Comment by tredre3

It is a good stick tho

The general public does, for those in the respective fields those safety lessons are ingrained in proper procedures and constititional knowledge. That's why start-ups in those fields are risky, usually their founders have never witnessed said procedures and knowledge at work, never worked under those procedures. Employees, especially early on, tend to be young an inexperienced as well. As a result, those companies neither have the constitiational knowledge nor the processes of their more mature counter part. Some try up make for this with "hacker" culture...

Those things are valid for everything from med tech to aerospace and, yes, cars. The dangerous thing so, and I saw that in real life, is when that culture spreads. Usually through juniors who gained their first experience in said start-ups, and not one of those legacy shops.

Edit: None of what I wrote prevents legacy giants from cutting corners themselves, the B737 MAX showed us as much.

If you can't afford to qualify the components on your 4000m diving vehicle, you can't afford to make a 4000m diving vehicle.

See: the fact that they lost their diving vehicle.

Not all COTS are equal. There are plenty of off the shelf controllers built for boats that are designed to handle wet environments such as might be found in an enclosed space where people are exhaling water vapor etc. They don’t however cost 30$ nor do they cost anything close to the R&D required to make an equivalent product.

Of note they might not have condensation in normal conditions, but condensation is exactly the kind of thing that results in cascading failures when just one seemingly minor thing fails.

Absent engineering, an engineered solution is no better than COTS, agreed.

Absent engineering, people die unnecessarily.

Trade offs.

They were charging a quarter million per head. Budget should not have been a concern.

I get using COTS but the decisions for this submarine would indicate that they have no grasp of the concept of failure modes.

Decisions like using a 3rd party controller (known to be terrible), a wireless controller (introducing a lot of extra risk from batteries to connection problems), and a door that cannot be opened from the inside (what if they get lost but manage to surface?) are all very sus.

NASA gets all that done on $28Bn/year.

There's a huge list of companies that have that much revenue.

In some cases, it doesn't matter, but we shouldn't use cash as an excuse to cut corners with safety and reliability.

NASA isn't producing in-house, they still source from third parties. So, if you want, or need, something from scratch, you pay for the development and industrialisation and then for the parts. And those suppliers are quote often the same ones as they are for the COTS stuff.

It many companies are going places NASA fears to tread. 12000 feet is pretty fucking deep. That’s why the wreck took so long to find in the first place.

You’re conducting a technical analysis that overlooks the legal analysis around fitness for a particular purpose.

It’s not about having a RGB controller, it’s the fact you can get a COTS controller built for boats which is vastly less likely to crap out unexpectedly due to say condensation in an enclosed environment where people are exhaling water vapor.

You might generally be fine, but many crash investigation involved some cheap component failing as part of a longer sequence. Ie something fails and humidity increases then XYZ fails until eventually your margin of safety is gone and everyone dies.

I have both a Logitech Gamepad and Logitech headset that are going ~15 years no issues. I wound up setting aside one of the MX mice after like a decade so I could have a mouse that had sensitivity buttons. It's my daily driver on my work system still.

Maybe those changes are recent but IME you've always had to figure out which are the quality lines of product from any peripheral manufacturer. I've seen dozens of the cheapo Logitech headsets broken and tossed over the years both at work and among friends. Meanwhile my G35 headset bought in 2009 has required two sets of replacement cushions in that time and still works great.

Even MS back in the Sidewinder days had their warts -- their gamepad was complete garbage while their Joystick was awesome (I still have mine).

I think GP's overall point though that peripherals like this aren't exactly unsuitable shouldn't be ignored. There's a huge advantage to something inexpensive that you can cheaply carry replacement parts for or whole replacement devices for. Once you go fly by wire (or dive by wire I guess in this case) it's not clear to me what advantage there is in designing your own bespoke system.

Well my G500s is working fine for last 10.

Also that controller is getting like 1/50th of use it would get under normal gamer so that's insanely weird detail to focus on.

I'd also imagine dropping ballast would need a controller in the first place.

From what I've seen Logitech stuff is next to indestructible (believe me I've tried).

I've replaced the 518 with a g300 (I think) and while it was a good mouse, it broke down way too quick for my liking. Now a happy user of a deathadder hyperspeed.

The mx518 (and mx400 before it) were godlike but the newer stuff has been distinctly mediocre.

I had to return a mx master 3 after a year when the left click button wore out.

I still have my rumblepad 2, it is a fine controller. Why they would use wireless here is beyond me however.

I have the same keyboard (MX Keys). I didn't have the flashing-light problem, but the lights nevertheless would constantly turn themselves off, after a very short (~5s?) period of inactivity.

I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to find a fix, including removing an internal cable and putting electrical tape over the top. Nothing worked. The closest I got was keeping the wireless keyboard plugged into its USB-C charger so that the timeout period before shutoff was longer than it was in battery-only mode.

All of which is annoying, because it's not cheap (>$100), and the fix is so stupefyingly simple - an addition of one or two settings in the configuration software. And, yes, countless people have reported this to Logitech and their 'support' consists, at best, of saying "I'll pass this on to The Team".

Never have I been more tempted to go all-in and become a firmware hacker, though the feasibility in time and probability of success are both quite low.

To be fair, Microsoft also sold a lot of Xboxes that were misdesigned from a thermal perspective, and thus red ringed themselves.