The message went out to patients of the medical facility – there are reportedly about 8,000 of them – on December 23, 2022. It asked patients to fill out a DS1500 form, which is used to help terminal patients expedite access to benefits because they may not have time for the usual bureaucratic delay.
About an hour after thoroughly alarming recipients of the not-so-glad tidings, the medical facility reportedly apologized in a follow-up text message.
Error or not, there should have been failsafes to prevent this happening. Even Tom Scott has a story from personal experience when he had to get himself tested for STDs (his face tells you everything you need to know
It's been a long while since I posted anything of interest other than fitness and running, so here's something I found that isn't fitness related.
Tom Scott (Twitter: @tomscott) posted this video about the Two Generals problem. Basically it centres around two generals and asks how they can synchronise communication to ensure they two something at the same time.
In multithreading computing, including back when I was learning Java, we had a synchronized keyword which ensure only one thread went through a block of text. But here, you want two threads to proceed at the same time. How do you ensure that? Turns out there's no guaranteed way.
Of course you could just use the UDP method of "fire-and-forget" and say "Hey, General B, we're going to attack at 8pm, catch up if you have to", and have dropped packets (or casualties in the two generals problem)
This is an interesting thought experiment and one I hadn't considered during my time learning parallel and threaded programming.
Oh well, you learn something new every day, I guess.
