Interesting to see this on HN. I currently work for the company that redesigned the HMI/UI following this incident. Or rather, it's how my company was founded. In the aftermath, the US Navy Command in San Diego contacted several UCSD professors in the Cognitive Science and Psychology department who specialized in high-impact decision making under stress and cognitive load. The Navy was apparently impressed with the detailed analysis and recs provided by these faculty and continued to collaborate with these folks on this an other projects. Eventually they were getting so much work from the Navy they founded a company focused on human factors engineering and interface design for complex systems.
The two original founders recently retired and our new CEO is a former Captain of the USS Zumwalt.
Any good reading on this? Might be some interesting learning opportunities for (cyber)security monitoring, which is a total mess right now. Stakes are a bit less severe, but still.
I would recommend Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild". He examines the performance of the crew of a ship acting as distributed intelligence and the many factors that go into making them an effective unit (or not).
Ed was also part of the UCSD Cognitive Science department at the time of the Vincennes incident and I suspect it was his work, along with Don Norman's, that drew the attention of the Navy. At the time, I was doing an undergraduate independent study in his lab, where we spent hours watching videos of airline pilots in 747 flight simulators, looking out for errors while using the flight guidance system. Our "textbook" was the operations manual for the 747 guidance and autopilot system.
An example of the sort of UI things we were looking for:
"Improvements" such as replacing the analog altimeter and airspeed indicators with digital readouts deprived pilots of operational awareness as they could no longer estimate rate of descent by watching the movement of the hands of the analog meters.
I find the glass cockpit airspeed/altitude tapes to be significantly worse overall than analog dials. Not only is it easier to see rate of descent, but it's very easy to see whether the absolute number is where you want it to be. Normally if you're cruising, you will be at an even thousand or 500 foot increment. The big hand should either be pointing straight up or straight down. You can even see out of the corner of your eye if you're a little too high or low. On the tape you have to read a 4-5 digit number. Similar thing with airspeed. Once you are familiar with a plane, you know what angle the airspeed needle should be pointing for a particular phase of flight. It's much quicker cognitively to see the angle of a pointer than reading a number.
Overall, though, having flown both, I'd have to argue modern glass cockpits have significantly better UI than the old steam gauges. So many old aircraft didn't even give lip service to helping the aviator with a good instrument scan and just stuffed things willy-nilly.
I recall reading that Thrust II (running at 1000mph but somewhat closer to the ground) used analog meters so that a glance could get an approximate value and rate of change quickly and in a situation of heavy pilot vibration. I couldn't find the original article, but I found this breathless page from the manufacturer which alludes to this.
https://masterhorologer.com/2014/05/03/rolex-unveils-two-bes...
>"Improvements" such as replacing the analog altimeter and airspeed indicators with digital readouts deprived pilots of operational awareness as they could no longer estimate rate of descent by watching the movement of the hands of the analog meters.
I find discoveries like this fascinating. The unconsidered knock on effects of decisions is one that is very difficult to appreciate at the time. Whether they were unconsidered because no effort was deemed necessary, just not enough experience by the decision makers to be aware the item was used for more than just the obvious use, or any other reasons besides any form of incompetence.
This is one of those times where not having enough people involved shows up. So it's a trade off on accepting a continuous rolling bit of changes just to make something happen now, or paralysis by analysis through committee of people to approve changes.
Loved his class at UCSD! It definitely was something that really sticks in your brain and never leaves cause of how unique the subject material and concepts were taught.
I wonder if they would update the theory of “distributed cognition” in an AI ChatGPT Turing complete world with ubiquitous computing. Thoughts?
Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things is a great intro to human factors and covers a number of high-stakes environments as well as more mundane things like door handles. Highly recommended reading.
I suggest you check out the work of Gary Klein and the Naturalistic Decision Making community, as the Vicennes work was one of the founding projects. He features it in his 1997 book _Sources of Power_.
From the wiki: “Rogers' next assignment was as commanding officer of the United States Navy Tactical Training Group at Naval Base Point Loma, a group responsible for training officers in handling combat situations.”
Is having that guy train people genius, or moronic?
Arguably moronic, if as appears he disclaimed responsibility for the failure, and even criticized the captain and crew of the Sides for failing to replicate it. At the time of the incident, it appears he had driven his ship into Iranian territorial water, in violation of international maritime law, on an invalid pretext in violation of a direct order from fleet.
At least he was "passed over for promotion to flag rank", and retired three years later, at age 53. One wonders how much responsibility he admitted in his book, "Storm Center: A Personal Account of Tragedy & Terrorism". His wife might not have been exposed to the pipe bomb somebody put in his minivan just a year after the incident, had he demonstrated any contrition at the time.
Of course he was passed over for flag. At Commander and above, it's more or less expected that you have a successful Commanding Officer tour in rank order to promote. A few Commanders that don't get command make Captain, but it's the exception rather than the rule. And it's virtually unheard of to make flag without a successful Captain command, because there are so many more Captains than there are slots for Rear Admiral (Lower Half) that most end up retiring anyway. If your CO tour blows up in your face, it's basically a guarantee that you will be expected to retire at the earliest possible opportunity.
The best quote I've ever heard on the subject is "the Navy doesn't have hospitals for careers. It has leper colonies."
Commanding officers at shore training commands are mostly there work on their golf games and sign administrative paperwork. The real lessons come from people with not even half his experience. Even a former CO that allowed this to happen is probably better to teach basic tactics than a Lieutenant who has done maybe two sea tours, honestly.
Software engineers sometimes wonder about the importance of their jobs by comparing them to other engineering fields where mistakes can hurt or kill fellow human beings. And then there are jobs that hurt or kill regardless of the quality of your work.
Go read about the software bug that literally killed people by miscalculating the radiation dose given by a medical machine. There is software which can hurt or kill fellow human beings. Industrial controls, aircraft flight controls, the list goes on.
The number of people harmed by that ramshackle contraption never came anywhere near the number wiped out in just the one incident.
Mis-operation of the Aegis system is, BTW, also responsible for the sinking of a British warship, HMS Sheffield, in the Falklands war, with at least 87 killed. It failed to identify an Exocet missile fired by the Argentines as a threat, even though the Navy was thoroughly aware Argentina had them.. (Two other British ships were also hit by Exocets, one sunk, for a couple dozen more lives.)
Sheffield was not equipped with Aegis. The only ships in the 1980s that had it were the American Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers. Aegis is the name of a specific anti-air system based around the SPY-1 phased-array radar and SM-2 surface-to-air missile. It is not a catch-all term like Kleenex.
The anti-aircraft/missile defence on Sheffield was Sea Dart. The Argentinian pilots were familiar with the type 42 destroyer type and its radar, and practiced against the Argentine's own type 42s. This might have some bearing on their success as well.
> Mis-operation of the Aegis system is, BTW, also responsible for the sinking of a British warship, HMS Sheffield, in the Falklands war, with at least 87 killed. It failed to identify an Exocet missile fired by the Argentines as a threat, even though the Navy was thoroughly aware Argentina had them...
Attributing the failure to avoid the Exocets to "mis-operation of the aegis system" is pure speculation AFAIK, unless you have evidence that that was the cause?
I'm not sure what you are implying. The nature of the work described above was to prevent a disaster like the shooting down of commercial Flight 655 from ever happening again.
Nothing personal, just interesting to see how engineers think about how their work can harm other humans, yet some jobs are about creating machines or weapons meant for destruction.
In my previous job writing a naval combat system (not Aegis) I figured that I couldn't prevent warships from existing, but I could make the combat system better, safer, easier and less error-prone to use which would ultimately reduce the likelihood of people being killed inadvertently. But I totally respect people who choose not to work in defence.
I'm fine with our name being mentioned. I didn't include it above because our website is trash, which doesn't bode well for a company with professional graphics designers and human factors engineers on staff haha.
I, for one, am glad it was mentioned. There's nothing secret about it and it saves me some trouble. Thanks for taking one for the team, Guy who figured it out
There have been only 5 "former Captain of the USS Zumwalt". That is a very small subset of humans. There have been more humans walking on the moon than former Captains of the USS Zumwalt.
Their names are a matter of public record and one can answer which works as a CEO with 5 simple google searches.
If they didn't want to name the company they shouldn't have identified it willingly and precisely.
Making clear allusions to the company without directly naming it allows anybody in this conversation who cares to figure it out easily, but doesn't get this discussion automatically indexed with that company's name. Naming the company in a response is rude and unnecessary.
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 they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place, and you'd feel the other pilot fighting you. When the plane stalled, one pilot correctly pushed down to come out of the stall (after which they would be able to pull back up) while the other pulled up instead (which is wrong but does feel like the instinctively correct thing to do). The inputs cancelled out so had almost no effect. By the end both pilots were pulling up, but that hadn't been the case earlier on when the problem could have been resolved.
The captain had been on a rest brake and only re-entered the cabin at the last moment. He finally figured out the problem but it was too late to do anything.
> “Go on, pull,” Dubois said. Was this comment a sardonic resignation to fate?
> 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.
Yeah they do. On the 737/757/767 they have a mach trim system to account for mach tuck. On the 737, at least, they also have a speed trim system to keep the plane under control at lower speeds when autopilot is off.
> 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).
It also caused one accident, where both pilots thought the controls were jammed because the other pilot was pulling in the opposite direction. This is no better than averaging. At least Airbus gives an alarm.
It was an air france accident, it happened twice (both times to air france), one time it resulted in an accident, then it happened again later but it only resulted in an extremely stressful go around
I couldn't find any evidence of it happening either, which makes sense, a system which gives feedback there's a problem intuitively seems better than one which doesn't.
a system which gives feedback there's a problem intuitively seems
better than one which doesn't.
Except that your intuition isn't always correct. Airbus throttle levers don't move on their own, Boeing throttle levers (at least pre-FBW) were mechanically linked to the control system and would move in response to computer inputs. Sounds safer, right?
