[prostheticvamp]

That’s one of the dumbest platitudes ever deployed to deflect criticism, and I wish people would use it correctly.

“This thing has absolutely no evidence of reliability or safety in a critical environment” is not criticizing it for being less-than-perfect. It’s criticizing it for being possibly inferior to the status quo.

Here’s one simple example:

Staff gowning up for routine rounds are much more careful, and safe, than staff rushing into an emergency code. If this thing throws up even the occasional false alarm, its cost to staff (in exposure) could easily outweigh, massively, and reduced rounding requirements.

That’s not “oh, well that’s not perfect.” That’s “oh, that might be worse, masquerading as better.”

“Perfect is the enemy of the good” is a wildly irrelevant comment.

[pstuart]

FTA:

> The deadly virus can infect you with a very small mistake. As healthcare workers, our frontline has to wander around the isolation wards to check vital signs of a patient from time to time. This task involves disposing of the protective gear after a visit. All just to check some reading on a device.

> A request from health authorities reached us to develop a remote monitoring system for isolation wards. There are expensive softwares to remotely monitor them. But Sri Lanka might not be that rich to spend such amount of money.

I think you're wrong in this case.

edit: formatting

[aastronaut]

I think you're misunderstanding the critique of the parent... In the software world we often tend to interpret "The perfect is the enemy of the good." as "If it's the only software solution it most certainly must be a good one.". But sometimes there are non-software solutions that are even better suited to solve the problem - engineering wise that MUST(!) also be taken into account.

What makes you think the team covered enough edge-cases to be "good enough" software? Do you think the presentation in a single blog post is enough information about a system to determine its quality and reliability?

[matz1]

You gotta start from something. That is progress. You made improvement overtime. Sure, in the worse case people can die, that something you have to accept.