jcutrell

For what it’s worth, reading the title and having been exposed to D&D, the orcs seemed completely appropriate. This is how many D&D adventures start (if it wasn’t obvious).

Totally unrelated to the content, but it's interesting to see these types of articles clearly using something like Midjourney to generate their header images. It almost feels like a dream-state when I first land on the page... my brain can't totally parse what I'm looking at on this one, for example. For me, that was actually pretty distracting.

From the article linked:

> Angered because the government was slow to make payments on his contracts, Lawrence fueled the plane and flew to Washington to strike a telling blow against the bureaucracy. Circling the Capitol at ground level to disrupt Congress, he landed directly on the Capitol steps and stormed into the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

I'm gonna guess this is when they started writing up some restrictions re: landing on the Capitol steps.

A (mostly) stock Cessna 182 lands at around 70kts - these stol comp aircraft are down below 40. I can slow flight my 182 down to 40ish on a clean day.

This reminds me of another similar system in which a single action means little, but once a condition is met things change: school.

I’ve specifically wondered about how sunk cost fallacy plays into these systems.

Say you believe that the value of college is only realized once you have a degree. (Oversimplified of course, on purpose.)

Purists of rationality might say that it is sunk cost fallacy to believe that you should finish the last class, since you’ve come this far (the sunk cost part).

But as this article states, the condition change is the meaningful bit; at what granularity should we measure something like sunk cost?

In other words, it’s not irrational to take a final course just to get the credit and finish the degree, even if the course seems useless, because it is a necessary step for the higher level condition change.

A huge swath of midrange companies will have a major competitive advantage, in my opinion, because they choose to opt-in to remote.

There might be one or two companies in the world I’d choose to move to work at. Even then, it’s a hard choice to make.

As long as remote is an option, that’s where I will work, even if I prefer another job on all other dimensions.

Yeah, this is just some purist BS in my opinion.

Message / medium have always mixed together.

Even folks who say content needs to be figured out before presentation... it's not so cut and dry. Your medium shapes your message - they are not mutually exclusive and for the receiver of the message, the medium matters for their reception of the message.

I understand the sentiment that TONS of CSS is probably a bad use of time. But trying to demonize or otherwise attach aesthetics the label of "meaningless" is, in my opinion, just as much egocentric as they claim CSS to be.

I was thinking exactly this.

It’s not surprised it would be abandoned, but the story makes it sound like it was suddenly abandoned.

The simplest explanation to me is likely the untimely death of the proprietor, but even that doesn’t seem like a sufficient answer.

That's super interesting - I didn't realize that certification would be required for this.

I would suspect that certification would break down at some point; does a plain old calculator need to be certified? Certainly not, but I'd imagine the FAA or whoever if asked would prefer pilots use calculators than do everything by hand.

I'm curious about EFBs as well - I run W&B for my little bugsmasher in Foreflight. Has that gone through certification? Certainly someone from the FAA wouldn't have to review every release for that if so...

So when does certification come into play versus it just being another tool that pilots are responsible for validating?

I've thought about this - if this is the case, they are extremely lucky because different planes could have significantly different payloads. Of course, then the TLAR would signal an issue.

Also this would mean some other aircraft had a particularly powerful departure, since both aircraft had lower-than-true weight calcs.

This sounds less like total weight, and more like a differential / CG problem.

Possibly, but aircraft carry a significant amount of extra fuel anyway. (That's how you can have a jet holding for 2 hours at a fix unexpectedly because of weather or whatever.)

It does seem plausible, but also almost heinous design if true.

Yeah the more I think about it the more this makes sense to me.

Both were lighter than expected (so if it was a swap with another aircraft we wouldn't necessarily know - possible that 4 aircraft got the wrong data and we don't know the other two).

But it feels more likely that the sums just failed and they incorrectly caught the failures instead of letting it fall out. catch(e){} is a bug factory for sure.

Ultimately this would be true for most anomalies. It's one of the reasons commercial air travel is as safe as it is.

In a car, you hit a bump, you keep going. In a plane, something unexpected happens and that plane is grounded. The utility function is just too skewed to take even a slight risk in this regard.

Title change recommendation: add “during”, so that causation is not drawn. Alternatively, replace “turbocharged” with “came with a significant increase in”

Well, jobs vs classes are very different. I'd also probably leave a job that gave me arbitrary assignments and tests and made me pay to be there, too, but that's generally fine in a classroom setting.

I think if you take that to another extreme, you could say that forcing someone to write code with a computer versus a typewriter is an arbitrary rule.