Look at the Sriwijaya Air 737 crash (among others). Even with the throttle levers showing wildly asymmetrical thrust, when the automation gave up the pilots didn't notice, didn't react properly, and crashed the plane.
Sticks (not throttles) mechanically linked to each other do indeed give feedback indicating there is a problem when the two sticks conflicted, compared to, it seems, the Airbus concept, which did not.
I see no reason the intuition here isn't correct: it's better to know about this problem when flying than to not know about it. Stories about throttles or automation are a distraction from what we're talking about: mechanically linked sticks.
On that note (back on topic), I still couldn't find any evidence of the crash mentioned above, but maybe I'm just searching wrong. Does anybody know about this crash supposedly caused by Boeing sticks being mechanically linked?
So-called "side stories" about throttles that provide feedback are entirely relevant because they address the issue at hand: the supposed benefits of physical feedback in the controls. The Sriwijaya crash is additionally relevant as it happened during a phase of flight where someone's hands were likely to be on the throttle quadrant in the first place.
If you're going to double down on the idea that somehow feedback in a control column is a wildly different affair than feedback in the throttle quadrant, Air France recently had a go around where the two pilots provided opposing inputs without realizing it. The inputs were forceful enough to un-synchronize the controls, so yeah, physical feedback is less helpful than one's intuition suggests.
With Air France 447, there should've been an annunciator that conflicting input was being provided (as well as the ability to lock out one set of controls).
However, when you're task saturated it doesn't matter what you're flying — there are plenty of things you're going to miss. Were there strong benefits to feedback (or lack thereof) on FBW controls there would be some sort of mandate from the FAA or EASA one way or another.
Hence my "at the time" bracket. Since then, newer Boeing planes have actually removed the physical connection between the sticks! Absolutely bonkers decision given the background. (I put "at least" at the end of my bracket because I wasn't 100% sure I rememebered correctly.) But maybe there is a good reason - e.g. like a sibling comment suggested, if one gets stuck.
As the sibling comment points out the 777 has mechanically linked yokes. The 787 does too. With the Air France go around, the pilots were pulling hard enough that the mechanical connection between the yokes was broken. Both pilots continued to provide contradictory inputs.
On an Airbus this would trigger a "dual input" annunciator, and there's a "priority takeover" button that would lock out one set of controls.
On the Boeing once the torque tube splits each yoke controls one side of the aircraft.
The synchronization and feedback intuitively seem like a good idea, but the reality is that at the point where you need to notice that the other pilot is doing something wrong you're already up shit creek and you're no more likely to notice an increase in force required to move the yoke than you are an annunciator. Linked controls aren't a substitute for CRM.
AFAIK the 777 still has mechanically linked yokes. It has a breakout mechanism in case one of the controls gets jammed (allows freeing the other one), but it's not been removed.
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.
> 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
It does not have to be “equal in strength to a pilot tugging hard on it” since there is normally no significant load applied by the stick to the hand (only the centering springs). So most every feedback should be noticeable.
And force feedback is being deployed right now on commercial planes. The Irkut MC-21 was supposed to be the first airliner featuring them, but the invasion of ukraine and subsequent sanctions nixed that (as the provider of the sticks is the french company Ratier-Figeac). Gulfstream’s 7th gen (GVII) also have active sticks, provided by BAE.
Of course they would: the problem is that there is a lack of feedback when incompatible input is entered.
Audio feedback was added since AF 447 but as well known sound is one of the first thing to be blanked out in high stress situations. Physical feedback provides a second stimulus, and one which does not get ignored as much.
The planes are FBW, the side sticks have no mechanical linkage outside their control box, there is no cause for a pilot to input significant force on the stick, and thus most every feedback would be sensible. Unlike a 737, the pilots are not physically moving the control surfaces.
> The moment one pilot does tug hard on the stick though, then the same problem is still there.
No, because the point is that the other pilot will feel the action and thus know that there are conflicting input. The sticks can even synchronise their movements, that way pilots can both see and feel that their copilot is inputting.
That is the point, making the existence of conflicting input clearer.
> So it will work most of the time except when you really need to
No.
> when the other pilot is panicking and won't provide accurate answers.
The sticks support taking priority, so a pilot seeing that their copilot is panic-inputting would be trained to press and hold the priority takeover button, deactivating their copilot’s stick.
You seem to be confused, obviously it won't work 100% of the time due to shear probability, it's not physically linked up so there will always be a possibility of one or both pilots ignoring every possible warning, shaking, vibration, mild pushback, etc... regardless of how well they've been trained on detecting these.
Whether it works the vast majority of the time, in practical situations, remains to be seen. Confusing a known, physically guaranteed, aspect of a system with an estimated likelihood of actual system performance is a common mistake.
Even with the most ideal deployment scenario, assuming it does get widely deployed one day, the real world performance reliability will likely not get anywhere near six sigma, let alone 100%.
I believe Airbus is planning to add force feedback to the side sticks for this error case. But I don't know that.
Many aircraft controls already have force feedback in the form of stick pushers [1], a device to violently shake the control yoke when the aircraft is at risk of stalling. Those have been around since the 60's.
So this is not only possible, but it's been around for a long time though Airbus had chosen to use a verbal warning only instead of a stick shaker.
The Cirrus SR-22 (the best selling general aviation plane every year since 2003) has mechanically linked side sticks. They aren't fly by wire like the Airbus but it shows they can be linked without a complex motor system.
Are those really side sticks, though? They look much more like one half a yoke than the kind of side stick you'd see in, for example, an Airbus or an F-16.
It's not just "a spring and a servo" when we are talking about aviation. Redesigning GA aircraft and rectifying is already bad enough. An airliner, and something as crucial as flight controls?
I think the biggest no-nos on this hack would be that it'd need to be certified and since it fundamentally changes the UI for the pilots, everyone would need to be retrained.
The hack itself would be a small detail line on the overall budget for the changes.
The retraining would barely be a concern. It would be a new input similar (but not identical) to the stick shaker, or a new audio alert (as was literally introduced for the dual-input issue after AF447).
The hack is the entirety of the cost, it would require completely redesigning the side-stick, updating their entire maintenance procedure (currently side-stick can trivially be unscrewed and swapped out), as well as redesigning the cabin cell to provide routing for the cables such that they keep tension and don't get damaged.
Stick manufacturers have been working on active sticks for more than two decades, and they're getting released right now. While force feedback on PC joysticks was introduced in 1997.
There really is no mechanical connection. And the Airbus A320 (first airliner with no mechanical backup) has been flying this way since 1988, so it's not anywhere near as dangerous as you think.
Since we're on the topic, you know how much HN complains about touchscreens on cars? Now find out how replacing old school analog controls with software touchscreens UI partly led to the USS John S. McCain colliding: https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...
This is a fascinating article. I feel like I am in my life constantly fighting against either haphazard UI like the one featured there, and the Apple-style UIs which attempt to optimize for beauty by shoving nearly everything (regardless of usefulness) into layers of "••• junk drawers" or little (i) icons.
On a ship worth hundreds of billions of dollars, it was never considered that the Big Red Button should have a plain English red sign saying "Emergency Take-Control-Here Button. Press to return control to THIS station."
The software designers as well could have used plain and direct language too, and made it easy to do the right thing, and require deliberateness to do a weird thing. If it's wildly irregular to have 2 people independently doing port/starboard thrust control, the process should be like "Transfer Thrust Control", followed by a modal with a giant "BOTH SIDES" button and two tiny "Port only" "Stbd Only" buttons.
Also when you are moving around something as important as control of your ship, why not have a simple voice announcement, what does a loudspeaker cost, 20 dollars a piece? "The Thrust control has been transferred to the Lee Helm" or "All Controls were transferred to the Bridge because the Red Take-Control Button was pressed at that station."
Sometimes I think only thoughtless people and Jony Ive-worshipers are doing UI design.
> If it's wildly irregular to have 2 people independently doing port/starboard thrust control, the process should be like "Transfer Thrust Control", followed by a modal with a giant "BOTH SIDES" button and two tiny "Port only" "Stbd Only" buttons.
A contributing factor in the crash of Air France Flight 447 was that Airbus aircraft average the inputs of the two pilots side-stick flight controls (as oppose to Boeing, which connects the two yokes so you can't move one without moving the other). At various points leading up to the crash one pilot understood the situation and was applying the correct input to resolve the issue, but the other pilot was doing the opposite and canceled out the correct input. While there was an audible warning about the conflicting inputs, it was easily lost in the chaos of the moment.
> 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.
Granted the stakes were slightly different - downing one airliner is less severe than risking starting a global nuclear annihilation.
> What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship.
What is sudden about that? "Two months before the incident, the U.S. had engaged in Operation Praying Mantis, resulting in the sinkings of the Iranian frigate Sahand, the Iranian fast attack craft Joshan, and three Iranian speedboats. Also, the Iranian frigate Sabalan was crippled, two Iranian platforms were destroyed, and an Iranian fighter was damaged. A total of at least 56 Iranian crew were killed"
And on the very day their helicopter received small arm fire from an Iranian patrol vessel, which they were pursuing when the shoot-down happened.
In this situation the idea that Iran would launch a fighter against them is not that wild.
Patrol ship sees and engages a foreign warship inside the patrol's territorial waters and radios for help. First fighter available launches and flies that way to investigate. Sees the warship engaged with the patrol boat and takes initiative, while other fighters are prepping for launch for follow on attacks in case the invading warship does not retreat or surrender.
The issue is "single". Does scrambling a single fighter ever happen, don't they always fly in pairs? A single attack or recognisance plane would make sense.
Of course they might have known that their ability to properly identify the threat was limited, but that raises even more questions...
The USS Stark was attacked by an (Iraqi) Dassault Falcon 50, not by a fighter jet. Fighters operating solo is virtually unheard of, especially in a live offensive posture.
