This. Many people are unaware of just how much authority a captain has; Failing to follow their instructions is (basically) a felony. It's best to just not mess around on an aircraft.
PIC authority is strictly limited to in-scope items, this very obviously wasn’t in scope unless it was e.g. causing other passengers to behave in an unruly manner.
> The PIC might not like a shirt you’re wearing, he can’t make you take it off.
That's likely a false statement, even if unintentionally so.
If the t-shirts print is offensive enough then I'm sure a strong enough argument can be made. After all, how are a "bomb" bluetooth name or a "free palestine" wifi ssid much different from a t-shirt with similar contents?
Try wearing a t-shirt with "I'm carrying a bomb and will blow this aircraft up" and see how far it gets you on your next flight. The crew (including the PIC) won't be amused.
You make it sound like it's a black-or-white situation, but it surely is not. What consitutes a danger to the safe operation of a flight is quite broadly up for interpretation. The word "bomb"? A strongly worded hateful message? Lots of things can e argued to compromise safety, by claiming they cause fear in other passengers, by indicating aggressive attitudes of the wearer, but claiming mental instability. I'm not saying that any of this is good. See the BT or wifi examples. But not liking it doesn't change reality.
And that you as a pilot would personally not do that in many situations may be commendable, but doesn't mean others won't nor that they don't have the authority to do so since in the end of the day it would be hard to counter in court.
> You make it sound like it's a black-or-white situation, but it surely is not
I have no idea how you could possibly interpret my comments like that.
> Lots of things can e argued to compromise safety, by claiming they cause fear in other passengers, by indicating aggressive attitudes of the wearer, but claiming mental instability. I'm not saying that any of this is good. See the BT or wifi examples. But not liking it doesn't change reality.
Now you are either just assuming dishonesty or falsely supposing that “can be argued” is the relevant test.
It’s a weird thing to debate in this manner, we’ve got endless legal precedents establishing the relevant standards. Absolutely no need to speculate.
> since in the end of the day it would be hard to counter in court.
No, it wouldn’t. Even legitimate cases of misbehaviour on aircraft rarely lead to prosecution (in the US).
> falsely supposing that “can be argued” is the relevant test.
Hm? It's what counts in court, so it is the only relevant test.
> Even legitimate cases of misbehaviour on aircraft rarely lead to prosecution (in the US).
People have been removed from aircraft by the police for decades. Yes, there is lots of precedence here. Whether in the end that leads to prosecution is secondary. What we are debating here is whether the PIC had the right to have them removed in these cases, and clearly they had.
> I’m lacking on the 1500 hours, but other than that, yeah.
Hmm. So by, "yeah," you mean, "no."
> The PIC does not get to make a passenger blow him, just like he can’t come read your emails if he feels like it.
Straw man much? A captain of a 121-op is not going to get on the intercom and ask for this ... and expect to keep their job. Given that most people don't know where the line is drawn, there is an expectation that you do need to follow all directions. There are definitely directions that, if not followed, result in committing a felony. The other side of the expectation is that of professionalism on behalf of the crew:
Google "professionalism" > It is a combination of competence, ethical behavior, and respectful communication.
You would do well to consider the effects of this statement before continuing too far past 1500 hours.
“Frozen ATPL” is the industry term, and I could never have imagined an adult trying to debate the difference when it comes to theoretical education (hint: it’s the same).
> There are definitely directions that, if not followed, result in committing a felony
So? Nobody is disputing that!
It’s certainly not a felony to disobey directions that are not relevant to flight operations or safety.
You’ve utterly failed to communicate what it is that you apparently disagree with me about, instead you’ve just dropped a bunch of unnecessary personal attacks.
An unnecessary insinuation that I’m overstating my credentials.
> Hmm. So by, "yeah," you mean, "no."
A direct allegation that I’m overstating my credentials. Given that only the theory part of ATP training has any relevance to this conversation, what was your purpose here if not to attack my character?
