Reminds me of the Therac-25 incident…

62 points
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This, right here, is why “professional” software “engineers” should be licensed.

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-48 points
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But I deserve to be paid just as much for my vast technological knowledge even if I didn’t get a bunch of speech and liberal art credits from a college in the middle of nowhere. Bootcamps are the industry standard! /SARCASM, GO GET A REAL DEGREE OR WORK IN FAST FOOD

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16 points

Let me tell you some shocking news: Most of the majors in Computer Science and Engineering (in the university I took it, one of the most prestigious in my country) don’t know shit about software engineering. They know only how to burp out the same leetcode style programs they were taught and that’s it. I’d trust a guy that managed to learn software engineering on it’s own through years of FAFO than (most) university majors.

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-18 points

Seethe more

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18 points

You don’t have to have a college degree to become a licensed P.E.; it just takes more years working under the supervision of one. (I think it’s something like your options are a bachelor’s degree + 4 years P.E. supervised experience or 8 years P.E. supervised experience alone.)

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0 points

First of all, there is little to no requirement to be NCEES FE/PE or even EIT certified to work as an engineer in the USA, unfortunately. But if there was, then you would still have to fill out an application documenting your experience, which in the vast majority of cases would be an Engineering course from somewhere other than an ABET / EAC accredited institution rather than simply having no education. Maybe in Canada but I’ve got no idea how things work over there aside from they have stricter regulations on the title.

Anybody in the USA can call themselves an engineer, and most working programmers do.

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5 points

Paid*

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1 point

ty

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21 points

Former healthcare to software engineer working on a master’s here. My colleagues who were licensed back in healthcare weren’t all of the same quality. They all made mistakes at one point or another, some pretty bad some minor. There’s no difference though, minor could just as well become major.

The way they get around it in healthcare is by throwing more people at the problem. You have a physician who is good at pointing in the general direction of the problem and a solution, then you have all the auxiliary staff who will narrow down on the solution based on their field. But at any single point all of them could fuck up, or one of them could.

Now that I’m a software engineer and I’ve written enough code to do stuff. I can confidently say that licensing will not solve this problem. Especially if there aren’t enough people involved. Which is probably what was missed in the beginning.

Anyway long rant over.

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10 points

Licensing isn’t about magically ensuring that the practitioner won’t make mistakes; it’s about holding the practitioner accountable for his mistakes, which in theory gives him more incentive to be more careful – or to change his practice’s workflows and systems so as to be better able to detect and correct mistakes.

In fact, I would argue that the “throwing more people at the problem” phenomenon in healthcare is an example of that very thing. Do you think they’d keep staffing levels equally high without licensing? 'Cause I sure don’t.

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0 points

So, what you say is let’s hold the lowest level accountable, the person who may don’t have any power over the fcked up decisions about the amount of developers, presence of QA, and timeline.

No, licensing will not make “accountable” people magically incentivised enough to make no mistakes

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16 points

Never gonna happen as long as the demand is so much higher than the supply.

Perhaps it should be a requirement for certain things though, like the medical area.

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2 points

Great, I’m never getting bolus from a pixel phone am i

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34 points

As a diabetic, holy fucking shit! I’ve been on the fence about getting a pump because it’s just one more thing that can fail.

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-23 points

Has nothing to do with the pump though. Just get like a omnipod dash

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23 points
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Huh? The omnipod dash is another pump from the same company that also has an app. What’s the difference? They’re both susceptible to bugs.

Yes it absolutely has something to do with the pump.

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-5 points
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No? Love the downvotes from people who don’t even know about this.

It’s an error in the phone app for the omnipod 5. It does NOT happen in the management device of the omnipod 5 or any other omnipod.

The omnipod dash system does NOT have a phone app that can control the pump, only one that can monitor the stats. The PDM for the dash or the omnipod 5 does NOT have this bug, it is only in the android phone app for the omnipod 5.

So no. It’s not a pump / pod problem.

You being scared is unwarranted and has nothing to do with pump systems in general.

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5 points

I don’t think you should take that as a main/sole argument against using a pump, there are many other pump manufacturerers oit there. I fir example am very happy with ma Dana i. (Apperently unlike the Omnipod, which seems very odd to me tbh) it has some saftey functions built into the device itself, so even if the controling software on my phone fucks up and doesn’t respect it’s hard limits the pumps driver still will. Unlike Apps or any management software I imagine the driver to be quite simple and thus less prone to errors like that.

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188 points

Jesus. QA is not a corner you should cut when it’s literally life and death.

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51 points
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So uh… as someone who works in biotech and understands exactly what level of rigor is required before the FDA allows you to sell a medical device - a term that has specific legal definition, regulations, and restrictions, I’m a bit suspicious this could be fake. This sort of error would indicate a systemic error and abrogation of due diligence at at least 4 different levels, and would be an apocalyptically huge lawsuit.

Edit: I stand corrected - lots of people are corroborating this whole thing. That’s kind of astounding, tbh.

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25 points

There is a video demo of the bug later on the thread.

Some android devices have a combination .- key on the numeric input UI. This is a contentious enough design choice to have stackoverflow threads on it. That combo key style is what’s used by the device and version shown on the demo. It appears that the device is reading that combo key as - and discarding (or taking absolute value), and not as a leading decimal.

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65 points
47 points

“and would be an apocalyptically huge lawsuit.”

Apocalyptically huge lawsuit, here we come!!!

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14 points

If the user does not recognize the issue, this may lead to delivery of more insulin than intended

I love their subtle attempt at shifting blame here.

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8 points

FDA requirements were the first thing that popped into my mind. Is it possible somehow these devices fall under different regulations than “medical devices”? I am only vaguely familiar with the applicable 21 CFR regs. This seems like a pretty gargantuan screw up since it could, I would think, kill people.

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6 points

It’s class III medical device software

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55 points

Not fake. I’m a type 1 diabetic on this version of Omnipod and have noticed this before as well as other issues. I also had the app refuse to let me close an innocuous error modal window to activate a pod while I was in another country.

While I love the hardware, the software feels precisely like it has been outsourced to a team with no knowledge of what T1 is and whoever internally is greenlighting the changes isn’t properly testing.

The newest officially supported phone is the S21.

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24 points

I mean they posted the steps to replicate it so it wouldn’t take long to debunk that sort of thing as being fake.

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8 points

This is not a mundane detail, Michael!

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Software Gore

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