Are you a software developer, and, if so, without looking it up, do you know what the THERAC-25 is?
@glyph No, first I'm hearing of it. Never learned about it in school.
I like that the wikipedia article leads by blaming concurrency, but the root causes section at the end has all sorts of horrifying things like this "However, some errors which endangered the patient merely paused the machine, and the frequent occurrence of minor errors caused operators to become accustomed to habitually unpausing the machine."
@aeva @glyph I once found a list of the deadliest/most costly software bugs ever, and the list compilers specifically called out THERAC-25 as the only UX bug on the list
(I think this list was made in the mid-10s, which would have been before BOTH America and Russia, in unrelated incidents, lost major naval war vessels to UX bugs)
1. U.S.S. John McCain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_S._McCain_and_Alnic_MC_collision I found a really good article about this before but can't find it now. The ship was designed so the helm could be controlled from any of a number of touchscreen interfaces around the ship, during the accident full control of the entire boat was accidentally transferred to a random screen near the ship's rear and the ship serenely sailed into another boat while the helm tried to figure out why the controls weren't working
@robryk @aeva @glyph I thought it was but apparently it was only offline for two years. Ten people died tho so that's still pretty bad