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I have a more optimist view about the industry being able to cope just because we have two more industries that have gone the same transitions, aeronautical and

• numpad0 5y ago
  I don’t want to imagine how Program Alarm 1202 looks like on a SpaceX Starship running Chromium instances on Intel Atom, the latter half of which is how they’re planning to do it.
  • jaywalk 5y ago
    The stuff running inside Chromium on Intel Atom processors is not mission critical.
• jsight 5y ago
  > I have a more optimist view about the industry being able to cope TBH, I have similarly optimistic views, but for completely different reasons. The truth is, the worldview has changed completely in the past 100 years. In the old days, if you failed at operating a saw, you hurt yourself badly. Now we slowly are starting to expect sawstop and other solutions to reduce injury. The same thing is happening in cars. We no longer expect perfection of the human as we augment them in various ways to both reduce the frequency and severity of collision. Its the early days yet, and its very much the "startup code" mindset with cars having way more bugs than its ever but also producing safer outcomes. Car software is getting worse, but we're better off for it.
• scarier 5y ago
  I'm sure you didn't mean it quite so bluntly, but characterizing the history of aviation safety as a triumph of computer control systems over analog ones misses the mark by a pretty wide margin--even if we're just talking about the advances that only computers have provided. Probably the only way a modern car is technologically less sophisticated than a passenger aircraft is its inability to substantially steer itself (and this problem is orders of magnitude more difficult for cars than planes). A lot of the systems we take for granted in our cars (ECU, ABS/stability control, adaptive cruise control, steer-by-wire, OBD) were pioneered in the aviation industry, and both industries' safety records have been massively improved by the ability to do digital design/analysis (CAD, FEA, CFD, etc). Then once you start talking about advances in computer-aided manufacturing and QC/QA processes, training, failure analysis, human-machine interaction... One of my perennial frustrations with current tech is the idea that putting a computer in the control loop necessarily makes things safer.
  • _benj 5y ago
    > One of my perennial frustrations with current tech is the idea that putting a computer in the control loop necessarily makes things safer. I completely agree with you! A simple electronic component is a lot more fragile that a mechanical counterpart that is unfazed by ESD, vibrations or whatever other things that can kill a electronic component, or a circuit board for that matter. My point is more along the lines that a computer in a control loop makes things different, not necessarily safer. But with the flexibility that a computer brings to the mix, if used properly a computer can add some safety features that would be hard to implement with only analog/mechanical parts. It seems to me that we have reaching a ceiling with what we can do with mechanical systems, although I do believe that we often get lazy and opt for software convenience instead of using mechanical reliability where it would be beneficial. So all in all, computer control systems are not safer just in themselves, but they can be, if not in reliability, at least in monitoring health and providing warnings before things are critical (i.e. a temperature reading instead of waiting to see smoke coming of the hood of a car)
    • varjag 5y ago
      > A simple electronic component is a lot more fragile that a mechanical counterpart that is unfazed by ESD, vibrations or whatever other things that can kill a electronic component, or a circuit board for that matter. No, not really.