TheCapn

I'm just going to copy-paste my own comment from a few weeks ago because I feel like it is needing to be said more and more recently

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I have, off and on, for years written diatribes about how if people in our industry want to run around with the "Engineer" moniker at some point they should start acting like it. That means respecting all aspects of what it means to be an Engineer and holding public well-being paramount is part of that. Licensure is part of that. Accountability and Responsibility is part of that.

I'm usually downvoted. The move fast and break things group seems to be blind (or willfully ignorant) to the harm that software systems can carry on a person's life. I don't know if its fear of regulation, or self-serving interests or some sort of disdain for the idea that we need to slow down and be more accountable to the public or what. At times the people I've engaged with lament on how they're capable but would be barred for lack of formal education or some such and its a distraction from the overall point: we need to be doing better and if we can't self-regulate then at some point we're going to be forced to act in a way that probably cuffs us more than necessary.

And yes, I understand how Software doesn't exactly fit into the mold of other engineering disciplines cleanly. But I think the idea that if we're going to have systems that can ruin a person's life in a second for a bug or oversight we need to start considering that accountability for those releasing software to the public matters. We lament about the difficulty of holding corporations to account for their harm, but it would be far more difficult for a company's negligence to hurt people if those turning the knobs were held to a higher standard.

I think that reckoning is coming soon. AI is going to create "an event" that we can't ignore and we're going to be pointing fingers in a lot of directions asking "how" we could prevent this from happening again. I'd argue "the event" has already occurred a few times over but we're purposely ignoring the severity of it to keep a diseased economy running roughshod. There's parallels with many historic events forcing regulation and the path forward won't be clean and easy.

I think that's the thing. We've surrendered ourselves to Greed.

I mean, we did a long time ago, but this blister is really starting to pulsate isn't it?

We weigh questions of security, and safety, things that should be absolute paramount for public good against the needs of economic markets. We've tied our horse to a runaway carriage on a downhill path and kinda just hoping there's a grassy knoll at the bottom. Fuck I don't know what analogy i even want at this point because I'm dumbfounded at how we've come this far and it seems like NOBODY in the tech/finance/political spheres want to be adults and say this is harmful.

Convenience is always going to be the answer.

If you know of safe pirating sites that have good bandwidth and uptime, that's great! But lots of consumers aren't willing to go through ones with quetsionable ads, or fight the need to new ones bimonthly as the streaming sites churn like a game of whackamole.

So if you've got that hookup and know where to find them, the convenience exists for you, its easy and useful. For someone wanting to get into it, it might not be so convenient.

I am working hard to manage my mental model when shopping now to try and minimize this affect knowing it exists. In a sense I've realized my mentality toward the world is less of "what brands are good?" and more of "how is this company trying to fuck me over?" and then moving from that mentality forward.

So when I'm out shopping I see brands that I've found advertised. I see brands I've never heard of. I look at both. But what one is selling products that are fully accessible to me, fully owned by me? Which ones use online features that can/will eventually be stripped and put behind a a subscription model? What ones are using quality manufacturing materials? Which ones are using cheap plastics or vaneers? Which ones have local brick and mortar presence where I can take issues in person? For instance, there's a very heavy Costco effect to my shopping. I've bought products from brands I'm pretty iffy on because I know Costco is going to take that return with no fuss if I get it home and discover there's something about that product I find distasteful.

And I should say that I'm not a very big consumer. Trying to do this a lot, buying for a family (kids, spouse, etc.) could quickly become overwhelming. I know how exhausting it is to need to read labels every time you're buying food because how often they enshittify the recipe, adding thickeners or allergens that weren't there the last time you bought it.

It won't work for everyone but the answer really is the same thing its always been: Be a conscious consumer. Research what you want before you buy. Know what is worth spending extra on, and what is marketing nonsense. Find companies with positive reputation (but still be observant for how you can be fucked when they sell out next year), and try to support local.

I have, off and on, for years written diatribes about how if people in our industry want to run around with the "Engineer" moniker at some point they should start acting like it. That means respecting all aspects of what it means to be an Engineer and holding public well-being paramount is part of that. Licensure is part of that. Accountability and Responsibility is part of that.

I'm usually downvoted. The move fast and break things group seems to be blind (or willfully ignorant) to the harm that software systems can carry on a person's life. I don't know if its fear of regulation, or self-serving interests or some sort of disdain for the idea that we need to slow down and be more accountable to the public or what. At times the people I've engaged with lament on how they're capable but would be barred for lack of formal education or some such and its a distraction from the overall point: we need to be doing better and if we can't self-regulate then at some point we're going to be forced to act in a way that probably cuffs us more than necessary.