Even if you usually run in pairs, if your gunboat is engaging a foreign hostile, and only one fighter has a pilot immediately available, are you going to wait for a second pilot or just send what you have?
I looked into this "small arms fire" you mentioned. You're right that it wasn't out of nowhere, but the actual story seems to be somewhat more nuanced than your very carefully worded depiction suggests:
> All 290 on-board including 16 crew perished. At the time of the incident, Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters and engaged in small arms combat with several Iranian surface craft
Did you miss that bit?
I mean in that context, with the guy stumbling into Iranian waters and shooting at some of their boats it makes more sense that he'd be worried about an attack. But that just makes the situation even stupider and more avoidable in my opinion.
UI failings aside, a few points, mostly from the US Naval Institute's Proceedings[2] (which has references to the Official Investigation "Fogarty report"[3])
- it was standard practice to illuminate Iranian military aircraft with missile fire control radar as a warning for them to turn around. "When you put that radar on them, they went home. They were not interested in any missiles," Captain Carlson recalled.
- the captain of the Vincennes was known as trigger-happy and the Vincennes was nicknamed the Robo-Cruiser.
- the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time of the shoot-down
- data from USS Vincennes' tapes, information from USS Sides and reliable intelligence information corroborate the fact that TN 4131 was on a normal commercial air flight plan profile…squawking Mode III 6760, on a continuous ascent in altitude from take-off at Bandar Abbas to shoot down."
- "Capt. Rogers was a difficult student. He wasn’t interested in the expertise of the instructors and had the disconcerting habit of violating the Rules of Engagement in the wargames." [2]
- Commander Lustig, the air-warfare coordinator, even won the navy's Commendation Medal for "heroic achievement," his "ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire," enabling him to "quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure.
- all hands aboard the Vincennes and the Elmer Montgomery received combat action ribbons."
> Then Vice President George Bush had gone before the United Nations on 14 July and declared, "One thing is clear, and that is that USS Vincennes acted in self-defense…It occurred in the midst of a naval attack initiated by Iranian vessels [...]
> As it came to pass, none of this was true.
> However, the truth of the matter would have given the Democratic candidate for President, Michael Dukakis, ammunition to embarrass George Bush.
> There were good reasons for spinning the story in a way that put the Iranians in the worst possible light.
And so the trigger happy captain got that ribbon instead
a US frigate (uss stark) was severely damaged by a single Iraqi plane in the previous year. the captain did not expect an Iraqi attack, so he tried to warn the plane off multiple times, ultimately allowing it to fire two missiles which hit his ship. the missiles would likely have been shot down if the Stark's countermeasures were working correctly. but they weren't, and 37 Americans died.
given that context, it doesn't seem wild to take an Iranian plane as a serious threat.
As far as I understand it, a single F14 could launch a single Exocet missile, and make a VERY large hole in an aircraft carrier, and if the conditions were right, putting it to the bottom of the sea. Or the same for a battleship. I seem to recall that being a large concern even then, if not especially then.
To my knowledge, the F-14 never carried any anti-ship missile, especially on the early-model Iranian Tomcats, as the F-14 only received an air-to-ground upgrade package in the 90’s.
Given the fact that Iran successfully jury-rigged MIM-23 Hawk SAMs onto their F-14s, it's not out of the realm of possibility that they could do something similar with Exocet.
During the Falklands war there were worries that the Argies were fitting Exocet to LearJets (turns out they were used for recce and communications), and Chile also had a project on the books to convert Falcon biz jets to carry Exocet. And, some say USS Stark was itself attacked by a Falcon carrying Exocets. Grafting missiles onto a warplane that already has hardpoints and the like seems like an easier task.
... which we can all discuss at leisure from our armchairs with zero of the stress associated with being in the command chair that day.
Just because commenters here may come up with some down-in-the-weeds detailed analysis that could have, if known then, changed the course of events, does not mean that it's reasonable to have come up with that in the heat of battle.
There is a reason that the practice is called "Monday Morning Quarterbacking".
If you are commander of an explicitly Anti-Air cruiser, and you are unaware that any F-14 tasked against you would not have an anti-ship missile and would be abusing some other weapon "off-label", then you should not be defending a carrier fleet from aircraft. You should be familiar with the airframes, weapons, and abilities of your adversary.
The F-14 is not an attack aircraft! It was designed to intercept incoming air threats and bombers!
"And it never made any search or track radar emissions"
"Yup"
"And it was climbing out of the area, and despite all your instruments showing it continuing to climb, you all asserted it was diving for an attack run"
"Right"
"And instead of trying to further deconflict, or ask any of the other local navy vessels their interpretation, or just take a risk and accept that as a member of the military sometimes your job is to stand up in the line of fire, you decided that this was definitely an F-14 interceptor, being used to attack an AEGIS vessel whose intended design is to protect an american aircraft carrier from 20 simultaneous incoming Soviet antiship missiles, and was definitely a threat to said vessel"
"Yup"
"And now 290 innocent people are dead"
The captain of the Vincennes also claims they were in "hot pursuit" of a small Iranian gunboat in "self defense" at the time, and was noted by superiors as regularly going beyond his Rules of Engagement in training activities. He had a chip on his shoulder and clearly made up his mind about what he was going to do to that plane well before he had any indication it was a threat. A nearby vessel that was datalinked (ie, was hooked into the same battlefield map and signals) very quickly and clearly concluded it was a civilian flight. Capt Rogers convinced himself otherwise.
>What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship.
Limited hit and run attacks were typical Iranian behavior at the time.
The US tested to see if the F-14 could launch a Harpoon anti-ship missile just a couple of years prior to this because Iran had both F-14s and Harpoons. The test was successful.
It is highly unlikely that Iran ever equipped the F-14 with Harpoons but the thought that they would because it was a capability they possessed was a very real fear at the time.
Maybe (probably?) it did seem crazy, but the officers sought verification from the system and seemed to get it.
They were probably unaware that there was an airliner in their vicinity, as it had been incorrectly tagged as an F-14. I don't know where the actual F-14 was, but quite possibly nowhere in the vicinity of the ship.
It was a disgraceful dereliction of duty by the implementers of Aegis to recycle contact IDs so eagerly. With 4 digits it should have taken 10,000 subsequent contacts before that number came around again.
It was a lack of imagination. They didn't anticipate that case and probably just selected the contact IDs randomly. A bad RNG and an unlucky day is all it takes.
No amount of training is likely to completely remove human factors. It helps, sometimes a lot, but there's always going to be a bit of a difference thinking actual ordinance is currently headed directly at you.
We got _incredibly_ lucky. A Soviet submarine trying to get through the blockade believed that war had broken out and wanted to attack the US fleet with nuclear torpedoes [0]. Normally only two men aboard the sub had to approve the nuclear launch, and they both wanted to fire. This particular sub happened to have a third officer [1] on board who also needed to approve the launch, and he may have literally saved the world by disagreeing with the other two officers.
1. More time to think. An incoming F-14 is a minutes/seconds scenario; the Cuban crisis lasted 10 days.
2. "X did not happen" does not mean "Y was not a factor in X". The "about to get blown up" factor was part of the reason the Cuban missile crisis happened; it's also probably part of the resolution.
All evidence is that Captain Will Rogers was a very different kind of person than Stanislav Petrov. The US military is famous for preferring "forward leaning" types.
Doesn't sound like the guy Will Rogers made that decision though. It sounds like he just blindly trusted his instruments, knowing he could act with impunity. He was right - after all is said and done he killed 290 innocent people and he ended up getting something called the "Legion of Merit" so it doesn't sound like it bothered too many people there.
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 really got used to it.
A few weeks ago, without a note, the whole interface changed. Now you HAVE to fill in the comma. If you just type in 5000 like you did before, you would send USD 5000 instead of USD 50. I personally know of one person who send way to much money and I suspect it is because of this UX change.
Using a "comma" to refer to the decimal separator when talking about USD while writing in English about software (written in a computer language that uses a decimal point) took me on a mental rollercoaster. So much so that it led me to read the Wikipedia page on the decimal separator. My favorite part:
> Unicode defines a decimal separator key symbol (⎖ in hex U+2396, decimal 9110) which looks similar to the apostrophe. This symbol is from ISO/IEC 9995 and is intended for use on a keyboard to indicate a key that performs decimal separation.
>> Unicode defines a decimal separator key symbol (⎖ in hex U+2396, decimal 9110) which looks similar to the apostrophe. This symbol is from ISO/IEC 9995 and is intended for use on a keyboard to indicate a key that performs decimal separation.
Egad, settling the ./, issue by selecting ⎖ is like settling the debate between 0-based arrays and 1-based by numbering them from ½. Or between little- and big-endian by choosing middle-endian.
Note the keyboard part. I think this is meant to be what they can physically print on the numpad section of an international-style keyboard. When you're typing numbers in a Euro locale you'd get `,` but in US English you would get a period. (At least, I hope that's what the decimal key on the numpad does when you set your locale to a certain locale. It would be obnoxious if when typing numbers in an English context, you had to go find the period key on the other side.)
I don't think we're meant to normally switch to actually putting that character in our numbers though. If so, clearly nobody has agreed to do it!
Huh, I don't see it that way. It's totally unambiguous, there would be no way for that character to have entered the number without it being the decimal separator.
Contrast that to choosing either a period or a comma and your setting yourself up for serious potential errors.
Obviously the user doesn't need to see that symbol, you can localize it however you want.
The price in cents is the way "it was always done" in retail, back when POS terminals were not directly connected to cash registers and the worker had to manually type in the amount. But yeah, sudden change in US design will causemany errors everywhere.
I find gas station pumps 25% are with the cents approach but usually if you type in 60 and press enter it will work
It’s definitely one of those UI concepts that’s different depending on context. similar to password with some websites making up random rules that vary sufficiently enough where automated password entry doesn’t work nor does using a reusable password for sites you don’t care about
I made a similar mistake, sending too little, back when PayPal had changed to use the user's local currency as the default instead of the currency I had my balance in.
