[yrral]

I think it's that you don't notice things that work well. House foundations, light switches, filesystems, silicon manufacturing, water delivery, grocery store logistics, etc etc etc.

These are all things that most people never notice because they just work. It doesn't even occur to people day-to-day that these things can fail.

[analog31]

House foundations, light switches, and water delivery, along with the professions that install them, are all regulated and licensed. There is somewhat of a trend for the quality of those things to have regional variation, e.g., lower quality in places that have historically had weak code enforcement and weak unions. And yes, the regulation probably did make those things more expensive.

[spacebanana7]

The filesystems example given by OP is an interesting counterpoint - Linux filesystems are the opposite of regulated, regionally varied, and expensive.

[roland35]

Maybe more expensive up front but probably cheaper in the long run!

[xyzzy21]

Semiconductors are not regulated except in terms of large scale externalities - e.g. water quality, air emissions, etc. Otherwise they pretty much use any methods, processes or means that they want. They do have economic incentives based on the constraints of physics - you can't boost defect densities of wafers by screaming at Mother Nature so to assure a market for your products, there are constraints on quality and process that all things equal you'd skip since they are "cost centers".

[Siira]

Considering the regulations aren’t universal, but they seem to work fine everywhere, your hypothesis sounds preposterous.

[youdontknowjack]

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I live in Alabama where there is virtually NO CODE, and NO ENFORCEMENT, and there definitely aren't any God damned unions, either. My house foundation, light switches, and water delivery are perfectly fine, thanks. Matter of fact, I did the wiring and installed the well pump and a fair bit of plumbing myself. Didn't have to ask anyone's permission to do it, either.

Wow, imagine that radical concept--a society that functions well without government goons breathing down everyone's neck! Maybe we could even come up with a word to describe this amazing new idea. "Freedom" maybe? "Liberty"?

Enjoy your slavery, serf.

[onion2k]

These are all things that most people never notice because they just work.

Taking the example of grocery store logistics, the number of times products are unavailable in my local store makes me thing that's a thing that doesn't "just work". It's something that breaks down regularly, and possibly has lots of people working hard to keep it from breaking even more often.

The same is true for lots of things. Stuff like water delivery and silicon manufacturing doesn't break all the time because lots of people are fighting to make it work, and are actively maintaining it all the time.

I think it's possible that most things don't "just work", and we're just fortunate that there are teams of people out there stopping us seeing the effects of all the failures.

[hef19898]

That's no contradiction. Logistics and manufacturing works because people are spending their professional lives maintaining them. It's the outside that doesn't see these efforts, for them it "just works". Like electricity.

[ksec]

As I wrote recently, [1]

> And it also pretty much sums up how most people in Tech have minimal understanding of Supply Chains and logistics works. Even distribution alone, within a single country ( ignoring the cross border logistics ) is complex enough.

Let me tell you supply chain and product availability in store ( especially grocery ) is still an unsolved problem. For a lot of different reasons and market dynamics. But mostly because grocery stores also have their own brand which compete with other products, and sharing sales data for better forecast is still a big no no. Compare to let say Smartphone, your average retail store will have zero chance completing with Apple or Samsung. So every time an iPhone is sold Apple knew instantly and can better manage their supply chain. Both domestic and international.

If we didn't had COVID and Chip Shortage, most of the world still doesn't give any credit or importance to Supply Chain management. Even though it is the basic fabric of our society. And that is speaking with experience working with Fortune Global 500.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30662680

[orzig]

Are those people optimizing for having every product available at every time? They have to balance against the very real cost of spoilage, so I don’t think they consider the occasional out–of–stock as the system breaking

[Swizec]

Look up "Things seen this week during structural inspections!" on imgur. Some truly horrifying stuff from that person.

For some of these foundations to still be standing and building occupants not to notice anything's wrong ... I can't even imagine how much safety factor is built-in. If we built software with those margins, nothing would ever ship.

Here's a few: https://imgur.com/gallery/Ko2jo4j

https://imgur.com/gallery/fD4jCdc

https://imgur.com/gallery/0JyOXy0

Sometimes they share pictures of foundations completely detached from anything. And it keeps working!

[______-_-______]

I'm planning to buy a house in the next year or two. I would 100% hire this guy as the inspector if I knew who he was. Those photos are more effective than any marketing.

