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Do we know for certain that a major cause of the failure has been a GSM-R failure?

Industrial grade communication systems tend to be very well behaved in terms of fault detection and management. I'd be very surprised if the whole whack-a-mole dynamic described in the post was a failure mode of GSM-R system per se.

There's very little information in either this post or elsewhere on the internets.

This discussion on a UK rail forum provides some food for thought [1]

The Elizabeth line is pioneering in terms of aiming for automated train operation (ATO) over infrastructure that's shared to some extent with trains driven by humans. Going beyond driving per se, both types of trains make use of highly complex automation for functions like switch management, traffic separation for safety and station door opening.

Reading through the lines, two systemic difficulties this brings about are:

(A) A conceptually new ATO system (Siemens Trainguard MT); a further plot twist is that Siemens acquired the system mid-development from Invensys.

(B) Ad-hoc integration of this system with a large number of external systems provided by several vendors; it should be of note that rail systems are not designed for to interoperability with other vendors, and integration is often achieved post-development bringing about otherwise avoidable complexity.

Given that during the incident each individual domain of the system (A) has been reset and validated multiple times, my suspicion falls on the undocumented and uncharted complexity underlying (B).

[1] https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/elizabeth-line-total-lo...

> Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions

IMHO, this one line summarizes remarkably well why Hollywood wrecks fictional universes: Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Fantastic Beasts, DC Universe, and even parts of the Marvel universe.

I see the absence of an auteur capable of respecting themselves and therefore their audience as the root cause of clichéd moves such as "war is bad so let Wonder Woman kill the God Of War". Clearly, the person making such a decision simply does not have a reputation to uphold; what remains is optimizing ticket sales, one movie at a time.

Experimental archeology is amazing! However the clash of this article as it is, is not very profound.

Going over the article, it mentions three constraints pertinent to obtaining timber, and it seems that their intersection is empty.

The constraints for obtaining timber are:

1. A UK source is preferred (due to national pride?)

2. Price needs to be very cheap given the archeologists' non-profit budget

3. Veteran trees are necessary for a reconstruction, but specifically these are a scarce and precious resource.

It seems likely that either they relax (1) or get funding/sponsorship to relax (2). (3) does not admit relaxation

There are really two, almost entirely separate, points there - one is about missing interpretability of LibreOffice, and the other is about the author's inability to install Microsoft Office on Linux.

I'd like to articulate a case why supporting the the author's use cases is likely uneconomical.

With respect to the LibreOffice interoperability with Microsoft Office: the author works in publishing, which requires almost pixel-perfect equivalence between how a document is displayed between them and their collaborators. Faithfully reproducing almost 40 years of evolution in the layout engine (some of which co-evolution with the Windows OS and the font system) necessitates a development program of mind-boggling proportions. It is absolutely no surprise to me that no entity, either commercial or open source can finance such an endeavor. (Even Microsoft does not exhibit 100% interop between the native Office and the cloud Office 365)

A similar argument applies to being able to install Office on Linux, with the added nuance that the major driving force behind Wine etc are game distributors, whereas Office compatibility is not a major priority, especially given the VM and Office 365 alternatives.

Here's a man who lived for much of the same ideals as Aaron Swartz, and was able to make a tremendous impact on the Russian internet universe while also laying low and quiet.

I'm awfully sad Stiver passed away before old age, but happy that at least it was not due to adversity.

What a great topic for a great blog.

I wonder what this perspective can tell us about the new wave of Chinese expansionism, which becomes somewhat akin to the US's abandonment of isolationism and the resultant war with Spain (1898) and joining the two World Wars.

I definitely don't have authoritative answers, but a plugin would likely be able to effectively block ads. While Google never made a direct move against ad blockers, the v3 Manifest push was rumored to have been partially intended to upset the adblocker ecosystem [1]. A hypothetical decision to add extensions to Chrome Android would likely face internal scrutiny based on the same concern.

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2423294/google-is-killing-on...

First of all, 2FA is a jolly good idea in terms of preventing account hijackings; relying on email/SMS (texts) introduces multiple hazards that can reverse 2FA's net benefit.

One configuration some people use is the KeePass desktop password manager, which supports storing TOTP seeds and has a nice UX for generating tokens; the password database file may be located as you see fit on a hard drive, DOK, cloud drive etc. Example of TOTP config for KeePass:

https://www.fhtino.it/docs/keepass-totp--intro/

Also, Keepass2Android can be used in similar vein from Android devices. iOS equivalents seem to exist as well.

TL;DR: the article makes a very general statement where common wisdom indicates a variance of nuanced approaches.

