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> you clearly haven't worked on systems that would kill people if things went wrong

True, but I have worked on a system that would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars if things went wrong. And they did go wrong, though we managed to save the asset. So I do have some relevant experience here.

Yes, if you put enough effort into it and deploy into a non-adversarial environment, you can get the odds of success pretty close to 100%. But then you also get the Therac-25 every now and then.

But mainly you get an endless stream of buffer overflows that lets hackers steal people's bank accounts. That's not life-and-death, but it's a significant societal cost nonetheless.




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