But there are actual reasons to enforce the tool - in that case, so you can execute your code in a similar environment to your peers. It is specific, but that's the point of the restriction.

Was going to mention this, and also the Bezos classification of Type 1 and Type 2 decisions - definitely would benefit from a better title.

I used to be told I needed to learn cursive. My parents had to learn how to operate a typewriter.

All of this is just various levels of abstraction. It’s still your responsibility to manage the final outcome, which is a far distance from “assembling words.”

I understand this clearly is something you feel strongly about, but do you think this is somehow drastically different from using other tools for doing secondary research? As in, using an index tool (like the Dewey decimal system, or Google) to surface previously performed work, so you can then summarize it?

There is always a line to draw, why is this the point where you think it is important to draw a line?

I think this is pretty subjective. You could also say that engineering should be used to increase the margin of safety (what is often labeled over-engineering).

If the engineering requirement is “do something that brings you close to the margin of safety in order to save resources”, is that not an influence of capitalism?

I’m not sure that thrust calculation is actually incredibly common. I’d be curious what the handbook on these aircraft say, but common practice for many aircraft is full thrust on takeoff - rarely is there a negative safety penalty for too much thrust. Just an earlier rotate.

Comment OP isn’t wrong entirely - this is the result of an economic decision. Not without it’s good effects - both can be true, but this is not a safety optimization by any means.

Many aviation accidents can be traced back to capitalistic pressure - cost saving on inspections, time saving for flow, etc. It’s appropriate to ask whether this is true here as well.

Makes me think this could have been a race condition where these aircraft somehow received the load calculations from other aircraft being calculated at the same time window. Some kind of poorly managed event stream / consumer that assumed no parallel jobs would be run? Or maybe the jobs are deduped by departure / arrival instead of flight number? Seems possible

Seems like something as critical as thrust in this phase of flight should have some kind of cross-check validation. Sounds like a bad single point of failure to me, but maybe there is a cross check I don’t know about that isn’t covered in the story.

What I do know is that with something like this, a little could go a long way. I wonder what the inspection and repair for a tail strike is, and whether that cancels out the money saved by minimum viable thrust across the fleet. I’m sure someone is punching the calculator on this to determine that.

Yeah, agreed here - workload on a departure (depending on the type of departure) can be pretty heavy compared to cruise phase. Arrivals and approaches are more commonly known to have heavy workloads, but there’s a lot to do just after departure, so this doesn’t feel wildly out of bounds for a scan recovery after an autopilot mistake.

Lots of speculation as to why people didn’t talk about the experience.

A few points should be made: - We don’t feel velocity, we feel acceleration/deceleration. While a sudden drop would feel crazy, if the jet rolled out and into the dive it may be subtle enough initially that the free fall was hard to feel. The pull-up out of the dive probably would have been felt, but! If the pilot came on the intercom and talked about weather, or if the attending crew didn’t act odd after the event, people are less likely to assume something weird happened.

Add to this the likelihood of IMC, as well as the likelihood that the crew warned of potential light turbulence - you’ll have a plane full of well-primed people who accepted the experience as “mostly normal.”

Add to that that there wasn’t likely wifi for another 10min or so, people may forget pretty quickly…

The graph looks wild, but people don’t feel that raw data. Perception is everything, and it is not that surprising that accounts of this event aren’t popping up like crazy.

Yeah - I think if it was an autopilot engagement, the velocity may have been gradual enough that it just felt a little weird. Add in clouds - it’s not a crazy amount of altitude to lose in a jet like this, and you prepare for some weird feelings getting on a jet in the first place.

Generally spatial disorientation would be pretty unlikely this close to departure, since the departure path tends to be “straight forward with a climb gradient of X” - a pretty unusual situation for pilots of that level of experience.

A possible scenario that has been discussed before is the engagement of autopilot (which often happens at this phase of flight post-departure) with an incorrect altitude entered - my guess is something like 310 rather than 31000, particularly because the language used for altitudes above 17k is in flight levels - “cleared Flight Level 310”, autopilot engages, “whoops…” disengage, recover, climb and continue with corrected autopilot setting.

Again, still odd, but very experienced humans make mistakes like this pretty regularly.

The thing is, the market always adapts.

Your “more productive” won’t actually feel that different. This tool is in that way just another abstraction.

Every tech advance has the same wave. Eventually the “more money” actually isn’t necessarily true because the competition has met or beat your thing.

Value keeps getting added to the market but the market also adapts to what is valuable relative to the rest of the market.