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"
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.
@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.
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”.