Online control is like a squatter waiting for years in the bushes on your yard and it only takes one time that you forget to lock your door and he sneaks in and claims he lives in your home, and uses all possible legal loopholes to prevent any imminent relocation.
A pedigree of chatcontrols has already been turned down several times in the past but there's nothing stopping it from being raised from the dead a couple of years later over and over until it finally passes. And then it's very much impossible to unpass.
What’s your point? That you should just give up and invite the squatter in? Serve him a cup of tea while you’re at it, and give him the house?
That brand of defeatism has been spewed every step of the way every time. If everyone thought like you, the first version of Chat Control would have passed. But it didn’t. And even if it eventually does, later is better than sooner. Later is worth fighting for.
Look, it’s fine if you yourself want to personally give up, this is tiring. But please don’t rub your despondency on the people who are trying to fight for something which benefits you. You’re not helping. On the contrary, you’re making it worse for everyone, including yourself.
Every time you make that sort of comment, you’re helping those who want to oppress you. Either join the fight or move aside.
Good effing luck with that. Government is an institution that grows until it controls every single aspect of its citizens’ lives. What to do when government grows cancerous?
Agreed, it won't happen in practice. It's common people who are in favor of more legislation without realizing that are shooting themselves in the foot.
> It's common people who are in favor of more legislation
I know. I've always called myself a progressive left individual, then found out the modern progressive left is all about solving every issue with more rules, more centralisation, more bureaucracy and more prohibition. It's maddening to see how many people feel their government isn't legislating enough and is still too liberal.
Case in point: Online Safety Act has been heavily pushed by Labour (despite starting as a Tory thing). Chat Control is being pushed by the Danish Social Democrats.
We could instead say “promote a utopia where everyone is treated fairly and empathetically and everyone’s needs are met without destroying the planet or a need for government”. That’d “fix” the current problem and more, the issue is what exactly can we do to “promote” that change.
It's actionable if you have some imagination. Raise funds for a nonprofit. Start lobbying on both sides of the aisle. Enlist an advertising company to show the dystopian future if something like chat control comes into effect, poll for focus groups and target them. Find ways to undermine and expose the forces that are pushing for authoritarian legislation.
Am I weird because I don't consider, in particular, the tracking nature of ads the biggest problem? Sure, I my browser doesn't share data between websites, I delete cookies automatically except whitelisted, and I don't give apps permissions for no good reason. But the problem with ads is their display, not the contents.
Early Google style text box ads were fine. Any ad put on the side of the page with no animated elements is probably fine. But in reality ads are intrusive and those block my mental process when I'm trying to read about of focus on something. Especially ads in videos would just make me focus really, really hard on blocking off the message until I can restore my mental stack and continue with the original video. (I can't watch youtube with ads, for that reason.) Anything that pops up, takes space, or requires me to find an X button to shut them off gets me to C-w the browser tab nearly without exception.
If the ads do behave I don't particularly mind. I even used to peruse ads in print magazines. In fact, untargetted ads are generally complete shit and if the "inter Net cloud thing" has even an inkling of what I might be interested at all, that's all the better I think. I don't ever click on ads though, so I'm probably not part of the prime target audience. But meaningful ads may make me add their products in the comparison set if I'm in the process of buying something similar.
Paper-shuffling used to be not a major issue in a doctor's work day. It was merely something that yes, sure you had to log new patient data and whatnot for reference, but you were mostly free to do the paperwork in a way that fit your natural workflow. Based on the doctors I know/knew, it was not a pain point. Yeah, you would sometimes have to fetch physical papers from somewhere instead of clicking yourself to the same information on the computer, but that was not a major issue. I'd say it was similar to a programmer who's waiting for an incremental compilation to finish: a minor moment out of actual work but nothing to fret about.
After doctors' offices got digital then interacting with the computer specifically certainly became an issue which didn't exist before. At best, it was just a clumsy way to do the inevitable and at worst it became a major part of the patient visit, with myriad of odd tricks you had to learn about some particular computer software in order to accomplish your actual goals.
If something that used to be normal part of work nobody thought twice about once become noted as a separate issue of the work day, something did change there. Sure, there are benefits too, but it's the friction points that you feel at work when you're trying to get other things done. Sure, software could be written to serve the user and not the other way around, but software rarely is -- no matter the profession, doctors aren't the only ones!
My old family doctor used to have IBM terminals into the early 2010s, I'm fairly sure there was an AS/400 somewhere in the back rooms where all the serial lines in their practice converged. Very fast system. Meanwhile I was at a specialist some time ago and they had to switch back and forth between notepad and the medical app, because you can't enter more than a few words at once into the app. So he would write everything that's not a drop-down in notepad then copy-paste it.
