PakledHostage

[Elevator music playing...]

Having a big open space to play in in zero G would be a lot of fun... I'd try to get stopped out in the middle and then experiment with how to get back to a handhold.

Length 22 metres, diameter 19 metres... what do you do if you find yourself in the middle of that in zero g? Blow hard and hope the delta-V is sufficient to reach the sides? Or will they put ropes across it like in the monkey cage at the zoo?

The conversational thread here has scattered a bit, so I need to ask: Are we talking about artificial human-like intelligence, or artificial intelligence more generically? Creation of art and how we learn language is unique to us. But that doesn't mean other entities (be they elephants, computers or Pakleds) aren't or can't be intelligent because they don't manifest their intelligence like we do. And please don't get me wrong... I'm not some Kurzweil fan boy... I expect that, while we've seen impressive progress in the AI field in the last 10 years, the devil will be in the details when it comes to emergence of AGI. There are aspects of current AI that can match our own, and at times I think we over estimate our exceptionalism, but the devil is still in the details.

@tater raises an interesting point with regard to iterations required to learn. Clearly our brains are vastly more efficient at learning than AI. That's even true of what some would regard as "dumb" animals. My sister went on a safari in Tanzania's Ngorongoro national park and the guides there explained that the jeeps weren't allowed to stop when they saw predators because the prey animals had figured out that the predators are located where the jeeps stop. The predators were having a harder time hunting because the prey detected a pattern in the human behavior. How many iterations did it take for the herds to recognize that pattern?

I'll admit to knowing very little about AI or how our own brains work, but my impression that I mentioned above comes from watching my kids learn as they grew from infancy into childhood and my own reflections on the subject. But having said that, how does the passage above support your argument? Current AI is basically pattern recognition, and LLMs can do all of what you describe as "true language processing"? One can ask it questions and give it instructions in plain language and it does a reasonable job of responding appropriately. Surely doing that requires contextual understanding of nouns, verbs, modifiers, and the like? Edit: Thinking about it some more, even your scenario of the elephant can be interpreted as an example of pattern recognition. Your brain learns that that combination of shapes and colours is an elephant. It learns how that combination of shapes and colours changes as the elephant is viewed from different angles. It learns object permanence. These are all patterns. Putting them together allows the brain to formulate an expectation or model of the world it is experiencing. Some of these patterns that it learns, like object permanence, arise out of interacting with the physical world, but that interaction still breeds a recognition of patterns and expectations that future situations will follow the same pattern as was previously encountered. Babies learn object permanence early in their development. They learn that things fall. They learn what elephants and petunias look like. They learn to expect that falling petunias don't think "oh no, not again!"

I've often thought that our brains are largely just pattern recognition machines. The degree of success we have in recognizing those patterns is seen as intelligence. Find or create a pattern that nobody has seen before? Smart! AI is good at pattern recognition too, and it is getting better. ...But then the trouble in categorizing AI arises from the edge cases around that "largely just"...

And would it conclude that red lights mean stop, green lights mean go, and yellow lights mean go really fast?

I found a way to watch it. It's very worth watching. Gut wrenching at times, but worth watching. Edit: It's on the BBC's iPlayer website, for those who have access.

The BBC documentary series "The Space Shuttle That Fell to Earth" looks brilliant. I want to watch it so bad that I even joined a VPN service so I could pretend to be logging onto the BBC website from the UK (they block streaming it outside the UK). Unfortunately, they also now want me to pay for a UK TV license before they'll let me stream it. I don't have one, and I'm not going to pay 160 GBP for one, so I guess I'm out of luck until such time that they make it available some other way... If anyone here manages to watch it,let us know how it is?

I saw on NASA's Perseverance mission page that they've named the site where Ingenuity's mission ended “Valinor Hills”, from Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings. It's a fitting tribute. As is written in the Wikipedia article about Valinor: The Valinor Hills are on the continent of Aman. Aman is known as "the Undying Lands", but the land itself does not cause mortals to live forever. However, only immortal beings are generally allowed to reside there.

I did see that in another of his videos. But it just seemed odd that he went on for 10 minutes or so and didn't once mention that the engine, cowls and nacelles that he was talking about aren't made by Boeing and that the Leap 1 engines aren't unique to the 737 Max jets either. Aside from that, he presented pretty well. But it left me feeling like he's not really being completely objective, because those details matter, especially when communicating to laypeople who might otherwise make assumptions. Edit: @tater That's quite literally a "glory shot"... nice.

@tater: What are we supposed to take from that? His presentation seems biased. Nowhere does he mention that the engines, nacelles and cowls aren't made by Boeing (they are made by Safran and the Leap 1 engine type is also used on Airbus A320NEO aircraft and Chinese Comac C919 aircraft). Isn't that relevant to the discussion? Odd that he left it out? In fairness, it sounds like the new acoustic panels aren't very robust, and clearly that's a problem. Delamination of those panels has been an issue for decades, even when they were made of metal. I question why they'd go CFRP, but to lay it all at Boeing's feet is disingenuous. As this guys says, the NAI system should maybe have an auto mode on the 737 to mitigate the lack of robustness of the acoustic panel design, but that's arguably still a bandaid. It's good, not bad that Boeing is delaying certification of the new Max variants to work through these issues first.

You clearly see it differently and that's your prerogative, but yes I am serious. She's no different than any other passenger. Sure she sat there and that's commendable, but she didn't sit there on every Max 9 flight... that day or any day since. If she (and the team of experts behind her) didn't trust that the aircraft was OK to fly and for ANYONE to sit there, it shouldn't have been flying. Full stop. In my own career, I was called upon almost daily to authorize deferrals, substitutions and continued operation of aircraft with damage outside the manufacturer's (i.e. Boeing, Airbus, Douglas) documented allowables. I never once thought "Nobody I know is flying on that plane", or "the boss isn't flying on that plane", so OK... If an aircraft is deemed airworthy, it is airworthy for everyone. That's how the system works.

