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Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

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Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna say 'Prioritizes "face" or "reputation" above literal accuracy' is definitely the US too.

I concur that there are places where this is true, but not at all to the level that it's true in Asian and African countries

It's true enough in western societies that we specifically needed Cockpit Resource Management as a tool to overcome deference to senior officers. A classic example being KLM captain van Zanten from the Tenerife disaster.

I hate that this thread descended into chauvinism and generalized cultural value judgments. The problem of excessive deference to authority plagues all cultures. By not being obsessed about saving face for our own society and acknowledging our own flaws, we make it easier for all of us to learn together.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live on the coast, 15km from major airport and sometimes in the summer planes fly directly over my apartment, including really huge ones, just a few storeys above (I'd say 100-150 ft, maybe more). With open windows, it's madly loud. With closed windows it's a loud but somehow tolerable.

Perhaps an order of magnitude more? You'd expect an airliner at about 4000 ft at 15 km from the airport, assuming it's trying to land. It's also illegal to fly lower than 1000 ft above inhabited areas in most of the world.

Typically sound follows the inverse square rule, so the difference between the same plane at 1000 feet should be a 1/169th (1/13^2) of the noise at 75 feet. So two orders of magnitude.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#533
post #41

I cannot imagine how unbelievably loud and damaging having a 777 fly 75 feet above my house would be.

Planes taking off from Boston Logan can fly as low as 300 feet over the neighboring town of Winthrop--and average about 700. I've kayaked in the area and you basically have to stop talking every few minutes when a plane takes off. Arriving flights are even a bit lower (although not as loud).

Following up from another thread, excluding reflections and what not, a plane at 75 feet should be 16x louder than the same plane with the same throttle settings at 300 feet. Sound follows the inverse square rule, where a change in distance of X reduces the perceived noise to 1/x^2. Since 300/75 = 4, you get a factor of 16 in perceived difference. Yikes.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#534
post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think your examples support the thesis that we're actually decent at discovering harmful effects, but we don't mind them. I think it's less that we don't mind them, and more that it unfortunately is a slow process to go from first research realising there's a problem to general scientific consensus to then one or both of public awareness becoming big enough that companies have to respond and stop choosing profit…

We already know that microplastics are dangerous (BPA, leeching of random compounds, plankton overpopulation, animals with stuffed stomachs), there's no need to wait 50 years more. Otherwise I agree with what you say, and I'd say it agrees with what I said: we're pretty good at detecting harmful effects, and good at not taking them into account. But that's not what the parent implied.

I don’t think you’ve followed completely the phases that need to be gone through: the fact that microplastics are still being produced is the most straightforward demonstration that can be had on the fact that companies are still to be forced by the general public to stop producing them

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#535
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just gone from a 2004 Corolla to a 2020 Serrato. It's a low end car but it has lane assist, braking detection when a car slows in front, cruise, speed limiter, etc. Combine all those settings with google maps and it easy for me to see how you could get complacent driving a new car and make mistakes. All these features work well most of the time, but they all notably fail on, still frequent, edge cases.

Yes and as with Tesla "FSD", supposedly the driver is to devote full attention to monitoring the car whenever activated. But this is silly because as these tools get better, the driver will inevitably monitor less. But it won't any time soon (ever?) avoid random errors every now and then. But now these will be catastrophic failures.

> But this is silly because as these tools get better, the driver will inevitably monitor less.

And for good reason. The main benefit to FSD, as I see it, is the ability to do something more productive with my time while getting from A to B. Most wealthy people end up paying for drivers not because they want an exceptional driver, but because once you reach a certain threshold of income it is more profitable to work (phone calls, laptop, w/e) or sleep, and pay to be driven everywhere than to drive yourself. FSD lowers that income threshold tremendously and could be a significant boon to overall human productivity. If it ever happens.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#536
post #351

I'm surprised fatigue is not mentioned more in the discussion of this incident. The takeoff was at around 3AM local time, and Emirates is well known for pushing their pilots hard (many pilots take a job there specifically to build hours quickly, despite the unpleasant working conditions, with the intention of moving to greener pastures once they've done that).

While I agree with you, I remember that 3 a.m. was also quite busy in Dubai, it's not an usual or quiet time there.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#537
post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's brilliant, and so funny because it's true. I've been wondering why we haven't really had any advances in our voice commands for nearly a decade - things like zooming and such are actions I've long wanted to be able to perform. Even that rotate map.. when your car is shown at the bottom and map is hard locked to current heading, when navigation is about to do a sharp right you end up with zero visibility of the…

Because it takes a dedicated team reviewing commands all day, every day, and dev team implementing event handlers, coordinating with other product teams. It takes lots of dedication. I used to run a chatbot that screened people. We thought we were asking simple enough questions, and yet two million chats in, we still discovered at least a Dozen unexpected/misdetected intents that required care. A day. And here is the…

> The answer is usually "one person every 400k sessions".

But you control that to some extent. If more people are aware of the command and believe it will work (I wouldn't) then you'll probably get higher incidence rates. I wouldn't believe it would work because like the person two parent comments above, less than half the novel crap I try works. So I try novel crap less and less frequently compared to things that I know will work.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#539
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and as with Tesla "FSD", supposedly the driver is to devote full attention to monitoring the car whenever activated. But this is silly because as these tools get better, the driver will inevitably monitor less. But it won't any time soon (ever?) avoid random errors every now and then. But now these will be catastrophic failures.

> But this is silly because as these tools get better, the driver will inevitably monitor less. And for good reason. The main benefit to FSD, as I see it, is the ability to do something more productive with my time while getting from A to B. Most wealthy people end up paying for drivers not because they want an exceptional driver, but because once you reach a certain threshold of income it is more profitable to work…

>is the ability to do something more productive with my time

Seems to miss my point, I may have not stated clearly. Yes I understand the sales pitch of self driving cars stated above...the "marketing" / "hype" of AI/self driving cars/ Tesla FSD evokes the idea of completely offloading the responsibility to the car and doing whatever you want with your time during commutes, as if it was public transit.

But my point was anything less than this is a complete waste of time and useless as a product because until you are completely hands and attention off, you have to be completely hands and attention on/ready...no matter how good or near actual FSD it gets.

Because 99.9, or 99.9999, or 99.999999% effective is effectively 0 percent effective given the catastrophic outcome of any error if you aren't devoting full attention to monitoring the car.

But aside from all of this theorizing, the actual product is NOWHERE near high 9's reliable. As it gets better, attention will drop but errors will still be pervasive. And with this as backdrop, the fact the marketing has ever even hinted at being general-AI type FSD (the name itself for example) is a scandal. The videos of people riding in the backseat, or any other instance of not monitoring the car fully because they think it can drive itself. I predict there's going to a be an endless stream of accidents from these cars then FSD will be shut down until fully proven, which won't be technically possible for a long long time if ever in our lifetimes.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#540
post #505
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driver training should be updated to include what to do when self-driving modes are used (ie what do you actually do to supervise the vehicle, which checks to do, etc).

I don't really see how the needed monitoring would be more interesting than fully driving the car, maybe with a few convenience and safety assistances. Planes can use autopilots because there are not litteraly surounded by traffics 2m away. If a car needs monitoring, and they will probably need it for a very long time, you should as well drive it.

> If a car needs monitoring, and they will probably need it for a very long time, you should as well drive it.

This is the crux of the intractable problem of AI/self-driving marketing vaporware, and why until this nonsense is shut down, the situation will probably have to get scandalously worse before it gets better (better meaning regulating fake "self driving" off the road as a public safety travesty).

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