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The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

(thedailywtf.com)
449 points lemper | 1 comments | 27 Aug 25 06:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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mellosouls ◴[27 Aug 25 08:41 UTC] No.45036960[source]▶
TIL TheDailyWTF is still active. I'd thought it had settled to greatest hits only some years ago.
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greatgib ◴[27 Aug 25 09:32 UTC] No.45037284[source]▶
This story is kind of old. But also I'm suspicious that this was an AI generated content due to this weird paragraph (one becoming "they"):

   It's worth noting that there was one developer who wrote all of this code. They left AECL in 1986, and thankfully for them, no one has ever revealed their identity. And while it may be tempting to lay the blame at their feet—they made every technical choice, they coded every bug—it would be wildly unfair to do that.
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1. HankStallone ◴[27 Aug 25 16:28 UTC] No.45041803[source]▶
It writes that way because almost everyone writes that way these days. It's annoying if you learned English grammar from textbooks and other materials written over 50 years ago, but it's extremely common now anyway. So a large chunk of its training data will be that way.

It's interesting, because all the older works in its training data will default to the masculine singular, and that has to be a massive number of books too. But maybe the modern writing, including lots of online sources, simply overwhelms that. Or it's one of the guardrails written into the AIs to avoid offending people.