What ICE is doing is naked incompetent fascism and the entity needs to be disbanded with hostility.
With that said, no, it's not evil to deport people who entered a country illegally. If I sneak into China, and China finds out, they are morally and legally clear to send me back, whether or not I've had children in China.
It likely wouldn't poll well for elections, but today's ICE does need to be disbanded. Its tasks can be given to other agencies until a replacement can be created and staffed. The recent recruitment drive makes it nearly impossible to reform the agency. There's just too many agents introduced in the poisonous culture and goals.
An easy win that should get widespread approval is bolstering the immigration court system. I have dark worries, but I'm still not entirely sure why this administration is whittling away at immigration courts. You'd think they'd want to process asylum applications faster, so invalid claimants could be deported sooner.
>An easy win that should get widespread approval is bolstering the immigration court system. I have dark worries, but I'm still not entirely sure why this administration is whittling away at immigration courts. You'd think they'd want to process asylum applications faster, so invalid claimants could be deported sooner.
Absolutely. Especially since upwards of 80% of asylum claims are denied[0] when they actually get adjudicated. Which usually takes years to happen because there aren't enough immigration "courts."
Provide enough immigration "judges" and "courts" and we could clear up the backlog within a couple years. I'd also point out that while asylum seekers aren't (yet) legal immigrants, they are (based on Federal law[1]) legally in the United States until their case has been adjudicated -- once again arguing for increasing the number of immigration "courts" and "judges." It certainly doesn't argue for hundreds of billions of dollars for a bunch of jackbooted thugs to terrorize citizens and immigrants alike, all to deport fewer people than other administrations who didn't need to shoot citizens to do so. Funny that.
OG classical fascism was pretty incompetent and bumbling at times too.
eventually they got their shit together.
China is a demographic disaster in slow motion and should be keeping anyone they can get who wants to say. The US and EU have avoided much stagnation by importing more bodies, and there is no ethnic component to USA-ian identity compared to being Han and being forced to speak Mandarin.
Something that I think many students, indeed many people, struggle with is the question "why should I know anything?"
For most of us--myself included--once you graduate from college, the answer is: "enough to not get fired". This is far less than most curriculums ask you to know, and every year, "enough to not get fired" is a lower and lower bar. With LLMs, it's practically on the floor for 90% of full-time jobs.
That is why I propose exactly the opposite regimen from this course, although I admire the writer's free thinking. Return to tradition, with a twist. Closed-book exams, no note sheets, all handwritten. Add a verbal examination, even though it massively increases examination time. No homework assignments, which encourage "completionist mindset", where the turning-in of the assignment feels more real than understanding the assignment. Publish problem sets thousands of problems large with worked-out-solutions to remove the incentive to cheat.
"Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity" -- paraphrase of an HN comment about a fondly remembered physics professor who made the students memorize every equation in the class. In the age of the LLM, I suspect this is triply true.
> once you graduate from college, the answer is: "enough to not get fired"
I thought the point was to continue in the same vein and contribute to the sum total of all human knowledge. I suppose this is why people criticize colleges as having lost their core principles and simply responded to market forces to produce the types of graduates that corporate America currently wants.
> "enough to not get fired" is a lower and lower bar.
Usually people get fired for their actions and not their knowledge or lack thereof. It may be that David Graebers core thesis was correct. Most jobs are actually "bullshit jobs," and in the era of the Internet, they don't actually require any formal education to perform.
I agree with both of your assertions. Most jobs are indeed bullshit jobs in the age of abundance, and while the "point" of knowledge and wisdom is, in a grander sense, to continue in the same vein and contribute to the sum total of all human knowledge (I prefer the slightly less abstract phrase "build and inhabit a greater civilization"), there's very little about the current education system or the economic modality of the modern West that incentivizes that goal.
> Closed-book exams, no note sheets, all handwritten. Add a verbal examination
You are describing how school worked for me (in Italy, but much of Europe is the same I think?) from middle school through university. The idea of graded homework has always struck me as incredibly weird.
> In the age of the LLM, I suspect this is triply true.
They do change what is worth learning though? I completely agree that "oh no the grades" is a ridiculous reaction, but adapting curricula is not an insane idea.
Something often left out is the dependence on LLM’s. Students today assume LLM’s will always be available, at a price they (or their companies) can afford.
What happens if LLM’s suddenly change their cost to be 1000 USD per user per month? What if it is 1000 USD per request? Will new students and new professionals still be able to complete their jobs?
I swear teachers said something extremely similar about calculators when I was in grade school. "What are you going to do when you don't have access to a calculator? You won't ways have one with you!"
