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The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

octodon.social

291–300 of 695 posts

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#291

Another good write up of this incident is on the excellent Admiral Cloudberg blog: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t... Another article in that series is also related to a UX mistake: Air France Flight 447. This crashed, in part, because the inputs from two control sticks (one for pilot and other for copilot) were averaged if they disagreed, unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where t…

It's not something that can be changed on airbus cockpits, since the nature of side sticks makes them impossible to be mechanically linked, unless there was some very complex motor system built into each stick that provided force feedback equal in strength to a pilot tugging hard on it.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#292
post #68
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is pretty low on civ casualties. Look at Gaza, or the Iraq/Vietnam invasions compare numbers (civ casualties AND time it took) and then draw conclusions on the use of the word genocide. I also would abstain from using "russians" (or USAers, or Israelis) when referring to actions of the respective govts. Keeps the discussion cleaner of generalizations wrt people that may totally not suppor…

I am sorry but Genocide is not about actually killing people, it is about "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group", which includes "killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group" ( https://en.wi…

Sorry, genocide is not bringing people to safe and allowing them school. If Putin wanted maximum death of Ukrainians he would carpet bomb big Ukrainian cities (like the US+allies did in Iraq, Vietnam, Japan, Germany, ...)

This war --as bad as it is-- is nothing close to some of the worst wars we've seen in the last 100 years.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#293

Another good write up of this incident is on the excellent Admiral Cloudberg blog: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t... Another article in that series is also related to a UX mistake: Air France Flight 447. This crashed, in part, because the inputs from two control sticks (one for pilot and other for copilot) were averaged if they disagreed, unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where t…

> unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place

I don't know if it's true, but I recall reading somewhere that this physical connection is a breakable link, so if one of the controls gets stuck the other control can still be used to fly the airplane (after some application of strong force to break the connection).

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#294

Another good write up of this incident is on the excellent Admiral Cloudberg blog: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t... Another article in that series is also related to a UX mistake: Air France Flight 447. This crashed, in part, because the inputs from two control sticks (one for pilot and other for copilot) were averaged if they disagreed, unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where t…

> unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place, and you'd feel the other pilot fighting you.

Note that it’s not quite that flagrant: because Boeings don’t normally autotrim (famously aside from the 737 MAX, whose MCAS was not documented and trained for — I think the more recent Boeings like 777 and 787 are FBW and do autotrim) it’s possible to fight your co-pilot while thinking you’re not trimmed, or even that you have excessive air load:

> excessive air loads on the stabiliser may require effort by both pilots to correct miss-trim. In extreme cases it may be necessary to aerodynamically relieve the air loads to allow manual trimming.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#295
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you believe they bombed the theater because they were actively trying to kill Ukrainian children? You know , people tend to believe the "other side" is so evil that they probably actually believe shit like this. That's the kind of belief that makes people think that all means justify the end and why we have wars that kill hundreds of thousands in the first place... if you saw people from the other side as just nor…

I'm not saying they are "so evil". They either support war or don't care. For many combatants to go to war to kill some Ukrainians is a way our of prison and/or poverty.

But don't say it is the war of the government. Isn't government a representation of the people? People of Russia supported invasion to Georgia in 2008, occupation of Crimea and Donbas in 2014.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon… lol. Is that even still alive? Are you gonna say that Threads is thriving as well?

The OP link is to a very much alive mastodon instance… so yes its doing fine. No idea about Threads but apparently some people use it.

But your claim is that twitter is no longer the center and many niches have migrated to Mastodon. I highly doubt this, unless you can point out an actual niche where Mastodon has more active discussions than twitter.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#297
post #94

I wonder when a tesla will show up in a courtroom with a situation like this. I'm not talking about autopilot. I'm talking about the continuous (past ridiculous) removal of physical controls from their vehicles. For example, the original model S/X had dedicated controls for lots of functions - turn signals, gear shift, wipers, autopilot, steering wheel tilt, etc. On the steering wheel, there were two buttons and a sc…

> I wonder when a tesla will show up in a courtroom with a situation like this.

Well in this situation no one went to prison, so I guess no reason to worry for Tesla either

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#298
post #94

I wonder when a tesla will show up in a courtroom with a situation like this. I'm not talking about autopilot. I'm talking about the continuous (past ridiculous) removal of physical controls from their vehicles. For example, the original model S/X had dedicated controls for lots of functions - turn signals, gear shift, wipers, autopilot, steering wheel tilt, etc. On the steering wheel, there were two buttons and a sc…

Its not just Tesla. Recent Jeep models have a digital speedometer with no analog backup. From an engineering perspective these changes just introduce needless risk of complex failure for no real gain. Surely the speedometer is not the make or break cost item on a car?

The analog gauges have been digital for a long time; there's a signal processor that decides how far the gauge should move and a motor that actually moves it.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#299

A quite recent UX disaster at Paypal. The Paypal iOS app used to behave strange with numbers. The interface was designed that you had to type in the amount you wanted to send in cents. If you wanted to send USD 50, you had to type 5000. Paypal then would add a comma after the second digit from the right. What made it even stranger: The numbers were aligned right, so it had the feeling of typing backwards. I never rea…

I dont know what you mean by aligned right (if it aligned left it would have to know how much you intended to transfer before you started), but wells fargo web (and I think app) uses this, and I prefer it for making small payments. They know you're going to type the decimal anyway, so they save you a step. I get mildly annoyed that other banking sites make me type it. If I'm paying $83.21 I still have to type 4 digit…

Because lots of people send mostly whole numbers to friends and family. If I want to send $5 instead of typing "5" I now have to type "500"

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#300
post #270
post #239

> they saw this contact heading towards them labeled as an F-14 fighter. What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship. Was there no moment where they thought "maybe there has been a mistake?" - like where Stanislav Petrov chose to interpret the Soviet early warning system telling him an ICBM was incoming as being a result of some faulty instruments. Grante…

In the moment, it's really hard to step back and ask yourself "Does this make any sense?" when you're primed to react in some particular way.

Especially with an element of "I might personally get blown up" involved.
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