I wondered why an obscure post of mine was suddenly popular. A clarification: The Therac-25 had an unfortunate race condition, what made this deadly was the co

I wondered why an obscure post of mine was suddenly popular. A clarification: The Therac-25 had an unfortunate race condition, what made this deadly was the conscious decision by the designers to REMOVE the physical safety interlock. They didn't consider modes of failure. The post says exactly this. Always consider modes of failure, you never know when some "other guy" is going to naively count on your work being 100% reliable. It's a system not a goal, as I like to remind people. Some of you might enjoy some of my other stuff, particularly on security: https://blog.eutopian.io/winning-systems--security-practitioners-5.-resilience/ https://blog.eutopian.io/winning-systems--security-practitio... The Tay Bridge disaster was important because: 1) Before it, we had several bridge failures in the UK. 2) After it we had almost none at all. Ever. 3) The report into the disaster was responsible for this improvement. It uncovered problems with: The design, the metal used, the way it was assembled, the maintenance regime, the project management and personal relationships and personalities of the people involved. I'd lay money on the cause of the recent tragic bridge collapse in Italy being one of those already cited in that 140 year old report. It's all there. Back to our own world... When major IT projects fail, there is almost never a public enquiry, even when those failures are government projects, and even when they cost hundreds of millions of dollars/pounds. These failures are repeated regularly in government, and daily in the private sector. Many of us who have been around a while have a (probably pretty good) understanding for why they fail, yet the lessons are not learned and there is little sign we are getting any better at all at not-failing. I suspect a bit of exposure to downside risk, or "skin in the game" as Taleb would call it, might improve things. Sometimes the medicine is hard to take.