There's a lot of criticism by the local people against Helsinki being too car-friendly. Pedestrian crossings deemed dangerous being simply removed rather than putting traffic lights to tame the cars instead. Large multi-lane roads right outside the densest city centre. Too much space allocated for cars vs pedestrians and other light traffic in the city centre area where the latter outnumber the former by 10x.
The only thing that directly supports the zero-death record is the lower speed limits. They used to be 50 km/h some decades ago, then most of the city centre was lowered to 40 km/h and now in the last 10-15 years there's been a proliferation of 30 km/h zones all over the dense areas where there are a lot of pedestrians. This is absolutely good, and given traffic and red lights the average speed was less than that anyway -- it's just that now the drivers no longer have that small stretch of road to accelerate to high speeds towards the next red lights.
In the centre, lower speed limits are perfect. Helsinki could've reached zero deaths earlier too if it wasn't for some random truck making a turn and running over a kid or something (I think that was the one traffic death in the previous year, or the one before that).
I'd still like to see fewer square metres allocated for cars, elevated pedestrian crossings, roads with less lanes (you can turn 4 lanes into 3 with bike lanes both ways).
People, in their excitement to play with or write cool tools to automate boring details in the programming process, often underestimate the value of boring grunt work.
While what you're doing consciously is something simple you're simultaneously also mucking about in your codebase in the "spinal cord level", or spending quality time with your creation. It's times like those when bigger/other things often click together the first time all the while you're doing something that's seemingly just grunt work.
It is known that the switches cannot effectively be flipped by accident.
It is known that the switches were set to "cut-off" because they were then later restored to "run", so it was not an electrical fault (i.e. switches pointing to run but reporting cut-off).
Pilot dialogue and engine telemetry confirms the cause of power loss was fuel cut-off.
The question I can't help but think is how did the pilot realize it was the cut-off switches?
I'm sure there's a warning message for them somewhere but in the few seconds of time when you're losing thrust right after rotate, and you're bombarded by a lot of warnings and errors on the screen and in the speakers: how likely are you to notice the fuel cut-off switches have been flipped?
Those switches are something you never, ever think about during operation because you're trained to only operate them when starting up and parking (and yes, in an emergency where you need to shut down the engine quick).
How long would it take for an average pilot to realize it's not one of the dozens of memory items pointing to more likely scenarios causing loss of thrust, ones that they've been training to check in case of an imminent emergency? And why didn't the first pilot who was recorded to notice the fuel cut-off didn't immediately flip the switches to "run" position first instead of asking the other pilot about it?
Given what you're vaguely implying -- that the switches would be nowhere near the first thing a pilot would normally think of in the kind of situation -- what are the odds the pilot asking on record "did you flip the fuel cut-off switch?" is the one who actually flipped the switches and was simply trying to fool the would-be investigation (even knowing they all are about to perish)?
> what are the odds the pilot asking on record "did you flip the fuel cut-off switch?" is the one who actually flipped the switches and was simply trying to fool the would-be investigation (even knowing they all are about to perish)?
This is such a diabolical mind-game that it never occurred to me. Like, they would all die, why would he want to incriminate someone else? But yet, people are weird and crazy. And maybe he didn't go down as a killer and decided to incriminate the other pilot? Anyway, it is totally possible to have happen. Sadly there are no cameras the cockpit, and a camera in the cockpit would really have help to find who did what.
Just a random example and I have no indication that that's what is going on here, but life insurance generally doesn't pay out for suicide so you'd need to make your death look like an accident or caused by someone else if you want to pull of a scam. Pointing this out to say it could be much more banal than some diabolical villain that gets off of killing hundreds of people.
I'd say the odds are 50%. The odds of the opposite scenario - where the pilot who said "did you flip the fuel cutoff" wasn't the one who did it are also 50%.
Based on the cutoffs for both engines being flipped 1 second apart, the above exchange being caught on the CVR, and then within 10 seconds the (presumably the other) pilot switching them back to Run, it's pretty clear that this was a deliberate act.
There is likely much more on the CVR than what has been released in the preliminary report - which seems to have been carefully sanitized so it doesn't implicate either pilot. I expect the investigators have a much better idea but not one that they are 100% confident in making public yet.
I've been reading commentary on aviation forums like PPRuNe and the consensus amongst pilots and others in the field seems to be that "electrical glitch" is a near impossibility. Also, the report states "and immediately thereafter, the Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec". They wouldn't have said the switches transitioned from one position to another if they weren't certain, they would have said something like a voltage change consistent with cutoff occurred. Several people have pointed out that these are large mechanical switches that make a distinctive noise when moved and the CVR is sensitive enough that it would have picked it up. Also, it's important to note that no safety bulletins were issued to Boeing as they would have in the case of some electronics issue.
Now, when I say deliberate act, I don't necessarily mean "pilot suicide" though that is certainly a strong possibility.
