robryk @robryk@qoto.org

@anna_lillith

Istm that it's useful to also note that per mass of protein it's still more than 5x less efficient than wheat (though it's not less efficient than rice in that metric).

@david_chisnall @sidereal do you remember what they assumed about distribution of pedestrians' arrival times? (Poissonian seems reasonable on the face, but in reality is very wrong.)

@niconiconi I don't understand how you'd measure that optically. I remember seeing densitometers that were used to measure lead acid battery charge level by measuring electrolyte density.

@foone do you know why 5v got chosen in the first place?

@_dm Yes. Parts of the story had no witnesses who didn't have an incentive to lie to cover their involvement, so I'm afraid that these parts might be whitewashed.

@_dm Given the lack of an equivalent of Andreotta et al in this case I wonder how much worse the reality was compared to what was reported.

@lauren @fheinderyckx @dangillmor

Let me then be more verbose: I myself can't imagine making it my life goal to do well at a ~single prespecified point in time, like Olympic athletes do, even ignoring the arbitrariness of the source of that limitation. However, there are life goals of that shape that aren't so artificial/arbitraily-set: the most obvious example having been "land on the Moon".

Are you pointing at this success-decided-in-a-moment property, or it in combination with arbitrariness?

@jonstahl @dangillmor how do they differ? If you have an objective score, but subjective additional conditions, then brinkmanship on the additional conditions creates the same impact of subjective judgement on results as subjective scores would.

@whitequark do you have a hypothesis for a mechanism that causes that?

@jonstahl @dangillmor nearly all sports have some amount of human judgement involvement in determining whether rules were followed (in sports with multiple players they are often as messy as determining intent).

@lauren @fheinderyckx @dangillmor Does that extend to e.g. Apollo astronauts?

@_thegeoff hmm... Perhaps you want to ask about Epic Parts Of Systems, which contributed to many safety wins?

@_thegeoff

There were a few US space examples: Apollo 13, Armstrong's Gemini (where straightforwardly using a backup system without any special cleverness saved the day), Apollo 11 landing (where knowing the ways failures should manifest allowed it to continue), Apollo 8(?) launch (where if not for engine limits, the second stage would have pogoed itself to destruction).

In aviation pretty much every single powerless landing satisfies the criteria.

There are surely many rail examples in the UK, where detonating caps (which were a UK invention) or the like saved the day. There's the amusing case of the train collision next to Żywiec in 2005, where a train derailment into a river was avoided by deliberately colliding two passenger trains (with no injuries) -- one can argue that having robust communications saved that day.

@mcc

I would agree of ytalk-style chat was available. Chat delimited in full messages with people I don't previously know feels somewhat stilted.

@lauren is this all from that interview?

@_thegeoff Therac-25 was ~due to missing anew category of risks (even if the computer is not broken, the suggested might do something other than what was intended) and due to missing feedback channels from users of equipment.

Kaprun fire is a good example for usefulness of defense in depth (and how a strong single layer defense might disappear due to mistakes/game of telephone).

@rabbit as in they were advancing at different rates, or same rate but different effective update frequencies?

@rabbit do they actually advance with passage of (actual) time?