talking with my wife about failure modes and robust design, and had the occasion to use the unique phrase "any failure mode that results in your bra being advertised with a picture of Hitler's face is not a good one"
@q an online clothing shop decided they needed a placeholder image as a default for all unlisted sales items, and someone had the thought "hmm we should make it something that really makes it obvious we didn't set an image yet, so nobody can ever forget to apply an image", and thus the default foolishly became a picture of Hitler's face, forgetting the golden rule that all processes will eventually fail at some point.
@q @gsuberland I sure as hell do want to know. Did some LLM decide that fash need bras as well?
@gsuberland @q loooool. I see how it ended up there but my god, do not make your placeholder image Hitler!
@q on one fateful day, someone hit publish on a listing without setting a product image, and boom. black frilly bra for sale, with Hitler's face as the product image.
someone noticed, took a screenshot, the media picked it up, big mess.
@gsuberland that is a perfectly believable and yet utterly horrifying story
@gsuberland @q even doing it "properly" doesn't necessarily save you -- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071120-00/?p=24453
@gsuberland Must be a *real cool* dev that didn't have a single better pic sitting in their memes folder.
(I probably would have gotten into far worse legal, but better social, trouble by putting "the entirety of Shrek in a 4mb gif" as the placeholder)
"This is the 'assume that every gun is loaded' of the publishing world".
@gsuberland @q I am reminded of a place where it was decided to remove a bunch of personal data from a system that didn’t really need it for users that were linked from elsewhere and a developer took the “dummy data” suggestion a little too literally. Unfortunately they also didn’t realise this system fed into marketing emails until they started getting complaints from customers receiving an email that started “Dear Dummy”.
@gsuberland @Nixie @f4grx @q I think I’ve found it (unless it happened twice…) — apparently the system picked a random photo from every photo they had and it happened to be a hitler book…
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/store-uses-picture-hitlers-book-6971303