Category Archives: culture

Busy?

Posted on by
Reply

Boeing’s 737 MAX has a software glitch that can cause an automated navigation feature to fail at difficult moments during an approach.

It emerged from a cockpit software update and can occur when flight crews alter their planned flight path following a missed approach. In a certain scenario, pilots may have to fly manually without some autopilot functions. That, some industry officials said, could overwork pilots while they are already busy, at low altitude and possibly dealing with situations like bad weather.

I have two comments about that. One is my usual: who tested that software update, in what scenarios, and with what test procedure?

The other concerns what constitutes “busy” in the cockpit. A single seat fighter pilot crossing the IP inbound to his ground target in a hostile environment is busy. Even a two-seat fighter crew approaching his airborne target(s) in a target rich environment is busy. In both cases, the busy-ness increases exponentially as the pilots begin actually engage their respect targets, a much more fluid situation than a go-around on a missed approach.

Airline pilots during a go-around, especially in low-altitude bad weather, do see their workloads increase, but they aren’t busy enough to be threatened with overwork.

It’s certainly true that “busy” is relative to what a fighter pilot or civilian aircrew are used to. That, though, is what time in the simulator—and there are very good ones extant for both military and airline pilots—is for. That includes failing the nav feature in the simulator to drill the aircrew on proper and timely responses until a fix to the software update—properly tested this time, hopefully—can be installed. Perhaps, also, this particular failure should be added to the unexpected and emergency drills in the simulator.

Crocodile Tears

Posted on by
Reply

Journalism organizations that heretofore pooled resources in order to cover Presidential events that occurred in venues lacking space for all of the journalists have chosen to refuse to cover President Donald Trump’s (R) small-venue events in response to Trump’s decision to bar three of their number from the White House press pool over those three’s dishonest reporting on administration matters. (Notice that: the bar is over dishonest news reporting, not over opinionating and commentary, as the pressmen have been arguing, thereby demonstrating the reporting dishonesty being sanctioned.)

“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting,” the pool members, FOX News Media, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News, said in a joint statement.

That’s just it, though. CNN‘s, MS NOW‘s, and Politico‘s news reporting has long been dishonest, and they’re not alone; they’re just the most egregious. That dishonesty begins with refusing to report all of the news—all of the facts underlying a news story—which is nothing more than lying by omission. This is a technique the broadcast outlets use especially broadly (viz., spiking the Hunter Biden laptop revelations of the New York Post). The outlets’ dishonesty extends to writing/broadcasting unattributed rumors—sourced to “anonymous,” or to “officials familiar,” even to mere “persons familiar.” That leaves us in their revered public with no means to check on those sources in order to evaluate for ourselves those sources’ qualifications on the subject matter, much less their actual presence in the alleged discussions. We can’t even evaluate whether those sources actually exist or if they do whether their claims are being accurately reported.

Overarching all of that is my long-standing question. Years ago, editors required at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate anonymously sourced claims. Journalists have long since walked away from that requirement, raising the obvious question: what concrete, measurable, publicly accessible standard of journalistic integrity do today’s journalists use instead?

Journalists’ silence on that question is a loud, clear answer.

In the end, Trump is right: journalists have no intrinsic right to enter the White House. They have all kinds of sources and means of ferreting out news regarding the administration and its doings without being inside an office building, however big a deal the building might be. If nothing else, they can interact with their anonymous sources and officials/persons familiar as those folks come and go from the office building.

If He Won’t….

Posted on by
Reply

An essay writer in the WSJ pled, via his headline, For the Love of God, Please Put on Headphones.

One recent morning, I was reading the newspaper in a sleepy Manhattan cafe when two young women sat beside me and proceeded to conduct a work call on speakerphone. As they yelled to their colleague about a marketing presentation, a man at a nearby bench checked in with his girlfriend—also on speakerphone.
Into this racket walked an influencer type armed with a selfie stick. He was livestreaming his coffee run to an up-tempo backing track. “So excited for my cortado! I wonder how it will taste!” he shrieked at his screen as he spun around the room.

I doubt the essay writer wasn’t alone in the cafe trying to enjoy their morning when these noisemakers arrived and began their cacophony.

There’s a simple, straightforward solution for this sort of situation and for dealing with the noisemakers creating it.

Those in the public space should gather around him (them in the particular instance) closely, and make their own noise—loud conversations, loud calls of greetings to passersby, turn up the sound on their own playlists on their own cell phones—and strongly interfere with the loudcaster and the speakerphone shouters who think they’re too cool to put on headphones or, at least for the shouters to take their cell phones somewhere more secluded.

Separately, but not too far afield, I have to wonder about the last few generations, even into the boomers. Whatever happened to folks being willing to take direct action, to address a problem on their own initiative, instead of looking and crying out for someone else to Do Something, or crying to mommy government, or just crying into the air? Or screeding an essay into the æther?

Mishmash

Posted on by
Reply

In a WSJ article about the Great AI Freakout, centered on fears of a supposedly coming AI apocalypse, there was this bit, which illustrates the press’ involvement in potentiating the freakout, all gathered up in one mishmash of…error.

Opposition to the widespread network of Flock Safety AI-enabled surveillance cameras in the US took hold this summer, just as details about OpenAI’s autonomous hacking of the company Hugging Face became public. In the background was a drumbeat of pushback against data centers and worries that the technology could result in widespread job loss.

Laying all of these at the feet of AI is the article’s news writers’ disinformation (and they’re not alone in perpetrating this).

Opposition to Flock Safety’s cameras has very little to do with AI and very much to do with opposition to widespread and spreading government surveillance of us ordinary Americans.

Opposition to data centers has very little to do with AI and very much to do with the data centers’ need for water and electricity at the expense of rising water and electricity costs to us ordinary Americans and to the potential for polluting potable water. (As an aside, while those concerns were, early on, largely justified, data center designers’ and builders’ increasing emphasis on recycling the water they use and including their own power plants in the construction designs largely eliminates the basis for those concerns.)

Buildout of the data centers, further, creates a myriad of construction and ancillary jobs, and the operation of the centers still leads to increases in employment, if only modest ones.

Even the autonomous AI hacking of Hugging Face is overblown. The hacking capability itself is a legitimate concern, but the escape of the AI hackers wasn’t executed by AI so much as it was allowed by the human AI developers’ negligence in maintaining an air gap between their development facilities and the Internet.

At bottom, AI is like any other tool: highly useful when used properly, highly dangerous when used carelessly or misused deliberately.

We’re not all going to die in 10 years, as a colleague of the disgruntled, or panicky, ex-Anthropic employee howled. Far more likely, we’re going to prosper once we grunt through the transition, just as we have done during and after all our prior technology leaps.