One end of the spectrum is line staff for fast-iterating low-innovation, low-margin businesses, the talent pool is often commodotized, hence hiring can be be made on cost-efficiency grounds alone.

The second end is moonshot winner-takrs-it-all businesses. The risk in not having resilient, mentally flexible, over-qualified core team is abject failure.

I wish the article had confronted this subtlety.

I think that describing the MCAS disaster using predominantly SW Engineering language is misleading.

The substantial change that might have averted the catastrophe is having qualified engineering oversight integrated into the MCAS project management structure.

MCAS is a flight control application; its defining discipline is control theory. Thus the hypothetical engineer who could have averted the catastrophe would have had to be a controls, rather than a SW person.

I have read much about MCAS, but no detailed narrative ever mentioned a SW bug, which implies that MCAS SW has apparently functioned according to given specifications.

Thus, while $9/hr SW engineers is a choice correlated with an inadequate safety culture, I fail to see the casual link between that and the tragic outcomes; I cannot condone asserting such causation.

Prima facie, there's a huge shortage of leadership underlying the accident, both at the "IC" (senior pilot) level and at the "middle management" level.

Which of the two possible causes do you think applies here?

1. Funnel intake: The US Air Force simply does have enough capable people coming into the system to make it to the relevant levels.

2. Lack of survival: relevant people come in, but leave the system before they can make impact.

Thank you - that's a spot on answer. Bell Labs was the only way Ma Bell could stay relevant given that the rest of the world was making progress on their own.

I'm so happy the article opts for reusing the original equipment, as opposed to recycling it (i.e., refilling the original case with different innards)

Legacy POTS is still well supported via modern ATA/FXS. I feel the heritage value is much better served via this path.

To answer your question: there are no answers satisfying your set of requirements. An extremely small minority of individuals will end up achieving notable outcomes fulfilling more than one of the requirements above, but even among those, very few will have been as a consequence of following abstract criteria, as opposed to focusing on opportunities appropriate to the individuals' strengths and taking up appropriate challenges as they come along.

It would help if you relaxed your (radically American-elite centric) set of requirements and instead focused on the following few questions:

- What could make you happy/fulfilled on a very personal level (very few people make any impact when unhappy)

- What could make your family/community happier? (very few people manage to persevere without associates or without a support system)

- What is a project you could grow to do within a year or so that would have a positive impact on the greater good you have in mind? ("the world" is a large place).

Having done a few startups, including one that may change how humanity treats cancer (via computational immunology; very few problems are SW alone or even mostly SW), there bulk of impact is gradient ascent: baby steps and finding people to collaborate with. Also, adopting a bit of perspective outside of my community definitely gave a boost.

Modulo Israel's unpopularity: how would another nation state, say, Korea, act, if a non-state organization attempted to assert its authority to act in substantial force to override the authority of the nation state's government?

It is my theory that, up to niceties, that such acts are a form of war; the nation's government would be under major pressure from its public to act in reciprocal force.

I think the idea for the format is brilliant. However the piece as written fails to deliver a systemic perspective of text messages, and indeed is borderline incorrect in a few places.

Examples:

- It is incorrect to characterize the SMS as whole as an "SS7" protocol. SMS is a transaction of TP-data protocol units (3GPP 23.040) bridged between several protocol domains, which may include SS7 in the core network areas.

- The SIM is not a party to the SMS transactions as such. It is used as a source of the SMSC Address (SMA) datum, to persist messages (on older devices), and of course for authenticating the phone (UE) as a whole.

I think even those two points add up to a piece that misses its conceptual goal of adding clarity to what is already an extremely complex system.

TL;DR: is it about some kind of a shift towards smartphone apps as a fundamental consumer payment mechanism?

I wish this piece of tech journalism was more informative; instead it feels like a lossy rendition of a corporate communique.

The stated goals are using a debit version with some merchants and credit with others, getting rid of the number+expiration+CVV scheme. Both require some kind of interactive UI and some kind of interactive communication with the payment infrastructure for authorizing payments remotely. Both requirements are met by smartphone apps, and hard to meet otherwise.

What I wonder about is - how is this going to interact with the existing Google Pay/Apple Pay ecosystems, and what are going to be the fallbacks when a phone (or whatever other tech they're using) is not available.

The two things we know about the vendor are unforgivable: the fact that they let a core piece of logic depend on indefinitely augmenting a Mongo record, and the fact that a deliberate effort by 3 somewhat above average people could replace them in about 3 months of work.

The fact that the vendor reached the state of doing business with a Fortune 500 client indicates how helpless organizations similar to this client feel facing even modest SW undertakings. Indeed, the project scope in question indicates it could be accomplished by some folks here as a hobby project.