Calculators have never been more accessible/available. (And yet I personally still do most basic calculations in my head)
So I agree students should learn to do this stuff without LLMs, but not because the LLMs are going to get less accessible. There's another better reason I'm just not sure how to articulate it yet. Something to do with integrated information and how thinking works.
Calculators are widely available for a low cost. The logic behind most calculators is able to be consistently duplicated across a variety of manufacturers, thereby lowering the cost to produce these to the masses.
LLM’s are not consistent. For example, having a new company make a functional duplicate of ChatGPT is nearly impossible.
Furthermore, the cost of LLM’s can change at any time for any reason. Access can be changed by new government regulations, and private organizations can chose to suspend or revoke access to their LLM due to changes in local laws.
All of this makes dependence on an LLM a risk for any professionals. The only way these would be mitigated is by an open source, freely available LLM that creates consistent results that students can learn how to use.
The comparison with calculators overlooks several key developments.
LLMs are becoming increasingly efficient. Through techniques such as distillation, quantization, and optimized architectures, it is already possible to run capable models offline, including on personal computers and even smartphones. This trend reduces reliance on constant access to centralized providers and enables local, self-contained usage.
Rather than avoiding LLMs, the rational response is to build local, portable, and open alternatives in parallel. The natural trajectory of LLMs points toward smaller, more efficient, and locally executable models, mirroring the path that calculators themselves once followed.
My intuition is that the costs involved to train and run LLMs will keep dropping. They will become more and more accessible, so long as our economies keep chugging along.
I could be wrong, time will tell. I just wouldn't base my argument for why students should learn to think for themselves on accessibility of LLMs. I think there's something far more fundamental and important, I just don't know how to say it yet.
> Add a verbal examination, even though it massively increases examination time. No homework assignments, which encourage "completionist mindset"
To the horror of anyone struggling with anxiety, ADHD, or any other source of memory-recall issues under examination pressure. This further optimizes everything for students who can memorize and recall information on the spot under artificial pressure, and who don't suffer any from any of the problems I mentioned.
In grade school you could put me on the spot and I would blank on questions about subjects that I understood rather well and that I could answer 5 minutes before the exam and 5 minutes after the exam, but not during the exam. The best way for me to display my understanding and knowledge is through project assignments where that knowledge is put to practical use, or worked "homework" examples that you want to remove.
Do you have any ideas for accommodating people who process information differently and find it easier to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding in different ways?
Maybe those people just wont get as good of grades, and that's acceptable. It is strange that the educational system determined it wasn't acceptable. If I go to a university and try to walk onto the NCAA Division 1 Basketball team, its fine for them to tell me that I am too short, too slow, too weak, can't shoot, or my performance anxiety means I mess up every game and I am off the team. If I try and go for Art but my art is bad I am rejected. If I try and go for music but my performance anxiety messes up my performances, then I am rejected.
Why aught there be an exception for academics? Do you want your lawyer or surgeon to have performance anxiety? This seems like a perfectly acceptable thing to filter out on.
I didn't ask for an "exception" in terms of knowledge, I pointed out a bias in favor of one specific type of assessment. I didn't do great on verbal exams but I could run circles around other people when it came to more hands-on assessments that required a deeper understanding of the material and applying it in practice.
A surgeon is a perfect example. Before you trust your life to someone, would you rather find out their grades on verbal assessments in med school or do you prefer to see their patient outcome statistics?
When hiring a software developer would you rather verbally quiz them on theoretical knowledge of SOLID and TDD or would you rather see their code and work history?
> Do you want your lawyer or surgeon to have performance anxiety? This seems like a perfectly acceptable thing to filter out on.
As a client you can do whatever you want, but that's not the goal of educational institutions. It's antithetical to their goals unless you subscribe to the cynical belief that schools only exist to produce easily replaceable, obedient, compliant workers.
[And reading your other comment, this indeed seems to be your view.]
Everything involves performing and actually proving what you know. If this is such an issue, then its something you need to fix. I have never actually met anyone who has this “perfomance anxiety” where they are so brilliant but do poorly on tests because of it. I think its a myth to attack rigor of academics. For knowledge workers everntually you have to go into court, or perform surgery, or do the taxes or give the presentation, or have the high pressure meeting. If anxiety is truly debilitating to the person all of these situations theyll be doomed so filter them out.
The question is no longer "How do we educate people?" but "What are work and competence even for?"
The culture has moved from competence to performance. Where universities used to be a gateway to a middle class life, now they're a source of debt. And social performances of all kind are far more valuable than the ability to work competently.
Competence used to be central, now it's more and more peripheral. AI mirrors and amplifies that.