I’m more familiar with the 737 (as a hobby, not as a pilot), but for that aircraft the “loss of thrust on both engines” checklist has the start levers as the second item on the list.
Note that in the checklist I am looking at the goal is to restart the engines rather than diagnose the failure and that involves these levers. I suspect you’d notice pretty quickly if they were not in the expected location.
Thanks, this is good information. So it then fits the overall picture that they would've actually bumped into these switches in the rush of emergency eventhough they're never expecting the switches to actually be off.
Just from a systems perspective if the actions to restart the engines can be parallelized then they should be; maybe only one engine will start. You don't want the 50% (for 2-engine aircraft) chance that you spend time on the one that won't start before trying the other.
I would assume that the engines cur of due to fault in the shared control system.
And to restore power the pilots toggled the switches to off and then back on to get them running again.
Hopefully the timestamps tell if the engines lost power before switches were turned off? Or is there some time window that was not recorded due to the lost power to systems?
This is one of the first scenarios that came to mind for me as well.
i.e. hypothetically, no one flipped the switches to cutoff initially, but a glitch in a computer component caused the same effect, including some indication (a status light?) that the switches were in cutoff state. One of the pilots saw the indication, and asked the other. The other (truthfully) said they hadn't. Ten seconds of confusion later, one of them flipped the switches off and back on to reset the state to what it should have been.
That assumes that the switches are part of a fly-by-wire system, of course. I am not an aircraft engineer, so maybe that's not a safe assumption. But if they're fly-by-wire, seems like there might not be a way to know for sure without cockpit video, because the logging system might only log an event when the switches cause the state to change from what the computer thinks the current state is, not necessarily when the switches change to the state the computer thinks they're already in.
Someone bumping the switches accidentally seems worthy of investigation as well, given the potential for an "Oops! No locking feature! Our bad!" scenario on the part of Boeing that's mentioned in the BBC article.
Why would you assume that? The engines were providing thrust to achieve normal take off. If they did that to restore engine power why would the voice recorder have one asking the other why he cut off the engines?
Maybe the pilot who cut-off the fuel was the one who asked “why did you cut-off?”. Knowing full-well the conversation is recorded in order to fool investigators, lay blame and confuse his colleague.
How can it be known that the switches were moved physically and not some electrical signal occured on its own (fault) equivalent of switches operated, without actual physical moement of the switch? Some electronic fault in the line of the signal. I do not expect having an independent sensor for this switch monitoring actual physical movements of the switch in parallel of the intended fuel controlling signals occurring, so the faulty signal reaching valves may have been registered and assumed that actual physical movement of the switch caused it?
We know that they restarted a few seconds later a few seconds apart from each other, and shut off a second part from each other.
It's extremely unlikely for a pilot to decide to react by shutting both switches off, then turning them on within seconds (this is not a failure mode they'd have expected, deciding to shut the engine off a couple hundred feet in the air would be... a fairly reckless decision).
That leaves both switches spontaneously turning off, then back on, a couple seconds after takeoff, which is a failure mode that's never been seen before once let alone twice. Also the pilots didn't make a statement about an incongruity between the report from the plane's systems about the switch being off vs the physical position, which they very likely would have in such a situation.
I can't really tell which sounds more horrible, the instructions for navigating such a party event or the existence of such an event in the first place.
> [complexity...] Author seems to imply that this is something unique to computing.
The unique part of computing is that complexity can grow way higher and faster than complexity in physical based engineering because it does not suffer from physical limitations and all the NN relations between pieces of shared code and data grow out of hand quick.
Creating something complex in physical realm is hard, and it essentially means doing more work to make something complex rather than simple. The common challenges are rather often about fitting the achieved complexity either in a small physical space (like an engine bay) or building it all out into large installments that look complex (like a nuclear plant). Yet many things in physical based engineering aren't inherently* hard but it will be hard to make it all into something that both fits in a practical enclosure and actually works reliably in practice.
But creating something complex in the realm of compute is rather the default offering. If you just put things together into a program then, in the classic rookie intern fashion, very soon you have something that mostly actually works but is implicitly so intertwined that nobody can understand the resulting interactions and can no longer start depicking the mahjongg of corner cases. Senior-level software engineering could actually be said to be primarily about managing complexity and whatever remains left after that effort can be used to build products and develop the trade. The reason we love abstractions is that they reduce complexity and make things manageable at all. There would be no progress in software engineering without abstractions.
If you were building an analog circuit that is, complexity-wise, on par with writing software systems you'd basically have to write software to design the circuit in somewhat manageable way. That's how software itself is written.
A pedigree of chatcontrols has already been turned down several times in the past but there's nothing stopping it from being raised from the dead a couple of years later over and over until it finally passes. And then it's very much impossible to unpass.