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Re:Apple iCloud account and sign in outage affecting some us... by londons_explore on Saturday December 26, 2020 @05:56PM (#25547112)
There are plenty of other branches of engineering with similar reliability goals. When I eat my lunch with a fork, I expect the prongs of the fork not to fall off... And so far, in my whole life of using forks, the prongs have never fallen off. The fork has been 100% reliable. It has always worked.

And before you say a fork is unrealistically simple, a metal fork is still the result of centuries of metalworking, casting, mining, etc. I'm sure some early forks did fall apart. But now, we have it refined, and they're close enough to bug-free.

I think the way to achieve it is to have a fixed feature set that you never add to.

Re:Apple iCloud account and sign in outage affecting some us... by eyelidlessness on Saturday December 26, 2020 @07:28PM (#25547648)
I don’t think even your proposed solution would yield the results you’re seeking. Even if the software were provably correct and never updated, it has to operate on hardware. Hardware will fail. Battery life will degrade, screens will crack, power cables will fray. Even other (real) engineering disciplines don’t guarantee 0% failure, they guarantee tolerances.

Metal forks don’t lose a prong, but their prongs do bend. They do get scraped in garbage disposals. They do get hot when left too long on a heated surface. Some (silver) forks are considerably softer, amplifying those failure modes. And while I’m sure there must be fork vendors who offer solutions with guarantees against those failure modes—there are niche products for nearly every imaginable niche—the vast majority of people knowingly buy forks with these known limitations, trading some reliability for economy and utility. If everyone had the expectations you seem to have, very few people could afford forks at all, and they very well may not have been developed because the market would be so small.