> Google "professionalism"
A rather more direct and entirely baseless accusation of unprofessionalism
> You would do well to consider the effects of this statement before continuing too far past 1500 hours.
An insinuation that I should not be flying planes because ???
It's not about a special status of flight captains. Same can be said of e.g. a store manager acting in-place of the owner. It's a matter of one being on someone's private property, instead of on public property.
Hi, when I was in flight school it wasn’t explicitly stated but certainly heavily implied that as pilots were not allowed to trespass passengers and kick them off the plane mid-flight.
If you have information to the contrary, I would like to be made aware because occasionally I have ended up stuck for hours in the air with unpleasant passengers.
It’s a rich take to discuss illegal and immoral stances while defending a technology that literally steals previous work and uses vast amounts of power just to exist.
Maybe it’s the LLM that we should consider as malware. After all, they have lead people to do many harmful things… and done harmful things on their own as well.
This may all be true, but it doesn't change the fact that the post you replied to is a logically valid rebuttal of the only point that the GP post could be making.
If the quoted license passage has force in the case of AI agent usage, then it also has force in the case where an author deliberately distributes "traditional" malware, simple as that.
Is bribe legal in your country? bribe matches this exact definition - paid to buy a power for doing something. some can argue that it is still stealing, but if I bribe POTUS to create a special Senior VP of United States role for me, you can consider it that I didn't steal it from anyone
… theoretically meets reality pretty quick in aviation. You’ll likely find a lot of red tape to modifying any particular aircraft until it has been tested or certified. Well, for certified aircraft anyway. Even in the experimental world you might find some (excuse the pun) resistance to sand blasting someone’s wing.
I remember in the naughts, coming across a dos machine that was quite out of time… even for the university basement it was living in next to a pile of lead brick. Its only job was to run an instrument via an home-built ISA card and write data out to 5.25” floppies.
It's a single user OS that runs everything in ring zero by design. I'm not sure, definitionally, that it can have security vulnerabilities. I... guess maybe code execution on exposure to an untrusted floppy disk filesystem?
Even then, what would that accomplish in most systems? That same disk would most likely be the only permanent storage available to the system when it's inserted. Maybe if you've got two drives and have two floppies inserted at the same time?
DOS systems often had hard drives. Also, floppy virus propagation is possible (aka: Sneakernet.)
It was a different era entirely; Writing a TSR was a right of passage. Sometimes just getting something to work without having any other motive was enough to do it.
A clever and small TSR might keep a copy of itself in memory and not require two floppies in the case of no hard drive. In comparison to today’s standards, it’s amazing what we did with 640k (or less!) of ram.
My friends and I didn't have hard drives. But maybe we were just poor. But fair, you could infect another disk if you just switched disks. No need to have both connected at the same time.
Look closely, you'll notice there's no network interface. The only vulnerability in a system like that is physical access by malicious individuals.
About the worst mal-ware it can have is a boot sector that installs a "terminate, stay resident" (TSR) that copies itself onto any floppy that gets inserted.
I don't trust facts from LLMs. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the AI output.
Even though the result is often good and combines information from multiple sources, it can also get things wrong by combining information from different eras or just plain outdated advice. AFAICT, without primary sources, the result is for entertainment purposes only.
> When I am searching for something, I usually want to find primary sources.
And therein lies the rub; for years now Google's search results have returned useless SEO garbage. For now, it definitely seems like an LLM answer is better than what was being returned and I guess this is the reason why Google ripped it out.
An LLM answer is not "better", it's in a completely different category. LLM answers can be useful, for topics where you can easily verify a fact (i.e if you ask for a Linux command and it gives you one, you can run it and see if it did what you wanted), or for topics which are more opinion than pure fact ("list some trade-offs between decision A and decision B"). But when you want information that's provided by some authoritative source, you want to see it from that source.