[Gigachad]

As usual its just how much money you put in to it. We spend a lot of money making sure building foundations and silicon manufacturing works because failing is expensive and dangerous. I don't want to pay double/triple price for a toaster to slightly reduce its risk of failing because I'm happy to accept that on average it lasts a long time but there is some chance it fails sooner. If I'm in charge of buying a $100M building, you bet I want to pay extra to assure it will not fall over.

[massysett]

There’s a lot of stuff that works remarkably well even though it’s cheap. I just came from a supermarket. It’s filled with items from around the world, of which most are very inexpensive. The consistent quality of these products is astounding—a bag of potato chips or a box of crackers tastes exactly the same, anywhere in the country where I buy it, year-round. A can of Coca-Cola tastes exactly the same even though they’re bottled in different facilities with different owners.

These things did cost a lot to develop, but for the consumer it’s quite inexpensive. As GP said, we just take these things for granted and don’t notice them.

[et-al]

I beg to differ, many of these large household companies are shells of their former selves as they've been bought, bankrupted, and traded around. What's left is just a name with no solid product line backing it anymore. E.g. Sunbeam was a solid household appliance name, and now it's a crap. Same with Braun.

The easy industrial design exercise seems to be luxurious looking materials paired with cheap electronics. Amazon is full of this. Oddly, the thing I end up trusting these days are in-house brands because the store has some responsibility to make sure their own brand's reputation doesn't get too tarnished.

[servytor]

I read somewhere, and this guy was talking about how if you want your house to sell for more, invest in everything you physically touch. High quality doorknobs, faucets, and light switches have a marked impact on our unconscious valuation of a house.

[mdp2021]

Check the deltas, the derivative. There exist long lists from personal experiences of things that worked very well and now are of comparatively terrible quality.

The issue is then not just with the item, but with societies that are increasingly accepting low quality: this is a horrible trend, and one side of decadence. You get both, flanked: low quality here for the occasion and decadence around for the trend.

The idea you say of some "distracted" ones "not realizing the failure potential" has a legitimate justification, beyond the simple inattentive, in those (inexperienced) that assume, for a number of reasons (especially including an internal healthy "mindset" of good standards), things are done properly. There is a line in a script for Scorsese that goes like: «I'm the guy doing my job, you must be the other one».

[IshKebab]

Society has always been accepting of low quality cheap stuff. It's just that there's a ton more of it available now.

[blablabla123]

Just to give one example, CI pipelines seem to fail all the time. For closed source and open source project. Just like this, it worked in the last commit and in the new commit it fails despite the test suite passing. The ultimate reason is routine tasks pulling in a ton of complexity of which only a tiny fraction is being used.

At workplaces this creates a lot of absurd situations that eat up insane amounts of productivity.

Or another example, it's pretty common that water pipes don't work as expected. (Congestion, low pressure, undesired backflow, tricky to get water at body temperature...) Nobody really complains, everybody lives with it and learns to completely ignore it. I'm not saying these problems occur everywhere 100% of the time but often enough to show there's something structurally not working

[darkarmani]

> just to give one example, CI pipelines seem to fail all the time.

Really? I've not seen this to be the case unless they are never maintained (ie: a year goes by and ignored dependencies change)

[Cthulhu_]

There's counterexamples for each of those though; just thinking of Flint, Michigan, or the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020. Also I had to replace a light switch in my shed the other day.

[giantg2]

Many of those things mentioned have changed very little in decades. Some have also been under continuous improvement for hundreds or thousands of years.

[asdfaoeu]

I think that just shows that these things take time but the process does work.

[emodendroket]

Which?

[Volrath89]

As someone who writes software for a big grocery store chain in Germany I'm surprised the logistics work at all. It's a s*show inside once you know the details, but somehow, yes it kind of works well enough as for the customers to not even realize is there.

[markus_zhang]

I think you put too much confidence in other engineering fields. They go wrong all the time (you might notice some when purchasing a house) and changes are extremely slow and expensive.

[Ekaros]

Or they just take longish time to fail and then cause lot of issues.

Foundations are such, 70s-80s had certain style which now has been found to lead to issues like mold if done even slightly imperfectly.

Or water pipes from certain age that have already in 20-30s have started to leak, these being copper pipes...

[hutrdvnj]

To be precise, that depends on the actual filesystem. But ext4 works really well.

[isolli]

It reminds me of this anecdote (probably a joke):

After the fall of the Soviet Union, UK experts flew in to help with the transition, and one of the apparatchiks asked: "We are eager to try this capitalism thing; now tell us: who is in charge of the daily delivery of bread to London?"

[lupire]

Cue the ZFS people, homeowners with cracked concrete, and flickery electricity .