Comment by sanxiyn

3 days ago

It's more like: food processing tool A is known to be defective. We ask employees of this restaurant and supply chains to avoid food processing tool A. This seems eminently reasonable. The question is whether the tool is in fact defective.

That's just it though. The tool(s) aren't necessarily defective. Just because you can chop off your own hand with an chainsaw or do a botch job of sawing a plank of wood because you weren't watching what you were doing with the electric saw, does not by itself make the tools (Chainsaw, Electric Saw) defective.

  • Or does it?

    https://youtu.be/gOReKxH5NlA?t=154

    I agree "not by itself" was said, mostly your comment just made me think of this newer tech for table saws. And, made me think "when is a design inadequacy a defect"?

    • My partner went to a carpentry school in Seattle 7 years ago where I learned about sawstops and I remember thinking the same. A pretty amazing technology exists that saves lives and limbs, and it is weird that we allow table saw without this technology.

      Interestingly there was a discussion here about exactly that a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39977058

  • The tool makes the food taste bad in ... say ... 20% of the cases, and in 5% of the cases it contaminates the food with salmonella.

    Yes you can have the chefs taste the food before serving, and test it for salmonella. But it would be completely reasonable for a regulator to ban such a tool, and even more reasonable for restaurants to have a strict policy against using this tool.

    • You may as well ban every technological advancement in society then. There are risks to everything we do, build and support. Ban 'em all! Let's go back to the dark ages where everything is safe!

      3 replies →

Why don't you come back to talking about software rather than using terrible analogies.

LLMs write bad code / so do people, a lot of really bad code.

LLMs write security bugs / so do people, so many god damned security bugs.

Sure, kind of, if the supposed defect is only one of the reasons, and if ‘food processing tool A’ was a hot-button topic that many people have deeply philosophical and ideological opinions about. Oh, and for good measure, if the proposed ban is for ‘food processors’ in general, and a material amount of pushback is coming from a bunch of greybeard industrial cooks that used one particular food processor a couple of years ago, weren’t all that impressed, and have been railing against food processors ever since.

Ironically, any SoTA LLM would be able to make a better analogy than you. Sometimes the average human is the slop generator