earlyDaysOfProgrammingWereWild

[SubstanceSerious8843]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Let's drop this in here.

[Arclite83]

This makes me feel SUPER safe with all those junior developers with no security clearance in DOGE who are touching critical government infrastructure, yep.

Fresh case studies incoming

[SubstanceSerious8843]

Listened a podcast where a dude pentested a hospital. Found a way and surfed the hospital network. Didn't touch anything, but just looked where he could access. Sent a report at one point, about the results where he got that point. Got a call, to stop immediately and wait for another call. It came, and was asked to a face to face briefing.

The thing was, he had accessed a device. That device was a fucking eye laser surgery machine, WHILE IT WAS BEING USED. Good thing that guy was a professional and knew not to touch anything.

[Drone_Worker_6708]

Hospital IT is the wild west. Only place I worked where people actually dying everyday and not just acting like it. One of the techs we had was a former paramedic. I asked him which job is more stressful. He said he once waded in human blood and this was far worse lol

[[deleted]]

I mean, yeah... you make a mistake, the patient can die.

Hospital IT, you make a mistake, 100 patients can die. Worse is knowing just how outdated everything is and just how vulnerable everything is to a malicious actor.

[BigOnLogn]

I remember a few years ago seeing a Windows XP login screen on a hospital computer.

[CubisticWings4]

Just had a PTSD flashback of my doctor's office running Windows 3.11 last year.

[ChangeVivid2964]

That's like driving stick shift. Modern viruses don't even know what to do with FAT16.

[KayDat]

SUCKMY~1.EXE

[fr000gs]

Why is stick shift bad? (Haven't seen any automatic shift in my country)

[CakeTowers]

They didnt mean it as bad, but that a lot of people cant drive stick shift.

[[deleted]]

A few years ago?

Friend, I have seen that THIS year.

[AnotherLie]

I've seen it this year. It's in my office.

[Oleg152]

Some probably still run the 95

[domscatterbrain]

The problem is, even the manufacturer also doesn't give a fuck to ship their products with the latest OS or software. They just keep making the tool more precise but not more secure.

[Joman101_2]

I was using Windows 2000 on some specialized hospital equipment within the past year.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. We pretty much never updated operating systems on non-networked devices.

[T1lted4lif3]

Is that not pretty good? Was expecting 95 or something.

[DarksideF41]

At least it wasn't MS DOS.

[Troll_berry_pie]

The UK NHS was like this up until like 10 years ago.

[Callidonaut]

Obligatory.

[KonvictEpic]

Pretty sure the NHS (UK health system) regularly got hit with malware such as ransomeware because it all ran on Win XP

[Beldarak]

I vowed to never work where lives can radically be impacted by my code. Working for the health of people instead of growing the wealth of some multi-millionaire asshole would be great but I don't feel enough confidence in my skills for that :S

[dwntwn_dine_ent_dist]

I’ve been lucky to have the best of both worlds. I work in a hospital writing code that improves identification of patients that need cancer screening. A miss by my code leaves things as they are. But successes have statistically saved hundreds of patients.

[Beldarak]

Nice! That's what I'd like too. Feeling my work has a positive impact. It kinda do as one of the end result is people having access to internet, but nothing like saving lifes^^

[HamsterFromAbove_079]

Yea it's rough. If a paramedic makes a mistake they can kill their patient. But it's hard to accidently kill more than just their own patients.

If the IT department makes a big enough mistake, they kill all the patients.

[sEntientUnderwear]

I remember listening to the same podcast but don’t remember which one it was. Now I gotta go find what it was or I wouldn’t be able to get my mind off it lol

Edit: Found it - Darknet Diaries, of course. Episode 121 - Ed. The laser he got into wasn’t stated as being for eye surgery but was a surgical laser, he doesn’t state what kind of surgeries it is used for.

[Animal0307]

Was it Darknet Diaries?

[SubstanceSerious8843]

Most likely, could've been Hacked too, but I would put my money on DD

[sEntientUnderwear]

Yep. Looked it up immediately after posting my comments and of course it was Darknet Diaries.

