False negatives are more worrying. On a small speedboat, a common cause of death is that the captain falls overboard while the boat is doing a sharp turn at speed. The boat then does a 360 circle and within 10 seconds runs over the captain before anyone else in the boat can intervene.
Will these wireless keyfobs reliably cut out within 10 seconds when the boat never goes more than say 60 feet from the captain? I suspect not.
Would a wired one that went unused prevent that? That would seem to be the core problem in your scenario - the existing technology that would not have a false negative here is going unused.
Also, can you cite any sources for that event being common (relatively at least)? Not that I doubt you specifically, the scenario is just so horrifying that I am generally having trouble accepting it.
The accident described above is basically the same as happened in my hometown in October 2021. There was no one else in the boat but many witnesses on the shore. The whole community greatly affected.
Here is a news report with video footage of one such incident (the part where the victim is decapitated is clipped from the report):
https://youtu.be/3IwhsYfnNvs
I am personally aware of quite a few speedboat related accidents, some fatal, and this is a common pattern.
The types of death that people imagine (boat sinks, boat engine dies and drifts out to sea) tend not to be killer in small boats because they mostly operate in busy waterways near shore where someone else will come help.
Radio waves propagate very poorly in water compared to air, so there's a good chance that the signal is lost as soon as the wearer falls in. From there it's just a matter of how long the timeout is, and the latency of cutting the engine.
Is there a reason people can't just have seatbelts of some type for that?
By the inverse square law accuracy should be better at close range, cutting out at 10 to 30 feet but not 0 to 6 feet should be possible, especially with UWB, and even moreso if the fob detects water directly.
Obviously you do everything possible to stop an outage like this happening...
But when it inevitably does, you should be prepared for a full system simultaneous restart. Ie. So that no 'bad' signals or data from the old system can impact the new.
That is the sort of thing you should practice in the staging environment from time to time, just for when it might be needed. It could have taken this outage from many hours down to just many minutes.
You should also design all your code to be rollbackable... But for the very rare case that a rollback won't solve the problem (eg. An outage is caused by changes outside your organisation's control), you also need to be able to do a rapid code change, recompile and push. Many companies aren't able to do this for example their release process involves multiple days worth of interlocked manual steps.
Twitter indexing was basically real-time - you could see a tweet within a few minutes of it being made
Mastodon seems to take many days to appear, if at all. I suspect Google just scrapes the webui occasionally and doesn't use any push-based mechanism for notifications. That probably means it misses some too.
HN is indexed in effectively real time as well. I've googled several phrases I've read here, hoping to find more information, where the HN comment of interest is the sole result.
I just had the opposite happen, was looking for a post I know ive found through google before and had to go through bing and then yandex to find it. Google's historical archive of hn appears wonky, or at least did that day.
This spooked me the other day. Made a comment about a phenomenon I knew of and the name I knew it by. Got curious whether other people knew it by that name too, googled the name, and the top result was my own comment made just a few minutes ago.
I never really saw how making the counters random helped fight bots.
Anyone who wants to know if their bot armies upvotes are counted can just choose 2000 articles, upvote a random half, then see if the half they upvoted have higher vote tallies than the half they didn't.
No amount of delay, quantizing, or adding noise will defeat that tactic. So why try at all?
I don’t think the technique would be meant to counter blind voting, but rather strategic voting—i.e. counter-voting some particular post down/up with a random member of your bot army every time it’s voted up/down, to keep its count high/low/at some constant value.
I say this, not because it seems like an especially common style of bot to be running, but rather because 1. it would be a rather heavy backend write load on the site if two bots doing this in opposite directions did exist, and ever “clashed” on the same post—and, much more problematically, a never-ending load, as the bots would never be satisfied; and 2. such bots do depend on the exact vote count passing some threshold, so fuzzing votes is a simple way to make such bots confused—not all the time, but probabilistically, enough of the time to make any such “clash” loops eventually quiesce rather than going on forever.
Pretty certain they did not. China controls the Internet a little too seriously and has banned Google for many years to allow them to fly Loon balloons beaming free internet to their population.
You would think so. Some of the messages sit in my inbox for an hour, trigger the "important message" feature so I get a notification, then gets moved to spam when google gets more info
I really want to see ssd manufacturers offer a decent warranty...
This drive costs $100, and will last 10 years or until 100TB has been written to it, as long as you keep it within the specified temperature/humidity/power conditions.
If it fails to do that, we will return $1000 to you.
This sounds like an SLA agreement, its very unlikely you'll get that for 100 bucks. Even if this manufacturer somehow perfected their process and have zero defects, they are still acquiring a 10 years liability for 100 dollars of revenue.
Well they sure market this, but it seems pretty difficult to collect. For the insurance to apply you have to register within 10 days of purchase with a list of what will be plugged into the the surge protector. In case of damage, you have to pay to ship the surge protector to APC. If they determine it's been damage by power line transients, then you need to ship all damaged equipment somewhere to be evaluated. If it's determined that the equipment was damaged by power line transients, then APC chooses whether they'll pay for repairs or for current fair market value.
In theory, a 3rd party insurance equivalent to AppleCare could be constructed for some technology products, but this is hampered by short product lifecycles, lack of BOM transparency (e.g components changed within a single product generation) and ability of firmware updates to change product behavior and invalidate previously collected data on reliability.
