4 ms·

because fail-forward works so great with implanted defibrillators, I presume? /s

by forum_ghost 4y ago

spaetzleesser 4y ago
“Move fast and kill people”
- bumby 4y ago
  That's my main issue with SV-mentalities moving into the safety-critical space like autonomous driving
  - spaetzleesser 4y ago
    I have mixed feelings. On the one hand you don’t want to kill people but on the other hand a lot of the big players in regulated industries are stagnant, complacent and inefficient. A good example would be SpaceX. Compared to their competitors they move faster, are innovative, cheaper and despite that they are reliable when it counts . Most of their failures were well calculated risks that helped them move faster. I am in health care and this industry also desperately needs new players that take more agile approaches and not the super expensive super slow approach most established players are taking. They are way too complacent.
    - bumby 4y ago
      I agree with you that the old corps in these industries are stagnant, but also recognize when there's a gap in the way new entrants approach safety-critical problems. One example is the Uber incident that killed a person. If you read the NTSB report, it seems like they intentionally programmed a delay into a safety critical system in order avoid nuisance braking. From a safety-critical standpoint, deliberately slowing the action of a time-sensitive safety mitigation is big error in engineering judgement. Imagine if I reprogrammed your home smoke detectors to wait for an hour to determine if there's really a fire because you were annoyed that they went off every time your baked. My suspicion is they did this because their software wasn't really ready but they wanted to push it to market for testing. Another example that has had some controversy in the industry is SpaceX using only touchscreens. I don't know where they settled, but a few years back they were adamant that they don't need physical controls. We've all probably experienced issues where a touchscreen doesn't respond as intended. Automotive manufacturers have walked back this idea on a lot of their models because they recognize all the additional failure modes that touchscreens introduce. My worry is that sometimes "innovation" is really just forgetting (or not knowing) the lessons learned from the legacy players. The traditional players like Boeing have had their own problems, but IMO they are more due to management than engineering. With the 737MAX, the engineering processes were in place. They had a hazard analysis that said MCAS shouldn't be a single-point failure; it seems they just didn't follow their own engineering processes due to budget and schedule pressures. That's a different animal than not having the safety-critical culture to define those processes in the first place (but not any less egregious).

because fail-forward works so great with implanted defibrillators, I presume? /s

spaetzleesser 4y ago

“Move fast and kill people”

bumby 4y ago
That's my main issue with SV-mentalities moving into the safety-critical space like autonomous driving
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  I have mixed feelings. On the one hand you don’t want to kill people but on the other hand a lot of the big players in regulated industries are stagnant, complacent and inefficient. A good example would be SpaceX. Compared to their competitors they move faster, are innovative, cheaper and despite that they are reliable when it counts . Most of their failures were well calculated risks that helped them move faster. I am in health care and this industry also desperately needs new players that take more agile approaches and not the super expensive super slow approach most established players are taking. They are way too complacent.
  - bumby 4y ago
    I agree with you that the old corps in these industries are stagnant, but also recognize when there's a gap in the way new entrants approach safety-critical problems. One example is the Uber incident that killed a person. If you read the NTSB report, it seems like they intentionally programmed a delay into a safety critical system in order avoid nuisance braking. From a safety-critical standpoint, deliberately slowing the action of a time-sensitive safety mitigation is big error in engineering judgement. Imagine if I reprogrammed your home smoke detectors to wait for an hour to determine if there's really a fire because you were annoyed that they went off every time your baked. My suspicion is they did this because their software wasn't really ready but they wanted to push it to market for testing. Another example that has had some controversy in the industry is SpaceX using only touchscreens. I don't know where they settled, but a few years back they were adamant that they don't need physical controls. We've all probably experienced issues where a touchscreen doesn't respond as intended. Automotive manufacturers have walked back this idea on a lot of their models because they recognize all the additional failure modes that touchscreens introduce. My worry is that sometimes "innovation" is really just forgetting (or not knowing) the lessons learned from the legacy players. The traditional players like Boeing have had their own problems, but IMO they are more due to management than engineering. With the 737MAX, the engineering processes were in place. They had a hazard analysis that said MCAS shouldn't be a single-point failure; it seems they just didn't follow their own engineering processes due to budget and schedule pressures. That's a different animal than not having the safety-critical culture to define those processes in the first place (but not any less egregious).