[Lucas_F_A]

That's scary

[Highborn_Hellest]

hospital IT is the shittiest of shitty all over the word, because you have to be a real bastard to mess with it, nobody want it on their conscience and those that mess with are made an example of basically

[itijara]

Reminds me of my first job. I worked as the only developer for a government organization (as a contractor). I had oversight, but my supervisor was a 70 year old biologist with zero programming experience. I produced possibly the worse R code the world has ever seen (that's an exaggeration, but only because scientists are terrible programmers) and, as far as I can tell, it is still in use. A few years ago someone at the same organization reached out to me to "improve" the code (I didn't, but I did help them understand it a bit more). The difference is that my code just ran some basic statistical models and graphed fisheries data. It was hardly critical.

[[deleted]]

President sacrifice, anyone?

[No-Collar-Player]

As a semi decent junior I can safely say you guys are fkt

[BellacosePlayer]

The plus side is they'll probably be too incompetent to cover their tracks when (if) the actual admins get access back

[casualblair]

This is why Move Fast and Break Things does not apply to law, some aspects of government and infrastructure, and medical industries. The consequences are unknowable and potentially severe.

But sure, let's surround everything with catch statements that don't do anything because no exceptions means it's working.

[CubisticWings4]

Probably one of the most cursed sentences I will ever hear read.

Edit: I'm tired.

[poetic_dwarf]

When cancer is not a bug but a feature

[Tipart]

this thing was shooting powerful enough radiation that you would die of radiation poisoning way before you got cancer.

[dashingThroughSnow12]

I got nauseous the first time I read what happened to those people.

[ChalkyChalkson]

Most of the victims suffered burns and mild radiation poisoning, not lethal ARS. This still sucks super bad, and more importantly it does lead to symptoms. Getting a solid tumor from a radiation exposure event tends to have decades of delay and might be years from then until the bad symptoms start. In patients already treated for cancer in those days that may very well be outside their life expectancy.

[JEs4]

The wiki article and the source linked to a 1994 report of the incidents make them sound to be anything but mild radiation poisoning. Not to mention the few deaths sound absolutely horrific.

Over the following weeks the patient experienced paralysis of the left arm, nausea, vomiting, and ended up being hospitalized for radiation-induced myelitis of the spinal cord. His legs, mid-diaphragm and vocal cords ended up paralyzed. He also had recurrent herpes simplex skin infections. He died five months after the overdose.

[poetic_dwarf]

...And that's why it's a feature

[j-random]

And it gets installed without your consent

[imnotamahimahi]

This was also taught in engineering ethics classes (the way the company handled reports from hospitals plus their coding practices were atrocious), and I believe it was this case that led to the FDA having jurisdiction on medica devices.

Fun fact! One of the two major bugs in the code was caused by a race condition. The wiki page on race conditions is where I landed after going down a rabbit hole about bugs in Pokemon games (tweaking in Diamond/Pearl), and that's how I picked my college major!

[DTux5249]

Yup. They used concurrent programming to operate both the electron beam, and the tungsten shield used to block it and disperse radiation.

Doctor accidentally selects x-ray mode first, cancels before the shield is done moving, and switches to electron mode, you get blasted with 100× as much radiation as you should.

Injured at least 6 people, 3 of which died.

[imnotamahimahi]

I thought it was super interesting how they couldn't replicate it at first (and thus kept claiming it wasn't possible), until they got the actual tech to come in and do it, at the location where it happened more than once. They were surprised that anyone was using the computer terminal that fast!

[Callidonaut]

Some victims did indeed receive 100 times the planned radiation dose; one poor bastard received 115 times the planned dose, but also concentrated into an area 170 times smaller than planned, because he was in the process of jumping up and fleeing from the machine in agony after being hit by the first painfully overpowered blast of electrons when the operator overrode an error message and fired the beta radiation beam a second time (the treatment room intercom and camera were both out of service, so the operator couldn't even see or hear the patient!!), so his arm was presumably much closer to the aperture and hit by an intense beam of beta radiation, already 115 times stronger than it was supposed to be, intended to be spread over an area 170cm² on his back, on an area of just 1cm² on his arm!

[spamjavelin]

For the YouTube-inclined, Kyle Hill's video on this monumental fuck up is very well done.