Google Search has been terrible for a long time. But you could still dig through it and find those primary sources. That is, in my opinion, the primary purpose of a search engine. Replacing it with what an LLM has invented based on ingesting both reliable and unreliable sources is not viable for a large category of things. The main way we can judge the reliability of something is to loo at where it comes from. If I'm looking for, say, official US job market statistics, whether I trust the numbers I find depends on whether I find them published on a US government website or on a random person's blog. A number presented to me by a chat bot would not let me judge, so it's useless.
The best a language model could possibly do, by definition, is to find websites and link them to me, letting me judge their credibility. But then it's just a worse search engine.
Personally I think I've developed a pretty good sense of when a question is easy enough that I can just trust the AI overview, and when I need to dig deeper. Google's original AI overviews were not reliable enough to ever trust, but now they are usually accurate summaries of the cited sources.
Job market statistics are actually probably a strong point for the AI overview. I just Googled 'us job market last month' and got an AI overview that accurately summarized a New York Times article for qualitative information ("surprisingly strong 115,000 jobs", "no-hire, no-fire"), followed by accurately summarizing the official Bureau of Labor Statistics website for raw stats, followed by some other stuff I didn't check. Not everyone would prefer The New York Times' take, but the citation prominently displays their name and logo, so you can tell what you're getting.
Weak points are when the topic is obscure enough that the AI overview conflates two different things or overgeneralizes, or trusts the wrong sources.
The training process literally ingests the majority of text on the internet, including a huge volume of SEO garbage, and seeks to create a self-consistent compressed model of that. This is totally imperfect of course but is also likely more truthful than the median Google result, because of the incentive for self-consistency and coherence that is created by the reward function as well as during RL.
Imagine that you had 1,000 years to read every Google result on a particular topic, and literally infinite patience. You would read a lot of rubbish but ultimately you are a smart person, you would figure out the underlying truth and likely produce something that is more valuable than the average or even the sum of the parts.
You can ask them to cite their sources. It's very good practice to do so, and to check those sources, because I've found that about 30-40% of the time their source doesn't support their answer at all.
Because it finds the sources much quicker than I would have been able to on my own, and I can then synthesize them into data I know is correct, as correct as any human-generated data can be of course.
No, it's usually because it finds sources that I would not have even thought to search for in the first place.
Agentic AI has its faults, but one thing I've found it to be very good at is surfacing the "unknown unknowns": things I didn't know I should have searched for but that are directly relevant to my problem.
Because way more than three out of five Google results are SEO garbage or sponsored crap. The bar has been set extremely low by Google, a 60% validity rate sounds magical.
If I'm going to an LLM (as with websearch before it), it's usually because I don't know the answer, don't have anyone close to me that knows the answer, and can't pay anyone (or don't know who to pay) for the answer. In other words, my failure rate without the LLM would be 100%.
It's much easier to determine the truth of an answer than it is to come up with that answer yourself. This is analogous to the P=NP problem or the recognition vs. recall problem: it is much easier to recognize and verify a correct answer than it is to recall or generate it yourself.
I've got a pretty solid algorithm for checking correctness: I ask the LLM for its sources, I try to find 3-5 independent ones (that are not just copying each others' answers), and if they all agree, that's very likely to be the correct answer. Simple math here: if you have 5 sources and they are each 60% likely to be correct, then an LLM choosing at random from them would have a 60% success rate, while someone checking all 5 of them for agreement would have a 1 - (0.4^5) = 99% chance of being correct. It's a good algorithm for doing other things like verifying scientific papers, too: you look for indendent research groups that have all reproduced the same findings.
I did the same thing with ten-blue-links websearch as well, and hope this would be the habit of anyone else too. (Although I know it wasn't, because I worked on Google websearch 15 years ago, on a project to increase the credibility of search results, and we did cafeteria UX studies about "What makes a credible result?" and everybody said "Because it appears as the top result on Google.")
Because being right 60% of the time with minimal work is still amazing, as long as one accounts for the failure rate correctly.
Say I want to look up some game from my childhood, which I barely remember any details for. Going to google and trying is likely going to be very difficult unless I happen to get lucky with some key element. But if an LLM can get it right even a minority of the time, it can lead to me quickly finding the game I'm looking for.
