[moss2]

Why? Safety Critical Software engineers are expensive. If you write a webstack with Node.js and React to run the insulin pump you can hire web developers. They are much cheaper. And who would be able to tell the difference? Boomer lawyers and judges working on the lawsuit targeted against us won't understand.

[rayiner]

Judges have the benefit of experts spoon feeding them information, and no deadlines other than the ones they impose on themselves. The judge I worked for wrote the panel decision throwing out the Communications Decency Act, at age 64. In addition to covering packet routing and caching, it did a pretty good job of capturing the decentralized ethos of the Internet: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/we...

> 11. No single entity -- academic, corporate, governmental, or non-profit -- administers the Internet. It exists and functions as a result of the fact that hundreds of thousands of separate operators of computers and computer networks independently decided to use common data transfer protocols to exchange communications and information with other computers (which in turn exchange communications and information with still other computers). There is no centralized storage location, control point, or communications channel for the Internet, and it would not be technically feasible for a single entity to control all of the information conveyed on the Internet.

Ironically, in this day and age of Facebook and Twitter, that’s probably not even true anymore in a practical sense.

[tptacek]

That's the opposite of the conventional wisdom on the strengths of the judiciary, so much so that there's a norm that courts defer to legislatures on findings of fact, since they're so comparatively hamstrung at generating facts.

[dragonwriter]

> That's the opposite of the conventional wisdom on the strengths of the judiciary, so much so that there's a norm that courts defer to legislatures on findings of fact

There... isn't such a norm (at least not in the American system) courts defer to legislatures on matters of policy, not fact. There's a norm that appellate courts in most cases have some deference to lower courts on findings of fact, reviewing them only for unreasonableness, but nothing about courts deferring to legislatures about matters of fact.

[dctoedt]

> There... isn't such a norm (at least not in the American system) courts defer to legislatures on matters of policy, not fact. There's a norm that appellate courts in most cases have some deference to lower courts on findings of fact, reviewing them only for unreasonableness, but nothing about courts deferring to legislatures about matters of fact.

That's very much an overstatement, and arguably even flat-out incorrect. See https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

[selimthegrim]

Legislatures and not juries?

[galangalalgol]

Actually, critical software engineers often get less than half the TC of a full stack and still much less than a front end.

[adrianN]

Having worked on safety critical software, yes, lawyers understand very well.