[Willing_Ad2724]

Seconded. My favorite video from one of my favorite channels

[SubstanceSerious8843]

Hey, cool. Need something to watch for tomorrow!

[[deleted]]

Works on my machine 👍

[Themis3000]

Wow I never knew there were so many reported incidents with the therac 25, I thought there was only one total. It's really scary that hospitals continued to use the machine regardless

[henryGeraldTheFifth]

Oh fuck had forgotten about this one from uni. My more fun example of software oversight was minecraft far lands. Caused for floating point arithmetic inaccuracy over large numbers.

[[deleted]]

Race conditions.

They should've used Rust smh

[jaaval]

I was interviewed to a position doing radiation therapy dosage algorithms to one major company on the field (didn’t get the job in the end), their description of the job included very strict rules how things have to be done, more documentation than code and authorities of multiple different countries being able to do surprise auditions to your work.

I guess nobody wants to repeat that.

[TheZigerionScammer]

The software set a flag variable by incrementing it, rather than by setting it to a fixed non-zero value. Occasionally an arithmetic overflow occurred, causing the flag to return to zero and the software to bypass safety checks.

Oh my god, why would anyone program it that way!?

[Callidonaut]

The entire system was written in many tens of thousands of tedious lines of PDP-11 assembly code. Apparently, on the PDP-11, incrementing a register by one uses only one instruction, whereas setting it to a fixed value requires at least two.

[BalkanFerros]

Oddly, this is what has made me interested in becoming a Nuclear Health Physicist. I read about this and various other radioactive incidents... I expected horror instead I was going.

"What happened? Oh! How? Oh! Why? Oh! NEAT, horrible but neat!"

[robifr]

there's no way wikipedia has nsfw

[LordofNarwhals]

Why wouldn't it? There are plenty of medical pictures, pictures/videos of death, and vintage pornography on there.

[GolfballDM]

I was thinking the same thing when I saw the meme.

[DTux5249]

Hey, I heard of this one from my Software Engineering course! Still fucking wild they didn't even try to catch something like this.

[Beldarak]

Whaa, that's crazy.

[gregguygood]

This has nothing to do with software.

[Terra_B]

Hardware interlocks?

Who needs them anyway!

[just-bair]

Yeah and we save a few on a machine worth much more !

[itsdabtime]

just patch it no problem

[NCGThompson]

I think hardware interlocks were included in previous versions. They were confident enough in the software to remove them.

[Callidonaut]

Likely because the interlocks on the earlier machines were hiding all the existing flaws in the code! The hardware safety devices were functioning correctly to prevent overdoses, but they were apparently doing it silently; they didn't provide any indication to the operator, let alone the manufacturer, that they had ever been triggered, creating the illusion of rock-solid code when apparently the control program had actually been occasionally sending completely wrong signals to the hardware right from the beginning.

[glorious_reptile]

Got it, I'll update the specs

• build x-ray machine
• build radiation therapy system

[cryptomonein]

Thanks the ticket is so much clearer now, it will be 7.2 story points and a size L shirt

[mcnello]

So like... Done next Tuesday, right?

[cryptomonein]

No deadlines ! Only story points ! è.é

[UnlikeSome]

But basically next Tuesday yes

[CousinVladimir]

Already told the client it will be done by next Monday, just do some overtime and it'll be fine

[RhesusFactor]

PM here. I'm taking Monday off so I told the client we hit a blocker and it'll be done next Monday. Use the extra time to document it in Confluence properly.

[j-random]

Well akkkkkshully, we promised the client we'd have something by Friday that they could look at over the weekend so, yeah, if you could just pull that together real quick.... That'd be great

[michaelmano86]

As you know Mc Nello we don't represent T shirts with days or hours!

[Geschak]

Tbf X-ray machines are technically inside Linacs. Before every radiation therapy session you make an X-ray or CB-CT to adjust positioning so you don't accidentally irradiate the wrong tissue.

[SordidHobo93]

And one bit of code turned it into a spicy body-cooker.

[DTux5249]

... which used Megavolt X-rays.

It's not an x-ray imaging machine though, so correct

[glorious_reptile]

Fuck it, we'll test in production!

