Re: https://murad.social/users/pablo/statuses/01M7DKNQ4P7XD3Z7PSQH9PCDFHThis is the sort of thing I'm referring to with https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1794739419.625208The "How complex systems fail" tretise was written in 1998 by someone with experience in system failures, but whose views are by no means the last word on the subject and were not even at the time it was written. Also, I suspect the austerity economics we've all been suffering under since that time has led to significant degradations compared to the state of things in 1998.There is a certain irreducible complexity in socio-technical systems, but I think in reality we are far away from having systems that are so well engineered that most failures are attributable to it. Human accountability for deploying potentially dangerous systems that are too complex to analyze matters regardless.#dev #tech #software #engineering #complexity #ComplexSystems

I've seen a few people say of the Microsoft and FAA incidents that it's foolish to seek failure points because these are complex systems and complex systems do not yield to such analysis.While that's often true of complex systems, I think this misses the point, dangerously. We can and frequently do engineer out this kind of complexity. That's what engineering and . The failure in these instances is that this appears not to have been done, or not done adequately.Socio-technological systems have existed for millenia. Yes, things are more complicated now. But that does not justify throwing up our hands and saying "welp, complex systems, no way to know". There are ways to know: you engineer the system such that when something goes wrong there is an analysis to be done that reveals causes. If that analysis is not possible, you're not finished engineering. Deploying a poorly engineered system is a fault traceable to individuals, and they ought to be accountable.We are today awash in systems that have not been engineered properly, software systems especially. Don't let that blind you or lead you to fatalism.#dev #tech #software #engineering #FAA #Microsoft

I put the text below on LinkedIn in response to a post there and figured I'd share it here too because it's a bit of a step from what I've been posting previously on this topic and might be of some use to someone.In retrospect I might have written non-sense in place of nonsense.If you're in tech the Han reference might be a bit out of your comfort zone, but Andrews is accessible and measured.It's nonsense to say that coding will be replaced with "good judgment". There's a presupposition behind that, a worldview, that can't possibly fly. It's sometimes called the theory-free ideal: given enough data, we don't need theory to understand the world. It surfaces in AI/LLM/programming rhetoric in the form that we don't need to code anymore because LLM's can do most of it. Programming is a form of theory-building (and understanding), while LLMs are vast fuzzy data store and retrieval systems, so the theory-free ideal dictates the latter can/should replace the former. But it only takes a moment's reflection to see that nothing, let alone programming, can be theory-free; it's a kind of "view from nowhere" way of thinking, an attempt to resurrect Laplace's demon that ignores everything we've learned in the >200 years since Laplace forwarded that idea. In that respect it's a (neo)reactionary viewpoint, and it's maybe not a coincidence that people with neoreactionary politics tend to hold it. Anyone who needs a more formal argument can read Mel Andrews's , or Byung-Chul Han's (which argues, among other things, that this is a nihilistic).#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #coding #dev #tech #SoftwareDevelopment #programming #nihilism #LinkedIn

Regarding last boost: "Firefox For Web Developers" is out here urging me to stop using Firefox.#Mozilla #Firefox #DarkPatterns#antifeatures #AISlop #NoAI #NoAIWebBrowsers #AICruft #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #tech #dev #web

Mozilla's new CEO is all-in on AI, though, regardless of what Firefox users want: https://lwn.net/Articles/1050826/Third: Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.He says the word "trust" a whole bunch of times yet intends to turn an otherwise nice web browser into a slop-slinging platform. I don't expect this will work out very well for anyone."It will evolve into a modern AI browser" sounds like a threat. Good way to start off on the right foot, new Mozilla CEO (sarcasm).#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AntiFeatures #DarkPatterns #AISlop #firefox #mozilla #NoAI

I'm glad to add Firefox to the list of apps I have to constantly check to make sure they haven't turned back on all the anti-features I disabled.#firefox #mozilla #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #SmartIsSurveillance #tech #dev #web