I am a software engineer and I endorse this comic

[sonia]

https://xkcd.com/2030/


Also I like the gender choices here.

Comments

[conuly]

As I understand it, although it is extremely unlikely, elevators are actually slightly more likely to rapidly accelerate upwards than to dramatically fall anyway, for the same reason that drawbridges are more likely to slam closed than to slam open.

[sonia]

... huh. I hadn't thought about either one. (Gives all the drawbridges over the Willamette River the side-eye.)

[conuly]

...oh, I meant castle drawbridges. I don't quite know if bridge drawbridges operate the same way? I should look that up.

But castle drawbridges are counterbalanced so their natural, neutral state is "up", for obvious reasons, and elevator counterbalancing works about the same way, I'm told. If the safety features were to catastrophically fail - which they wouldn't*! - then the elevator would go up.

* They really wouldn't. People are so scared of elevators crashing that multiple redundancies is the name of the game. Eight ropes, every one of which is capable of holding up the entire elevator and cargo alone, plus safety brakes. The guy who popularized elevators ran regular stunts where he'd be in an elevator in a scaffold and all the ropes would be laboriously sawn through, and then the public could see the elevator didn't move a notch despite all the ropes being broken. Which they wouldn't ever be, because there are eight of them.

[sonia]

Ah, that makes sense. The bridges here have varying mechanisms, but I'm pretty sure the default state would be down/open/functional as a bridge over the river.

Main point being, voting machines are not constructed that way, and are laughably* undependable. I've been saying that for years as my professional opinion, so it was nice to see the comic reinforce that.

*Laughable until you start looking at the real-world consequences, that is.

[jesse_the_k]

Absolutely true -- and I wish that the terrors of insecure voting were the worst of it.

We depend on computers working perfectly in so many areas of our lives.

[sonia]

Yep, our infrastructure is pretty fragile.

I liked growing up near Washington, DC in the height of the nuclear war threat, because I figured I'd be a cloud of radioactive dust and wouldn't have to worry about after. This slower-moving climate disaster (exacerbated by politics/voting) has no such solace.