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Notes -
The Titan submersible suddenly became very hot culture war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_incident
The wikipedia link is quite thorough.
TLDR as of 2023-06-22 000000z seems to be:
5 people are trapped on a submersible that has lost contact with the outside world.
It was trying to visit the wreck of The Titanic.
Major effort rescue is on under way.
They are running out of air in the next couple of hours.
The name of the vessel is Titan (come on, no one can be that brazen, you are tempting fate)
The people are couple of billionaires, explorer, and the CEO of the company
The vessel can be opened only from outside.
The vessel used some off the shelf parts (like a logitech controller) and somewhat exotic materials.
Now comes the culture war
Somewhat lack of empathy for the people there because of their status in the crazier places of the internet.
The way the vessel was built and operated embodied the SV ethos. There are reports that it was not certified or audited by anyone, that the hull testing procedures were not adequate, that the company moved fast and broke things. So right now said ethos is having torn a new one.
Surfaced a recording of the CEO bragging how they don't want to hire 50 years old white guys because they are not inspiring.
To me actually 2 is the most interesting one out there - 1 is just internet being the internet, 3 - if a small error could lead to death - hire the most safety oriented, pedantic and boring people there are to design your product.
But with silicon valley moving more and more prone to overtaking the meatspace - their physical products kinda suck. From smart thermostats to fridges to whatever we actually have degradation of the experience. So I think we are in a rough ride. And the more products they make smarter or move fast - the more human lives will be at stakes.
I don't see a strong culture war aspect to this one actually. As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone thinks that thing was obviously a death-trap and the CEO was an idiot. There's only a little variance on how hard to sneer at the passengers for being foolish rich people and whether to trash the CEO for claiming he "didn't want to hire 50 year old white guys". Okay, they're foolish, but they've suffered pretty severe consequences for it. And the CEO sounds kinda racist with that statement, but I think he actually cares more about not bringing in anyone who would question the bad design and lax safety practices than their skin color - the staff pics I've seen look pretty lily-white.
A few other notes that I picked up in my reading about this:
The hatch is only rated to a third of the depth they were diving to, and the pressure vessel was never actually proofed to any depth at all. It's made of carbon fiber mostly, which tends to shatter instead of deform when over-stressed.
The life-support limit is a bullet point on a document, and a suspiciously round number. Nobody knows how they actually came up with this number or whether their life support systems were ever actually tested with 5 people for 96 hours. It's not clear how it works either or what its failure modes are. It's possible it could lead to an abnormally high oxygen level, which makes the environment highly flammable, and doesn't appear to have any firefighting capabilities or smoke mitigation systems.
The hatch is installed in the center of the endcap of the cylindrical vessel. It's pretty clearly designed to only be opened on the submersible sled thing it gets launched with. It seems likely to me that if the sub was floating on the surface and the hatch was opened, it would rapidly flood and sink. Maybe slow enough for people inside to get out, maybe not. I guess (if it made it to the surface) being able to maybe get out and float around on the surface in the middle of the Atlantic is better than definitely suffocating, but not a lot. I guess life vests, survival suits, and life rafts would be too much to expect here.
Right now it's looking like the submersible did indeed shatter. The more I read on their website, the crazier the whole thing seems: their previous version only went down to 500m, this one they were trying for 4000m.
It's hard to speak ill of the dead, given the CEO went down on this trip, but the entire philosophy seems like "try moonshots and don't be held back by the regulators" which is great if you're mucking around on land but not so great when an "oopsie!" means you're crushed to death by the water pressure of deep ocean.
'I don't want to hire the old guys like the other companies do, I want young and exciting original thinkers' is a bad decision because the old guys are the ones who've seen how things fail and when, and if they were saying "uh yeah I don't think so" then firing them to be replaced by 20+ year old who goes "totally let's use a game controller" is not the best idea, yes?
I really like how several people have already explained to you that the game controller is one of the sanest parts of the debacle, but you continue to treat it as a slam dunk.
Well, given their other design decisions, is the Logitech looking like such a good choice now?
Yes, it has been explained that game controllers are used elsewhere. I am not aware that other submersibles use them, please inform me if that is so. And while it may not have been the worst part of the whole package, I think that when you are doing something that could go very badly wrong very fast involving human life, being cautious and making sure you have robust systems in place is better than "Well the Navy use it for surface level machinery!"
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