And yes, I understand how Software doesn't exactly fit into the mold of other engineering disciplines cleanly. But I think the idea that if we're going to have systems that can ruin a person's life in a second for a bug or oversight we need to start considering that accountability for those releasing software to the public matters. We lament about the difficulty of holding corporations to account for their harm, but it would be far more difficult for a company's negligence to hurt people if those turning the knobs were held to a higher standard.

I think that reckoning is coming soon. AI is going to create "an event" that we can't ignore and we're going to be pointing fingers in a lot of directions asking "how" we could prevent this from happening again. I'd argue "the event" has already occurred a few times over but we're purposely ignoring the severity of it to keep a diseased economy running roughshod. There's parallels with many historic events forcing regulation and the path forward won't be clean and easy.

Just go dumber

Set up a monitor with the data values you need to monitor

Point a camera at that monitor.

Camera feed is remote accessible. Control software is not.

Want alarming? There's systems designed specifically to send texts or make phone calls when signaled electronically.

I like your analogy.

Because while I dislike AI writing, it matters in context. If someone is trying to formulate a coherent thought of work tasks required of me then I don't really care if it reads like AI as long as the point they're trying to get to me is clear.

If there's an attempt at something human, or emotionally important I will quickly balk at anything spat out through an LLM. If you're trying to communicate at the human level with me I want your input, flaws warts and all.

A card with just...nothing personal on it has as much value as machine text. I understand that you took the effort to think of me, but that's the bare minimum. If trying to express yourself isn't worth the time to make it personal then I'd almost appreciate if you didn't try at all because it hurts more to believe I'm not worth the effort.

I made mention on a reply to the other commentator but I feel the issue is due to lack of training data in the PLC/SCADA space. If an AI engine with the appropriate amount of training data was available to me I'm sure it could do the work just fine, but at the current state we have partial knowledge which is too similar to other languages. The result is agents which quickly hallucinate capabilities of the SCADA or PLC hardware and write out code that fundamentally won't work. The result of this is that I distrust AI to get it right enough that I won't kill an operator or blow up a production line. The automation world is too closed source and until the push for open standards that have begun to gain traction really takes off we're sort of stuck.

But then at the same time the code of an industrial system typically isn't the bottleneck in development. Selecting the hardware and waiting for the physical installation is a far bigger bottleneck on a project than what I do. As a result, in the end it isn't the "Correctness" of code in the sense of it is doing what it was instructed to do properly, but the correctness of matching software to hardware and that's where I've seen several failures in AI. If I tell it I have a Schneider Altavar VFD and I get code to interface with an Allen Bradley PowerFlex that's one issue. But if I get code to interface with a Altavar that expects specific parameter adjustments on the drive that haven't been set that's a separate issue and more typical for the faults I've seen within AI. If 99% of drives are configured to operate pumps and that's what AI learns for training, the moment I need it for a mill, aeration fan, or conveyor belt (which have distinct physical requirements) then we have the issues I've been seeing and it takes a trained eye to spot those deficiencies in my experience.

The biggest part of that is how there's a lot more community involvement for IoT and things like Home Assistant than there are for the proprietary PLC systems.

In the PLC/SCADA space a lot of the development and resources are closed source. There's been a big push in the last few years for Open standards but that's slow to adopt and I'm sure in time we'll see the Controls space catch up (it is notoriously dated compared to the rest of the software world).

But in the meantime its like the perfect storm of terrible-ness for AI. The vast majority of my SCADA work is in AVEVA products, mainly Wonderware and Edge. Wonderware's scripting language is something called QuickScript.NET which is like 80% of VB.NET. The issue with AI is that being a statistical engine it very quickly starts on the right path, then veers into what is very obvious VB.NET training data and starts doing things that are impossible in Wonderware. Edge uses VBScript, but a limited subset of it. So querying AI for help mostly just spits out useless code in the same way; confidently declaring what it gave is possible when it only results in runtime exceptions.

In the PLC space you can get AI to do pretty mundane things with ease. Writing ladder logic or structured text is pretty okay, but like most things that was never the bottleneck in project development: you're not saving a lot of time for the cost of an AI subscription license. As mentioned, Open standards are starting to be adopted pretty quickly and a lot of PLC systems allow import/export of the proprietary formats into XML now which is going to be beneficial in the long run, but we're not quite there yet.