This also explains to me why Retool is so popular with tech leaderships, while not necessarily so with engineers. I wonder what other product approaches could address the same gap.

Disclaimer: I am not American. I have spent a total of 3 years in American corporate colonies in my country, and probably 3 times as much operating at various roles in local startups, many of which had major American funding.

I observe that even for the most capable Americans, operating a startup is at best a phase. Across the general public, it is not considered prestigious vocation. Of course, academic stars can do so, but very often that's as a side gig (unlike Big Tech, which is a valid extension of one's academic career). And for people who could both work in tech and e.g. finance, working in tech is the odd choice.

Since founding is premised on operating and having operating experience, a direct corollary is that extraordinary circumstances are needed for an American to be a participating founder (as opposed to e.g., throwing in the funding).

P.S.: Even if they are "special", the sheer size of the US leads to an abundance of indigenous founders. It's just that in my society, being a founder is a universally aspired role, whereas this appears not to be the case for US-born Americans.

A different way of putting the above is that Casablanca's aesthetic was so influential that it guided decades of subsequent work.

My 2¢: this could be a consequence of both the movie's strengths as much as of the trade-offs taken that did not overshadow the strengths. For example, the movie's wartime moral dichotomy is carefully offset with reminders about the limitations of moralism.

One of my acquaintances wrote this piece a couple of years back, asking if Meta/FB's use of product engagement metrics as a signal for IC performance was a case of the McNamara fallacy:

https://4qbits.com/posts/2022-02-04-the-meta-fb-downturn-as-...

I was responding to the "Jodorowsky’s attempt was ... never released" critique by trying to expand on both the similarities and dissimilarities between Etak and Jodorowsky's Dune.

I concur with you that Etak delivered a functional product, albeit not a commercially successful one, which is farther along than Jodorowsky's Dune project, which stalled mid-way in development.

What I wanted to point out is that both projects produced massive amounts of reusable knowledge, and that knowledge set up the stage for a whole field of influential and exciting derivative works.

Highly inspiring! Will share with my team (and I don't do that often!)

It seems that Etak was to navigation systems what Jodorowsky's Dune was to 1980s sci-fi: a trail blazing endeavour that was wild and wildly innovative, did not fulfill its intended mission but rather set up an entire field for subsequent success.

Also: the design must have included several masterpieces when considering the state of tech in the 1980s: even seeking to the right point on the map cassette is an untrivially hard problem.

This piece left me with three thoughts:

1. Had circumstances been even sightly different, Grant would have been considered a failure, perhaps even by himself.

2. It took a certain amount of mentorship to get Grant going as a noteworthy writer. I wonder if so it came that Mark Twain was the only figure Grant could receive mentorship from.

3. The article describes how for a brief period after a horrible war, there was a demand for politicians acting genuinely and in good faith. I wonder if there's any way to reach this state sustainably.

Prof. Nissan is also remarkable due to having had first line achievements in CS Theory and then shifting to do major impact in the rather distinct field of algorithmic game theory. It's both heart warming that a single person living today could be as diverse, and that the system allowed him that flexibility.

TL;DR: managed runners by construction constitute a major ongoing infosec liability.

A managed runner means not only entrusting a third party with your code but also typically providing it with enough data/network connectivity to make testing/validation feasible as a part of the build process. While this is doable per se, it introduces multiple major failure modes outside of data owners' control.

Failure scenario (hypothetical): you hydrate your test DB using live data; you store it in a dedicated secure S3 bucket, which you make accessible for the build process. Now the managed runner organization gets hacked because making resilient infra is hard, and the attackers intercept the S3 credentials used by your build process. Boom! Your live data is now at the mercy of the attackers.

See also the recent HN discussion around an article on how the Ultraviolet Catastrophe could not have been what drove Planck to his radiation law.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39345618

TL;DR: the expectation that a business can be "saved" by bolting AI onto an existing organization is unrealistic.

Detail: My experience is that commercially viable AI requires a leadership that gets AI and can execute very careful tech/product development facing end-to-end business problems, obsess over data quality, pivot and and manage risks in a way that's subtler than shutting the whole thing down. None of these are possible when attempting to transform a pre-existing business.

Consider AI and classic Google Search: in the best case scenario, AI will cannibalize on the search. In the worst case scenario, it will generate no lift. The middle ground is elusive at best.

What does seem to work across pre-existing businesses is when AI is used to provide embellishments/optional upsells. But of course that's not the dramatic transformation that a lot of people not in the scene seem to be expecting.