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| Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby? |
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| RoGeorge:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 26, 2021, 08:03:13 pm ---Would you seriously try to claim you are not responsible for the ensuing fires and injuries, because you didn't realize your design would cause those? --- End quote --- Try asking that to a software developer. ;D |
| Zero999:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 26, 2021, 08:03:13 pm --- --- Quote from: Zero999 on June 26, 2021, 04:49:16 pm ---The designer lacked experience and didn't envisage such a dangerous situation occurring. --- End quote --- They were fully capable adults, so lack of understanding is not and should not be a protection against culpability. Let's say you design a hand-held widget with a 2000 mAh lithium-ion battery in it. But because you're not experienced in such design, yours has this metal spike that will pierce the battery and short it, if the device is held "incorrectly" in adult human hands. Would you seriously try to claim you are not responsible for the ensuing fires and injuries, because you didn't realize your design would cause those? While you did not cause them to happen, your negligence made them possible/likely, and in most legal jurisdictions you would be culpable. I believe you should be culpable, because you were negligent in the design of the hand-held widget. Same for the drone case. --- End quote --- Looking at how crappy the design was, it's a bit of a stretch to say they they were fully capable adults. I'm not saying they are not culpable, just that there's a difference between negligence and ignorance, due to perhaps incompetence. The blame might lie further up the chain, than the designers. The person who employed them should have done due diligence, to ensure they got people who were suitably qualified for the task. If you want something designed on the cheap, so go and hire a load of college students, with no engineering qualifications, or experience and it blows up and kills someone: is it fair to blame the students? Aren't you more to blame for hiring people who weren't up to the job? |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: RoGeorge on June 26, 2021, 08:19:29 pm --- --- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 26, 2021, 08:03:13 pm ---Would you seriously try to claim you are not responsible for the ensuing fires and injuries, because you didn't realize your design would cause those? --- End quote --- Try asking that to a software developer. ;D --- End quote --- Being one myself, my answer is yes. I do firmly believe software engineers should be responsible for design errors. Stuff like having an "undocumented" root shell with a fixed password listening for incoming connections on a nonstandard port, and believing it is safe and okay to do that as long as it stays a secret, should get you fired and blacklisted, just like structural engineers who pass sub-par concrete jobs because having it redone is just too much work. Yet, have you ever heard of a software engineer getting punished for doing bad, dangerous work, like for implementing software that silently garbles user data? I haven't, and it annoys me. I am sure it is one of the reasons why average software quality is so atrocious. --- Quote from: Zero999 on June 26, 2021, 09:32:28 pm ---If you want something designed on the cheap, so go and hire a load of college students, with no engineering qualifications, or experience and it blows up and kills someone: is it fair to blame the students? Aren't you more to blame for hiring people who weren't up to the job? --- End quote --- Assuming the students are adults, they are partly to blame. Those hiring them are also partly to blame. I'd need to see their communications to have any quantitative opinion (i.e. who more, who less). Also note that I am of the opinion that if an underage person commits crime, both they and their legal guardian should be punished. This extends to companies and organizations, too: no power without responsibility. I do know that this is a scary opinion to have, because most software developers are used to being able to cop out of responsibility (via licenses and disclaimers), and the thought of being actually responsible for ones own work output is scary. I know, because it scares me too. So I understand why people oppose this opinion. But I think that fear is good and necessary: The same reason I want structural engineers to be responsible for their work product, is the same reason why I think software engineers should be too, and if one cannot handle it, they should get a different career with lesser personal risk. |
| Siwastaja:
But software is* different because it's in total crisis, have been for maybe two-three decades now, in any case so long that most software developers who are notoriously young people have never seen a simple and working software system in their life. Maybe in 1970's software development paradigms were not any better but problems were limited by the software size and complexity limitations coming from the hardware and languages available. *) describing the situation as it is now, not what I would want it to be; in my opinion, software should be evaluated against the same standards as hardware, buildings, bridges, and so on, depending on where it is used. Now, no one seems to have an idea how to build even remotely robust software, no one seems to have an idea how to build any software for less than say $100 million, especially if taxpayer is involved. No one even dares to discuss about responsibilities. There's a lot of software science telling us how to develop robust software but all of this is failing in practice. Software simply doesn't need to work at all, no one bats an eye. For example here in the Great Finland we have this new healthcare IT system which reportedly by doctors prevents proper care completely, nearly or actually killing people left and right (for example, by completely blocking the availability of any patient information, including allergies to medicines, in emergency situations in ICU), but no one can do anything, and no one is and will be held responsible. It was so expensive it has to be used despite how many human lives it takes. So we can't even say "hey, let's free everybody from responsibility and just drop this software, revert back to the old working system, and forget about this ever happened"; no, we have to continue making human sacrifices on the altar of modern software paradigms. Hardware on the other hand, not so much. The situation is so much better we can afford to have this discussion about responsibilities, remove the few bad apples. Besides, no one buys hardware that is completely non-functional but for some strange reason, with software this doesn't seem to matter; I can't think of anything else but it's because people are so desperate with software, anything at all goes. And yes, I again agree with mr. Animal that starting holding software developers responsible for the worst offends (like killing people directly or indirectly) would help solve the software crisis. The task is enormous but it has to start somewhere. On the technical side I applaud mr. Animal's efforts regarding C standard library improvements/replacements to get rid of all the built-in traps in current specifications and implementations. |
| Zero999:
Well there's safety critical software., which does have to work and not kill anyone. I put a lot of the blame on those who commission the services of software companies. A government organisation, such as the UK's national health service, should write penalty clauses into the contract, with software companies, stating that they're responsible for damages if it goes wrong. |
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