Björkus "No time_t to Die" DorkusOh cool, another Chrome 0-day abusing integer overflow.
Neat.
Great.
Awesome.
Meanwhile, we'll be writing about how we need to have "high impact libraries that help lots of users" and then give examples like CLI Parsing/JSON Parsing before we sit down and go "we should have some standard library types / functions for integers...?".
v.v.v.v. cool prioritization we do here.
We keep calling ourselves software engineers, but engineers elsewhere advance their industry by analyzing failures and building up tools to stop those and make them standard industry practice!
But we'll just have the same 6 problems, on a regular spin cycle, for like 40 years.
David Nash@thephd I’ve said before that I’m undecided on whether or not “engineer” is an appropriate title for people working in routine software development and design, but also that people who do want to use the title absolutely should take the time to learn about engineering failures in multiple disciplines. Software failures like the classic Therac-25 fuckup are bare minimum table stakes; it’s a good idea to find something else (ideally, several different types of something else) and learn more about how people addressed those failures, learned from them, and made sure they (and other related cases) didn’t keep happening.
@thephd Here's a concrete (no pun intended) example of a very basic fuckup that should have been caught, wasn't, and killed a bunch of people: the Hyatt hotel suspended walkway that collapsed during an event with hundreds of people, killing over 100 and injuring over 200 more.
The cause? A sudden design change that was inadequately discussed and reviewed, which caused the walkway to support twice the load of the original design, which *itself* was not fully up to proper design specs. The engineer who signed off on the original plans later said "any first-year engineering student could figure it [the error] out." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse
@thephd One of the outcomes of *this* fuckup: normalization of the idea that (from the article above) "structural engineers are now ultimately responsible for reviewing shop drawings by fabricators." This was the position adopted by the American Society of Civil Engineers as a direct result.