Comment on Felt cute, might kill 4 people by radiation overdose later idk đ€Șđ€Ș
scratchee@feddit.uk âš2â© âšdaysâ© agoThe company did many things wrong, itâs an almost idealised example of total failure to take software seriously.
Most importantly they decided they didnât need to test the software on their new machines because theyâd already shipped previous machines running the software, so they âknew it workedâ. The previous machines had hardware interlocks that made it impossible for the software to cause a massive dosing errors, the new machine was entirely software controlled.
Also they had exactly 1 âvery smartâ engineer build the software, who obviously wrote it for a hardware-safe machine. To be fair, Iâm sure he was very smart, but safety critical and solo projects are not a great combo.
Also they had no mechanisms to ensure failures would be communicated to their engineers for investigation (failures were reported to them and then dropped into a black hole and forgotten about).
Also they didnât even have any capability to test their machines after failures started popping up, because they knew the code worked perfectly so they didnât need to waste any time or money on qa capability, massively slowing down their ability to fix things once people started dying
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works âš2â© âšdaysâ© ago
The single engineer wasnât mentioned on the podcast, episode but the rest of it was. Itâs a really instructive story.
Really, the whole podcast is this kind of story.