This does depend upon the ability to evaluate the answer, like checking against source or some other option where you know a good answer from bad. If you can't, then it does become much more dangerous. Perhaps part of the reason AI seem to empower experts more than novices in some domains?
I don't find it nearly that bad. If I really need factual information, it will generally go off and read the data from primary sources anyway. So unless it's really misunderstanding context, you're getting the data from the source.
It really matters the task. General knowledge from Wikipedia, great. Things more specific, with any thought needing to be used, or technical fields outside of software his numbers are pretty close to mine.
The problem too, is that we're all using different tools with different experiences -- there isn't one "AI". And if you're not paying for it, you're getting some real bad experience.
Search engines don’t do that any more - they just give you a bunch of SEO spam sites, now mostly filled with plausible slop. Answers from search are _less_ reliable than answers from an LLM now.
I worry that the LLMs are just the equivalent of a ‘lagging indicator’ of web quality though - that they will also soon be overwhelmed with the sheer volume of plausible nonsense that is the web now, just like search engines are.
If the LLM is capable of providing good citations, then those citations could be returned in the same format as traditional search engines, not the new, LLM generated content first format. If they aren't capable of providing good citations, then the suggestion I was replying to is incorrect (and you'd have no way of knowing if they were right or not)
In general users don't like to have to follow citations, even if they should. They'd rather have an answer right in front of them, even if there's a good chance that it's wrong.
Google, like most consumer product companies, designs for the majority. Citations are a niche feature for the 5-10% of users that like to do their own research. The majority just wants an answer, which has been the direction Google's gone in since Knowledge Panels and the Answer OneBox came out in 2012.
That might make sense (at least on the first order, second order effects would still be horrible) if the LLM generated answer was reliably correct. It isn't.
ChatGPT is the only bot that reliably cites sources (through Web search mode).
The other bots either make up links or simply don't provide any information that is distinguishable from the LLM predictive output.
Ironically Gemini is also very bad at this, while it should have been the best at Web search.
Gemini also does something very patchy, which is to provide "links" which are in fact GET queries into classic Google search. I'm guessing they did it this way because the links generated/hallucinated by the LLM were too unreliable.
Asking an LLM to cite sources just leads to hallucinated sources, same as any other attempt to make it explain its thinking process. It doesn't have actual visibility into its internal processes, just rationalizes an explanation.
Even before the AI era I slowly became less and less successful with google searches. Everything - non trivial / specific - that I looked for turned into a chore and I quickly gave up.
LLMs, that can supply valid links, give me a completely different variety of results. Either I am too dumb to search manually, too impatient or google search is just broken, but Gemini usually gives me something I can work with. I just wished I could blacklist some sources like medium.
Checkout Kagi. You can blacklist sites. You can also weight certain sites higher than others. I've been using it for almost a year at this point. When I'm forced to use Google at work, I am legitimately less effective at finding the information I need.
I've been paying for Kagi for like four years. I like it but also resent that it's something I pay for now when I remember how good Google was 20 years ago.
From the past hundreds of Google searches I've done where I got an AI summary, I'd say the result is actually rarely good. At the very least 80% of the outputs contain critical mistakes, often exactly about the specific thing you're asking.
It's all slop. Look at the first two examples in their own announcement: fitness and wellness slop from websites like "top 11 exercises to do when you work from home", and god damn sneaker drops and what bloody influencers are saying about some celeb-endorsed sneaker. Jesus christ
Sometimes I use chatgpt thinking mode for searches when I expect there will be a lot of noise. "What are some in-depth reviews for <some book I've heard of>"
Have you tried explicitly asking for links to primary sources?
Sounds like a good question to ask Google (… only partially joking)
There are many primary sources depending on exactly what you are looking for. Shipping/port manifests or even stats are often findable. People in the region witnessing first-hand what is happening. If you are interested in political views then people who are in charge of policy and control resources in the region. Etc etc…
If you want a summary then, yes, you want a journalist or another source that looks at primary sources and has some knowledge of the region to start with to help give context to a specific situation.
