindly pass the buck.

Sure, after you've settled your claim with the user, maybe TRY to go after the upstream provider, but good luck.

(Extreme example) -- If your company produces a pacemaker dependent on AWS/GCP/... and everyone dies as soon as cloudflare has a routing outage that cascades to your provider, oh boy YOU are fucked, not cloudflare or your hosting provider.

More than one person/organization can be liable at once.

The point of signing contracts is you explicitly set expectations for service, and explicitly assign liability. You can't just reverse that and try to pass the blame.

Sure, if someone from GCP shows up at your business and breaks your leg or burns down your building, you can go after them, as it's outside the reasonable expectation of the business agreement you signed.

But you better believe they will never be legally responsible for damages caused by outages of their service beyond what is reasonable, and you better believe "reasonable outage" in this case is explicitly enumerated in the contact you or your company explicitly agreed to.

Sure they might give you free credits for the outage, but that's just to stop you from switching to a competitor, not any explicit acknowledgement they are on the hook for your lost business opportunity.

> The point of signing contacts is you explicitly set expectations for servkce, and explicitly assign liability.

Sure, but not all liability can be reassigned; I linked a concrete example of this.

> But you better believe they will never be legally responsible for damages caused by outages of their service beyond what is reasonable, and you better believe "reasonable outage" in this case is explicitly enumerated in the contact you or your company explicitly agreed to.

Yes, on this we agree. It'd have to be something egregious enough to amount to intentional negligence.

"Can" isn't the same as "is"

IMO humans commonly mix-up the separable concepts of guilt, blame, and responsibility, treating them almost like synonyms. That can make some discussions difficult.

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