Perhaps a better design could be two number fields clearly demarcating the two halves of the value.
Plus, you cannot fill more than digits after the decimal place for most currencies, so IMO the design they went with (even though it is done that way on POS terminals) is bad for web and phone apps.
For example, if some system showed a value to transfer at $25.645, and the person input 25645 by mistake, instead of 2564, they would end up sending $256!
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 digits, why not save me the step?
When I've encountered it, the interface has looked like this (as I'm in the process of filling it in):
$_.__
$_._1
$_.12
$1.23
$12.34
Typically it also rejects non-numeral inputs, so if you muscle-memory a decimal point it gets ignored and your input (hopefully) proceeds normally. Whereas a "left-aligned" input would be the style that we're accustomed to from general text input:
I’m confused by the “aligned left” comment. Analogously this seems like saying left alignment in my word processor would mean the word processor would need to know what I was going to type before I type it.
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 scrollwheel on each side of the steering wheel. Press the center of the steering wheel for the horn. The door had mirror adjustment and windows + lock
Unfortunately a few critical controls were on the touchscreen - defrost front and back were big ones, but all the climate controls, and other nonsense too - all pretty much hidden with multiple taps, or small targets or both.
not all of this is bad - putting lots of detailed but non-critical settings like miles vs km are the perfect thing to have on a touchscreen.
but it needed more dedicated controls.
When the Model 3 came out, it started removing controls. There are two stalks, the turn signal also sort of controls headlights and wipers, the shifter is overloaded with autopilot.
It has two scrollwheels without buttons, you have to push them left and right.
all other controls are on the touchscreen.
It really needs dedicated controls for important things.
And then the updated model S/X came out. wow.
there are NO stalks. turn signals are touch areas on the steering wheel. so are high beams, horn, wipers. the scroll wheels do different things at different times.
shifter? nope - it guesses what direction you want to go. many more things involve
the touchscreen, like going into park. (there is also a touch drive selector in the center console, but you have to look down and touch it to wake, then to select)
Sometimes the car does not want to go in to drive/reverse for some unknown reason.
Not long after I first got my tesla, I was making a 3 point turn to go on to my driveway. I moved forward, then stopped, turned the wheel, pressed the stalk to go in to reverse, pressed the accelerator and WENT FORWARD, right in to my old car denting the door. There was no indication the car declined to go in to reverse apart from the icon on the screen.
Now, Tesla released an update so the car makes an audible noise when changing to drive/reverse and a separate noise when the car refuses your instruction. It's much better but annoyingly the car still refuses quite often to go in to Drive/Reverse when you tell it to, especially when you just get in to it. I now out of habit press the gear stalk 4 or 5 times when first getting in to drive it.
>annoyingly the car still refuses quite often to go in to Drive/Reverse when you tell it to
How the everloving F** does this even happen? I cannot imagine an ICE car "refusing" switching gears. I know electric vehicles don't manage driving direction through physical gears and linkages like ICE vehicles but this feels like an absurd regression.
Just to be clear, I prefer my Tesla to my ICE car and I enjoy driving it as much as my Kawasaki ZX10R..
The Tesla will refuse to go in to gear for genuine reasons, such as:
- refuses forward/reverse if the car is moving too fast in opposite direction
- refuses forward/reverse if the car just turned on and foot isn't on brake
I haven't worked out what the other reasons are though.
The vast majority are when I'm in a rush, I get in sometimes have to press the stalk about 4 times (in 2 seconds) for drive. It could be because my seatbelt isn't on yet, or the car needs a small amount or time to boot up. To be fair I'm moving off faster (even pressing the stalk down a few times) than my ICE car, and Tesla adding the Chimes really helped.
I wonder if this issue is behind all the reports of people randomly crashing into weird obstacles. Often it's claimed that they are confusing the break and accelerator pedals and one pedal driving is cited. But there's a bunch of other EVs that also have one pedal driving and they seem fine.
Mind you, my (much cheaper) EV will beep at me if I try to engage a mode and it refuses. Be it forward, reverse or park. But in the 'ready to drive' state it has never refused reverse or drive; I don't know why it ever would.
Holy cow! I have driven a Tesla handful of times and found the UX both terrible and dangerous, but this is a new one to me. Even with all of the other issues those cars have I'm shocked to learn that they will refuse to shift direction. I literally can't imagine myself ever owning a vehicle that would refuse basic commands by design.
The idea of a car "refusing" to do what I tell it to do infuriates me. I already have enough problems with various computer programs trying to second guess my decisions. I don't want my toaster, vacuum, or metal buggy telling me it knows better, too!
With the big difference of AUTO mode working for Hyundai while failing miserably for Tesla, because instead of using tested an proven technology the rely solely on their cameras.
For example look at the complains about the windscreen wipers not firing when they should and firing when they shouldn't:
IIRC they got in trouble in Germany for this already because certain controls were mandated by law to be a certain way and they flaunted it. I just bought a new car and a make or break decision for me was the control layout. Too many automakers jumped on the touchscreen bandwagon. Its fine for some things like android auto. But all touchscreen all the time was stupid in star trek and stupid in real life. Having physical controls for things like the lights, wipers and hvac is critical.
Even in Star Trek it wasn't this horrible. The touch buttons were mostly unchanged and in the same place. See the 'pilot' consoles in the first episode all the way to the last, they are exactly the same. No weird 'modes' or different screens.
It is not too farfetched to assume they had some form of haptic feedback (or something even better). They might as well feel like actual buttons to them.
> there are NO stalks. turn signals are touch areas on the steering wheel. so are high beams, horn, wipers
I didn't realize how important wipers were till last winter. I was on a 2-lane road at highway speed going into a turn. There had been light snow the previous day which was thawed on the roads, so it was wet and muddy conditions. A truck in the oncoming lane either hit a puddle or otherwise deposited a large splash of muddy water on my windshield instantly, and due to the turn coming up I had to see where I was going. I had about 1 second to find the wipers (it was someone else's vehicle) or I would have gone off the road or into oncoming traffic. That's not the time to hastily search for the wiper button on a touch screen!
I'm not a fan of the removal of the stalks, but this deserves clarification.
On the 2017-2023 Model 3, there's a button at the end of the left stalk that immediately activates the wiper. It's basically a mist button, which is also common on most every other car I've driven. So you can always get the wipers to activate instantly without getting anywhere near the touchscreen.
On the 2024 Model 3, with no stalks, there is a steering wheel button on the right that serves the same function. Push for mist, hold for wash. Same as the button on the pre-2024 model.
Stalkless is probably still going to be a deal killer for me, but still.
Thank you for clarifying. I just felt like sharing because I had no idea that windshield wipers could suddenly be as safety-critical as the steering or brakes, despite 24 years of accident-free driving. (Of course if it's raining, you need them, but every time I've driven in the rain there's still enough wiggle-room with partial visibility to pull over safely)
The left scroll wheel can: play/pause/next/previous/vol up/down in Normal mode
If you press the wiper button on the steering wheel it can change wiper speed
Long press is a custom function
When there's a call it answers/declines, mute/unmute, and ends a call
The right one actives autosteer/tacc/fsd, adjusts follow distance and max speed
There's 3 buttons for left/right/high beam on the left, and on the right, buttons for wiper mode, voice, rear camera, and in the middle, horn.
Not sure I need a button for steering wheel tilt, should only be when stopped. Also do I change gear so often I need a dedicated stalk? It's not a manual car. Direction/park is only done when stopped too.
My God, they’ve finally made Marcus J. Ranum’s comment reality: ‘If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles — but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.’
Yeah I’ve always been suspect of these critiques of Teslas UI. Besides the climate control you don’t really need to tap on the tablet for anything critical to driving WHILE driving. At least that was my experience in my brief experience with a 3.
I’d still add maybe another physical dial for stuff like climate, maybe even make them programmable. But that’s for convenience.
I find the rare times you need to use xdrive on BMWs which is a physical dial + a few buttons just as distracting as using a tablet while driving.
not only is it on the touchscreen, it doesn't have a dedicated location, is hard to locate visually, then hard to hard to actually press (small target), all in a moving car and without affecting other controls.
also, turn on cabin lights? flash headlights off and on? sigh.
> When there's a call it answers/declines, mute/unmute, and ends a call
Literally do not care about a phone call when it is raining. Hopefully, it at least has coyote time on it so when you adjust the wiper speed it will ignore a phone call.
> Not sure I need a button for steering wheel tilt, should only be when stopped.
I've had to adjust while driving. I don't remember for what reason, but I know I've had to do it a few times in my hundreds of thousands of miles of driving.
> do I change gear so often I need a dedicated stalk? It's not a manual car. Direction/park is only done when stopped too.
When you need it, you need it. I was once driving towards a non-gated, non-indicated railroad crossing in my hometown. There was only a train about once a day that went through there, but that day, there was a train that should not have been there. I slammed on the brakes, pulled the emergency brake, and threw the car into park. I stopped with less than an inch between me and the train.
I also destroyed my transmission by putting it in park at high speed. Worth it.
> I also destroyed my transmission by putting it in park at high speed. Worth it.
absolutely not worth it. modern cars (ie, anything with abs and disk brakes) achieve maximum deceleration when you mash the brake pedal and allow the car to modulate the clamping force. using the emergency brake and putting the car in park just locks up the wheels. the whole point of abs is to avoid this. you destroyed your transmission to increase your stopping distance.
