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Let’s say you are a civil engineer and your calculator had a problem spitting out wrong results the day you were calculating the amount of reinforcement for the

Let’s say you are a civil engineer and your calculator had a problem spitting out wrong results the day you were calculating the amount of reinforcement for the school you were designing. If the school collapses on the kids, you are going to jail in most countries . It does not matter the calculator had an issue, you chose to use it and not verify the results.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
How many structural parts does a school have that need to be considered? How many iron beams? How many floors? Several thousand at most? Everything else on the BOM doesn’t matter - wallpaper isn’t a structural priority. In computer code, every last line is possibly structural. It also only takes a single missing = in the 1.2 million line codebase to kill. Comparing it to school engineering is an oversimplification. You should be comparing it to verifying the structural integrity of every skyscraper ever built; for each project.
- aeonik 2y ago
  Chemical and elemental properties of the walls and wall paper can matter though. Leaded paint, Aresenic, flammability, weight (steel walls vs sheet rock). The complexity is still less than software though, and there are much better established standards of things that work together. Even if a screw is slightly wrong, it can still work. In software it's more like, every screw must have monocrystalline design, any grain boundary must be properly accounted for, and if not, that screw can take out an entire section of the building, possibly the whole thing, possibly the entire city.
- whatever1 2y ago
  The claim was not that it will be easy, but since the stakes are high the buck has to stop somewhere. You cannot have Devin AI shipping crap and nobody picking up the phone when it hits the fan.
yuvalr1 2y ago
When handling critical software and hardware, for example automated cars, it should be the case that it's never ever the sole responsibility of a single individual. People make mistakes, and will always do. There should be a lot of safety mechanisms existing to ensure nothing critically bad ever happens due to a bug. If this is not the case, then management is to blame, and even the state, for not ensuring high quality of critical equipment. When something like that does happen, it is very hard to know the measure of responsibility every entity holds. This will most certainly be decided in court.
jandrewrogers 2y ago
That is because this is trivial to check and the systems are simple compared to software, so the cost imposition of the requirement to do so is minor. The software engineering equivalent would be a requirement to always check return codes. I don't think anyone believes that would move the needle in the case of software. There is a lot of literature on civil engineering failures. In fact, my civil engineering education was largely structured as a study of engineering failures. One of the most striking things about forensic analysis of civil engineering failures, a lesson the professors hammered on incessantly, is that they are almost always the result of really basic design flaws that every first-year civil engineering student can immediately recognize. There isn't some elaborate engineering discipline preventing failures in civil engineering. Exotic failures are exceedingly rare.
- thfuran 2y ago
  So the defense for software is "I helped build a system so complex that even attempting to determine how it might fail was too hard, so it can't be my fault that it failed"?
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    Unless you want to go back to the steam age, it’s not a defense, but all we are humanly capable of. Never forget as well that it only takes a single cosmic ray to flip a bit. Even if you code perfectly, it can still fail, whether in this way or countless other black swans. 2.8 trillion lines of code aren’t going to rewrite themselves overnight. And as any software developer can tell you, a rewrite would almost certainly just make things worse.
    - thfuran 2y ago
      It would cost an untenable amount of money to rebuild all buildings, but that hasn't stopped us from creating and updating building codes.
      - theamk 2y ago
hn367621 2y ago
More like your engineering organization gets sued into oblivion because it created design processes with a single point of failure. Things happen all the time. That’s why well run organizations have processes in place to catch and deal with them. In software, when people think it counts, they do too. The problem is not all people agree on “when it counts”

gjsman-1000 2y ago

How many structural parts does a school have that need to be considered? How many iron beams? How many floors? Several thousand at most? Everything else on the BOM doesn’t matter - wallpaper isn’t a structural priority. In computer code, every last line is possibly structural. It also only takes a single missing = in the 1.2 million line codebase to kill. Comparing it to school engineering is an oversimplification. You should be comparing it to verifying the structural integrity of every skyscraper ever built; for each project.

aeonik 2y ago
Chemical and elemental properties of the walls and wall paper can matter though. Leaded paint, Aresenic, flammability, weight (steel walls vs sheet rock). The complexity is still less than software though, and there are much better established standards of things that work together. Even if a screw is slightly wrong, it can still work. In software it's more like, every screw must have monocrystalline design, any grain boundary must be properly accounted for, and if not, that screw can take out an entire section of the building, possibly the whole thing, possibly the entire city.
whatever1 2y ago
The claim was not that it will be easy, but since the stakes are high the buck has to stop somewhere. You cannot have Devin AI shipping crap and nobody picking up the phone when it hits the fan.

yuvalr1 2y ago

When handling critical software and hardware, for example automated cars, it should be the case that it's never ever the sole responsibility of a single individual. People make mistakes, and will always do. There should be a lot of safety mechanisms existing to ensure nothing critically bad ever happens due to a bug. If this is not the case, then management is to blame, and even the state, for not ensuring high quality of critical equipment. When something like that does happen, it is very hard to know the measure of responsibility every entity holds. This will most certainly be decided in court.

jandrewrogers 2y ago

That is because this is trivial to check and the systems are simple compared to software, so the cost imposition of the requirement to do so is minor. The software engineering equivalent would be a requirement to always check return codes. I don't think anyone believes that would move the needle in the case of software. There is a lot of literature on civil engineering failures. In fact, my civil engineering education was largely structured as a study of engineering failures. One of the most striking things about forensic analysis of civil engineering failures, a lesson the professors hammered on incessantly, is that they are almost always the result of really basic design flaws that every first-year civil engineering student can immediately recognize. There isn't some elaborate engineering discipline preventing failures in civil engineering. Exotic failures are exceedingly rare.

thfuran 2y ago
So the defense for software is "I helped build a system so complex that even attempting to determine how it might fail was too hard, so it can't be my fault that it failed"?
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  Unless you want to go back to the steam age, it’s not a defense, but all we are humanly capable of. Never forget as well that it only takes a single cosmic ray to flip a bit. Even if you code perfectly, it can still fail, whether in this way or countless other black swans. 2.8 trillion lines of code aren’t going to rewrite themselves overnight. And as any software developer can tell you, a rewrite would almost certainly just make things worse.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    It would cost an untenable amount of money to rebuild all buildings, but that hasn't stopped us from creating and updating building codes.
    - theamk 2y ago

hn367621 2y ago

More like your engineering organization gets sued into oblivion because it created design processes with a single point of failure. Things happen all the time. That’s why well run organizations have processes in place to catch and deal with them. In software, when people think it counts, they do too. The problem is not all people agree on “when it counts”