I completely agree with you. Do you have any ideas about what might stem this tide on a grander scale? I live in the country and will homeschool my kids--I think the risk of under-socialization is worth the reward of competency-based education and the higher likelihood of my own principles taking hold--but I would vastly prefer to send them to a normal school with other kids, albeit one in a superior society to that which we currently inhabit.
> Do you have any ideas about what might stem this tide on a grander scale?
The best way to move from the working class to the middle class these days is the military with a federal government job after retirement (even with what the current admin is doing). That said, a person doing this needs to realize that they will need to unlearn and learn a lot of social habits and learn some new ones.
The bonus is that higher ed will be free, and ambitious folks can ladder up into officer roles, which can be even more of a social climb.
> I think the risk of under-socialization is worth the reward of competency-based education and the higher likelihood of my own principles taking hold
I think you are very wrong on this point.
A highly-socialized person with the minimum viable amount of competency will go much farther in life than a highly-competent person with limited social skills.
If your kids are in a good school system, there will be a culture of competence in the students and their families.
> but I would vastly prefer to send them to a normal school with other kids, albeit one in a superior society to that which we currently inhabit
You just need to find the right pocket of people.
I personally recommend good Montessori schools over home schooling for K-8. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it works well when it’s a good fit. The community around the school is usually fairly healthy as well.
For 9-12, a high-quality private school, a magnet school, a combo high school / JC, or an independent study high school (often with home school “classes”) are all good options for curious and ambitious students, imho.
I had an electrodynamics professor say that there was no reason to memorize the equations, you would never remember them anyways, the goal was to understand how the relationships were formed in the first place. Then you would understand what the relationships are that each equation represents. That I think is the basis for this statement. Memorization of the equations gives you a basis to understand the relationships. So I guess the hope is that is enough. I would argue it isn't enough since physics isn't really about math or equations its about the structure and dynamics of how systems evolve over time. And equations give one representation of the evolution of those systems. But it's not the only representation.
This is all very well if the goal was to sift the wheat from the chaff - but modern western education is about passing as many fee paying students as possible, preferably with a passably enjoyable experience for the institutional kudos.
I think that really depends on countries. I went to an engineering school only 15% of applicants out of high school were admitted and of those who were admitted only around 75% graduated.
Western education passing as many fee paying students as possible seems to be very much a UK/US phenomenon but doesn't seem to be the case of European countries where the best schools are public and fees are very low (In France, private engineering schools rank lower)
I wonder if education will bifurcate back out as a result of AI. Small, bespoke institutions which insist on knowledge and difficult tests. And degree factories. It seems like students want the degree factory experience with the prestige of an elite institution. But - obviously - that can’t last long. Colleges and universities should decide what they are and commit accordingly.
I think the UK has been heading this way for a while -- before AI. Its not been the size of the institutions that has changed, but the "elite" universities tend to give students more individual attention. A number of them (not just Oxford and Cambridge) have tutorial systems where a lot of learning is done in a small group (usually two or three students). They have always done this.
At the other extreme are universities offering low quality courses that are definitely degree factories. They tend to have a strong vocational focus but nonetheless they are not effective in improving employability. In the last few decades we have expanded the university system and there are far more of these.
There is no clear cutoff and a lot of variation in between so its not a bifurcation but the quality vs factory difference is there.
On other side in western systems funded by taxes the incentive is still to give out as many degrees as possible as schools get funding based on produced degrees.
Mostly done to get more degree holders which are seen as "more productive". Or at least higher paid...
Honestly, I feel like I have to know more and more these days, as the ais have unlocked significantly more domains that I can impact. Everyone is contributing to every part of the stack in the tech world all of a sudden, and "I am not an expert on that piece of the system" no longer is a reasonable position.
This is in tech now, were the first adopters, but soon it will come to other fields.
To your broader question
> Something that I think many students, indeed many people, struggle with is the question "why should I know anything?"
You should know things because these AIs are wrong all the time, because if you want any control in your life you need to be able to make an educated guess at what is true and what isn't.
As to how to teach students. I think we're in an age of experimentation here. I like the idea of letting students use all tools available for the job. But I also agree that if you do give exams and hw, you better make them hand written/oral only.
Overall, I think education needs to focus more on building portfolios for students, and focus less giving them grades.
> and "I am not an expert on that piece of the system" no longer is a reasonable position
Gosh that sounds horrifying. I am not an expert on that piece of system, no I do not want to take responsibility for whatever the LLMs have produced for that piece of system, I am not an expert and cannot verify it.
This is like the Indian education system and presumably other Asian ones. Homework counts for very little towards your grade. 90% of your grade comes from the midterms and the finals. All hand written, no notes, no calculators.
You didn't answer why the student should memorize anything, except the hand-waving "Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity".
