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We’re going to be having this same tired, pedantic, round-about conversation when Tesla’s routinely decide to take out a family of four because it mistook a plastic bag for an off-ramp.

Commenters will show up like clockwork and say shit like:

“What man, it’s not like cars didn’t crash before? Haha”

Don’t be dense dude. And definitely don’t pursue a leadership position anytime in the future.



Tesla fans are annoying, but it is absolutely valid that the safety bar for self-driving cars can't be "100% perfectly safe" - it needs to be "safer than the alternative".

The problem with both this example, and the AWS one (it needs to have better availability than your personal home-spun solution, and it does), is that people are amazing at deluding themselves.

"Yes, cars are dangerous, because other people can't drive. But I'm a better than average driver"

"Yes, other people will build unreliable systems. But I know how to architect for my use case and ensure that for my needs the availability will be higher than AWS's"

Both are true* in the micro sense and false in the macro sense.

* Not really. 88% of americans think they are "above average" drivers.


Well, anyone non-dense will tell you that most dense thing you can do is say “oh my god run for your lives” whenever there’s an outage. No statics, no cost-benefit analysis. Just commenting “Haha you can’t manage your own raids and ciscos what a noob” makes you a thought leader, yes.




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