Graham Sutherland / Polynomialtalking with my wife about failure modes and robust design, and had the occasion to use the unique phrase "any failure mode that results in your bra being advertised with a picture of Hitler's face is not a good one"
(yes, this is a real-world example)
in case the reply doesn't federate, the story is here:
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial (@gsuberland@chaos.social)
@q@glauca.space an online clothing shop decided they needed a placeholder image as a default for all unlisted sales items, and someone had the thought "hmm we should make it something that really makes it obvious we didn't set an image yet, so nobody can ever forget to apply an image", and thus the default foolishly became a picture of Hitler's face, forgetting the golden rule that all processes will eventually fail at some point.
jamesb (MW1CGG)@gsuberland
In 200 years time a religious sect of what was left of America will be shaving and cultivating their nipple hair to look like a Hitler tache and no-one remembers why but ZAT IS ZE VAY!
In 200 years time a religious sect of what was left of America will be shaving and cultivating their nipple hair to look like a Hitler tache and no-one remembers why but ZAT IS ZE VAY!
Tamonten@gsuberland yeah, I don’t know how long Leeds’ educational AD had wildly inappropriate dictators in there because a bunch of 18yr olds were tasked with populating the test environment with users. Test that suddenly became prod. Natch.
I think we got rid of that batch, but Hugh Janus stayed for far longer than necessary.
FishermansEnemy 「漁師の敵」 
@tamonten @gsuberland I have a very inappropriate mental image of the guy in question giving his famous salute with the caption “my eyes are up here”
@FishermansEnemy @gsuberland and how is the seeking of help going?
Q ✨ 🔜 CoSin@gsuberland I... do I want to know?
@q an online clothing shop decided they needed a placeholder image as a default for all unlisted sales items, and someone had the thought "hmm we should make it something that really makes it obvious we didn't set an image yet, so nobody can ever forget to apply an image", and thus the default foolishly became a picture of Hitler's face, forgetting the golden rule that all processes will eventually fail at some point.
Jon Wood@gsuberland @q loooool. I see how it ended up there but my god, do not make your placeholder image Hitler!
F4GRX Sébastien@gsuberland @q what the fucking hell
Nixie
eva lauren, 🐸☂️@gsuberland @Nixie @f4grx @q I think I’ve found it (unless it happened twice…) — apparently the system picked a random photo from every photo they had and it happened to be a hitler book…
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/store-uses-picture-hitlers-book-6971303
@eval yikes lol
@q on one fateful day, someone hit publish on a listing without setting a product image, and boom. black frilly bra for sale, with Hitler's face as the product image.
someone noticed, took a screenshot, the media picked it up, big mess.
gaytabase@gsuberland @q christ
Timjan"This is the 'assume that every gun is loaded' of the publishing world".
Ben C@gsuberland @q I am reminded of a place where it was decided to remove a bunch of personal data from a system that didn’t really need it for users that were linked from elsewhere and a developer took the “dummy data” suggestion a little too literally. Unfortunately they also didn’t realise this system fed into marketing emails until they started getting complaints from customers receiving an email that started “Dear Dummy”.
@gsuberland that is a perfectly believable and yet utterly horrifying story
R@gsuberland @q even doing it "properly" doesn't necessarily save you -- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071120-00/?p=24453
You even have to watch out for your placeholder bitmaps - The Old New Thing
During the betas of Windows Vista, the final set of sample logon pictures had yet to be determined, so a bunch of placeholder bitmaps were created. These placeholders consisted of the letters FPO in a box. FPO is a standard term in desktop publishing; it stands for For Position Only. In order to permit designers to […]
@r @gsuberland oh no… not the FPÖ
@q @gsuberland For Positioning Österreich
Phil Ashby 
🍵I was once responsible for website content management for a part of BT (BTexact if anyone remembers), and regularly used this placeholder, because pretty much all the images were advertising. Of course it leaked a few times...
ROTOPE~1 
@gsuberland Must be a *real cool* dev that didn't have a single better pic sitting in their memes folder.
(I probably would have gotten into far worse legal, but better social, trouble by putting "the entirety of Shrek in a 4mb gif" as the placeholder)
@q @gsuberland I sure as hell do want to know. Did some LLM decide that fash need bras as well?
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial (@gsuberland@chaos.social)
@q@glauca.space an online clothing shop decided they needed a placeholder image as a default for all unlisted sales items, and someone had the thought "hmm we should make it something that really makes it obvious we didn't set an image yet, so nobody can ever forget to apply an image", and thus the default foolishly became a picture of Hitler's face, forgetting the golden rule that all processes will eventually fail at some point.
Scarlet ❤️🔥Graham Sutherland / Polynomial (@gsuberland@chaos.social)
@q@glauca.space an online clothing shop decided they needed a placeholder image as a default for all unlisted sales items, and someone had the thought "hmm we should make it something that really makes it obvious we didn't set an image yet, so nobody can ever forget to apply an image", and thus the default foolishly became a picture of Hitler's face, forgetting the golden rule that all processes will eventually fail at some point.
Arx@gsuberland Put that on a T-shirt.