Students had very good reason to question the education system when they were asked to memorize things that were safe to forget once they graduated from school. And when most functional adults admitted they forgot what they had learned in school. It was an issue before LLM, and triply so now.
By the way, I now am 100% agree with "Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity." However, if you asked me to try to convince the 16-year-old me I would throw my hands up.
I completely agree with you, and now that I am far away from being a student (and at the time, I vehemently hated any system that demanded memorization), I regretfully say that sometimes you just have to force young people to do things they don't want to do, for their own good.
That’s a terrible indictment of society if true. People are so far from self-realization, so estranged from their natural curiosity, that there is no motivation to learn anything beyond what will get you fed and housed. How can anyone be okay with that? Because even most chronically alienated people have had glimpses of self-actualization, of curiosity, of intrinsic motivation; most have had times when they were inspired to use the intellectual and bodily gifts that nature has endowed them with.
But the response to that will be further beatings until morale improves.
What about technology professionals? From my biased reading of this site alone: both further beatings and pain relievers in the form of even more dulling and pacifying technology. Follow by misanhtropic, thought-terminating cliches: well people are inherently dumb/unmotivated/unworthy so topic is not really worth our genuine attention; furthermore, now with LMMs, we are seeing just how easy it is to mimic these lumps of meat—in fact they can act both better and more pathetic than human meat bags, just have to adjust the prompts...
People who aren't fed and employed generally struggle to be self actualized, right? First you need to work for your supper, then you can focus on learning for its own sake.
As more jobs started requiring degrees, the motivation has to change. If people can get food and housing without a degree again to a comfortable extent than the type of person getting a degree will change again too.
If you let them, they'll alienate you until you have no free time and no space for rest or hobbies or learning. Labour movements had to work hard to prevent the 60 hour workweek, but we're creeping back away from 40, right?
But "enough to not get fired" is not an answer to a question "why should I know anything?". To be honest, it's not clear if the rest of your post tries to answer the initial question of why you should know anything or the implied question of how much should I really know.
The answer to "why should I know anything" is a value judgement that, if advertised in my top-level post, provides a great deal more rhetorical surface to disagree with or criticize. My main point is that regardless of why anyone wants to know anything, in the age of AI, if you want to produce students who actually know things, I recommend dropping the tech and returning to a more rigorous, in-person curriculum with a foundation of memorization.
Here, though, is my answer: an excellent long-term goal for any band of humans is to create, inhabit, and enjoy the greatest civilization possible, and the more each individual human knows about their reality, the easier it is to do that.
What I like about the approach in the article is that it confronts the "why should I know this?" question directly. By making students accountable for reasoning (even when tools are available) it exposes the difference between having access to information and having a mental model
But suppose you think strictly in utilitarian terms: what effort should I invest for what $$$ return. I have two things to say to you:
First: what a meaningless life you're living.
Second: you realize that if you don't learn anything because you have LLMs, and I learn everything because it's interesting, when you and I are competing, I'll have LLMs as well...? We'll be using the same tools, but I'll be able to reason and you won't.
I think the people who struggle with the question "Why should I know anything?" aren't going to learn anything anyway. You need curiosity to learn, or at least to learn a lot and well, and if you have curiosity you're not asking why you should learn anything.
To play devil's advocate: In the future, "knowing things" might not really be a prerequisite for living a decent life. If you could just instantly look anything up that you need to know, then why would you need to know anything? I don't think it's a ridiculous question. As long as I can maintain basic literacy and an ability to form questions for an LLM, why really do I kneed knowledge? Maybe I don't find any intrinsic "life meaning" from knowledge. Maybe I don't care if it's interesting. Pragmatically why should I be educated?
Why would I need to be able to lift 100kg? I'm never going to need to lift 100kg, and if I do need to, I'd just find a tool that will do it. My life isn't any less rich because I can't lift 100kg, and I can maintain basic body health without being able to lift weight from the ground.
Exactly. In the long term, I would argue that "interest" is always a bigger determining factor of professional success than innate "capability" in a field. An interested person can grow their competence over time, whereas a disinterested, yet capable person will mostly remain at a fixed level of competence.
I dug out my dad's Windows 98 era PC that he was running Windows 2000 on that we hadn't turned on since 2011, and it felt lightning-fast compared to W10 and W11. Double-click to open apps and they appear, ready to type in. It felt like I was on some kind of futuristic prototype.
Yeah but how much faster is hardware since then? M.2 SSDs, lots more GHz + cores, fast GPUs, etc. Everything is way faster and should more than make up for those security checks IMO.
