> An aerial refueler flying so close to Venezuela can't have been there with the best intentions. I don't think that they're too keen on advertising their presence or whereabouts.
Which is precisely why they should avoid flying INTO civilian aircraft.
Imagine if that refueler had stayed away from the JetBlue, we wouldn't be talking about it ;-)
Absolutely agreed. But the midair collision that happened at the Ronald Reagan Intl airport (DCA) in Washington DC in February doesn't really give me the confidence that they care that much. Especially given how furious the senior NTSB official Jennifer Homendy was at both the military and the FAA.
I don't remember where I read this, but will tell this story every time ChatGPT is mentioned as a replacement of StackOverflow.
> I asked chatgpt how do I do X. Chatgpt replied with the accepted answer from stack overflow, thus saving me 1 second. In theory. In practice, what Chatgpt did NOT tell me was that the top voted comment on that accepted answer said "Do not do this, doing X in this way creates a security vulnerability of type Y because of Z"
Honestly, in this scenario I’d lean toward the LLM providing the better answer. Whoever shared this parable didn’t understand that ChatGPT isn’t just a search engine that regurgitates the top voted accepted comment from Stack Overflow. An LLM is probably more likely to parse the entire page and all of the comments if it pulls an URL. It would also be more likely to pull multiple URLs. It would also be more likely to pull from accumulated embedded knowledge. Unfortunately for this fabricated example, the casual visitor to Stack Overflow is most likely to be duped by an incorrect accepted answer if they don’t scroll down and read the fine print (which isn’t that common, a fact that surprises people who always read the comments and all answers).
The requested prompt does not exist or you do not have access. If you believe the request is correct, make sure you have first allowed AI Studio access to your Google Drive, and then ask the owner to share the prompt with you.
On iOS safari, it just says “Allow access to Google Drive to load this Prompt”. When I run into that UI, my first instinct is that the poster of the link is trying to phish me. That they’ve composed some kind of script that wants to read my Google Drive so it can send info back to them. I’m only going to click “allow” if I trust the sender with my data. IMO, if that’s not what is happening, this is awful product design.
After ChatGPT accidentally indexed everyones shared chats (and had a cache collision in their chat history early on) and Meta build a UI flow that filled a public feed full of super private chats... seems like a good move to use a battle tested permission system.
Google Drive is one of the bigger offenders when it comes to “metrics-driven user-hostile changes”, in gsuite, and its Google Meet is one of its peers.
Not really, that's just basic access control. If you've used Colab or Cloud Shell (or even just Google Cloud in general, given the need to explicitly allow the usage of each service), it's not surprising at all.
Why does AI studio need access to my drive in order to run someone else's prompt? It's not a prompt for authentication with my Google account. I'm already signed in. It's prompting for what appears to be full read/write access to my drive account. No thanks.
A bit of topic, but I was wondering how much bigger is the steam machine compared to the mac mini m4, since that's what I have and is my frame of reference. Obviously comparing apples to oranges and only talking about physical volume, not features, compatibility, price, personal preferences, etc.
The Steam device has a 110W GPU and 30W CPU. The M4 Mac Mini's peak power consumption is less than half of that. Even with the Apple Silicon efficiency, it can't keep up with high power GPUs in graphical loads like gaming.
Mac Mini will throttle itself after sustained full load, especially with the GPU engaged.
A Mac Mini will start throttling well before the end of a 30 minute online gaming match.
A larger volume for better cooling was a good choice for a machine designed to run the CPU and GPU at full load for hours.
In that sense the Mini M4 is targeted more at Desktop than gaming. Can do short bursts when needed but cannot run the marathon in terms of graphics. Nothing wrong with this, it is just a trade off.
A bit of topic, but I was wondering how much bigger is the steam machine compared to the mac mini m4, since that's what I have and is my frame of reference. Obviously comparing apples to oranges and only talking about physical volume, not features, compatibility, price, personal preferences, etc.
It's insane that clicking on the video in the VLC interface does nothing. In every other app it is play/pause. There's a way to enable it deep in settings (or as a plugin?) but it should be the default.
VLC has fallen slightly victim to the “developer team tries to rebuild the entire product from scratch and still isn’t done with the rebuild but has stopped maintaining the original for like three years” issue that some software seems to have
That's awesome. I used VLC only because of the nightmare of codecs back in the day, and worked well for me for ages. I now just use mpv with some UI plugins.
I did drop MPC in favor of VLC, but with the new UI of VLC, maybe it's time to give MPC a try again. Didn't realize there was forks of it, time to do some rabbit hole diving!
All nuclear explosions themselves aren't even going to be statistically detectable.
IIRC from assessments of the US military's carbon footprint, cumulative footprint of nuclear weapons infrastructure is probably significantly less than .1%
There's a hundred other things to worry about first IMO.
Instead of complaining about individual sites, learn to use your browser more effectively. They can all zoom in on things, and any good one will let you set a minimum font size. Set that to the smallest size that you can easily read and instantly no website anywhere will ever have text that is too small to read.
