Comment by rkomorn
4 hours ago
A lot of the other responses say something along the lines of "of course people have more incentive not to mess up, they care about their own lives more than corporations care about getting sued" and sure, that's true in general, but:
- people try to wingsuit through narrow obstacles and miss
- people try to build their own planes and helicopters and die
- people try to build submersible vehicles to go see the titanic and, uh, don't have a 100% success rate
- people try to build steam-powered rockets and die
"It's their life, they won't fuck it up" doesn't exactly cover a lot of behaviors.
I'd argue home-rolling your own medical device firmware is closer to daredevil/"hold my beer" behavior than normal.
None of these have anything to do with your average diabetic loop hacker. You are comparing people that live for the thrills with people that are just trying to live.
They're also people who had a lot of confidence in their own skills (including thinking they knew better than others) and ended up being wrong.
I would say that can have a lot to do with your average diabetic loop hacker.
I'd like some proof that the embedded programmers working for 'the man' at medical device companies are better and more motivated than those that are hacking on loop devices.
You're comparing people with a death wish in disguise with people that are extremely motivated to improve the QOL and they're very careful about how they do this, in fact if you read up on this you'd notice the insane attention to detail and the very rigorous process, on par with what I've seen in industry and in fact probably better than most.
All of this talk in this thread makes me think back to a time when people were laughing at that Finnish kid that was making his own OS with his buddies. Surely nobody would ever trust their business, their property or the lives to open source.
I checked and this is actually hacker news, not the BSA.
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