- dell p2 300 win95
- early core duo era with linux 2.4 (some kali linux image)
in both cases there was something very odd, the crude os design (no parallel systemd etc), gui toolkit and desktop environment (no compositor, glitchy) wasn't an issue and the low amount of lag felt very good. it's the same feeling when driving 90s cars, the drive feels directly connected to the whole, it's cruder but it feels better
and saying this as a fan of recent linux kernel and systemd parallelism with the crazy cpu over ssd speed.. i was utterly surprised
For small-to-medium size data sets, you can use Power Query/BI to essentially run a relational database and metrics/dashboards on it inside an Excel spreadsheet plus a web page, minus all the features that a real DB has in terms of version control and backups.
I can't leave Excel for that. I can set up a "data integration" in 3 hours that has a highly customizable and (relatively) bug-free front-end, and maintain it myself. The amount of work and knowledge it takes to get the same thing spun up in a proper language with a proper server is 1-3 orders of magnitude more.
"If you're going to pretend to be someone, why not pretend to be someone who doesn't hit on the cocktail waitress when he's away from his family?"
Edit: found the exact quote:
> "I feel like I am playing a part, that I'm in a role. It doesn't feel real."
> Instead of trying to stop playing a role-- again, a move whose aim is your happiness-- try playing a different role whose aim is someone else's happiness. Why not play the part of the happy husband of three kids? Why not pretend to be devoted to your family to the exclusion of other things? Why not play the part of the man who isn't tempted to sleep with the woman at the airport bar?
> "But that's dishonest, I'd be lying to myself." Your kids will not know to ask: so?
> The narcissist demands absolutism in all things-- relative to himself.
> We can't even declare total victory with LED bulbs over incandescent.
The LED bulbs I have access to (whatever's in the aisles at Home Depot, Costco, etc.) fail much more frequently than the incandescent bulbs I used to buy, and produce an uglier light that is less warm even on the softest/warmest color settings.
My suspicion is that incandescents were at the "end" of their product lifecycle (high quality available for cheap) and LEDs are nearing the middle (medium quality available for cheap), and that I should buy more expensive LED bulbs, but I still think that there are valid "complaints" against the state of widespread LED lighting. I hope these complaints become invalid within a decade, but for now I still miss the experience of buildings lit by incandescent light.
The other thing with AI--the LED revolution was led on this idea that we all need to work as hard as we can to save energy, but now apparently with AI that's no longer the case, and while I understand that this is just due to which political cabals have control of the regulatory machinery at any given time, it's still frustrating.
> The LED bulbs I have access to (whatever's in the aisles at Home Depot, Costco, etc.) fail much more frequently than the incandescent bulbs I used to buy, and produce an uglier light that is less warm even on the softest/warmest color settings.
LED lamps work just fine, you just need to pay more attention when you’re buying them. Philips makes decent LED lamps.
Make sure you’re buying lamps with 90+ CRI, that will help with the quality of light. 2700K is a good color temp for indoor living room/dining room/bedroom lighting, 3500-4000K for kitchen/garage/task lighting.
You also need to buy special lamps if you put them in an enclosed fixture, look for ‘enclosed fixture’ rated lamps. Regular LED lamps will overheat in an enclosed fixture.
The light color they call "daytime" is around 5000K, so I expected it to look like being outside in the sun; but instead I got a cold blueish vibe. The problem? Not enough power! I got the equivalent of a moonlit room.
So I got this 180W LED lamp (that's actual 180W, not 180W equivalent) [1]. It's so bright I couldn't see for 5 minutes. I put two in my office on desk lamps. The room now looks like being outside, without the "ugly blue" tint, even though the product says it's 6000K. The days of my SAD suffering are over!
Maybe buy your bulbs somewhere else? I'm yet to replace any of the LED bulbs I've bought over the past 15 years and honestly can't even remember the last time a bulb failed.
Actually, since posting this I've vaguely remembered a previous discussion on here about differences between LED bulbs sold in the US and those sold in UK/EU so maybe that explains it.
In many cases you can break one of the resistors off the LED bulb's printed-circuit board and run them at two-thirds of the power so they last forever. In other cases the surgery required is a little more involved than just snapping a surface-mount resistor off with pliers.
[CITATION NEEDED] They do not. If you take the mean, median, and mode of the failure lifetime for LED bulbs sold at these stores and compare them to the failure times of incandescent bulbs, I also guarantee you are empirically wrong here.
I believe this is true for the LED technology compared to the incandescent technology as a whole, but I'm simply turning over bulbs at a far higher rate than I did in the incandescent days. Often the LED bulbs are failing within a year under normal usage patterns. It's possible that using modern LEDs in old fixtures is causing some kind of issue.
Are your LED lamps failing in enclosed fixtures? You need to buy special lamps for enclosed fixtures, regular LED lamps will heat up too much for enclosed fixtures.
