If anyone is s curious, I work in that industry, and that is why it is so regulated. A lot of things have to go wrong for any single person’s mistake to matter. We test the heck out of aircraft. Some of these tests are absurd, but they’re meant to prove that the code still works even if the plane flies through the twilight zone.
I also work in the industry and yet you’ve got a company that didn’t follow the rules of redundancy, locked a normally required safety critical architecture and software of using redundant sensor behind paid DLC and caused two fatal crashes.
i read that Boeing paid developers in India less than $5/hr for the 737 MAX software
As far as I know, the MAX software fully complied with its software requirements. The problem was crappy system requirements, and Boeing actively lied to their pilots to conceal that they added a brand new automatic flight control system that can push the elevators down independent of the autopilot and stick pusher.
That last part is what sent people to jail.
That’s shit even by Indian standards.
Having worked in this industry for going on 25 years, I long ago learned that there are way too many incompetent programmers in the world working critical jobs. It’s best not to think about it.
Don’t they use super statically verifiable code for these kinds of applications? Like, Ada?
I’d say ‘Imposter Syndrome’ + ‘Past Job Position Trauma’. There should be good review process and good pipeline with automatic testing and static code analysis, it shouldn’t be a responsibility of a single person.
Have never and will never fly. Don’t care. Too much shit goes wrong. “BUT YOU ARE MORE LIKELY TO GET IN AN AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT” Yeah, but cars tend to not FALL OUT OF THE FUCKING SKY FROM WAY THE HELL FAR UP WHEN SOMETHING GOES WRONG. Hate that fucking statistic because you DO have a good amount of control over the safety of your own car vs. a plane that if any little thing goes wrong, you’re likely fucked.
Sure, there are dangers driving a damn car. There’s danger walking out of your front door. Getting into the shower. Doing ANYTHING in this life with our frail-ass human bodies. I’m not going to escalate that by going up into the goddamn sky on board an old-ass fucking airplane depending on half-assed maintenance and poorly done code. If my car fails, it’s on the side of the road waiting for a tow truck. If I get hit by someone, or I hit someone, at least I can survive and that is significantly improved with the quality of my driving. If the plane fails, I’m fucking dead, end of fucking story.
Don’t give me this CARS ARE MORE DANGEROUS shit. And “odds” mean nothing because at any time the odds can fall against you. Odds aren’t a guarantee of “this has to happen X number of times in Y without fail”. Typical uneducated thinking.
Planes fail all the time. That’s five separate incidents from this week. It’s very rare that an accident happens, and this can be seen in the statistics. If you’re curious how accidents do happen, check out Mentour Pilot’s videos on YouTube. I understand that being in control of a car feels safer but the statistics don’t lie.
It’s less uneducated thinking and more “here’s a thing I read online that I can parrot to show that I am more rational than others”.
That statistic could be entirely unfounded and people would still be repeating it because it serves their purposes. Internet nerds love gotchas.
That aside, fully agreed regarding the level of control. It’s a little like saying “people have - and therefore you have - an x% chance of getting lung cancer” while completing ignoring that a huge portion of that is a direct result of only some people’s behaviour, namely smoking.
The people driving defensively, sober and attentively are not likely to be the ones folding themselves around a roadside tree.
