[HN Gopher] What Hath Woz Wrought (1979)
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       What Hath Woz Wrought (1979)
        
       Author : tie-in
       Score  : 28 points
       Date   : 2024-09-16 21:45 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.folklore.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.folklore.org)
        
       | shadowgovt wrote:
       | An old mentor once said "Don't solve things in software that
       | should be solved in hardware."
       | 
       | Unfortunately, adding a clock to the thermal element was a
       | software solution masquerading as a hardware solution. If you
       | have a piece of your system that can start a fire, you need to be
       | sensing temperature, somehow. Sensing anything else is daring
       | reality to get creative with your abstraction model.
        
       | woooooo wrote:
       | Good reminder to monitor for the actual problem, and not a proxy,
       | if you can.
       | 
       | Printer heads being on for 10ms isn't a problem, overheating is.
       | Might have been cost-prohibitive or too complex to add in a
       | thermometer and use that to shut down in addition to the 10ms
       | test, but in a perfect world..
        
         | gmuslera wrote:
         | In real world, you have inexpensive to get metrics that act as
         | proxy for the real problem that would be pretty complex or
         | intrusive to measure. "Your pulse is elevated" message may be a
         | warning to decide, if you have enough context and agency, what
         | would be your next steps (or stop completely).
         | 
         | We have to take compromises between what we can do and measure
         | and what would be the perfect policy. In this case you had as
         | much as 2kb for the binary code and limited electronics, I'd
         | say it was a fair enough compromise.
         | 
         | Maybe a second kind of (cheap enough in both electronics and
         | intrusiveness) measurement could had added complementary
         | reassessment that it could had been the right move. In modern
         | systems we have multiple easy/cheap enough to get proxy metrics
         | for a lot of decisions, sometimes we just take isolated ones to
         | signal a potential problem, but in some cases that could be
         | improved taking more into account.
        
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