Look for ‘enclosed fixture rated’ LED lamps for enclosed fixtures.
> Airbus prevailed because it was the least European version of a European industrial strategy project ever. It put its customer first, was uninterested in being seen as European, had leadership willing to risk political blowback in the pursuit of a good product, and operated in a unique industry
This really buries the lede, given that over the past 40 years Boeing sawed off both its own feet and drank cyanide. Total cultural change at the executive level that prioritized returns over good engineering.
I’m a staunch capitalist but Boeing vs Airbus is a demonstration of a big failure mode of capitalism (However, both have huge state intervention - Boeing’s factories are placed to give jobs to populations, it’s electoral choices, and that caused the airframe scandal).
Typically, in most capitalist systems they get (eventually) broken up as it stifles competition, which (non-winning) capitalists don’t like. Same as in Soviet systems a patron gets too fat/corrupt and other patrons start vying for attention.
But that is far from certain, and aerospace & military has always been rife with this issue. The ‘merge until they become too big/important to fail’ playbook isn’t just for banks!
Messerschmitt, Sukoi, Tupolev, Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.
This really isn't an accurate description of what happened. In fact, the contrast between Boeing and Airbus is instructive. Boeing is exactly what happens in the event of unregulated capitalism, which is endless mergers and attempts to exploit monopoly power and relentless efforts to satisfy the financial sector.
The end state of unregulated capitalism for a company like Boeing is a “capital-light” company based entirely on monopoly power and relationships that hardly manufactures anything at all, having outsourced everything to subsidiaries and suppliers to satisfy the return on capital requirements of Wall Street.
The Airbus approach is a clear contrast to this. The fact that Boeing has imploded while Airbus has thrived is, in fact, a very helpful counterpoint to reflexive and idiotic market fundamentalist ideology.
Boeing was also pressured to outsource world wide, to spread around the grease to countries with large aircraft orders. They they didn't outsource because it made sense. They outsourced to get the sales guy his sale, and management their numbers to unlock compensation.
My buddy refused to work there just because of the nightmare of trying to certify it all/ensure compliance at every point.
Airbus is currently less of a problem because they more recently had huge issues/lost their minds, so they’re more on top of it right now.
But it wasn’t that long ago they were literally faking black box data to cover their ass when their one of their new line of aircraft crashed at an airshow.. I don’t think Boeing ever went to that extent, but I guess we’d never know unless they did it particularly badly.
Any sufficiently large/important organization tends to do stuff like this unless it is actively stopped. A generation or so is usually enough for people to forget important lessons.
Airbus literally is the result of mergers of many countries aircraft manufacturers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus], including - from that list, Messerschmitt.
In capitalist systems. Boeing is also still a going concern, and is a major competitor to Airbus. It hasn’t ’imploded’.
It is having some difficulty right now - but more due to the entire US economy going through a ‘narcissistic’ phase.
Airbus has plenty of issues a decade or two ago, including very similar issues to what Boeing has recently been going through.
In 2013, they externalized the construction of the metal rings that make the body. It was supposed to be CNC’d, but the provider obviously made them manually, with all the mistakes that entails, including sloppy sawing and cutting holes in the wrong places. It was validated for production, because of political pressure to not blame the provider. Boeing re-cut the holes in the right places, making them twice weaker.
So yes, the MAX isn’t the first unsafe plane of Boeing. That it wasn’t proven that it caused accidents, doesn’t mean it was safe.
And there are countless other affairs like this. The lithium batteries.
737 MAX. That whole saga was because of Boeing trying really hard to not certify a new airframe so that they could quickly push out a competitor to A320 Neo. The result was hundreds of deaths.
Yes. The problem wasn’t the airframe, nor even frankly the engines, it was the combination plus the decision to fix an aerodynamic instability with an undocumented software patch.
That last part is key: the MCAS system was designed to fake handling like the older planes but they skimped on safety to save the cost of a second sensor and didn’t train pilots on it or have an override mechanism. If the whole thing had been aboveboard they’d have saved so many lives…
There was an override system, MCAS drove the stabiliser trim motors and so flipping the stabiliser trim motor cutout switches would disable MCAS. This relied on the pilots diagnosing an MCAS runaway as a stabiliser trim runaway and enacting the same checklist.
However, to add insult to injury, the MAX also had another change. In the 737 NG, there were two switches, one would disable automated movement of stabiliser trim, the other would cutout the electric trim motors entirely. This allowed the pilots to disable automation without losing the ability to trim the aircraft using the switches on the yoke.
The MAX changed this arrangement, now either switch would cut power to electric trim. Tragically the pilots of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 recognised the runaway, enacted the correct checklist, but the aircraft was now so far out of trim that aerodynamic loads made correcting the situation using the hand trim crank impossible. In desperation the pilots restored electrical power to the trim motors, MCAS re-engaged and drove the aircraft into the ground.
