> A more recent example is the Boeing 737-Max where there was a focus on automating trim control. In that case, the automation made the system more complex, to the detriment of a pilot understanding and reacting to an abnormal operation
To be fair this is not entirely accurate: a focus was made on stall prevention in a very specific mode of flight given the variant's increased susceptibility to the pitch-power couple. It did not make the system any more complex per se than other airliners - see e.g. Airbus aircraft which do actually have autotrim in normal flight. The actual kicker was that the existence of MCAS was hidden to avoid the need for lengthy re-training of pilots if the 737 MAX was deemed sufficiently different from its predecessor variants (on top of MCAS being rather poorly implemented in its first iteration).
Fair enough. The “hidden” aspect is what I was alluding to…ie, control that exists but isn’t apparent to the pilots (and worse, intermittent). In the human factors world, it was more complex than the pilots assumed, but you’re right that it’s probably not the best description.
(As an aside, the hazard being mitigated, ie stall, has little bearing on whether or not it’s autonomous or complex, although it does impact whether its safety critical)
The fact that the autopilot will loudly disengage if there is a serious enough control surface failure to cause an upset is more than enough support IMO.
Not only is landing not an "abnormal situation", contrary to armchair internet wisdom pilots of airliners in fact do not use autoland all the time and don't even always fly a precision approach at all.
Not to mention that they get mandated regular reviews of their ability to fly manually. And even with that, there's still a reason why "children of the magenta line" (i.e. pilots who passively follow automated systems into danger and/or have seriously degraded stick-and-rudder skills) has become a term.
2 things. First, landing a plane is abnormal! You're shedding a huge amount of energy and you're transitioning from a state where you can keep flying due to your speed to one where flight is impossible as you lower speed. That's an abnormal state to put an aircraft in, regardless of how often it happens. Second, what exactly is the level of automation you're saying is not necessary? Should we rip out radar systems that mark glide paths?
This is about as silly as feverishly claiming that e.g. deploying a web app to production is an "abnormal situation".
On top of that I'm sorry but you seem to have skimmed over both the article and what I said in favour of clutching pearls at some nebulous entity apparently claiming that "automation should be ripped out" when what is actually being explained to you is that without actual, manual, hands-on, current experience the "human in the loop" loses the ability to properly control or take over from an automated system - and worse, the ability to even understand when it is doing something nonsensical and/or dangerous.
As an aside, I assume that by "radar systems" you are referring to radio navigation aids. Like I've already mentioned (though in fairness not everyone knows what a non-precision approach means), pilots of airliners are still trained to fly without them, are expected to know how to fly without them, and shockingly enough DO fly without them in the real world where equipment fails or cannot even be installed at all. I know most of the software that people write here is insulated by several layers of abstraction from the hardware, but surely we haven't already lost the understanding that automated systems are not in fact magic - that they depend on real world hardware with real world physical constraints?
First, snark goes against HN guidelines so you might want familiarize yourself with them.
Secondly, MCAS autonomously adjusts trim based on sensor inputs to avoid a hazard. It is not advisory and directly controls flight surfaces. This would make it automation according to how organizations like NASA categorize flight software taxonomy.
> That's an abnormal state to put an aircraft in, regardless of how often it happens
Taking off, flying, and landing are all absolutely required in the normal operation of a plane. If your plane is not engineered in such a way that landing is normal, it won't last long
I think they were intending to evoke the image of RAID rather than literally referring to a redundant array of inexpensive disks. You host your code on Github, Gitlab, and at home, then you survive a Github outage. It's a redundant array. Not sure it's inexpensive, though.
This is HN; it has probably never occurred to half the people here that the average person even in first world countries doesn't even have the financial capacity to make an impulse five-figure USD purchase, even if on credit.
No one said anything about this being an "impulse" purchase -- it would usually be perceived as a "career investment" purchase, given that many feel they need to race to be with "it" or be left behind -- nor does "five figure" have anything to do with this -- DGX options are available at $3000 -- there's a certain irony that you are posting a comment that is basically "people in my country/circle can't, therefore no one can", while dismissing my comment that many people can.
Millions of people are paying thousands of dollars a year to buy a slightly upgraded entertainment package in their car. There are 60 million or so millionaires alone, including 6 million+ in China.
There are a lot of people with a lot of wealth on the planet. A lot. Millions...it isn't that unfounded, friend.
So doing this "this is HN" snide jerk act, and then basically projecting your lot on the planet is...I don't know if you intended it, but it's rather amazing.
> In my highest volume weeks, I ship low hundreds of thousands of lines of software not counting changes to deps
But what do they actually do?
I keep seeing people wax poetic about the mountains and mountains of code that LLMs are dumping out but I'm yet to anywhere near a proportionate amount of actually useful new apps or features. And if anything the useful ones I do find are just more shovels for more AI. When do we get to the part where we start seeing the 10x gains from the billions of lines of code that have probably been generated at this point?
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