isityouyesitsme

We assign fault precisely so that we know who to extract damages from. The burrito assembler is not going to be held liable for bad outcomes when they did everything right.

The mere fact that there are damages to extract means that someone was already damaged, not merely that we want to punish someone. If my neighbor is poisoned by food, I do not have standing to sue in my own capacity because my neighbor was poisoned. At this point, the moral question is whether or not you should be able to extract damages when you can show that you are damaged. Essentially every society has said "yes, of course," even though the specifics of what constitutes damage and recompense differs.

Why do people not universally (or at least generally) tend toward making Fail-Safe systems? I don't know, but they just do not. They must be compelled to.

Call it original sin or prevarication, the second law of thermodynamics, evolutionary inclination to save effort, whatever. But humans just default the opposite way of what you're saying.

I think I am closer to understanding you, but not quite there.

If, for instance, your burrito worker did something egregious, they could be held criminally liable, and depending on the specific situation, the employer could also be held civilly liable.

I say "depending on the situation" because it is the duty of the vendor to ensure best practices are followed: sanitary restrooms, soap and running, clean water for cleaning up, etc. And a nontrivial number of places do so because they know an inspector is coming at some point and they will suffer if they do not comply.

But it is harder to hold the vendor liable if all reasonable precautions and amenities are availed by the vendor, and all proper education, but the end of line worker decides to ignore all of it one day.

You do not need intent to find fault and have standing. Negligence is a thing.

If your farmer chose to ignore industry standard practices and agricultural regulations to prevent and contain such contamination at the source, they are indeed liable. And they can still issue a recall, and indeed must do so as soon as they learn of the problem.

Your vantage point is a bit too optimistic for reality. If it was not, we would not need courts.

your comment was excellent.

I couldn't read past the article's pretentious opening.

Agreed. your parenthetical comment explains the tension.

The only solution is to have a crystal ball.

I do not disagree that I may lack sufficient background for this. It was clearly written for "those in the know," people who already share a common viewpoint and vocabulary, and only differ on minor nuance. A bit like getting a bunch of mechanics to argue about cars.

In this regard, the writing is definitely rambling and incoherent. It's one big mutual academic exercise (I am avoiding the use of a sexual term here).

What did I just (halfway) read? This person is incoherent and rambling, raptured with their own brilliance.

There may be solid points in there, I will never know. I automatically cannot take anyone as serious who writes this way. They do not want to be taken seriously. They want to be congratulated on their keen observations.

I don't quite understand how anyone could actually compare systems from different vendors. The failure modes aren't something the vendors have been able to identify in advance of a cataclysmic event.

So I agree with your "delusional" statement, and also consider your remarks of the same caliber. You cannot determine a system's safety by watching videos.

Think how many videos there would be by now of the 737max taking off, flying, and landing if airplanes were as hip and new as robotic drivers.

I'm truthfully not understanding whether you've missed the point or if you're so interested in defending Tesla that you choose to look past it.

I'm not making a claim about relative feature capabilities (yes, having replied in this specific thread makes that confusing, but that's where your comment was). I'm making a claim that the vast majority of developers do not know how to judge a system's safety.

As an example of this from you, and for a more critical view of Tesla from me, I'll say that when I look at Tesla's capabilities, I could not make a claim that it does anything safely. Safety implies that the system knows its limits and refuses to operate outside of them. This is definitely not Tesla's way. Else it would be impossible, for example, to have sun blind spots make it not "see" a semi.

This is the same type of thinking that prevents most developers from working in safety-critical fields. The presence of a feature, or even its impressive capabilities, is/are not what constitutes "performance." It's also the same type of thinking that gets Tesla drivers decapitated or slammed into an abutment.

was brown vs board of education "activist?"

possibly. I don't think I know anyone who regrets it though.

SCOTUS is just one big game of political football. for centuries.

Well, what I'm not ok doing is arguing silly points steeped in what-about-isms. There are far more entertaining ways to waste time.

The context is that I replied to a comment where one knows.

While not really being one who cares personally about the example here, I would not give a tool a name that I full well know will offend the sensibilities of some who will use it. That would make me a jerk, no matter how funny or whimsical I may find it.

Even when poking fun at myself, I choose names of projects carefully. It's pretty easy to not be a jerk, at least in this way.

Cool. What's the opportunity cost to fix it?

Thank you for the reply!

All my life, it has been common parlance among every person I have ever spoken with to refer to a depleted battery as a "dead" battery.

When someone announced that their cell battery is dead, I have never once in my life heard someone ask for clarification on whether the battery was incapable of charging or is simply depleted. I have also never once heard a correction of the person with the depleted battery when they announce that they have charged their phone.