Open-source SSD firmware would provide more transparency on performance and reliability.
True, in my perfect world I would settle for a trade in program, you would get some value for the failed unit so that you can upgrade and the OEM could recycle the raw materials. If we will ever live in a sustainable society we are going to need repairability and recycling programs for all consumer products.
using up the flash doesn't hurt the controller, though. the controller still knows how much writing it's done even if the flash itself is toast, it's a totally different part of the drive.
And even still, you could construct the controller so that it was burning e-fuses to indicate lifespan and the fuses could be readable through JTAG, short of complete controller death or lightning-strike level surges (which you can legitimately argue as being abuse and not warrantyable) you could make it offline-readable from an external device.
The problems here are primarily economic/social, not technical. Companies don't want to hold warranty liability on their books for 10+ years, but they also don't really want to accept returns for defective products or other things either, and we make them do it anyway.
The EU is already pushing warranties to a minimum of two years for exactly this reason. Could it be 5 years, or 10 years? Sure, why not.
Companies will scream in the short term, of course. It's cheaper for them to push out crap that'll die and be in the trash in 3 years. Engineering products for longer lifespans would be a shift in engineering/design mindset. It probably would also push minimum device costs upwards at least a little bit, but, that's not a bad thing either - the slogan is "reduce, reuse, recycle", in that order, and "reduce" there means simply buy less or buy things that last longer. A shift away from planned obsolescence isn't the worst thing culturally, we don't want to encourage design-for-disposability.
Especially as Moore's Law slows, hardware is relevant for longer and longer periods of time. For example, a lot of people are finding that their GPUs are dying before they're actually irrelevant as hardware. It's not just NVIDIA who had bumpgate, a ton of hardware from that era failed over time due to faulty solder and probably could have been fixed with an hour of a tech's work.
Even worse, they're often dropped from support. There's really nothing wrong with a R9 290X as a GPU, but AMD won't support it with software anymore, despite the fact that it basically works anyway and it's pretty much purely a software lockout (which third parties have hacked and bypassed), because they want you to buy the new one. Wouldn't it be nice if GPUs were just expected to work for 10 years from purchase and that was covered by warranty and software support?
There are an increasing number of people who do hang onto hardware for 5-10 years because the relevant lifespan is getting longer and longer, and we should encourage that and require companies to support those consumption patterns. Just like not gluing together phones to make the battery irreplaceable, we really should be making sure electronics bumpouts don't fail in 3-5 years and that companies don't dump-and-run on the software.
Routers are another one where the software support is just egregious, too. How many rando Linksys or TP-Link or whatever actually get an update when a bunch of new vulnerabilities in WPA or whatever are discovered? Not that many, and "just install OpenWRT" is not a society-level answer especially when companies are locking down hardware.
Growing up poor, I was always a few generations behind, rocking a 486 DX2 when the PII & PIII where the latest and greatest. 33kbps modem when others had 56k. When I was 10ish Me and my older brother would go to the thrift store and dig through the computer parts, it was an adventure.
> When I was 10ish Me and my older brother would go to the thrift store and dig through the computer parts, it was an adventure.
I miss that too. Thrift stores suck now, they're pulling all the good clothes out and selling them to upcyclers and pulling all the cool electronics and cameras and other stuff and selling them on ShopGoodwill and ebay.
And ShopGoodwill is pretty absurd, almost everything is sold as-is and uninspected, and prices are just as high as ebay if not sometimes higher.
The days of wandering through a goodwill and finding some neat stuff at a bargain price are gone now, unfortunately.
Back when HDD would fail really a lot warranty was working. I'd happily fill an online form, Web 1.0 style, and then send my Seagate (I'm in Europe, was sending them to the Netherlands IIRC) disks and a few weeks later I'd receive a new drive.
I probably still have a few screenshots of these forms somewhere.
I am not sure why you want a 10x refund, but it seems like your request is easily met by current warrantees. A 1TB WD SN850X advertises 1200TBW endurance, rather more than you require.
Seems clear the idea is to make sure that companies err well on the side of lifespan rather than designing something that fails a month after the warranty expires. Because if they're cutting it close, a decent number of units are going to fall under the warranty line and they'll be liable.
Even if a company is required to stand behind the product, a lot of consumers won't pursue it if it's not perceived to be worth the trouble. Do you care about the 120GB drive you bought in 2012? Not really. Do you care if you can get 10x the original ($1/gb) purchase price for it? Sure, $1200 is worth my trouble.
As they say - "A times B times C, if that's less than X, the cost of a recall, we don't do one".
I'm not OP and am not gonna die on this hill as a point of policy, but if 9/10 consumers just shrug their shoulders and accept that their 8yr old drive has failed and throw it in the garbage, that's still a bad thing at a society-wide level where you want people to be using hardware for longer and longer periods of time. Especially as moore's law tapers down even further and hardware becomes relevant for longer and longer periods of time - a R9 290X is still a pretty nice piece of hardware!
Michigan used to do something very similar with checkout price scanners - if the price coded in the system was more than advertised, you got 10 times the difference up to a limit. And the point was to get retailers to pay fucking attention because a 50 cent pricing error on a can of chili could cost them 5 bucks. Punitive damages, with citizens who spot the violations receiving the bounty.