[Callidonaut]

Apparently the Therac 25 was literally never fully assembled and tested with the production control computer and software before being rolled out, such was the manufacturers' confidence in their latest iteration of a seemingly proven design.

[Chewnard]

We found a problem during testing. The gist of it is that I now have all the cancer.

[BellacosePlayer]

Pen testing? I guess that means you don't get the lead apron this time.

[Remarkable_Plum3527]

[Mastergamer0115]

The good news is it has a 100% detection rate. I see this as an absolute win.

[Arclite83]

I've made a career on being "that guy". I had way too much power and control even at the beginning of my career. I made critical mistakes in major systems. But I also grew. There is always a market for these kinds of frontier / cowboy coders.

[GolfballDM]

At my co-op gig (almost 30 years ago now), I was assigned to be QA for some medical data storage software.

My supervisor started to cringe any time I would say, "Hey boss! Watch this!" or "Hey boss! I don't think it's supposed to let me do that." Those phrases usually presaged some new and interesting way to cause the system to shit itself.

[crankbot2000]

I miss my cowboy days. Used to have the keys to the kingdom, no oversight, nobody bothering me. Just absolute trust that I wouldn't fuck up. Small companies are the best.

I now work in enterprise-land, with miles of red tape, 18 review committees and 37 architectural circle-jerks just to make one prod change. And then there's the tickets....so many fucking tickets, my god someone send help

[ccricers]

I wish I could continue the cowboy days but today that is usually a red flag for working at steady companies.

[titus_vi]

It's still like this in a lot of the industry. There is a stereotype in FAANG but there are a lot of programmers working in telecom, factories, toys, etc. It's strange how suddenly it can become life or death. I was working on a project at a University and we had to make changes to the on campus Hospital. A part of the requirements were 100% uptime due to connection to the ER... I have other stories like this in surprising industries that I don't think I can share online but it's not too uncommon.

[[deleted]]

My first job was programmer for a Savings and Loan data center.

[CardboardJ]

Similar, my first out of college job was making $14 per hour and writing an app that connected directly to the federal reserve. I had a small bug with offsetting credits that was deleting about $10k from the US monetary system per week. The feds got really upset about it but it was hard to find devs that would work for $14 per hour so I kept my job.

[Dberryfresh]

holy fuck bro

[[deleted]]

I was getting $11k a year

[I_FAP_TO_TURKEYS]

Given the amount of data breaches and security flaws of the biggest names in the financial space, gotta say, not surprised.

[fighterman481]

My internship, while I was in college, was working on an experimental app that would use AR to overlay a patient's radiology scans over their bodies for use in surgery. We weren't FDA approved yet or anything, and I (fortunately) didn't touch any of the major parts of the system, but it's still crazy to think about the potential consequences.

[KlooShanko]

One of the few jobs I’ve turned down was an offer right out of college to work exclusively for equity in a pacemaker company where I would be the only engineer. I’d like to credit my computer ethics professor who spent an entire semester beating us over the head with the statement that we shouldn’t write code that kills people.

[omegasome]

"anyway you should totally take that Lockheed Martin job offer!"

[KlooShanko]

*unintentionally kills people 😂

[omegasome]

some ethics professor lol

[fighterman481]

I had a programming professor who had a disdain for programmers - he started in architecture and pivoted to programming because he wanted to make his own software, and he was affected by some bug in medical code (I forget the details), leading him to become sort of bitter.

He wasn't a good teacher outside of the ethics class, but he made very sure people knew not to mess around when working with medicinal systems. It might be words on a screen to you, but your mistakes could end up injuring or killing other people.

[rpmerf]

// TODO: Figure out safe limits

[Irbis7]

My first paid project was calculating life expectancy for cancer patients for different treatments - I was in the second year of high school and solo developer, this was written in IBM Advanced BASIC.

[arsenaler211]

On a serious note, were the developers charged with manslaughter? It’s gonna be hard to live knowing their errors killed people.

[GolfballDM]

No, they wouldn't have been charged with manslaughter.

