Klarna users are being signed in to random accounts

tangential thought, but related: I am, in general, a proponent of nuclear energy as a green alternative to whatever the hell we are doing today. But when I see such stories that humans manage to fuck up simple payment processing apps, still make errors while maintaining bridges, still manage to do hugely negligent screw-ups (most likely corrupt) in *cable cars maintenance*, I immediately think that it is imminent, that something will go wrong with such complex thing as a nuclear reactor and the price there is much bigger.

The Italian cable car was really messed up. The emergency brakes of that cart were intermittently triggering, so the operator jammed a piece of metal to stop that from happening.

His assumption is surely, "Relax, what's going to happen, the cable won't break!".

I kind of get the worry, but the requirements and processes seem to scale exponentially with reliability needs. Online companies may fuck up every day in new and creative ways and we barely get to hear about it. On the other hand we know of every nuclear failure so far with enough public details to discuss the whole time line, system design, steps each person followed, etc. and the death count is still minimal. Then each of those is an input to the future processes. Nuclear power plants and air traffic are in their own class of reliability and safety processes - not even comparable to that's happening in internet commerce.

Yes! We will always make huge mistakes.

.. so we need to accept the eventuality that the worst result will eventually occur.

There are also plenty of services with really incredible uptime. You just don't hear about them because they're deep in whatever stack you're using and haven't broken publicly in decades.

It's all about good engineering practice and architecture.

We know every nuclear failure. We don't know every time a strong nuclear risk existed but by chance, didn't trigger. Nuclear power plants are probably much safer on average, but it only takes one corner cutting plant to cause a nuclear accident.

That said, I'm also pro-nuclear.

...which is why it's important to design things to fail safely. That "worst result" needs to be minimized by design.

With nuclear .. that's probably a bit difficult

There are much-safer-by-design reactor plans out there now. Hopefully the "nuclear is horribly unsafe by default" opinions will consider the new options.

In fairness, the government does not watch over your shoulder if you write code for payment apps. Nuclear energy oversight is so over-the-top, it's almost not worth doing it.

> The emergency brakes of that cart were intermittently triggering

My guess: each time a strand within the cable broke the cable stretched a little and the brake triggered.

Five years ago a company was hired to maintain the cable car. They took one look at the state of it, wrote to the operator (the town council) saying it needed to be shut down and exited the contract. It was an accident waiting to happen long before the brake fiasco.

The worst scenario is always meltdown.