I have also heard these same speech patterns pertaining to vehicles. It is odd to demand that a written work that is authored for popular consumption not to use the popular parlance.

Question, not argument: what is the definition of "super cold?" Asking because in my area, which is not an area associated with bitter cold, we have been in sub-20F temperatures for a week, and overnights are down to sub-10F. My PHEV has not done well in this.

This area sees these temperatures for a total of, I'd guess, 3 weeks (non-contiguous) annually. There's usually a couple days of around 0F each year (and if it goes lower than that, it sticks around for several days). Some years, we get 4-6 weeks of such cold. Basically everywhere from Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and north of New York will see the same or worse.

Sorry for the long explanation. I want to calibrate on what "very cold" means to an EV.

What does it mean for a safety-critical program to terminate?

I suspect you do not want your car's brake controller to do this.

Why not? Each project has a unique blend of acceptable risks and non-functional requirements. I promise you, you'd hate C++ if you had to write each project, safety critical or not, according to the least common denominator feature set for safety critical domains.

He misses the point. If air was like coal, it would require extraction effort to both us and deliver it, and significant capital to do it at scale. If air was like water, it would require significant effort just to keep it clean enough to use without a near-immediate, acute, negative reaction. Imagine every person staking claim of water as part of the "public." It wouldn't last very long. Nearby where I live, they had to drain an entire reservoir for a municipality because they caught someone sneaking in past a fence to urinate and defecate into it.

Now, since pollution spreads so far and so quickly in air, he may have a different point, whereby the corps freely ruin the air, and then could charge for purified, usable air. The root problem there is the pollution, not the purification---which takes effort and capital to perform at scale.

Tressell is just another person who takes real problems, the depression of the poor, and suggests that a simple fix is to just "don't let them do this," as if anything in the world is this simple.

Throw-away comment: that's essentially the point.

I don't think that there is.

An obvious comparison is religious thought. Unlike most religious thought, you do actually learn when the consensus has been utterly wrong. What you don't know is when that will happen.

Please cote the spot where I suggested anything that even remotely looks like I took a position.

All I mean to say is that circular logic based on upholding one's views of reality do not bring any clarity to the situation.

The same situation seems to happen countless times in the history of empirical science and mathematics. There are incontrovertible facts, until some new information controverts them.

It is also possible that everything humans understand is simply a vignette into a much larger reality, and all of those things would fall apart because they aren't true, they're merely the laws we've discovered with the limited information we have available to us.

Whether or not it is enough depends on the context. Some cases require 100% condition and decision coverage. In these cases, it gets to be very difficult to achieve that unless you are directly testing the functions you write, not through a caller.

But even deeper, it is "accidental" because you are not testing contracts on the public APIs, you're testing the private functions through a layer higher. When the implementation changes, you have coupled your tests so tightly to the implementation that they are useless for regression testing. If not, then you actually aren't testing the private function at all, you're just hitting some parts by coincidence.

Exactly.

I worked in a place that disallowed friend functions and classes generally, but explicitly for unit testing. I never wrote another private function. Instead, there was an explosion at the tiny-free-function-that-could-have-been-a-private-function factory, and the parts ended up everywhere.

It does no good to shoot down every change as "not good enough." I think the people who do this, almost as a knee jerk response, either do not actually believe that global climate change is something to be concerned over, or else instead achieve their self-esteem through tearing others down.

The environmentalists eat their own so often and so badly that they can't be taken seriously. You need to give people something to latch on to that appeals to them, to start something. Scolding them for believing something is a true solution when it is about a 1% solution is helping nobody.

1000 people each doing a different 1% solution is better than 10 people each doing a theoretical 100% solution. Over time, the former will run in to some good practices. The latter are just turn-offs.

We won't lab-grown-meat our way out of this. We won't electric-cars our way out of this. We won't nuclear-power our way out of this. And the overall tone is that any shift in a positive direction is still driving the getaway car, even if you aren't the one to actually pull the trigger for the crime.

If you want progress in anything, you have to give people a way to atone for their sins, even if the atonement doesn't undo all of the damage already done. Without that, the vast majority are going to ignore you, because the shock to the system is too high to do what needs to be done. People do not willingly start to play games they are nearly certain they will lose, they only continue those games once they are already playing them.

Not really. It's the very definition of an ad hominem.

If the study uses non-factual information or does not interpret the data by understanding the nuances that may yield different interpretations, then the author's educational background may offer an explanation. But that isn't the critique here.

It's just reverse ageism with a mix of elitism.