For example a modern EICAS system is required today, and all modern passenger aircraft have one. Except the 737 Max.
The 737 Max 7 and 10 had to get a waiver due to not being certified in time by the hard requirement to have one when updating old types. Let alone certifying new types.
Considering the low ground clearance is one of the major issues of the 737 today (which lead to the whole MAX disaster), you'd have to replace the landing gear, and with that you'd also need to make changes to the airframe itself.
> Considering the low ground clearance is one of the major issues of the 737 today (which lead to the whole MAX disaster)
You’re describing an introduced aerodynamic instability. Not an airframe issue. (Misconfiguring the airframe with non-airframe modifications doesn’t count as an airframe failure.)
Analogy: most Linux kernels are not real time. If I run a non-RT Linux in a real-time use case, that doesn’t make the kernel crap. (You probably used it because it’s popular!) It does mean you used it wrong.
737 Max was fundamentally fucked. But it was fucked because it tried to retain a great and proven airframe with incompatible components. The problem isn’t Boeing producing bad airframes. (787 is also a great airframe.) It’s Boeing integrating terribly.
Missing this distinction misses a critical point about the 737 Max’s failure. (It’s also not necessary to understand it the way an aerospace engineer and pilot might. But then don’t misuse, and then double down on misusing, technical terminology.)
You're just clinging to definition while missing the actual issue.
For the 737 to compete with the A320neo, it required much larger engines.
For those engines to fit, they'd either have to raise the landing gear and redesign the airframe to accommodate the changes (which would be a very different airframe), or they'd have to offset the engines (which massively increases the stall risk and lead to the MAX disaster).
This is not an integration issue. There is no possible way for the 737 to fulfill the needs of the 21st century without becoming an entirely different plane.
The 737’s airframe’s excellence is the reason Boeing was loath to let it go. It’s a really good airframe, and a market fit to boot for the transition from hub and spoke. A clean-sheet design for the 737 would look a lot like the 737. That is what makes the shortcuts tempting.
Engines, avionics and control software are distinct components and not part of the airframe. (Debatable only on engine cowlings and mounts. Neither of which were relevant to the 737 Max’s faults.)
Southwest's 737 MAX contract had a penalty clause of $1 million per aircraft that would trigger if Boeing's delivery contract for the 737 MAX failed to meet certain standards, particularly Southwest's insistence that no flight simulator training be required for the MAX
Meaning, the roots of the “no new type rating” requirement come from Southwest, not Boeing.
This is an interesting detail I had not heard. Can you link to a backstory on this? Why would such a contract ever be signed (especially for a technological product)?
Basically they were looking for an edge against Airbus and a really big one was being able to promise that pilots wouldn’t need a separate certification from the existing 737, which is where that MCAS software came in trying to make the new hardware behave like the existing planes. The allegations about Southwest in particular got the most attention in this lawsuit:
Wasn’t there a scandal about doors falling off that came back to missing screws missed in cutback inspections that had been outsourced to a split off subsidiary or something like that?
Only one door plug fell out. Other door plugs were inspected but there was no reporting on their condition. The door plug seems to have fallen out due to lack of nuts, not missing screws. There was rework due to poor work from a spun out former subsidiary that required the door plug to be opened, but I think? the door plug was opened and closed by Boeing, and not properly recorded by Boeing in the work log, resulting in no inspection/verification and nobody else noticed the missing nuts either; IIRC the opening was recorded 'in the wrong place' and the closing wasn't recorded at all. I wouldn't call that a 'cutback inspection'
I don't remember which party is responsible for installing the interior trim that covers the door plug, but their checklist must not have included verifying that the door plug nuts and their retaining wire were in place, either.
One thing I noticed while I was reading NASA engineer Allan MacDonald's book about the Challenger accident he tried and failed to prevent was that every time he came into contact with a member of the news media, there was a sense of skilled elitism about the practice of their craft. I started looking back on other nonfiction depictions of the times before the 1990s, and I was struck not only by the amount of elitism displayed by people working in the creative industries, but by how many "sellout creatives" (that were making a living selling advertisements or hosting news segments or whatever) had huge exposure to and experience in past creative culture. It's like every media/art worker at that time had had a goal as a young person to create the next Great Work, and over time they flamed out and settled for sticking niche literary references in the Simpsons or taking pictures for development companies or writing sports magazine articles or teaching or some other lesser-than creative career than being the next Dostoevsky.
By contrast, I don't get that sense at all from people working in "culture" today, neither by the people still staffing "legacy media" or in their influencer replacements.