This was most certainly not anywhere near a modern car. Further, it was a gravel road, which is a case where I'm not sure ABS brakes work better, but I could be wrong.
the first key insight here is that brakes can generate much more friction against the wheel than the tire can against any surface you're driving on. this makes the tires the limiting factor for stopping distance, not the brakes. the only exceptions to this rule are very old (like pre-1980s) cars, cars that desperately need new brake pads, and brakes that have overheated from heavy use on a track or riding them down a long hill.
the second key insight is that tires generate the most friction when they are allowed to slip only a small amount. different surfaces have different optimal slip amounts, but you never want to lock up the wheels completely.
gravel does make a difference here. abs is typically tuned for optimal performance on pavement, so it's at least theoretically possible for a skilled human driver to outperform older abs implementations on gravel. the average driver panic stopping is very unlikely to beat abs though. being a lower traction surface, it's also much easier to lock up the wheels on gravel. there's no reason to use the ebrake and especially not to force the transmission into park unless you know for a fact that the main brake pads are failing.
I'm sorry to completely beat you over the head with this explanation, but what you describe is extremely unsafe and I really hope no one reads that and tries it themselves in an emergency. the emergency stop SOP for any abs-equipped car is 1) fully depress the brake pedal, 2) focus on steering the car away from the immediate hazard or at least in a relatively straight line.
The issue is that I realized I wasn't going to stop in time while depressing the brakes, but just barely. That was when I pulled the e-brake and put the car into a spin, trying to burn energy. By that point, I was probably only doing 20-30mph. Thus I came to the train tracks almost parallel, but skidding along the road. My goal, as I was doing it, was to clip the train and get pushed along vs. shoved from the side. Then put the car in park to hopefully absorb as much of that impact as possible since I figured I might either die or lose consciousness. I wanted to be found on the road, instead of in the swamp on either side of the road.
I was incredibly lucky that day, there is no doubt about it, but, I also did a lot of insane driving during that point in my life. I knew how to handle that car in a variety of conditions from rain, gravel, snow, and ice and any mix of them.
Did I make the right decisions during those fleeting seconds? Possibly, possibly not. One thing I did have, was options. Options are something that has been taken away over the years through weird UX choices.
You don't seem to understand the point of ABS brakes. The way to achieve maximum deceleration in a car IS to lock up the wheels. The reason ABS brakes exist is because when the wheels are locked, the car is sliding as opposed to rolling, which causes the car to skid instead of turn when you turn the steering wheel. Average drivers tend to struggle with this and end up spinning out of control.
So ABS brakes pump the brakes rapidly as a compromise between controllability and stopping distance, which allows the average driver in an emergency to just "stomp and steer" instead of having to learn how to control a skid, which is a more advanced driving skill. But they do this at the expense of stopping distance, which is longer than if you just locked up the brakes.
Putting the transmission in park was still unnecessary and probably useless. It's not designed for that force, so it didn't absorb any energy or help the car stop faster; it just blew up.
> The way to achieve maximum deceleration in a car IS to lock up the wheels
That isn't true. Dynamic friction for a tire is always less than static friction, as soon as the tires are sliding your stopping distance is going to get longer. A good driver used to be able to threshold brake better than a basic ABS setup, but that hasn't been true now for years. Modern ABS computers are quite advanced.
> The way to achieve maximum deceleration in a car IS to lock up the wheels.
Very much untrue and it's a subject covered by school physics textbooks.
The wheels may not lock up simultaneously(often don't) and that is the reason why ABS will monitor wheels individually. And, if you are doing that, might as well do it all the time, and that's traction control.
ABS decreases stopping distance and increases controllability. It's a win win. These days you can't really do any better than ABS, "average" driver or not.
I'm not sure this is true. Yes, steerability is the main benefit of ABS, but I think bringing wheels from a slight roll to skid absorbs more energy (through deformation of the rubber) then just skidding along would under the same time frame. I.e. ABS does marginally decrease stopping distance -- at least on asphalt -- compared to plain skidding friction.
> I slammed on the brakes, pulled the emergency brake, and threw the car into park. I stopped with less than an inch between me and the train.
Something has to be very wrong with your car if this is required. The emergency brake is just an element of the regular brakes, and the parking pawl is laughably flimsy (it shouldn't engage anyway, it should just skip loudly over the detents if you try to throw the transmission into park while moving).
All you should ever need to do is stand on the brakes. Try to put that pedal through the floor. Don't waste time reaching for transmission levers or emergency brakes, keep both hands on the wheel to maintain control and use your foot to provide maximum stopping power. If your regular brakes are the limit, something is very wrong. Your tires should be the stopping limit.
One side of the steering wheel has buttons for driving functions: cruise control, following distance, lane assist, etc. The other side has audio controls for radio channel selection and volume, voice input, start/end phone call, and a customizable button that I set to record a voice memo.
Behind the wheel are a pair of regenerative braking paddles that work much like the paddle shifters on some gas cars: left paddle increases regen, right paddle decreases it. That left button comes in handy on the rare occasion when I may want to slow down in a hurry without lighting up the brake lights. (I will leave it to the reader to speculate on why I may want to do that) The drive mode button (eco/standard/sport/winter) is below the horn button.
Two stalks for headlight/turn signal/etc. and wiper/washer control.
Dual screens: one in front of the driver with driving info: speed and speed limit, how much battery you're using or regening, etc. A touchscreen in the center for infotainment stuff.
Below the center screen is a dual mode touch panel for climate controls or radio/map/nav controls. I just leave this in climate mode. Physical knobs at each end of this panel that change roles for the two modes. The left side of this panel has front/rear defrost, recirculation, and auto climate which remain there in both modes.
The center console has physical buttons to turn the EV on or off, a physical R/N/D knob, and physical buttons for parking camera/auto parking and a couple of related features.
At the front of the center console are dedicated buttons for driver/passenger seat heating/ventilation and steering wheel heat. Oddly, these are touch buttons in my GT-Line but physical buttons (better!) in the lower-end Wind trim. In Australia the GT-Line keeps the physical buttons here.
Behind the steering wheel next to the door are physical buttons for panel illumination level, charge door and rear hatch opening, and a couple of other things.
The driver door has traditional buttons for mirror adjustment, lock/unlock, windows, and child lock.
After driving gas cars all my life, the first time I got in an EV6 it felt very comfortable, like a real car and not a science experiment.
Anton Yelchin was killed due to traumatic asphyxiation when he thought he parked his Jeep and got out of the car and it then rolled into him and crushed him against a gate. Arguably the blame falls on GM for building one of those stateless shifters that always pops back to the center.
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 speedometer it replaced has been digital behind the scenes for ages. The cluster is just sat on a CAN (or similar) bus and controlling a servo for the analog gauge. The pure digital speedometer is significantly less failure prone (and indeed when it does fail, it’s obvious).
> The pure digital speedometer is significantly less failure prone
It sure is. I'm old enough to have had several cars with speedometer malfunctions due to that stupid little plastic gear at the transmission. One more nuisance I'm glad we don't have on newer cars.
> these changes just introduce needless risk of complex failure for no real gain
Analog speedometers are more complex and can’t be patched OTA. Eliminating them from the fleet means one less part to procure and inventory for manufacturing and service. Given the downside is losing precise speed awareness (you should still be able to judge rough speed visually—that’s the back-up), this seems like a fair trade-off.
Contrast that with e.g. brake lines, where digital systems can add redundancy. (That doesn’t mean they always do.) Or physical mirrors, which add critical redundancy to cameras.
Why do cars need to be patched OTA? Why isn't the code for something as mission critical as a car not written right before it was shipped? I never needed an ECU update on a car before? And my infotainment rarely needed one to the point where the handful of times it did get a firmware update it was handled during servicing just fine.
> Why isn't the code for something as mission critical as a car not written right before it was shipped?
We OTA spacecraft. We update planes’ software as part of maintenance. We have never written software once. We just accepted the bugs and defects as part of the product’s basket of tradeoffs, marvelling when the occasional manufacturer got it right in the first manufacturing runs.
> never needed an ECU update on a car before?
There were always weird bugs associated with models that you learned to deal with, or a tendency towards certain failure modes. In extreme cases we recalled.
> We update planes’ software as part of maintenance
We don't OTA plane software updates.
> We OTA spacecraft.
Because we can't realistically bring them back and there's an incredible amount of work that goes into make those updates flawless. Spacecraft are not a mass produced consumer product driven by profits and are less likely to have corners cut.
Sure. We still update the software. The tool which airlines use to create update blobs is even online [1].
> Because we can't realistically bring them back
We couldn’t always OTA spacecraft. Back then we just lost them.
The point is in even high-stakes games we don’t write flawless software. Now software in cares is doing more. There will be bugs. Pretending there won’t is delusional.
What we can do is minimise safety-critical bugs by forcing standardisation and certifciation in those components, even if that slows down innovation, and ensuring timely patches. That’s easier with digital than analog, which in turn makes manufacturers more willing to admit they made a mistake.
They don't need to be patched OTA. It's ridiculous. The terrible product design practices from other parts of life have unfortunately seeped into automaking.
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.
While it is important for cars to have speedometers so that drivers can learn to judge their speed, with a little bit of caution, a journey during which the speedometer fails can be completed both safely and within speed limits.
On the Volvo 240, the analog speedometer tends to get sticky after you've done a couple hundred thousand miles. Sometimes it will reset if you just hit the dash hard enough, sometimes you just have to guess the speed based on the RPM and gear and experience.
In the near future we will ask ourselves how people back then were doing this virtuoso thing called "driving" and be deeply grateful for the autopilot technology which Tesla was pioneering.
I'm more worried when spacex "pivots" to iron dome like products.
you will get a barrage of missiles raining down from space on top of some kindergartens because the autofire ai correlated a bunch of Toyota suvs moving to the same point with terrorists
Aside: it is the second day in a row that a thread from Mastodon ends up on the frontpage of HN. When was the last time I Twitter thread did the same, and does anyone else doubts that Twitter is no longer at the center of tech-related conversation?
A lot of the recent OpenAI events that were posted here were links to Twitter and I’ve seen plenty of people point this out as evidence that Twitter still is at the centre.