Just wanted to check you really meant primary source.
I don’t understand how you can learn anything then. News is off limits for you, history, sciences (unless you do the experiment yourself) as well. Math might be possible, at least you can check the proof yourself without having to travel anywhere. At least one can see the earth isn‘t flat by getting on a plane, but one has to squint a bit.
More seriously, to summarise, I don’t believe you live by this principle, you would live under a rock and I wouldn’t be chatting with you.
You have made a strange logical jump. By answering your question you seem to have gleaned more about me than seems reasonable.
I did state, “when I’m searching for something,” which (in my view) is different than simply being curious or watching/reading the news; One does need to be careful with what news they consume.
>one does need to be careful with what news they consume
100% agreed, it has become very difficult to stay balanced and not end up in some ideological echo chamber.
> “when I’m searching for something,” which (in my view) is different than simply being curious or watching/reading the news
yeah ok, that’s nifty. Still, one search requires traveling, meeting people to hear from their mouth the statement the book / newspaper reported about, for example. How many searches a year to you manage?
I think you/we are in the minority. I’m surrounded by parents that start sentences with “ChatGPT told me…” or “I asked AI and…”.
We’re often talking about something that the literature refutes, but the LLM was trained on a bunch of public content from resources such as whattoexpect.com, full of terrible parenting advice.
People didn’t bother with sources and research before, they don’t bother now, AI is just a magical thing for them.
I don't trust facts from humans. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find direct sensor readings. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the human output.
Even though the result is often coherent and confidently synthesizes information from multiple experiences, it can also hallucinate, suffer from recency bias, or accidentally merge memories from different decades. AFAICT, without access to the underlying telemetry, human responses are for entertainment purposes only.
Except that emulating what is seen is surprisingly useful to find attack vectors. As a single deeper datapoint, one can look at more than just baseline behavior and delve into timing details to further refine implementation guesses.
> The problem is that we cannot trust code we cannot instrument. If a third-party binding makes HTTP calls through concrete functions, we have no way to add tracing, no way to inject timeouts tuned to our SLOs, no way to simulate partner outages in testing, and no way to explain the 400ms gap in a trace except by squinting at it and developing theories. So we write our own. More work upfront, but the clients we write are observable by construction, because we built them that way from the start.
> If a third-party binding makes HTTP calls through concrete functions, we have no way to add tracing, no way to inject timeouts tuned to our SLOs, no way to simulate partner outages in testing, and no way to explain the 400ms gap in a trace
Given that tracing etc. is IO, are they just threading IO through the entirety of all their Haskell code?
Despite the article title, IPv6 is not the complication. The problem is that IPv4 is incumbent and IPv6 has to live along side of it. It doesn’t matter how it’s done, the dual stack nature of expanding the addressing system will always exist.
this is why people keep inventing nonsense like ipv8 which is worse than ipv6 in every possible way but they think because ipv6 has problems and ipv8 isn't ipv6, ipv8 doesn't have exactly the same problems.
Dual stack isn't a terrible experience it's just usually bad. I wonder if more effort should have been put into making dual stack good instead of making IPv6 good?
Would that have been possible? No clue but my instinct is that most design decisions are trade offs and if you can imagine a trade there's someone out there clever enough to make it happen.
IMHO, the worst thing about dual-stack is that you have to do it at all. There are translation mechanisms but that doesn’t help when you have local devices (maybe IoT?) that don’t support IPv6.
I think that's why this new IPv6-Mostly stuff is so exciting. You can dual stack a network segment if some of those v4-only devices exist there, but IPv6-Mostly will make sure that the other devices stay on v6 (translated or native).
NAT requires remembering every connection pair (IPv4:port for both internal and external sides of the NAT)
You don’t need more than the /64 to know where to send traffic, all of the bits required are still just in the prefix. One route per customer… the edge deals with addressing issues.
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