this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
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Holy cow. I work in factories, and I know enough about industrial safety to know that would not fly.
Yeah a big red shutoff should be the cutoff to the electricity, water, air, oil, or whatever else it’s meant to stop.
No, the big red button launches the nukes.
That has the secondary effect of shutting off the electricity, water, air, oil, or whatever else ... It just takes a little longer.
And that's only, like, the most basic part of an industrial e-stop. On top of directly disconnecting the energy source, it also has to include redundant circuits (since it's possible for a contactor to break and fail open, or weld and fail closed), and some even need to have signal pulses constantly going through them to actively confirm they haven't been pressed. They absolutely should not just send a signal to a Linux computer, because general-purpose operating systems are too complex to be rated for safety.
This isn't even my area of expertise yet I know this stuff. The fact that they failed at the very first requirement is really messed up.