Doctors, engineers, and lawyers aren't infinitely accountable to their equivalent of bugs. Structures still fail, patients die, and lawyers lose cases despite the reality of the crime.

But they're liable when they fuck up beyond what their industry decides is acceptable. If Crowdstrike really wasn't testing the final build of their configuration files at all, then yeah -- that's obviously negligent given the potential impact and lack of customer ability to do staged rollouts. But if a software company has a bug that wasn't caught because they can't solve the halting problem, then no professional review board should fault the license holder.

> we first have to find a way to separate innocent run-of-the-mill mistakes from gross negligence - and that's going to be extremely hard to formalize.

I think we just (oh god -- no sentence with a just is actually that easy) need to actually look at other professional licenses to learn how their processes work. Because they've managed to incorporate humans analyzing situations where you can't have perfect information into a real process.

But I don't think any of this will happen while software is still making absolute shit loads of money.