The problem is always that time it messes up, and it can be very subtle. Off by one errors which would be perfect fine in one environment can be catastrophic totally depending on how your I/O Comms were configured. I was trying to interface with some hardware that I asked AI to see if I could solve the pain points of remote enable/disable via network comms. It very eagerly told me I could use OPC-UA Methods to achieve what I'm after, but I was working a platform that didn't support Methods. It even fabricated a path to fake call a method which obviously did not work when applied to a real world scenario. So I asked it how to use Modbus which requires use of FC16 to act on the hardware. Again AI very eager to tell me how to do that, but hallucinated what could be done. Lastly I went for the TCP route which again had AI giving incorrect information - it was far closer this time, having instructed me to send a command in a format which doesn't work out of box, but could be manually configured in the hardware to work. Fortunately I was testing to see if it could save me time, not trying to see if it could do something I was unable to do, but I try to imagine what would happen if I allowed it to do that type of work on a VFD, or PID loop. That tiny little bit of misunderstanding by the agent could be catastrophic.

Each time I share this type of experience (and I have others) with the AI community I'm told I'm doing it wrong. That if I was using better models or different configurations that wouldn't be an issue. Telling me that I need to pay for models - as though I want to fork over cash when their demos are wildly underwhelming. It gives me a lot of overall distrust in the AI community because of this. It feels a lot like interacting with Linux fanatics who are unable to accept that it has faults that aren't tolerable by the layperson. That these people cannot see the faults because it works great in their narrow needs.

But at the same time, using AI to give little tips. How can I speed up this SQL Stored Proc? Why is my DataBinding failing to update? What is causing this OS upgrade to fail? Its done pretty good work. I see it as a tool that works along with me and an IDE, not as a human replacement like so many feel it is ready to be.

The one thing that poisons the entire online discourse regarding LLMs to me is just simply not knowing who you're dealing with and what their problems are. This, like all things, is complex and nuanced.

For all my efforts to get LLMs to work for me, they've failed. I figure it is because the tech space I work in (Industrial Automation) simply doesn't have the training data that someone building webapps does. The few times I've put LLM to the test its failed horribly, and since my job has me existing in safety critical scenarios I don't humor what AI gives me at all.

So when I bitch about LLMs and their useless nature, its because of how I've experienced them in my craft. They get 95% of the information right, but that 5% it gets wrong can have very serious repercussions.

But when I'm talking with individuals online who see them as revolutionary? I don't know if their job is editing templates or formatting data or any other host of problems that AI can be revolutionary for. I don't know if they're full of themselves, having drank the AI koolaid. I don't know if they're just really deep into the LLM world and figured out things I have yet to learn (or am unwilling to pay for). But from a HN or Reddit discussion, they're all one in the same and without trying to figure out who they are, their opinions all carry the same weight.

As a Canadian I've had pretty shit experiences with the land crossings coming back to Canada from the US. They seem to be total grumpy shitheads all around.

But at the same time I've had the absolute worst experiences crossing borders from Canada to US too. Seems like agents at the land crossings both ways just hate life or something.

And lastly, as a Prairie resident, I've felt that general unease in Ontario/Quebec as well. I think people there are just generally more bitter.

So I'd say don't take it personally, but that's only worth what you make of it I suppose.

This is Conservative playbook 101.

It doesn't matter what the truth of the matter is. What Dear Leader says is used as a scare tactic and marching orders for the underlings to believe and repeat. If you live/interact with conservative people long enough you see the pattern. There's absolute trust in what their leadership says, but skepticism for any criticism of those same talking points.

So all this tweet is doing is seeding doubt, and distrust among the electorate. It doesn't have to be true, but if the goal is to maintain control it looks like this. The Canadian Conservatives are still extremely pro-USA but have learned to keep their opinions close to the chest because they're currently politically unpoular.

As a Canadian who has been listening to the "51st state" wordvomit coming out of US administration your comment is very apt.

For some reason I can't fully grasp, a LOT of US citizens are ignorant to how the rest of the world is perceiving them at the current moment. There's countless US articles talking about US/Canada relations as if it is a trade dispute and that they think Canadians are eager to re-unite and go back to the way things were without ever addressing the threats to our sovereignty. Then you have comments like the parent to your post who is....wildly off the mark thinking that in a point of contention we'd prefer to keep our data on US controlled systems because their government would need to follow their own legal processes to acquire data of a foreign/hostile state??????

You're discussing layoffs.

OP is discussing firings.

And yeah, there's crossover but they're not 1 to 1. At the same time, if a company is taking two people of equal position and firing one, or keeping the other, the honesty in how they came to that conclusion through transparency has value. Was the decision one of seniority? Performance? Geographical relevance? Was it favoritism masked in another reason? The person receiving the pink slip deserves to know the truth, especially in cases where legal matters could be of question where a company may say one thing, but be acting on another.