Item — HN Reader

I am baffled by some of the twitter responses. If a real person were crossing out one drug and writing in another would people be rushing to their defence? Here is a good rule:

It is never right that a computer should do the wrong thing.

It may be explicable, it may be avoidable, it may be correctable but if it is wrong it is wrong. We will be living in a world where computers are increasingly autonomous in their actions. Defending their behaviour now sets a dangerous precedent. Will the same people be blaming victims of self driving cars?

So whoever added drugs to the spell checker didn't think it through properly. They need to be told to take them out or put them all in and keep them updated. If we work around things it is us who will become the servants.

4 comments

Honestly, it's been a while since our partisanship has spread to arguments about tech. It never suprises me to see people are going to extreme lengths to defend Apple, even when it's a life and death situation.

"Re check your work before you click submit or send. Don't place blame on Apple."

"It’s pretty easy for a sysadmin to disable autocorrect"

Educated people aren't immune from this effect either.

Dealing with any issue in the Apple community is mostly baffling. The mindset of it works for me just pisses me off so much. Got a weird apple bug? 20 comments of how it works for them and YOU must be the problem. Watching people do mental gymnastics to apologize for the battery slowdown issues on iPhone recently makes me throw my hands up in the air and land of my face.

I recall when the first iPhone came out. People would criticized the missing features, which were inability to copy and paste and no MMS support and Apple apologists would reply with "why would you want that?"

It was pretty surreal.

I agree. The ridiculous lack of empathy is egregious: it’s easy to whitelist a word (for me based on the single example given in the tweet and ignoring the hideous number of trade names for pharmaceuticals); any competent sysadmin could disable it on the network/is the master image (since I could and I have no experience with the administration or staffing of a medical business so I assume they have plenty of budget available for IT busiwork).

You don’t need to be working at a VC-backed company in the valley to be a tech-bro.

Most medical businesses I'm familiar with (having a lot of doctors in the family) have no professional sysadmins and definitely no master images.

Same to both from here. I remember helping MD fix their homebrew patient record systems implemented in MS Access, and advising them to YE GODS

and a mistake in a prescription script can have life changing circumstances