meshko

fixed, i think.

part of the 2001 charm?

yeah this is what happens when you let LLM design the UI. The whole flow needs to be updated.

WebSockets.

yup, this is the original website. The domain kept auto-renewing I guess :)

yeah, that's the original. It is better than this remake but no multiplayer.

you probably got damage. If stuck like this, go to menu and select "mass kill"

yup, it was a java applet. Stopped working when Java in the browser died.

for the 25th anniversary (approximately) I vibecoded what i wanted to do for years -- port of the original remake (yes) to JavaScript. Alive again.

I so hate it when people fill these postmortems with marketing speak. Don't they know it is counterproductive?

to be fair, they needed to scale to roughly a thousand concurrent users (where concurrent is used very loosely here). so I wouldn't say that scaleability was really a requirement. 1000 users is nothing.

You think I was rude asking you about your experience. Now think how rude this unsubstantiated allegation of obvious simplicity of the code in question is to the person who wrote it -- with the weight of hundreds of lost lives on their shoulders. These control systems can get arbitrary complex. We don't know anything about the hardware this runs on and what it has to interface with. We don't know the constraints and age of the codebase. Nothing. To assume that this boils down to a simple if statement is something I would expect from a recent college graduate, or someone who has only worked at a web startup, not a person with 5+ years of real world experience building complex systems. I agree about all the points about testing and business processes. We have enough evidence to conclude that unforgivable mistakes were made there (and I point to that in my original comment).

"The technical implementation can be roughly inferred by any programmer", "such a foreseeable failure state"... how many years of experience do you have?

All the talk about how crappy Boeing engineering here was is bullshit and speculation and I am surprised PG participates in it. What we can discuss objectively here is incident response in which Boeing allowed the situation to continue after the first crash. How did they not run hundreds of hours of simulations, code reviews etc, etc on the system assumed to be at fault? How did they not immediately change the safety features associated with MCAS to be free and mandatory for everyone? Engineering mistakes happen and are hard to prevent. Business mistakes like this are a sign of terrible culture, lack of priorities and are an existential thread to the company.