No, not generally. 99% of all webpages you visit will be perfectly fine. At most you might notice some misalignment between graphical and text elements on the page, but most pages don’t rely on that for anything important.
In this case, it should be easy to detect genetic or biological material if it was a meat sack strike & rule out space debris. They don’t tend to do well when hit at several hundred mph.
The only other thing really up that high would be space debris, weather balloon payload (the balloon itself is very thin and soft), or maybe a sounding rocket (but don’t these come with NOTAMs?).
180 mph taken from a bit of googling, ballpark figure on upper end.
So this was really immediately after takeoff. My understanding of commercial airliners is they usually fly fairly parallel with the ground just after takeoff to pick up speed before ascending, so I would guess they hadn’t much altitude at all.
Anyway it’s a very interesting article, ty to poster! And it was an interesting question to think about.
AFAIK (what is not much on the military side), fighters are all optimized for performance, and not resilience. And fighters that work on improving the crew options focus on survivability instead of resilience because it tends to weight less.
It's more like if you make a plane resilient to bird strikes, you sacrifice a good chunk of performance - envelope, maneuverability, something.
Depending on how fast the plane is going, "good chunk" might be a hilarious understatement too. Hitting an object at 1000mph imparts 4x the damage compared to hitting an object at 500mph.
If you want to see an example of a durable military aircraft, look at the A-10:
Anyways, that's a military plane designed to get hit by... stuff... and as a result can take bird strikes. But its max speed is like 400mph and it would get absolutely wrecked by any serious opposition from fighters. The more resilient you make a plane to birds, the more vulnerable it is to missiles, per unit price. And missiles is kinda the point of the whole endeavor.
I heard that the Navy (historically, at least--don't know about today) placed a greater value than the Air Force on engine redundancy. Hence why we have both the twin engine F-18 (Navy) and the single engine F-16 (Air Force), even though functionally there's a lot of overlap between the two.
Sure, but then you also have the F22, F117, B2, A10, SR71, U2, and a bunch more I can’t think of right now.
Some helicopters have a single engine. Most have 2. They are still unreliable death machines, and arguably 2 engines makes the problem a bit worse (more moving parts). They are (sometimes) more tolerant of a single engine out, of course. But transmissions are often the weak spot with helicopters.
Single vs Dual has many factors, not just reliability.
A single engine failure on a SR71 (if I remember correctly) resulted in a airframe loss and ejection at relatively low speeds, and one at full speed would likely result in a complete crew loss on top of it - and it has dual engines. Think catastrophic near instant destruction.
Sometimes you just need more power than a single engine (with current tech) can provide in the space you have available, for instance.
Sometimes, like an A10, you really do want something that can take a massive beating and keep going.
A B52 can lose 2 engines with no issues, and theoretically up to 4 and still be controllable (depending on the distribution of the lost engines). But that isn’t because it needs reliability, but because it’s got 8 engines because it was designed to carry a metric shit ton of explosives, and it only had 60’s era tech jet engines.
Modern jets usually use 2 (much more powerful) engines for similar or even larger payloads.
Plenty. They're far simpler to fly than multi-engine planes, but they don't have the redundancy or power needed for e.g. airliner purposes. For example FedEx operates a fleet of over 200 single engine turboprops (Cessna 208). Pilatus built about 2,000 PC-12s in the 35 years since it was introduced.
They're designed around not getting hit at all, rather than being able to take hits. Stealth, stand-off weapons, sensor fusion and information displays all so the plane never gets put in a position to be hit.
That's not to say they don't defend in depth, one reason twin engine fighters are desired is because of engine redundancy after all, but a more "armored" plain is a slower, bulkier, easier to detect and easier to hit target. And you'll still likely get taken down in one hit.
And there's still not a lot you can do if your engine swallows a bird or two, especially if you only have one.
The military also has the expectation that not everyone is going to come home, unlike a civilian airliner where the safety margins are much wider.
That might be technically true, but the F35 and F16 are both single engine aircraft and IIRC constitute the bulk of at least the US air force’s combat aircraft.
B2, F117, B52, P9, F22, F14, F18, C130, C17, C5, CH47, AH-64, SR71, U2, A10, and on and on just to give some recent examples.
There are a few single engine aircraft roles (including the F104), but they are not and have never been the bulk of active serving aircraft. It isn’t just ‘technically’ true.
Be that as it may, the workhorse combat aircraft of most NATO air forces and the USAF itself is the F-16, a single-engine fighter, and its nominal replacement, the F-35 is also single engine. You can try to make your point by comparing those vs the numbers of F-15s, F/A-18s, F-Fs, Rafales, Eurofighters and so on in service vs the F-16 and F-35, but bringing C130s and C17s into it is irrelevant, those are not "combat aircraft".
edit: ah but they are "military aircraft", sure. fine.
Which is precisely why they should avoid flying INTO civilian aircraft.
Imagine if that refueler had stayed away from the JetBlue, we wouldn't be talking about it ;-)
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