Hmm, I recently found my old official “Zilog Z80 CPU Programmer’s Reference Guide” from October 1982. I thought I’d lost it. It was very much loved by my teenage self!
> I found myself on the phone to Rackspace, leaning on a desk for support, listening to their engineer patiently explain that backups for this MySQL instance had been cancelled over 2 months ago. Ah.
There is no part of this story that’s the protagonist’s fault. What a mess.
Agreed. Negligence bordering on criminal all the way up the management chain. The fact that they blamed the author is telling about the culture as well.
Yeah. And even if this cancellation was to save money, it’s not even an excuse.
What is hard and expansive are easy to restore backups.
Simple backups that may be a pain to restore but that are going to save your company from bankruptcy are only costing you some cheap storage and someone that more or less routinely checks that your data is safe somewhere.
I mean, of course I’m not advocating for flaky backups but even when you are cheap as fuck, you can afford a cron script running rsync and a couple hard disk drives.
Going fully yolo on this topic should not be even remotely acceptable in any business.
Are strong whistleblower protections what’s needed to balance this?
As an Australian I am absolutely horrified that we continue to put people in jail who have blown the whistle on the government here, and it makes me think that large organisations are absolutely terrified about strong whistleblowing protections.
This all suggests to me that whistleblower laws would be very effective.
David McBride and Richard Boyle. Both tried the official channels then whistleblower channels. Both made some mistakes but all in the public interest. Aussie gov treated them shamefully.
Witness K and Bernard Collaery came to mind when I was writing it. They blew the whistle on illegal espionage used to pillage the resources of our tiny neighbour, and the government threw the book at them. Absolutely shameful.
I understand that Wikileaks is controversial but I don't think there is any dispute that he has acted in the role of whistleblower to some extent. But that's not really the point I'm trying to make, so I've removed the reference.
I think I'd argue for a sui generis classification, which does partake somewhat of the whistleblower, but it seems like calling Napoleon a general. He was certainly that, at times. Apologies for the nit-picking in any case.
Another example would be David McBride who was in the Australian military and blew the whistle on war crimes. He recently got sentenced to jail while actual exposed war criminals are free.
It feels this way with PATs as well, with legacy PATs still necessary for most of the things I use them for, despite being pushed into the newer ones. And the documentation is terrible. I had the exact same thought, the PAT transition feels like an unfinished feature as does the API transition.
For me the API transition is even more bizarre since it’s almost trivial to wrap REST calls with GraphQL.
What it feels like to me is a mounting level of serious technical debt which isn’t being addressed, and if that’s not a sign of trouble in a product like GitHub, I don’t know what is.
> For a long time the X Window System had a reputation for being difficult to configure.
Honestly I thought it was hard to configure because until I used Linux, my X terminals didn’t need to be configured at all!
I may be misremembering but I think my NCD terminal used bootp and probably a little tftp, then off it went. The hardest part was probably finding an Ethernet drop to plug it into.
There is a lot more to meeting a customer’s needs than blindly doing what they say. Sometimes, you need to write code to protect them from their own (sometimes-but-not-always rational) decisions - or to protect other customers and stakeholder from them.
You also need to keep your own team nimble. I’ve seen plenty of systems that have just thrown code at the product, and they end up with SQL tables with 150 columns - most of which nobody uses, and which can’t be removed, and the customer ends up pissed off anyway because you can no longer turn their requests around quickly.
A good, layered design mitigates against this and makes it possible to continue to be productive even in the face of customer demands.
Externalising customisations is a huge benefit to productivity.
> Reminds me of Republic of Minerva, which was quickly attacked by Tongan savages at the behest of western powers.
100% agree that this is racist, even a cursory understanding of what happened makes it obvious that official Tongan troops backed by regional pacific nations were involved.
The whole thing was an artificial island created by an American anarcho-capitalist, making the claim that “western powers” were involved even more ridiculous, considering the protagonist. Wikipedia describes what happened (edited excerpt):
> The Republic of Minerva was a micronation consisting of [snip] the reclaimed land of an artificial island in 1972. The architect was Las Vegas real estate millionaire and political activist Michael Oliver [snip] they anticipated a libertarian society with "no taxation, welfare, subsidies, or any form of economic interventionism."
> When asked about the Minervan's project, the King of Tonga, Taufaʻahau Tupou IV, denied rumors that Tonga meant to claim sovereignty over it, yet said "it was in the best interest of Tonga not to allow a group of people, whose objects were to make money and whose activities could be harmful, to become established on the reefs." Neighboring countries agreed; Fiji’s Prime Minister, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, claimed the actions of the Minervans set a dangerous precedent: "If these people can claim Minerva, what would stop them from doing it here?"
> Consequently, a conference of the neighboring states (Australia, New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, Nauru, Samoa, and territory of Cook Islands) met on 24 February 1972 at which Tonga made a claim over the Minerva Reefs, and the rest of the states recognized its claim.
> A Tongan expedition was sent to enforce the claim, arriving on 18 June 1972.
And then the Phoenix Foundation tried to overthrow the government of the Bahamas in collaboration with famed mercenary Mitchell WerBell. Now who's the violent invaders?
> The Foundation's next attempt to establish a libertarian state [after Minerva] was in 1973 on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas. In the period approaching Bahamian independence, a number of white residents objected to living under black rule.
Before. That’s why I bothered to look it up. And that’s when I discovered that the “savages” were actually employees of the Tongan government acting with the authority of the Pacific Forum.
You’re not very good at this “good faith” business are you, friend?
I've banned the other user for breaking the site guidelines, but it's not ok for you to break the site guidelines either, no matter how bad someone else's comments are or you feel they are.
There were two crashes. The CEO most certainly should have known about the problems after the first one.
It’s the CEO’s job to ensure that sufficient measures are in place to prevent failure. They should not be punished for accidents; they should be punished if the accidents were reasonably predictable.
Which was most certainly the case when they decided to the redundant AoA sensor an optional extra.
> The airplane manufacturer broke the agreement by “failing to design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the U.S. fraud laws throughout its operations,” the DOJ said.
He’s not being held responsible for the crime, he’s being held responsible for looking the other way.
The CEO is 100% responsible for designing programs to ensure that the business operates within the parameters of the law.
After the first accident, Boeing was said to be blaming the pilots, in private, despite knowing about MCAS but not revealing it. They deliberately misrepresented the design (and in particular they minimised the severity of the failure modes) of MCAS to the FAA during the certification process. There are transcripts of the test pilots discussing this stuff. Boeing also heavily lobbied the FAA not to ground the Max 8 despite other jurisdictions grounding the aircraft.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Boeing knew what was going on, and if the CEO didn’t know then he wasn’t doing his job.
There really is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
What amazes me is that the first crash is arguably "pilot error compounded by MCAS" but they didn't just immediately pay the tens of millions it would have cost to retrofit all existing planes with the double-sensors that were an option but not required.
Ah I see - makes sense then, if that is all accurate. It would be good to know how coordinated this was internally. If the malicious behaviour genuinely went all the way to the top, then probably those people all deserve criminal sentencing, for sure.
For me the real kicker was that Boeing convinced the FAA that the aircraft did not need redundant Angle of Attack sensors, even though they knew that this meant that there was a single point of failure in a system which had control authority (ie, MCAS).
Boeing did not disclose the existence of MCAS to pilots, and therefore did not train the pilots on how to recover from MCAS failure, and there was no redundancy in the key sensors that fed MCAS.
IIRC at least one of the crashes was caused by an AoA sensor failure.