This is part of the current cycle of fragmentation. Twitter is no longer the centre, but it still holds certain cultural niches. Other niches have migrated to Mastodon or elsewhere.
I am personally pretty excited to see this diversification and fragmentation as it should help provide more niches for more people.
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.
My claim is not "many niches migrated to Mastodon", but "Twitter is not at the center of tech discussion". At least, not for the hacker types. Even here, the majority of HN links that show up as a Twitter thread are about technology "businesses", not tech itself.
I don’t know how you can say that. The whole fiasco with open AI recently was a good example of how Twitter was the place where you could really stay up-to-date with everything going on. All the main players were posting there.
I love HN, but just because there wasn’t a lot of links to Twitter doesn’t mean it’s not the center of tech discussion
You can't call any piece of evidence that happens to not support your theory as being an outlier. And even then the OpenAI saga is probably the most important development in tech in the last 10 years (conservatively).
Perhaps, in terms of how much it's affecting Silicon Valley; though I'd say iPhone adoption, the tail-end of Flash, the death of ActiveX, the destruction of libraries, and the growth of Amazon were all more impactful, there.
Probably not, in terms of how much 2040s tech will be based on this stuff. Language models are good for machine translation, and real-time image transcription, but everything else I've seen them do has better solutions (which have been around for decades in many cases, but don't have much funding).
One difference is that Twitter no longer shows threads to logged-out users, while Mastodon does. If someone posted the same thread to both sites, the Mastodon one would be better to link to.
I think this is a misfeature that will hurt Twitter going forward. I don't bother clicking a link to a Twitter thread any more because I know I'm just going to get prompted to log into the account I don't have. And I don't care enough to use an alternate tool, so I just move on. I expect I'm not alone.
I'm not, but I'm on mobile Safari 99% of the time. I see there is an extension that does something similar, which I'll check out. Thanks for the nudge.
I wonder how this compared to plain air traffic control technology of that era? Were ATC doing it better? (Obviously there are a lot of ATC-driven disasters of that era too).
I first thought this was a post about flat design, then went and read the whole toot. Man, who'd expect UI to be bad enough for life and death operations.
Someone should post more details about the actually confusing UI that lead to this event. Would be a good lesson to most of us.
It also appears that Lockheed won a contract for using this system in 2023 [1]. Can someone share if they actually fixed the UI issues with it recently?
Thank you. Did go through the whole thing. Talk about complicated systems, lack of documentation, work stress and then branding it a personnel failure. Totally unlike most systems today (not!)
Reading the different takes on the incident leaves one with the impression that there was a lot more going on there than just the stuff with the user interface.
What an insane story. Crazy to think that some of these engineering errors led to such a disastrous outcome...
I do resonate with someone's comments in the above sections reflecting on whether or not such a narrative would be given if it was say, a UI mistake from an enemy country.
Why would it need to be interoperable then? Presumably it tells adversaries that you’re friend OR foe though. The friend bit is obvious. The foe… still not seeing the logic.
There's a difference between civilian transponders which generally squawk all the time and military IFF, which typically only responds to a coded challenge (called an IFF interrogation). If a military IFF doesn't receive a valid interrogation, it remains silent.
It is Very Bad if an enemy can either spoof a valid "friend" IFF response or cause IFFs to respond and give up one's position. The latter was done with great effect in both WW2 and the Vietnam War.
That's easy. On many civilian planes, beacon turned on automatically, but on military must be turned on intentionally.
Because of this, extremely typical, when you see military plane, but have not got alarm about it's approach - just pilot forgot to turn on beacon.
FoF system is totally another measure, in real dogfight they do not consider it much, it is mostly like additional spare fuse, may save your life in some case. Rumors said, pilots of U-2 was pray, to avoid cases, where need to use these radio tricks.
As already pointed out, civilian transponders are not really "IFF", they're a tool for ATC to keep track of you.
Military IFF transponders don't emit unless they get interrogated by a valid code, and then only briefly.
The interrogating plane would typically only interrogate if you show up as a radar contact, and at that point, being able to say "I'm friendly" is very useful. You're not hidden anyway.
Note that the name "Identification Friend or Foe" is misleading; IFF can only positively identify friendlies. A nonresponsive bogey (unknown) may still be a friendly with bent IFF, wrong codes, etc.
I have tried to find the sentence you quoted in the article and was not able to. But it is not true that "every large aircraft (...) carries an IFF". IFF is strictly military. What civilian aircraft do have (large and small) is a transponder. The article talks about this but in a confusing way.
Eh. Military aircraft would also have a transponder, they just wouldn't necessarily have active broadcasts.
Civilian aircraft do broadcast actively (ADS-B). But they also respond to secondary radar for Mode A/C, which are basically cases of IFF Mode III (okay, maybe not exact term, but the idea applies.) So it's still a challenge-response/IFF, just in this case always responding.
Military aircraft use different modes and presumably don't respond unless interrogated with an appropriate challenge, but the principles are the same.
You tell your enemies where you are so they wont get close. Its sabre rattling. A favorite engagement for soldiers is firing at other soldiers somewhat out of practical range.
Pretending to not be the enemy will get you close before the enemy realizes and everybody loses.
You may wonder, but computers extremely important in our life, I bet, you don't release how we depend on high tech now (was not such before war).
I will list how I remember, not by importance.
1. Electric grid is core of infrastructure, and it depend on computers. Even if in many cases could use decentralized power sources, but need it to feed bank networks for money payments; water supply, heating, also need electricity. And Russians actively use hacker attacks to turn off power in Ukraine.
2. Air defense. God bless America and developers of Patriot! After last spring we received this wonderful tech, we could feel much safer, just periodically hear "Citizens may hear explosion, as system automatically intercept ballistic missile. Alarm siren was not triggered".
3. For our people in trenches, information is literally life, because Russians have large number old, but dangerous tech, like artillery and air approx 1960s.
And now also got cheap new tech from East - most annoying drones (UAV).
So if one side got knowledge, where some opponent military unit, they immediately fire on it if possible.
Even become usual thing, artillery duels, when artillery units on each side, try to destroy each other. And as they are long distance units, they don't see opponent, just know from intelligence, that on some coordinates appear opponent.
that's truly incredible how much lives can be saved with good electronics and it-systems.
I wish the war ends asap, before the autonomous ai-powered drones comes into play... because at that point this might become complete skynet-like hell.
Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic about terms of war in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, war in Ukraine looks not like war of one country against another country, but this war like Democracy and free market against Communism.
And rumors said, military support for Russia from North Korea is larger, than support for Ukraine from US.
Just now military power of Ukraine is near to equal to Russian, but this is not sufficient to return occupied Ukrainian territories in some overseen time. I'm not sure, if we could afford Korean variant of large part of country sacrificed to communists to end war, because Russia will not stop there, they want to occupy territories of other countries - Poland, Baltic states.
So, we working hard, to make Ukrainian military more powerful with new technologies. All possible to save people lives. And yes, we use robotic units at real war, but their intelligence extremely limited, even GPT-3 is too resource demand to be useful, only image recognition technology now is practical at field.
> And rumors said, military support for Russia from North Korea is larger, than support for Ukraine from US.
Certainly China is funding NK support. So they use NK to covertly provide military support to Russia while they front as the "good guys" that support "peace" and only provide economical support to Russia.
It's hilarious that someone that says it's in Ukraine, "country at war", writes that God bless an state that has brought that same war to hundreds of places in the world. In an article discussing an incident where the country that God should bless killed 290 innocent civilians because they wanted to. Not very different from Russia to me.
What a weird take. Is it really so hard to put yourself in their shoes?
If my country was being attacked and America gave us weapons to fight back I'd also say "god bless America" even though I don't believe in god and I'm very aware of all attrocities America has committed in wars across the globe(and still does). Is that so hard to imagine?
>>Not very different from Russia to me.
Did you think about this sentence for more than 2 seconds before you typed it?
> Is it really so hard to put yourself in their shoes?
So was it really hard for him to put himself in the shoes of the people to whom America did what Russia is doing to his country? I guess being in the same situation would make him to better empathize with these peoples. But maybe not.
> If my country was being attacked and America gave us weapons to fight back I'd also say "god bless America" even though I don't believe in god and I'm very aware of all attrocities America has committed in wars across the globe(and still does). Is that so hard to imagine?
I don't know. What would you think if some random Syrian guy wrote "God bless Russia" in a post talking about the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 which was, allegedly, shot sown by Russian forces in the Dombass?
>>So was it really hard for him to put himself in the shoes of the people to whom America did what Russia is doing to his country?
I've literally addressed it. These two are not mutually exclusive. I'm going to be thankful to the country giving me weapons to fight my invader, even if that country is a scumbag too. That shouldn't be difficult concept to grasp. Do you think Ukraine should be like "uhm no thanks US, we don't want your missiles, we're good". What country under active invasion would do that??
>>What would you think if some random Syrian guy wrote "God bless Russia" in a post talking about the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 which was, allegedly, shot sown by Russian forces in the Dombass?
I have no idea, because I don't see how that's related.
>>Considering the fact that America’s involvement in Ukraine is the reason Ukraine is in the war to start with?
The only side to blame for invading Ukraine is Russia. Literally no one else. That's not to say US hasn't had involvement in Ukrainian politics - I'm sure they did. The responsibility for the invasion still lies 100% with Russia.
Your view of history is far from accurate. The "vote" by crimea to leave ukraine was after Russia took over Ukraine in a military action. Voting to secede after someone takes you over and that Russian someone doesn't do democratic voting.
"The Crimean status referendum of 2014 was a disputed referendum[1][2] on March 16, 2014, concerning the status of Crimea that was conducted in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol (both subdivisions of Ukraine) after Russian forces seized control of Crimea.[3]"
This is the old maxima "Divide and conquer" - make two sister nations fight with each other for your own benefits. Then you can always look innocent and blame one or the two fighting parties for their own fight.
