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Comment Re:Directly monitored switches? (Score 1) 42

Obviously the black box can only record what the computer tells it is the state of the switches. There's no camera looking at the switches to confirm they actually were moved. No doubt the switches are wired such that a short or an open circuit will not fool the computer into thinking the switch was moved and shut the engines down. But if something caused the computer to think (pardon the expression) the switches had changed state, it would shut the engines down and the flight recorder would dutifully record this change of state.

Suppose for a moment a computer glitch did shut the engines down. The pilot, upon noticing this asks the copilot about it and he says, no I didn't shut them down. Knowing he has to do something, reaches over, flips them to off and back to on again to try to get them going again, after which the engines did restart but sadly not in time to prevent disaster.

Comment Re:Don't blame the pilot prematurely (Score 1) 42

Mods, this should not have been rated -1 flamebait! Totally inappropriate mod.

I deeply respect Captain Steeeve and his videos are great. Any nervous flyer should watch his videos (except the Air India ones!). And indeed Captain Steeeve's summary of the report is accurate. And his videos about the cutoff switches are accurate too. The chance of those switches being flipped inadvertently or on their own from mechanical wear and vibration is zero. And indeed the computer shows that inputs from those switches went from on to off and back to on again with timing suggestive of human intervention.

That said, one of Captain Steeeve's youtube collaborators, Garybpilot with whom he has done videos about Air India (Hanger Talk) has done his own videos on Air India. In one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0n3iIjvQk8) he mentioned that at Air India, there is not one pilot who believes the official report blaming the pilots. These are pilots who knew well both of the pilots in the cockpit on that tragic flight and find the suggestion difficult to believe. The Indian investigation board has been mired in political intrigue and controversy the whole time (before even). They were definitely under pressure to exonerate Air India and blame the pilots. Also to exonerate Boeing. Not that long ago a 787 had both engines shut down during landing. And there is a minor history of electrical anomalies on 787s, including RATs deploying mid flight for no discernible reason.

If the pilots did not shut the engines down, I don't think we will ever know what actually happened unless there is another accident. And given the problems Boeing has had in recent years (and other planes with engine shutdowns during flight), another accident is a possibility.

Comment Re:Don't blame the pilot prematurely (Score 1) 42

Those words were said, definitely. and the other guy responded, "I did not."

I don't know anything about what conspiracy theories are going around on the Internet, but I do know there among some professional pilots there is skepticism. There are no pilots at Air India who knew well these two pilots who believe they were simply suicidal. Plus there was at least one other incident this year with a 787 where both engines shut down during landing. The investigation has certainly been fraught with political tension. Obviously it's in Air India and Boeing's best interests to blame the pilots.

Comment Re:Europe has itself to blame for this (Score 3, Insightful) 215

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

Comment Re:AI detectors remain garbage. (Score 1) 33

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

Comment Re:So, basically (Score 3, Insightful) 109

Not really. If you ask it what's going on in the news then you'll get an up-to-date response, because it knows in that instance to check and summarize the news rather than just generating something from its LLM.

And if you ask Gemini what time it is you'll get the right answer, for the same reason.

The fact that ChatGPT fails to do this is a problem with ChatGPT, not any inherent problem for AI. Probably in response to this embarrassing article it will be fixed within a couple weeks.

Comment Re:AI is just limited. (Score 2) 109

I find the various LLMs are helpful as a form of search engine, enabling me to drill down to potentially useful information more quickly. However at the same time they are far worse than a search engine because they aren't able to actually give you the sources to check. When ChatGPT generates a chunk of code, if you ask it where it got it from, it will say it didn't get it from a specific site, it just knows this stuff. Which of course ends up wrong half the time. So you end up with wrong stuff confidently passed off as accurate, which is ultimately stolen from real human sources. When I was in uni it was drilled into me to list my sources. Why should LLMs be held to any different standard? Google's AI summary does show sources, at least few, which is good. I always check them.

Even Claude AI which is supposed to be geared towards coding suffers from these same problems. I am trying to do some esoteric Qt 6 programming involving OpenGL, and all the AIs really struggle here because there's a limited amount of source material to steal from. It's certainly not capable of digesting the API documents and synthesizing code to do something without first seeing someone else's code. Claude AI seems to work best if you use a popular library or framework with lots of online discussion and github code for it. The popular languages and frameworks of the day.

Comment AI detectors remain garbage. (Score 5, Interesting) 33

At one point last week I pasted the first ~300 words or so of the King James Bible into an AI detector. It told me that over half of it was AI generated.

And seriously, considering some of the god-awful stuff passing peer review in "respectable" journals these days, like a paper in AIP Advances that claims God is a scalar field becoming a featured article, or a paper in Nature whose Figure 1 is an unusually-crappy AI image talking about "Runctitiononal Features", "Medical Fymblal", "1 Tol Line storee", etc... at the very least, getting a second opinion from an AI before approving a paper would be wise.

Comment Re:I thought we were saving the planet? (Score 1) 193

FYI, their statement about Iceland is wrong. BEV sales were:

2019: 1000
2020: 2723
2021: 3777
2022: 5850
2023: 9260
2024 (first year of the "kílómetragjald" and the loss of VAT-free purchases): 2913
2025: 5195

Does this look like the changes had no impact to anyone here? It's a simple equation: if you increase the cost advantage of EVs, you shift more people from ICEs to EVs, and if you decrease it, the opposite happens. If you add a new mileage tax, but don't add a new tax to ICE vehicles, then you're reducing the cost advantage. And Iceland's mileage tax was quite harsh.

The whole structure of it is nonsensical (they're working on improving it...), and the implementation was so damned buggy (it's among other things turned alerts on my inbox for government documents into spam, as they keep sending "kílómetragjald" notices, and you can't tell from the email (without taking the time to log in) whether it's kílómetragjald spam or something that actually matters). What I mean by the structure is that it's claimed to be about road maintenance, yet passenger cars on non-studded tyres do negligible road wear. Tax vehicles by axle weight to the fourth times mileage, make them pay for a sticker for the months they want to use studded tyres, and charge flat annual fees (scaled by vehicle cost) for non-maintenance costs. Otherwise, you're inserting severe distortion into the market - transferring money from those who aren't destroying the roads to subsidize those who are, and discouraging the people who aren't destroying the roads from driving to places they want to go (quality of life, economic stimulus, etc)

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