The Admiral Cloudberg article is much better, particularly in its explanation of how the plane came to be flown with blank fuel gauges. The first technician noticed an issue with the fuel gauges being blank a few flights earlier and applied a fix he happened to know: disabling one of the two channels, which restored the gauges. This was an acceptable fix - the plane was certified to fly with only one of the two channels active, as long as the lost redundancy was regained with manual checks. It was flown twice in this state (working gauges, single channel, manual backup fuel check).

When this captain handed the plane over to the captain of the incident flight, there was a misunderstanding in the conversation that led to the incoming captain believing the prior captain had been flying with blank fuel gauges and only manual fuel checks. In an unfortunate coincidence, the second technician who was checking the plane at this time disabled both channels to try and troubleshoot the issue again, but failed to return the system to the “one channel” functioning state (apparently because he was interrupted by a request to help with the manual fuel check, ironically).

The second technician’s mistake would have been noticed by the pilots, except that due to the misunderstanding, they were expecting to see blank gauges. Those were the initial conditions that allowed the “pounds, not kilograms” mistake to threaten the flight.