Reliability in a World That Isn’t
Originally written: 02 November 2020
Designing for Reliability During COVID
It’s November 2020, and absolutely nothing feels reliable anymore. Store shelves empty out as soon as supplies arrive, and people are filling their carts with toilet paper, sparking heated arguments in otherwise quiet grocery aisles. Rules seem to change by postcode, and police checkpoints now appear right where our local dog parks used to be. Even time itself feels completely distorted, with individual days stretching out endlessly while whole months collapse into one another. In the face of all this chaos, we have decided to double down on reliability. Not optimism, and certainly not speed. Just raw reliability.
The mechanism for MyHerculead already works on a functional level, but simply working isn’t enough for us. Right now, we’re actively testing how it fails, how it recovers, and exactly how it behaves when a human handler loses their balance, when a dog surges suddenly, or when tension spikes mid-step. Systems are never truly defined by their success states; they are entirely defined by how gracefully they fail. And in a world that currently feels structurally unstable, graceful failure isn’t optional.
— Elysia
