Today we had a fire alarm in the office.

[dalias@hachyderm.io]

@tagir_valeev A deadly case of the general principle that the situationally useful information lies not in the statistical pattern but in where and how deviations from the pattern occur.

[majick@mefi.social]

@tagir_valeev More galling still, a scheduled test of a fire alarm system typically *still includes evacuation.* Leaving the building *is* the drill. I have never worked in an office where there was any condition under which occupants are told to ignore the alarm.

Ignoring alarms leads to alarm fatigue which then leads to failure. Alarms either exist for a reason or they don't. A device that says otherwise is a broken device. You're right, devices like that will kill.

[tagir_valeev@mastodon.online]

@majick well, in our case there were definitely cases of 'scheduled alarm maintenance'. In that time, random alarms occurred many times during two or three hours. Evacuating after every single of them would mean nobody is doing the actual work during the good part of the day.

[majick@mefi.social]

@tagir_valeev Exceptions like that are reasonable, I think, with the caveat that 'being prepared to not die' is the actual work on any good day.

[stuartmarks@mastodon.social]

@tagir_valeev As 90% of fire alarms are drills, it makes perfect sense to respond with the most likely scenario.

( /s in case it wasn’t obvious. Rather startling that people are arguing with you.)

[funbaker@chaos.social]

@tagir_valeev idk Dude, when theres a fire alarm I leave the building and make sure everyone made it out, and dont write shit in Slack

[mdione@en.osm.town]

@tagir_valeev ... and even if it was a drill, you're supposed to leave. So not only the thing has no criteria, just parrots what it has heard before, it's also parroting the wrong thing.

[sven_aus_kiel@troet.cafe]

@mhd @tagir_valeev
„I hope this e-mail finds you well and unscorched …“

[sbourne@mastodon.social]

@majick @tagir_valeev There are two kinds of alarm testing. One is as you described, where they are testing the alarm structure and functionality. You should get advance notice to ignore the alarms, preferably with a reminder to listen to announcements just in case there's a real emergency in the middle of their test. The other kind is testing the human element, so yeah, you have to leave when they tell you to because you never know.

[richlv@mastodon.social]

@majick @tagir_valeev There could be some cases where the test checks sound etc, where evacuation is not the drill, but those indeed would be exceptions.

In Latvia, in 2013 fire alarms were repeatedly set off in a supermarket. Security just reset them, and employees & shoppers returned, then ignored the alarms.
The building collapsed and 54 people died.

Whenever I hear a fire alarm, I first get the fuck out, then I figure out what's happening.

https://lv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lielveikala_%22Maxima%22_sagr%C5%AB%C5%A1ana_R%C4%ABg%C4%81

[majick@mefi.social]

@richlv @tagir_valeev Operators resetting/muting the alarm without understanding why it fired is a perfect example of alarm fatigue. A tragedy like that underscores why it's a Big Fuckin' Deal to avoid it.

The root cause of a failure like that is almost never the dude who did that. It's the circumstances that led to that dude thinking it was the correct thing to do.

Then people die.

My own opinion that evacuation is always the drill. Working on the alarm device, be it wiring, programming, or the noise that comes out of it, is part of working on an end-to-end system that includes people going away from the alarm.

[majick@mefi.social]

@sbourne @tagir_valeev I don't agree with this because no alarm should go ignored, but I do understand why it's done that way in the real world. And why it's the default method.

Nobody[1] calls a reliability engineer before putting together their building maintenance punchlist and sending dudes with ladders.

1. note: nobody except my kid's boyfriend who is a chief facilities engineer, or my kid who is a marine engineer and grew up around rigid high-reliability high-risk operations. They're exceptions.

[navi@catcatnya.com]

@tagir_valeev even if it is "just a drill", you do need to leave the workplace!!!!! fucking LLMs!

[tagir_valeev@mastodon.online]

As it gets much more attention, than I expected, here are two clarifications:
1. The Slack message was written after the person evacuated properly. It was written via phone while staying at the designated area outside the building.
2. Nobody asked AI advice explicitly. It was configured to answer automatically if it thinks it can help you. The configuration was updated after this incident.

[metaphase@toot.community]

@tagir_valeev The ironic thing is that if you look at the probabilities that are represented in the training data, and likely the real world - it was very likely statistically correct. All the more reason that humans should be the arbiters of human decisions not AI or even algorithms

[monstreline@ottawa.place]

@tagir_valeev phew! I’m glad the configuration is updated!

[aadeacon@mastodon.social]

@tagir_valeev Having worked in the Chemical Industry all my life my first instinct is evacuate, carry out roll call and then establish whether or not it was a real fire. My colleagues and I were all fire and rescue trained but would only act on small fires we always called the fire service. Many of the sites I worked on had alarms that went to the local fire control and triggered a turn out, a turn out of 6 engines at one site plus a general alert to other brigades

[richlv@mastodon.social]

@majick @tagir_valeev As much as I love to talk about alert noise/fatigue, in that case other factors were contributing.
A bit of pressure from the supermarket chain, a bit of leftover mentality from the russian occupation times. Similar to the "I'm not afraid of no virus, I'm not gonna mask!" etc.

[tom_ofb@23.social]

@tagir_valeev @davidgerard

[aethervision@sfba.social]

@tagir_valeev Charles Darwin has entered the chat.