And it's also a very convenient propaganda technique used by Russia all the time - "look we didn't really want to do this, it's the foreign interference in Ukrainian politics that made us attack them!". Like, ok, sure - but you are still the ones pulling the trigger.
Ukraine is not sister nation to Russia. This is old Russian propaganda, in reality, Ukraine is old European nation and Russia is Asian (just remember about mummy at center of Russian capital, and think, where at Western country exists something comparable).
Claiming Ukraine sister nation for Russia is not exact same, but similar to claim Israel sister nation to Iran, or Japan sister nation to China.
Russia and the U.S. are both thinking that they are acting in their interests. Russia wants to keep away NATO because they fear NATO will randomly destroy their kleptocracy, and the U.S. wants to weaken nations regularly trying to assassinate citizens in western countries.
The U.S. is 10x more powerful than Russia who is 10x more powerful than Ukraine. Russia falling for the trap of a quagmire on their border is not the fault of the U.S.
U.S. behavior is mostly legacy of British, and partially from continental Europe.
And adequate person might notice, U.S. is practically on the border, between European and Latin American parts of world.
Practically, the same as Ukraine on the border, between Europe and Central Asia.
And this geographic situation is very important, on border you could not be really neutral and weak, you must choose one side and be strong enough to be on this side or you will be divided to sides by some external force.
Russia is very typical Asian country, or to be more strict, typical country of Central Asia, not European, for example, South-Eastern Asia is very different.
And Russian behavior is very typical for Central Asia. Absolutely nothing extraordinary.
> According to one study, the U.S. performed at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections during the period 1946–2000.
Read and count, in how many coups involved Russia (unfortunately you may need to use google translate from country of Democracy and free market):
ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Советская_республика
And yes, I don't think "Soviet republic" as Democracy, because I've seen USSR and it's pseudo-elections without choice.
What they are, you could see in good film Bridge of Spies with Tom Hanks - literally, gangs occupy country and supported by some Communists country - caught on such things Russia, Iran, Venezuela, China.
Ukrainian elections after 2004, ALL considered democratic, if you don't hear from your sources.
Life is simple, if all need measures implemented on time. And partially, when you could delegate important things to other people, so you don't have to do all important things yourself.
Unfortunately, some important things have not done by Ukraine, some have not done by West, and now we have this huge mess.
That time when a badly implemented government contract drop down menu UI design was blamed for the false alarm Hawaiian incoming ballistic missile emergency sms [1] only for it later to turn out to have been caused by regular old human communication error and poor safeguards [2].
There seems to be a lot of trust in IFF in this incident, what would stop Iran from reprogramming their F-14's IFF to identify as as civilian aircraft (or if reprogramming isn't feasible, retrofitting a stolen civilian airliner's IFF system into an electronics pod on their F-14, I'm sure the Iranian government wouldn't have any trouble getting an aircraft from Iranian Airlines)?
Do warships do any verification beyond reading the IFF ping aside from looking for attack patterns like climbinb/decending, etc, it still seems possible for an attacker to get within missile range while still appearing on radar to be a civilian craft.
First, very slight correction to the thread, most civilian craft have transponders, not IFF. They're kinda the same thing in practice but transponders just give out a static number, IFF is a cryptographic challenge response.
I don't know how the navy does it when abroad, but anything entering or leaving a sensitive area will generally be on an ICAO style flight plan (entering US ADIZ/TFRs/DC SFRA etc) and it's a simple matter of checking to see if the thing responding with "hi I'm mode c or s (civilian aircraft) 1234" is doing what it should be.
There are also some other sidebands that get used like NCTR which looks at the radar return to attempt to identify the type of aircraft but they weren't well developed in the 80s.
If the aircraft is not responding at all to transponder interrogations you can assume it's hostile and presently attacking you or the pilot is forgetful and didn't flip the switch (choose wisely).
You can obviously put a mode c/s civilian transponder on a cruise missile or better yet fill a remotely piloted 747 full of explosives if you're feeling especially squirrelly and that's totally been done. That's also part of why these events keep happening, everyone's kinda understandably jumpy.
Great answer! For anyone wondering, NCTR is non-cooperative target recognition.
> If the aircraft is not responding at all to transponder interrogations you can assume it's hostile and presently attacking you or the pilot is forgetful and didn't flip the switch (choose wisely).
Unless the transponder is bent, M4 is badly updated for some reason, etc. etc. Better do a RAYGUN call or ask AEW&E to declare.
> what would stop Iran from reprogramming their F-14's IFF to identify as as civilian aircraft
If you do that, you paint a target on civilian aircraft launched from your country's airfields. Especially if your airfields are military and civilian dual-use like the airfield in this case.
Sure, it might only work once, but it sure would complicate war efforts if the "good guys" kept shooting down civilian airliners carrying passengers of various nationalities.
I'm so conflicted reading this story. On one hand, yes, there were choices made during the design of the system that directly contributed to this tragedy. And a lot of innocent lives were lost, so saying that's "shit happens, it's an edge case" rings very hollow.
On the other hand, this was a very peculiar set of circumstances, very much an edge case. Is it reasonable to expect designers of combat systems to triple check their choices and run more test scenarios to identify and address such edge cases? I'd say yes. However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.
Reusing identifiers after such a short time was a pretty galactic design cockup. I'm a consultant and if I came across that in a design doc or while analyzing a system to form an understanding in my head of how it works, it would have immediately screamed out to me as asking for this kind of trouble. Operator punched the ID in for (civilian) aircraft A, and unknowingly got the trajectory data for (military) aircraft B.
Coding for the 90% common conditions are easy, it's the edge cases where things get hard and true engineering talent shines through. Ignoring them is simply incomplete design.
It's not tolerated in other fields of engineering (eg. civil) and it shouldn't be in ours either.
Sorry, I don't see where's the edge case. In a given area there are going to be lots of planes. If there is risk of confusing them and making decisions based on non-reconciled information, it seems a pretty critical flaw.
Hard agree here. There are so many small things there that could be improved.
One simple one is identifier re-use, if it is necessary for some reason, then at the very least it shouldn't happen within a specific time frame, so that you may have the same identifier used again as in the scenario.
I agree, the described scenario could just be another day at any airport and surrounding airspace (I guess any airport that is dual purpose military and civilian).
This was not an edge case, it was a swiss cheese failure that was just waiting to happen.
In a tech company this would correctly be thought of as a systemic failure as opposed to a personal one.
There are so many questionable design choices here for a system that is supposed to be used in high-stress situations. A lot of it reads as someone thinking "ooh yeah it would be cool if it did X" instead of "what's the simplest and dumbest possible way to do this".
> However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.
When it comes to safety-critical systems, the right engineering choice is to lean towards a 'safe' default. For example, the safe default would be to always slave the cursor:
> Once "hooked," the contact would be tracked by Aegis. But critically, unless the operator took the additional step of "slaving" the cursor to that contact, as the contact moved away the cursor would not follow it.
And here, don't reassign a tracking number, at least not within in a short timeframe:
> Vincennes assigned her the tracking number 4474; Sides assigned her 4131. Aegis unified the contacts under the number 4131. 4474 was then available for re-use, so Aegis assigned it to a US A-6 bomber, which happened to be descending.
> the safe default would be to always slave the cursor
I don't think so, I imagine that behavior could be frustrating, e.g. if you're cursoring over many contacts. Admittedly I am not an expert either, but that suggestion smells like a classic case of armchair design that would actually cause more problems, because I imagine that the two modes exist for a reason and the designers intentionally chose which default to use, but they didn't anticipate this user error.
Thus, I'd suggest that the UI should have made it extremely obvious whether the cursor was slaved and when a contact gets hooked/unhooked under the cursor.
If I had to make an analogy, I'd compare it to normal and insert mode in Vi(m). The fact that the default is normal mode actually makes sense even though new users may suggest otherwise, but the real problem is that by default it's hard to tell which mode you are in.
> The next aircraft taking off on that runway was an Iranian military F-14 fighter. The cursor was only left on the runway for around 90 seconds, but that was long enough for the Vincennes to get an IFF response corresponding to a military fighter. So Flight 655 was reclassified from an unknown contact to a potentially hostile one.
The default was that the automated system conflated two completely distinct aircraft. The IFF ("identification friend or foe") for a military aircraft was attributed to a civilian airliner
Yes - but the implications of reassigning the number immediately to another contact seems something that should have been noticed in the design phase.
> Vincennes assigned her the tracking number 4474; Sides assigned her 4131. Aegis unified the contacts under the number 4131. 4474 was then available for re-use, so Aegis assigned it to a US A-6 bomber, which happened to be descending.
> But he didn't realize that its tracking number had changed. He thought it was still tracking number 4474,
Global commercial flight traffic averages around 100k flights per day. I don't know what fraction is within the radar range of a big ship in a busy area, but maybe 10k? So it's not trivial to avoid reuse within a day while still having 4-digit numbers. Especially when contacts are assigned numbers independently by multiple ships and then reconciled.
> I don't know what fraction is within the radar range of a big ship in a busy area maybe 10k? So it's not trivial to avoid reuse within a day while still having 4-digit numbers
So in the design phase that should come up as an issue and you would surely use 5 digit numbers
Given the stakes of an “edge case” in a war machine, not to mention their cost, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect the number of such cases to be zero.
I think a highly volatile and chaotic use case is exactly where I'd expect them to design a perfect, or at least orders of magnitude less susceptible to operator error, system.
Of course it's hard for me, a spoiled millennial who got into programming via online games, to imagine what war computers were capable of in 1988, but as described in the thread, this scenario sounds so utterly routine that I am surprised that it basically involved a game of telephone to confirm basic facts about a plane.
"A tracked entity gets confused with another tracked entity" or "an entity's status of hostile-or-not gets lost" sounds like exactly the cases that should be impossible to get wrong as a fundamental goal of this kind of operation.
