[HN Gopher] Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrec...
___________________________________________________________________
Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrection such a
nightmare?
Author : rntn
Score : 50 points
Date : 2022-07-15 10:51 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| worker_person wrote:
| India has the same issue. Apparently bribing an official is an
| easy way to settle a dispute. Without the messiness of actually
| killing someone.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh_Association_of_D...
| GuB-42 wrote:
| There was a story where an employee was fired by mistake. It was
| an automatic procedure and he had all his access revoked,
| computer and physical.
|
| No one could un-fire him, the only solution was to hire him again
| as if he was a new employee.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| The good news is that you get the new employee salary increase
| instead of the token half-inflation-rate increase.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Cf. Doc Daneeka in Catch-22, listed (as a courtesy so he could
| collect flight pay) on the flight manifest of a bomber that
| crashed, and that he was not counted to have parachuted out of.
| His persistent existence was resented by company officers, and
| eventually his wife.
| LocalH wrote:
| A quite macabre example of "computer says no"
| ncmncm wrote:
| Nice rejoinder to the mid-20th-century assertion about runaway
| automation that "we can always just turn it off". Not when it
| would be against the law to turn it off.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Love Dabbsy's stories.
|
| There's a traditional way to screw over co-workers. On a day they
| are not in the office, scrawl "DECEASED" on all their mail, and
| drop it in the outbox. It's said to take years to undo. That long
| predates computers.
|
| The Motorhead vid was a bit sad, though. R. I. P., Lemmy.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| I think this is the first of his stories I've read, and what a
| treat.
|
| I love this part of his autobio at the end:
|
| > _He still stings from having to provide proof to the French
| authorities that he was not a bigamist prior to getting
| married. Most countries have such a thing as a Wedding
| Certificate but in France, there is also an official
| Certificate of Unmarriedness, and it is a right old bugger to
| find someone to draw one up when you're not French. In the end,
| he persuaded a British consul to sign a letter stating that the
| aforementioned - a person he didn't know and had never met -
| was, as far as he could guess, probably not already married,
| perhaps, maybe, I dunno, I hope not. The French authorities
| accepted it without further question._
|
| Back to the story, sometimes here in California we have the
| opposite problem, where someone really is dead, deceased, an
| ex-person, pushing up the daisies, kicked the bucket like Jimmy
| Durante [1], but no one will let him Rest In Peace.
|
| Every week or so I get a piece of mail with an offer for
| guaranteed issue of a life insurance policy for an acquaintance
| who died a few years ago. He never actually lived at my
| address, but through a chain of events his forwarding address
| was set to here.
|
| Since they are so insistent, I am tempted to fill in one of
| those applications on his behalf and see what happens. Maybe
| they will bring him back to life? After all, they do call it
| Life Insurance.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w00Kab17aeI
|
| "Did you see it? He _(slap)_ sailed right out there! "
| moistly wrote:
| > tempted to fill in one of those applications on his
| behalf...
|
| ...and then send in his death certificate. It should be
| amusing, provided you aren't nicked for filling in the
| policy.
| thedanbob wrote:
| Falsehoods that programmers believe:
|
| - Someone declared dead will never be declared alive again
| [deleted]
| Joeri wrote:
| This applies to so many systems that have irreversible status
| transitions. I have seen this again and again over my career as
| a developer. A foolproof system is designed and then some fool
| of a user puts it in a different state from reality, after
| which it requires all kinds of tricking the system to make it
| match the observable universe.
|
| By now this should be system design 101: the system should
| always have an override to move a record from any state into
| any other state.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I try to design systems on an accounting principle. Every
| persistent state change is basically a journal entry, and you
| can always create a new entry to correct a prior entry.
| moralestapia wrote:
| This is almost always the right decision and it applies to
| pretty much any thing that needs to record anything. It
| also is one of the few down to earth use cases for a
| blockchain.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| THIS. No unaccountable editing, but always allow new
| entries that accommodate the same needs. There is no legit
| reason any legit error correction can't have a log that
| shows the error and the correction. There are reasons, but
| no legit reasons.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I am just now programming a system where you can make a
| temporary deactivation and a permanent deactivation of a user
| account. And a permanent deactivation is irreversible from
| the UI, though it can be reversed by flipping a boolean in
| the DB proper. It is intended for situations where, e.g., the
| employee leaves the corporation.
|
| Should there be an override in the UI? Why? The way you are
| stating it sounds like a mathematical axiom, but I would like
| to see it treated as a theorem: with a proof, or at least a
| powerful set of reasons.
|
| I can see that a particular person may rejoin the same
| corporation later, but IMHO they should be given a new
| account, not just have their old account reactivated. They
| aren't really "the same person" anymore, they might have a
| different job description etc.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| The more curious parts of my brain are wondering whether being
| offically declared dead and not fixing it would have any
| advantages.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| It seems a great hack for a new life.
|
| Declare _yourself_ dead and start again!
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| The mechanics of birth/death registrations was once covered in a
| Blackhat talk.
|
| https://youtu.be/9FdHq3WfJgs
| mike_hock wrote:
| Use of an object after the destructor has been called is UB.
| zen_1 wrote:
| Time to introduce governments to placement new.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Well, people die all the time, so the process of registering such
| events is well known - it had to be repeated millions of times,
| and thus is typically well implemented and optimized.
|
| But people are falsely declared dead, or get revived after being
| declared dead quite infrequently, and that's why this process is
| typically not automated and sometimes even entirely missed.
| closeparen wrote:
| Dead people's identities are also great targets for e.g. spies,
| illegal immigrants, and money launderers, so governments have a
| strong interest in making sure the identities of the deceased
| get turned off promptly and thoroughly.
| asr21 wrote:
| The People need to use tombstone logic with a field as
| markAsDead.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-15 23:01 UTC)