One of the things I remember about myself and others as young people emerging in the years around Y2K, was that we were taught presumption at every opportunity. Pat answers from the elite circles were to be found for everything, and the referential aspects of pop culture were built on that; they could critique it, make satire, but they couldn't imagine a world without it, and therefore the conversation had a gravity of the inevitable and inescapable. Piece by piece, that has been torn down in tandem with the monoculture. A lot of it has been subsequently called out as something toxic or an -ism or otherwise diminishing.
Every influencer now has this dance they do with intellectual statements where, unless they intentionally aim to create rhetorical bait, they don't make bold context-free claims. They hedge and address all sorts of preliminaries.
At the same time, the entry points to culture have shifted. There's a very sharp divide now, for example, between online posting of fine art, decorative art, commercial art, and "the online art community" - influencer-first artists, posting primarily digital character illustrations on social media. The first three are the legacy forms(and the decorative arts are probably the least impacted by any of this), but the last invokes a younger voice that is oblivious to history - they publish now and learn later, so their artistic conversation tends to be more immature, but comes with a sense of identity that mimicks the influencer space, generally. Are they making art or content? That's the part that seems to be the foundational struggle.
I tried to in my initial comment draft, but I couldn't really come to a satisfactory answer so I thought I'd just post the observation.
I believe the average person today is far more apathetic about the parts of their own civilization that aren't explicitly political than ever before. Morality, cultural expression, architectural aesthetics, manners, fashion, product design, whatever. I think this slide into apathy predates the Internet and has something to do with copyright law, mega-corporate capture of the supply chain (and it's subsequent off shoring), excessive focus on cultural and behavioral neutrality in education, lawsuit culture, and endless video evidence of everything, but I can't spin that into a coherent narrative.
I'm not entirely sure what this implies, but I definitely don't think the introduction of LLMs is going to move the needle back toward widespread elitism and highly motivated creative industries. I wish I had a better answer to your question, which I appreciate you asking.
I can't help but feel the shift to apathy is in part due to a cultural shift from a sense of building society together to a more exploitative view where people have to get what they can while they still can get it. The lack of motivation to produce Great Works feels related to the disconnect from a greater purpose/community.
It all feels related in some way to the dearth of great statesmen. At least the Rockefellers of the past contributed back in the form of great works dedicated to public use.
I think adjacent to this is an element of reduced risk taking from younger people because the stakes are much higher (or at least feel much higher). I've worked with so many smart and talented grads who have seemingly planned their lives/career to the nth degree, in a way that was certainly not that common in my broad circles when I was a similar age.
From conversations with them, it all stems from the view of you can't afford any mistakes/missteps if you want a relatively benign type of comfortable middle class life, in terms of things like housing in particular. If that'd your starting point, you're looking to ge a guaranteedish success at anything you're trying to do and that inherently puts a lid on how much you want to deviate or be creative from the norm. More so than ever, I think, people are more aware of optimising monetisation in all aspects of their lives, and that sort of results in more things being the same or only having minor deviation from what "works".
> More so than ever, I think, people are more aware of optimising monetisation in all aspects of their lives, and that sort of results in more things being the same or only having minor deviation from what "works".
This infiltration of monetization is insidious. Even in my own idle thoughts I find myself wondering how I might profit off of something I threw together for fun. Or make a great cake and people say you should open a bakery. It's hard for people to imagine doing something for its own sake, let alone for no financial gain.
This video [1] touches on the same theme. Its opening comparison of historic and modern lampposts is illustrative of the greater shift in culture.
In the modern day, when the public has the opportunity to create something dedicated to the public, the opportunity is squandered and used for trolling (like boaty mcboatface or the stick figure euro coin).
The global economy is so China-dependent it doesn't even make sense to talk about an individual country's emissions profile unless we look at their imports.
Ironically, I think a large part of the sense of scale comes from it being a vertical video. Really helps with stacking all these layers of environment on top of each other. Anyway, Rückenfigur (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCckenfigur) style concept art where there's a tiny figure in front of a huge layered environment has been common in games for decades, the difference is that with ai we can create """concepts""" that look nearly like a playable demo.
This game looks cool, but also the trailer just showing 3 static scenes from the same angle for a minute is a sure sign that this is very very early.
In a youtube demo, the author says he has been working on this idea for a while, and was motivated to deliver after the GIF. So, kinda? Thanks for the reference.
I don’t think it’s ai because it correctly resolves both vertical and horizontal parallax with correct perspective lines applied to the scene - something ai still seems to struggle at greatly
With that said, no, it's not evil to deport people who entered a country illegally. If I sneak into China, and China finds out, they are morally and legally clear to send me back, whether or not I've had children in China.