Bogus, batshit, banal, bizarre, or bicubic: Assorted News

[Büge]

Or The Abyss

[Mongrel]

I'm seeing articles that the window in the cabin was rated down to 1500 feet. They were going 4000 feet deep.

lol

lmao

Maybe 4000 metres? The Titanic is 12,000 feet down.

[Yoji]

I know people are advising against it, but I'm still getting hung up on how the sub is apparently controlled with an old game controller. I don't want to drag on it if it works. But considering the trouble I had to go through to get a more recent model to overcome the mindnumbing high-stakes challenge of working with a goddamned Pilotwings 64 emulator, that feels like a pretty big if. Maybe too big of an if to trust it.

And I get the impulse to go with more off-the-shelf parts. I hang out at r/Nerf, and I get pretty tired of seeing people strutting around with fancy machined parts used where repurposed plumbing couplers will do just as well. In that case, "garbage in, greatness out" kinda gives me the warm fuzzies. But not in the case of amateur deep sea diving. So maybe don't brag that you sourced hardware from an RV supplier or hold up a piss bottle as your "restroom" if you want to inspire confidence in me.

[Upthorn]

The kind of people who got in that sub have a deep-seated psychological need to believe they are on the forefront of technological innovation, that all that development stifling regulation is needless waste, and that it is possible for one smart outsider tinkering in their garage to totally disrupt any industry, no matter how developed and researched it is.

It's an integral part of a whole host of other corollary bullshit necessary to support a worldview where the current distribution of wealth is an exact reflection of each individual's merit.

[Mongrel]

One of the things to keep in perspective is that while the two fields do have some non-overlapping challenges, submersibles and submarines are, by definition, more difficult to engineer and subject to vastly higher stresses than (current) spacecraft. It's the payload rockets that are the hard part of space.

So if you wouldn't trust a space capsule with bits from an RV store, guided by bootleg PS2 controllers off Alibaba...

[beatbandito]

This is actually kind of true. The controller shown in the sub is a modified version of one of the logitech controllers available at the time that would have included the maplestory codes.

[Newbie]

It's not the controller, it's the lack of any alternative to the controller.

[Mongrel]

Yeah I mean the problem is you have no idea how reliable those things are because they're cheaply made, and while that's fine if you have say, spares on board, I didn't see anything to indicate that they did.

Also I like this additional only-kinda-related comment he made a bit further down.

A fun thing about computer skills is that as you have more of them, the number of computer problems you have doesn't go down.

This is because as a beginner, you have troubles because you don't have much knowledge.

But then you learn a bunch more, and now you've got the skills to do a bunch of stuff, so you run into a lot of problems because you're doing so much stuff, and only an expert could figure them out.

But then one day you are an expert. You can reprogram everything and build new hardware! You understand all the various layers of tech!

And your problems are now legendary. You are trying things no one else has ever tried. You Google them and get zero results, or at best one forum post from 1997. You discover bugs in the silicon of obscure processors. You crash your compiler. Your software gets cited in academic papers because you accidentally discovered a new mathematical proof while trying to remote control a vibrator. You can't use the wifi on your main laptop because you wrote your own uefi implementation and Intel has a bug in their firmware that they haven't fixed yet, no matter how much you email them. You post on mastodon about your technical issue and the most common replies are names of psychiatric medications. You have written your own OS but there arent many programs for it because no one else understands how they have to write apps as a small federation of coroutine-based microservices. You ask for help and get Pagliacci'd, constantly.

But this is the natural of computer skills: as you know more, your problems don't get easier, they just get weirder.

:thad:

[beatbandito]

pkang pkang pkang

[Thad]

Yeah I mean the problem is you have no idea how reliable those things are because they're cheaply made, and while that's fine if you have say, spares on board, I didn't see anything to indicate that they did.

I'd consider Logitech to be one of the better third-party controller manufacturers, but apparently that model in particular has connectivity issues.

And even if it didn't, you shouldn't be using a wireless controller in a mission-critical environment in the first damn place. At least it's not Bluetooth, but still, this is one of those situations where a nice reliable wired connection is in order, and yes, multiple other devices in case something goes wrong with the first one.

All of which assumes this submersible should exist in the first place, which of course it should not.

[Mongrel]

Oh my god, I didn't even realize it wasn't a wired connection.

[Upthorn]

Despite the many, significant, structural and mechanical reasons for the mission failure, I'm still a huge fan of the dark-horse theory that sub crashed because the controller batteries ran out.

[Joxam]

So, they lost the sub before for like 5 hours. Their response was to shut off the command ship's internet connection so no one would post anything on social media. This time they waited 8 hours to tell anyone they had a problem. Imagine being the CEO of the company (who is one of the dudes dead down there) and realizing you're dying in no small part due to you're own fucked up policy on what to do when the thing goes missing.

[Thad]

I think if these people had that level of capacity for self-reflection, they wouldn't be in this situation in the first place.

[Mongrel]

I was wondering if that was an actual procedure, or pure panic from a crew with no plan other than "Ask the boss".

Oh, another thing that's come up in the news is that at some point in the past year or two that submersible's hull had been downgraded to 3000m depth due to metal fatigue and was regraded again to 4000m again this year, but no one who will speak to the news knows how, why, or what sort of repairs, if any, were done.

That doesn't mean they didn't in fact do something to reinforce it, but no one having any records of that isn't exactly the greatest sign. As the article a few posts back suggests it's not so much that they used or did a specific this or that, it's that taken together they paint a picture of an org run by a guy who gave no fucks. A catastrophic critical failure is when, not if, at that point.

[Friday]

Engineering catastrophes are always fascinating to learn about. Well, fascinating and horrifying. My personal favorite is the Sampoong Department Store collapse, which is just a clusterfuck of everyone involved making the absolute most amazingly shitfucked choices possible over and over.

Sounds like that kind of thing is what's going on here, basically. Except instead of killing 502 innocent people and injuring 937 more, it killed 4 rich people and a CEO who literally did it to himself.

[Mongrel]

I was wondering if that was an actual procedure, or pure panic from a crew with no plan other than "Ask the boss".

Well apparently shutting off the internet was indeed procedure, because as it turns out this isn't even the first time their sub went missing for hours.

[Thad]

So, they lost the sub before for like 5 hours.

it turns out this isn't even the first time their sub went missing for hours.

Mongrel.

It's okay to slow down and read posts carefully before you respond to them.

[Mongrel]

So, they lost the sub before for like 5 hours.

it turns out this isn't even the first time their sub went missing for hours.

Mongrel.

It's okay to slow down and read posts carefully before you respond to them.

You know, I decided not to needle you for completely missing Buge's large image post four above yours in the journalism thread.

[Grath]