Did you post the wrong link? That paper says nothing about any such thing?

Antarctica is delicate and there is pressure (and some acceptance, internationally) that it be set aside as an ecological and scientific preserve. I'd hope that Rocket Lab (and anyone else) would ensure that they aren't re-entering debris over it. To paraphrase the meme: all your base are not belong to us... There are parts of the world we should leave alone.

I see that their second stage jettisons its batteries about mid burn. It's on a trajectory that takes it south over Antarctica from New Zealand. I hope debris from the batteries doesn't survive reentry to litter the ice? Not cool, if so... Does anyone know where the batteries re-enter? Maybe they overfly Antarctica and land in the Indian or Atlantic Oceans on the other side?

Reminds me of my first Kerbaled mission to Duna... Just jump, Bill!

Constance von Muehlen is woman. And it is a token gesture because she's not making the determination on her own that it's safe to fly. A whole team of experts, from regulators to engineers to mechanics have done that. There are people under her and in adjacent roles to her whose job it is to deem an aircraft airworthy. She's a figurehead and she's showing leadership, but she's not taking on any more risk than any other passenger takes on any other flight. All passengers on all flights are trusting with their lives that the team of experts (pilots, mechanics, engineers etc) have done / will do their jobs correctly.

I saw in the CNN article that Alaska Airlines' COO, Constance von Muehlen, was seated in the seat adjacent to the L/H plug door on the first flight that they operated (from Seattle to San Diego). It's a token gesture, but a respectable one.

I wouldn't say that. Your ideas were interesting. Aviation is a weird industry because it's mired in processes and bureaucracy that are hard to change, but it also has a way of incrementally improving - usually after something bad happens and then the industry and regulators get together and figure out how to stop such a thing from happening again. I am certain that changes will arise out of this. I hope it isn't just a knee jerk reaction to media pressure, but a meaningful change. From my own experience participating in those types of regulatory rule making processes, it probably won't be knee jerk. ...It will be tedious and boring, but it won't be knee jerk.

Yes, thank you @StrandedonEarth for the link. What I was trying to get at in my long winded post (which I intended as context) was "why?". Why are these errors happening on the factory floor? I once read a great book titled "They Called it Pilot Error". It asks why otherwise rational people would go fly into a mountain or pull the wings off their airplane in a spiral dive. Just dismissing those errors as "pilot error" also dismisses important understanding of what lead to the person making the error. Similarly, why are these errors happening at Boeing? Are they understaffed and overwhelmed? Are they jaded and don't care anymore? Are they getting pressure from above to cut corners? Or something else? Just as most pilots don't wake up in the morning and think "I'm going to fly into that mountain", it is reasonable to assume that these people are motivated to do a good job but can't for some reason. Why is that?

I wrote my last post in the middle of the night (insomnia sucks), and having thought about it since then, I think the bit quoted by @StrandedonEarth may be a bit unfair to Boeing. Clearly Boeing has a responsibility to ensure that the parts that their suppliers provide to them conform to the design, but it sounds from the quote like they are doing that. If Spirit is being deceitful by painting over bad rivets to hide them, that's on Spirit, and good on Boeing's QA for noticing. We also have to remember that the people assembling parts at a fab shop like Spirit generally aren't licensed aircraft mechanics. They'd be people off the street with only the bare minimum skill set to do the job (probably much of that obtained through on-the-job training). I am generalizing, but I have to wonder how much most of them really care about aviation? The professionalism I experienced in my colleagues in fleet management at the airline where I worked, on the other hand, was mostly born out of a love of aviation and a talent to get that far in the organization. The mechanics in the team were the best in the company. It was their job to provide troubleshooting guidance to the line mechanics. The chief pilots weren't directly in the fleet management team but fleet management and flight ops worked closely enough together that we were on a first-name basis with them. The engineers had all studied aeronautical or mechanical engineering and were there because they liked airplanes. So it was a much different environment than at an outfit like Spirit. That said, it would be Boeing's responsibility to install the parts that it gets from Spirit correctly. I don't know if these plug doors are sub-assemblies of a larger fuselage section that's also made by Spirit, or if the plug doors are something that Boeing mechanics install themselves. Either way their processes would need to monitor and ensure that all parts of all assemblies conform to the design. It sounds like Boeing's QA mostly does that, but stuff is somehow still falling through the cracks. The question then is "why?". Are they understaffed and overwhelmed by a flood of poor workmanship by their supplier? Are they jaded and don't care anymore? Something else? I can't know. But we can rest assured that the high profile of this event will yield changes.

I'm going to trot out my naivete again: How does this happen on the ground, on the factory floor? We once had a competitor's airplane in our hangar while it was being fixed by an Airbus AOG team. It was winter, and in the interest of overall collective aviation safety, we allowed Airbus and the competitor to use our space so the work could be done properly. (Competitor airlines collaborating on maintenance isn't uncommon, because we're all ultimately working towards the same goal.) Our CEO saw the airplane there and had a total meltdown rage fit, complete with contorted face and spittle flying out of his mouth, but the airplane stayed in the hangar for a bunch more days until it was fixed. Everyone just ignored the guy's demand that we kick them out. That's the climate I knew. How has the laziness and corner cutting seeped down from those bean counters to the floor? Something's not right.

I am not going to make excuses for Boeing. That wasn't the intent of my post. My post was intended to point out that the people in the industry generally aren't a bunch of "Mr Burns" types, with an array of evil plans. Neither the MCAS nor the door plug issue should have happened, that is clear. But let's not over-simplify those problems (or their solutions) either.