Post #428447

2026-02-26 11:16 UTC

Many, many years ago, at school for CS and before that interning at NASA Ames, I learned to take programming seriously as engineering work, and also the level of rigor that engineering work requires. In the intervening thirty years, I have had to come to terms with the degree to which this attitude is rare in theory and vanishingly rare in practice again and again. Tooling has gotten better, but the rigor applied to the average line of code has gotten worse. I would hope that safety-critical systems would be different, and in some cases they really are. However, the number of people who want to build secure communications systems that they want to be safety critical and who expect thousands of people to literally use in a case where a breach of the threat model means the users will die and who as developers cannot bother to meet the basic design rigor requirement of 2006 — have a fucking threat model that is accurate and up to date — will never cease to shock me.

Replies (5)

@stoklund@oldbytes.space 2026-02-26 16:07

@dymaxion it was shocking to learn about the kind of code Toyota shipped in their electronic throttle control system 20 years ago. But it was probably pretty solid compared to what’s in a Tesla today.

Open ##1610801
@aarbrk@mstdn.mx 2026-02-26 18:56

@dymaxion There does seem to be space for superior modeling and engineering, now that most firms have signed onto the More and Worse approach.

Open ##1610802
@rootwyrm@weird.autos 2026-02-26 20:19

@dymaxion oh, you would be absolutely fucking *horrified* at the approach in many life-and-safety-critical systems now. And I'm not talking heart monitors. I'm talking systems where control errors can do tens of millions of dollars in damage and potentially maim or kill any operators on or near the equipment. No, believe me, it's even worse than that. No, still worse. Nope, keep going. Once you reach 'us-east-1 and S3 as a SPOF for machine control' you're /starting/ to get there.

Open ##1610803
@marshray@infosec.exchange 2026-02-27 01:31

@dymaxion Those “move fast and break things” clowns really destroyed the profession didn’t they.

Open ##1610807
@vonxylofon@witter.cz 2026-02-27 06:59

@dymaxion Don't worry, IBM's stock just dropped 10% because Anthropic said it's a good idea to migrate critical COBOL systems using Claude instead of understanding what's going on in the code. We'll be fine...

Open ##1610808