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I wholeheartedly agree with your comment. The “move fast and break things” mentality works for the banal and unimportant, but not for the significant or important.

Who cares if a social media site is offline for a day? Society will be fine. Users will be fine. Is anyone really going to miss a random social media post lost due to misbehaving code? Probably not on balance.

But if you’re attempting to build a quality, say, EMR/EHR, or some kind of industrial control software, or a password manager, you have certain duties that are completely incompatible with that mentality.




Worked to get into space with SpaceX. ULA is trying the old approach. We can look at the difference live.


None of the SpaceX ideas where actually that new, rockets lanfed already decades earlier. That ULA got complacent is a differwnt story, ULA is far from being the only competitor of SpaceX outside of US government launches.

Not tgat SpaceX isn't imoressive, it is. They did move woth less beauraucracy, not with more risk. Kind of like the Covid vaccines, less red tapes speeds things up. Otherwise, SpaceX seems to be rather conservative ubder Shotwell's leadership as far as safety is concerned.

Dpace flight is, funny enough, less regulated that commercial aviation and tue aero part of aerospace.


Every time peoples life, health and well-being depend on your action advocating for "move fast and break things" should be reason for immediate termination. The severance package can be negotiated later.


While I agree with you generally, one could make the argument that if your aim is to drastically disrupt some domain, you may wish to adopt a riskier but faster path even if you're working in a safety-critical field, because the "slow and safe" route means more lives lost / negatively impacted while you slowly perfect your solution.

If you'd humor my extreme utilitarian view for a minute, I would argue both autonomous self driving and some medical endeavors could save many more lives if we, as a society, said "you get a budget of 10k. 10k lives you can severely negatively impact to deliver impact greater than that number" - basically giving you an investment/debt you repay to society via your future impact. Currently, traffic fatalities are at ~38k/year in the US (with over 2M/year injured), and the numbers for leading medical causes are staggering (heart disease ~700k/year, cancer ~600k/year, etc.). I would argue our current processes for breakthroughs in areas where health or safety are involved simply lean too far towards the "safe" end of the spectrum.

One anecdote I can share is a friend who worked for over a decade on a system where patients could buy a medical test at a pharmacy, take a urine sample at home, and get lab quality results using their phone's camera. The tech was ready in their first year of running. They built a suite of validations and tested things across hundreds of phone models, they really did their part well because they truly care. Getting things FDA approved and in patients' hands took much longer, because the processes are extremally slow and designed to reduce risk by almost all means necessary. While that's a good idea in theory, it didn't stop a scam like Theranos (because when you're intentionally dishonest rules don't always help), and it did make it so my friend's company took a lot longer before being able to get fast, accurate, test results for many different metrics to rural and poor communities where lab testing can be an issue...


Theranos isbthe exception proofing the FDA right, the 737 Max is the exception proofing the FAA right. And no, there is no such thing as a "budget" of lost lives to further innovation. That approach is just deeply cynic, and should ve in itself ground to not work in any of those industries. The 737 Max and Theranos do show so that there already to many people with that exact mindset out and about. And while Theranos didn't cause any death (at least not that I am aware of), the MAX indeed did. All for profit, all for moving fast. For me, that is simply not acceptable.


>> And while Theranos didn't cause any death (at least not that I am aware of), the MAX indeed did

The Max killed 346.

Theranos is directly related to 1 (Ian gibbons) but it is probable that the indirect number is much much higher. Between suicides for false positives, and lack of treatment for false negatives, there are significant outcomes.

Given that they delivered at least 150 000 incorrect results, I'm going to wildly speculate here that they are more deadly than Boeing.

Context matters. Good strategies for a social media company does not necessarily make it good advice for companies in another context. Turns out "breaking things" is not terribly good advice to airplanes or medicine.


I agree with you fully. However, the way I read int0x2e’s comment was as a theoretical example of the logic they were putting forth. Not as advocacy for actually taking that tact.

Typically we empower governments with restraints to prevent them from allowing those tactics, and for good reason. (Even if in reality it is imperfect).


> as a society, said "you get a budget of 10k. 10k lives you can severely negatively impact to deliver impact greater than that number"

10k negative impacts multiplied by every startup, most of which will never get to the stage where they’re able to deliver their “benefit”, and even then, how do we quantify whether it was worth the cost?


> Who cares if a social media site is offline for a day? Society will be fine. Users will be fine.

Not just fine... better off.




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