this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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At least you get to take an ethics class. Mine was just about patents and Therac-25
I mean, we really don't want a repeat of the Therac-25
Still can't believe it happened the first time.
"Oh let's just reuse the code and forget the hardware breakers on the machine it'll be fine."
Like I have no ethics training but they even had a (human operated) control rod in the first chicago pile who trusts a radiation gun to a SOFTWARE toggle?
It wasn't collectively known that software was hard to do right at that time. If it always performed as intended it would have made for a less expensive and perfectly safe machine. It's the textbook case in doing software wrong because there wasn't one that happened before it.
I only learned about it from the "Well There's Your Problem" podcast. Can't believe my school never talked about it. We did hear all about Challenger though as well as a few other disasters where the lesson was "If you cut corners, or take chances, people can DIE"