In aviation there's a saying, "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate" which describes the hierarchy of things to pay attention to while piloting an aircraft.
Autopilot can be thought of better as "auto-aviate". That is to say, if there is already a navigation plan, the aircraft can follow that plan. Simple autopilots just keep the wings level, others can hold an altitude and change heading. More sophisticated ones can change altitude or even fully land the plane.
All of those things, however, require people to manage the "Navigate" part. "Aviate" is a deterministically solved problem, at least in normal flight operations. As you point out we trust autopilots today, including on (nearly) every single commercial flight.
LLMs are a poor alternative to "aviate", but they could be part of a better flight management automation package. The parent article tries to use the LLM to aviate, with predictable results.
If paired with a capable auto-pilot (not the relatively basic one on that C-172), the LLM could figure out how to operate the FMS and take you from post take-off to final approach and aid in situational awareness.
Currently, I don't think there is a commercial solution for GA aircraft that could say, "Ok, I'm 20NM from KVNY, but there are three people ahead of me in the pattern, so I have to do a right 360 before descending and joining downwind on 34L".
Having an LLM propose that course of action and tell the autopilot to execute on it definitely would be an improvement to GA safety.
I don't think it's an easy problem to solve at all, that's why I quipped about making it an interview problem. :) In an interview, I'm just interested in hearing people talk through trying to solve difficult problems. Getting to a solution is incidental. And it's way more fun when I don't know of a go-to solution, either.
Not to be contrarian, but if you cared, you could easily rule out your suspicions.
It's not even worth it to say why or how, since not even doing rudimentary research means that you aren't interested in developing a well-informed opinion.
>> Not to be contrarian, but if you cared, you could easily rule out your suspicions.
That's just false. You might try to rule it out yourself to see. My comments here and the responses demonstrate that it's a waste of time to argue against people in the purity cycle of global warming. My position is one of moderation not denial - and I'm downvoted, told I don't care, and I haven't done even the minimum of research. Pffft. HN is not what it used to be.
You are being down-voted not because of some imaginary "purity cycle", but because you discard without reasoning a vast amount of evidence to the contrary of your hypothesis.
You've heard of the saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Holding a hypothesis of water-vapor from air travel being the primary driver of warming trends is extraordinary.
Invoking the oft-repeated "do your own research" rhetorical crutch and referring to scientific consensus as "hype" doesn't help your case.
Mid-day sun in a clear sky is very white, in the 5k-6k color temperature range. It's hard to get a sense of how white it is because of how bright it is. In fact, the color temperature on the surface can be even higher than in outer-space!
Compare this to a "warm" light bulb, which is around 2.5K. Sunrise/sunset is also around that range.
Perhaps the "warm color" sun mindset comes from the only times that people can look directly at it. That is to say, around sunrise or sunset.
"Trigger happy" means an affinity to shoot with little or no provocation. Effectiveness with a weapon is unrelated. This is absolutely the definition of trigger happy.
The officer chose to engage and close on the vehicle and chose to circle from the front. If the officer was concerned about being run over, they shouldn't have stood right at the bumper. The car was clearly in gear, moving forward was an obvious expectation.
Did the officer have an escape route? Obviously yes, since they only had to side step to avoid the car. Was there an exigent circumstance? No, the officer could have retreated and nobody else was clearly in harm's way. Was the driver clearly a threat? Again, no.
No, this was straight-up murder from a trigger happy psychopath.
> Airlines operate to a much stricter standard than one in a million. If one in a million flights ended in a fatal crash, the US alone would see about 3 airline passenger deaths per day on average.
I think you conflated flights (several 10Ks per day) with passengers (several million per day).
One in a million flights is one accident every few decades.
> at least in the US. Engines will fail
As per the report, this appears to be a structural failure, not an engine failure.
If randomly distributed, one in a million flights crashing and killing all passengers means that one in a million passengers dies.
The US sees about 25,000 airline flights per day, or around 9 million per year. So with one in a million flights crashing, we'd expect roughly 9 crashes per year.
Okay, but it doesn't mean they're regular people. Owning a single one of those plots out them in the 1% of household net worth, even if they had 0 other assets.
Ok but what does that contribute to the conversation? I think a good enough definition for regular people is if the average person can achieve that title with talent and hard work more than luck (not that luck doesn't also play a major factor). Whereas becoming a billionaire has a lot more to do with luck than hard work (even though hard work still plays a factor).
The gulf between well paid white collar workers and regular people is so massive which is "closer" depends mostly on which billionaire you're measuring.
That doesn't pass the smell test. Outside the inflated prices paid by Zuckerberg the houses were worth around $4 million, which likely would be around be most their main net worth (let's say it is 5 million). The median net worth in the US is $200k so let's call the the cut off for "regular person" (by that definition >95% of people on HN would not be regular). So the gap from the millionaires here to "regular people" is a factor of 25, in contrast the factor to the smallest billionaire is 200, so no what you say is simply false.
that would be completely correct... sorry. the export options now read "ASCII Basic" and "ASCII Extended", and "Basic" generates plus signs for corners, as of now. I feel like the behavior might have changed. Extended option seem to use 0xE294xx range for lines.
Autopilot can be thought of better as "auto-aviate". That is to say, if there is already a navigation plan, the aircraft can follow that plan. Simple autopilots just keep the wings level, others can hold an altitude and change heading. More sophisticated ones can change altitude or even fully land the plane.
All of those things, however, require people to manage the "Navigate" part. "Aviate" is a deterministically solved problem, at least in normal flight operations. As you point out we trust autopilots today, including on (nearly) every single commercial flight.
LLMs are a poor alternative to "aviate", but they could be part of a better flight management automation package. The parent article tries to use the LLM to aviate, with predictable results.
If paired with a capable auto-pilot (not the relatively basic one on that C-172), the LLM could figure out how to operate the FMS and take you from post take-off to final approach and aid in situational awareness.
Currently, I don't think there is a commercial solution for GA aircraft that could say, "Ok, I'm 20NM from KVNY, but there are three people ahead of me in the pattern, so I have to do a right 360 before descending and joining downwind on 34L".
Having an LLM propose that course of action and tell the autopilot to execute on it definitely would be an improvement to GA safety.
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