The "obscenely safe" remark was directed at "regulated" vessels, not at his own sub. He was acknowledging that he was taking risks by not conforming to regulations.

Thanks, my bad.

From what I understand he was also complaining about those regulations holding back the private industry and also it's been stated as of late that he's on record saying how he's broken rules. That among allegations of a safety director being fired in 2015 for pointing out design safety oversights. [0]

I don't think it's great to make this guy into a folk hero just because he was pushing the limits. Imagine, for a second, how this would be reacted to in the aviation space.

If the CEO cut corners then that should be his legacy. Great people can be flawed. Flaws can be fatal. It's just a shame if those flaws weren't properly portrayed to those who dove with him.

[0] https://fortune.com/2023/06/21/titan-titanic-missing-sub-dav...

It’s ok and even a good thing to cut corners and take a “ask forgiveness not permission” attitude when the results of failure are inconvenience and annoyance. Pushing through layers of accumulated red tape does indeed help when you’re making a taxi service or delivering food or making a social app.

Not so much when you’re building life-critical systems or those where there are real big serious problems when they go down or fail.

Things can go bad quickly with taxi and food delivery too. The difference is that those come with built in fall guys

making people into folk heros just because they were pushing the limits is how we got aviation in the first place, and a lot of dead aviators

https://www.planecrashinfo.com/famous1910s.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviators_killed_in_av...

progress in both aviation and undersea exploration stopped about 50 years ago when we stopped doing that

Oh I'm all about innovation. Just don't pretend to be innovating when you're charging people $250k for a trip in your experimental vehicle that is thinly veiled with the marketing gimick of "tourism". I believe you're conflating individual risk takers with the new age charlatans looking at this through the lens of profit first, innovation second.

The links you provide show a stark difference in end game from then and now. None of them killed tourists in the name of pushing the limits. That and those risk takers in aviation didn't blindly disregard highly researched and engineered vehicle designs, and oh by the way, publicly state that your design was ultimately against what other experts in the industry have shown to be non-viable with our current build process and manufacturing capabilities using those materials. And to top it off using control mechanisms not even remotely designed for the use case of a real time system that could cause a grave outcome of life. One that you can buy at Walmart to play a video game.

In my mind comparing this situation with those innovators is unfortunate.

It really makes you think about other tech CEOs, when they say something is safe, or private or something similar.

Most software doesn’t implode though.

Those of us making web apps don't have the same safety critical nature as anything carrying souls. Working in aerospace gave me a great appreciation for the complexity of ensuring safety, the engineering hours poured into it, and why regulations exist.

The CEO was quoted[1] as:

> “We only have one button and that's it,” Rush said in the CBS report. “It should be like an elevator.

What an example to reference. Early elevators resulted in many deaths [2] and safety regulations and mechanisms needed to be invented to prevent them [3].

Similar regulations existed for submersibles, but he decided not to take all those lessons learned. I'm thankful building elevator operators do not have a cavalier attitude towards safety like this.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/06/20/david-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elevator_accidents [3] https://blog.ansi.org/history-of-elevators/#gref

Having formerly worked in safety critical software, it would make me cringe when I would hear people in those industries use phrases like "move fast and break things."

I'm not even a risk-adverse individual. But I can often recognize when people say things like that, not because they're comfortable with the risk, but because they are blind to it. It's hard for me to feel like the teenager aboard was fully cognizant of the risks.

While it’s been 15 years I used to work in telco. Everyday I reminded myself that my software needed to work because someone might need to call 911, or make an equally important call.

Mostly yes, although externalities are worth considering. For example Pokémon Go may have lead to 256 deaths https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3073723