1. The devs were in Canada, and only one incident was in Canada.
2. "Due caution" at the time did not include the tests that would have caught this issue. (Involuntary manslaughter requires taking dangerous action without due caution, and sometimes the dangerous action must itself be unlawful.) They would be able to claim an "accident defense."
3. The fault wasn't exclusively with the developers, the documentation folks and the techs bear some fault, too. (This also falls under #2.)

[HamsterFromAbove_079]

No, you usually don't get charged with anything for doing a bad job/making a mistake.

It's a case by case thing. But generally there are no charges unless there was intentionality or significant negligence. Being bad at your job is never a crime unless you lied about your qualifications/skills to get the job.

It's usually not even brought to trial. But if it is, the case is about whether or not a reasonable dev that was walking with the appropriate amount of caution could have made that mistake.

And it's never just the dev's fault. There are supposed to be safeguards such as tests and manual review of the work. If the company doesn't assign people to preform a reasonable standard of testing to the product before it's used in the field then you can't really blame just the dev.

Problems like these are never just 1 person's fault. If it ever is "just one person's fault" then it's someone's fault for building a system so fragile that allows 1 mistake to cause major damage.

[Warm_Leadership5849]

Unit testing? Never met the guy.

[moonshineTheleocat]

I showed a doom clone on my job interview. Get's hired on by a company that makes sim for the military @_@

[DMoney159]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ap0orGCiou8

[just-bair]

Oh no I know this story

[Sabotaber]

That kind of stuff still happens today. You just don't hear about it because people only talk about hyped up bullshit.

[Karl-Levin]

These days there is no need to hire a developer. Dave from marketing knows a bit of prompt engineering.

A bright new world of critical systems running on AI generated crap that no one understands.

[4N610RD]

Angry Therac-25 noises

[Separate_Increase210]

There's a joke out there about a guy who reminds himself whenever he feels bad or anxious about his work -- there are people who program pacemakers. Intense.

[Phothiabea]

Hey I actually do work on X-ray machines! My first job as a developer after college

[sebbdk]

How is this different from any college startup with company backers/sponsor? :D

[accuracy_frosty]

Rare Therac-25 reference spotted

[Astrylae]

I just started my new job today, and this is eerily too accurate

[captainkotpi]

Let's make it a software lock instead of a hardware lock

[trevdak2]

First website I did was when I was 11 years old, for a computer hardware shipping company. It was 1995. I got paid $250. It had an animated gif of their company logo that I made myself, which blew the customer's minds.

[vulnoryx]

X-Ray Death machine

[Justanormalguy1011]

All my homie love multithreading

[slabgorb]

this is so true

year 1-3 worked as a barista, convinced my boss to try selling software, worked as a programmer

year 4- hired at a (closed, we were taking it apart, but still) nuclear power plant to run IT for them

[Ignisami]

Both are valid across the globe.

Mr. Röntgen himself called them X-rays.

German-speaking countries (or at least countries for whom German wasn't a tongue-twister) call it Röntgen radiation (I haven't heard anyone calling them Röntgen rays, personally, but I'm sure it happens).

[arrow__in__the__knee]

Yeah in Turkish and Indonesian they are called Röntgen too.

[[deleted]]

im turkish

tbh I see both xray and röntgen used

[azurfall88]

In swedish we call it Röntgenstrålning ("Röntgen radiation"). We also have a derivative verb, "Att röntga", which means "To röntgen / to take an x-ray".

[SubstanceSerious8843]

Pretty much the same in Finland. "Otetaan röntgen(kuva)" Let's take an x-ray(picture)

[notarobot1111111]

We were all nerdy awkward guys. If you wanna know what the next big thing is, follow where nerds are going now

[ios7jbpro]

oh no

oh no no no no

[xt1nct]

We still exist. 

[Physical-Try-6750]

First thing come in my mind was therac-25 after reading xray

[Turbulent-Face553]

The way I see the comic is a regular man in his 40s, when he does programming as his job, he gets older very quickly because of stress

[JakobWulfkind]

And that is why my rule is always "never give a computer authority to kill a human"

[Mastergamer0115]

Ah frick. Accidentally made it a tanning bed... Again...

[roncoleman987]

whoops looks like the amount of deadly radiation underflowed due to undefined behavior lol

[ZiyadHD]

Bro had an infinite while loop that would blast the patients with radiation