> On the other hand, this was a very peculiar set of circumstances, very much an edge case. Is it reasonable to expect designers of combat systems to triple check their choices and run more test scenarios to identify and address such edge cases? I'd say yes. However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.
Even if this is your position, it doesn't excuse the Navy's blaming of the crew after it happens. Even if the design issues could be written off as a reasonable mistake, the mistake still lies with the design and not with the crew.
It really peeves me to hear the phrase “edge case” used as a defense of incorrect software. As if software should not be expected to deal with edge cases.
Edge cases are not rare. If you have a lot of people using your system, or people who use it a long time, hitting an edge case increases in likelihood to the point that it becomes inevitable. It’s a fallacy to think that an edge case being mathematically unlikely implies that it is unlikely to ever happen. See also murphy’s law.
Well, apart from the fact that the Iran-Iraq war had been on right there for eight years, there's all this on the referred Wikipedia page, including the fact that the Vincennes was actually in Iranian territorial waters at the time:
> The Flight 655 incident occurred a year after the USS Stark incident, during which the Iraqi Air Force attacked the U.S. Navy guided missile frigate USS Stark on 17 May 1987, killing 37 American sailors.
> U.S. naval forces had also exchanged gunfire with Iranian gunboats in late 1987, and the guided missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts had struck an Iranian sea mine in April 1988.
> Two months before the incident, the U.S. had engaged in Operation Praying Mantis, resulting in the sinkings of the Iranian frigate Sahand, the Iranian fast attack craft Joshan, and three Iranian speedboats.
> Also, the Iranian frigate Sabalan was crippled, two Iranian platforms were destroyed, and an Iranian fighter was damaged. A total of at least 56 Iranian crew were killed, while the U.S. suffered the loss of only one helicopter, which crashed apparently by accident, killing its two pilots.
> On the morning of 3 July 1988, USS Vincennes was passing through the Strait of Hormuz returning from an escort duty. A helicopter deployed from the cruiser reportedly received small arms fire from Iranian patrol vessels as it observed from high altitude. Vincennes moved to engage the Iranian vessels, in the course of which they all violated Omani waters and left after being challenged and ordered to leave by a Royal Navy of Oman warship.
> Vincennes then pursued the Iranian gunboats, entering Iranian territorial waters.
So yeah, you are right, there was no actual war. But everyone was pretty war-ish
Wikipedia says "The attack occurred during the Iran–Iraq War, which had been continuing for nearly eight years." I guess it wasn't supposed to be a war that the US was involved in directly? But they were apparently getting their helicopter shot at and were doing things in Iranian territorial waters, so I guess they weren't just hanging out.
Is this a mastodon instance? Mastodon is a twitter clone that doesn't allow long posts? All the posts but the first come collapsed and I have to click on each to read it. Is someone measuring engagement?
The default post size limit on Mastodon is 500 characters, there is no line limitation. I suppose the message split here is mostly influenced by the user's desire or familiarity carried over from Twitter.
This could have been an article worth reading, instead it is chunked in tweets (or whatever they are named now) on X. I'd be interested in the topic, but hate the reading experience to much to read it.
Everything's possible, but there would be no debate about UI mistakes if it was Iran shooting down a US plane. They would've done because they are evil by nature, or at least perceived as such. In that case the media and the public buys into its own reality, but of course the UI discussion could be a distraction from the public maybe starting to question if that's actually the reality.
Also from the Wiki page about this shootdown:
In 1991, political scientist Robert Entman of George Washington University compared U.S. media coverage of the incident with the similar shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviet Union five years earlier by studying material from Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS Evening News. According to Entman, framing techniques were used to frame the Korean Airlines incident as sabotage while framing the Iran Air incident as a tragic mistake,[67] stating "the angle taken by the U.S. media emphasized the moral bankruptcy and guilt of the perpetrating nation. With Iran Air 655, the frame de-emphasised guilt and focused on the complex problems of operating military high technology."[68][a] By "de-emphasizing the agency and the victims and by the choice of graphics and adjectives, the news stories about the U.S. downing of an Iranian plane called it a technical problem while the Soviet downing of a Korean jet was portrayed as a moral outrage."
That’s a stupid comparison because the USSR intentionally shot down a plane without trying to contact it and then didn’t cooperate at all on search efforts.
Additionally, the pilot positively identified it was a passenger jet due to the double decker windows but shot anyway because they were shooting down “spy planes”, not anything that was an actual threat.
This is in contrast to the US incident where they tried to contact the plane on 10 different frequencies (3 civil aviation) and were operating under the understanding the plane was a fighter carrying missiles.
There is obviously going to be some media bias, but equivocating these two events is terrible from a “moral outrage” perspective.
>That’s a stupid comparison because the USSR intentionally shot down a plane without trying to contact it and then didn’t cooperate at all on search efforts.
I don't know much about either incident, but your summary sounds exactly what the OP is saying: "Here are the reasons the Russians did it. It's different, because they're evil".
One side was lying about thinking it was a spy plane, but the other side legitimately thought the plane had missiles on it?
It's actually astonishing that anyone who's been on this planet for more than a couple decades can take any of these narratives seriously.
These are two separate incidents, with similarities but also important differences.
We don't know how the US military would've reacted if Iran Air 655 would've overflown restricted airspace above the US.
For sure the Soviets fucked up by not trying to call on 121.5 MHz, but is that worse than the US fucking up by being so close (arguably intruding) another country space, and yet not having equipment to monitor civilian air traffic control in the area? I'm not sure.
> and yet not having equipment to monitor civilian air traffic control in the area? I'm not sure.
Did you not read the linked article in the thread you’re replying to? The US did have an IFF detection system, it was a core part of how it worked. The issue was a UI failure which confused identification by mixing up two different (real) IFF indicators one from military and one from civilian and made it seem to the captain that the military one was flying towards them. That’s a legit honest mistake.
They had 4 minutes from the “take off” to when it was almost overhead. Navigating Iranian air traffic control radio isn’t exactly a solution in tense situations.
> We don't know how the US military would've reacted if Iran Air 655 would've overflown restricted airspace above the US.
Restricted US airspace has been violated many times in history. As have Russians. And many other countries.
> We don't know how the US military would've reacted if Iran Air 655 would've overflown restricted airspace above the US.
We have to deal with the facts and reality as it exists, not as it "could have been" in a reality that does not exist.
And in the reality that exists, the US acted with infinite more grace and compassion than the Soviet Union. They found the wrecking and kept it a secret for years. I find it extremely unlikely the US would do anything like that in any circumstances even remotely similar.
> is that worse than the US fucking up by being so close (arguably intruding) another country space
It's not so much about that they messed up, but how they dealt with it. Do you accept responsibility and take action to prevent it in the future, or do you lie and cheat and do everything you can to weasel your way out of responsibility?
> "Here are the reasons the Russians did it. It's different, because they're evil"
No. The OP was talking about generally thinking that the Russians are evil and the US is great. Whereas the comment you're replying to gave specific malicious things that happened in the Russian case and didn't in the US case. The difference between the way people acted in the two cases is clear and doesn't require any particular political persuation to understand.
actually I agree with itsoktocry. You assume all those things to be facts, but nobody discussing here was personally present in any of those events. I can assure you that the version of "Russians knew it was a civilian airplane" is not recognized as true in Russia. This even without being able to speak Russian, nor ever being in Russia. But of course, they are bad people :-).
Indeed, if you ignore all the evidence, including the declassified Russian documents[1], you can conclude that Russia did nothing wrong with regard to the KE007 flight.
To be honest, the persistent blind contrarianism of this community is really tiring.
I didn't say they didn't do anything wrong, it's really not about that. The comment was on the coverage of the incident that happened in 1983. Nobody in 1983 knew anything about what will be declassified in 1992. You're stuck in a good vs bad box which is what my comment was actually about.
It’s “Russia made no efforts to contact” and “Russia made no efforts to search” both of which indicate it was because Russia was up to no good.
Funny how you ignore the reasons the commenter you’re replying to gives to indicate Russia did it because it was evil, reasons which do not apply to the U.S. case, and pretend they never gave those explanations at all.
The point is that 1) those reasons are themselves assuming a particular value system in order to judge evil (for someone who believes national sovereignty is absolute, neither country need give any reason to justify such decisions), and 2) those reasons are simply the propaganda you've heard, not necessarily what actually happened.
You can't judge evil without a backing value system to do so. Not assuming a value system presumes there is no such thing as evil. Which sure, if that's what you want to advocate for then go for it.
But for those of us who do have a value system we'll continue to use it in deciding whether something is evil or not.
I mean it looks like the private internal memos regarding the Soviet incident were released in 1992, so this is not propaganda. Or if it were it'd make the USSR look better, not really bad.
It's not stupid. All governments and militaries use propaganda. You'd be a fool to believe anything they say, no matter which country it is. The absolute truth of what happened is unreachable to us, we can only try to piece together a coherent version of the events after the fact. Government narratives are notoriously unreliable sources to base such an understanding upon.
Propaganda doesn't mean its necessarily a lie or misleading. Its just government marketing. It can be truthful or deceitful.
Back to the core issue of accidental shootdowns. I think its important to note that while these tragedies have continued to happen after the US incident in the 80's, none of them involved the US military since. That does lead credibility to their claim it was a UI and procedural problem that was fixed. Both Iran and Russia have shot down civilian air liners in the 21st century. In Russia's case it was 2014 in Ukraine and was judged a war crime by the courts. The man responsible, Igor Girkin, is wanted and likely will never leave Russia for fear of arrest. In Iran's case they accidentally shot down their own airliner in their own air space a few years back. I don't know what became of that.
> Propaganda doesn't mean its necessarily a lie or misleading.
> Its just government marketing.
All marketing is inherently a lie or misleading due to inescapable conflicts of interest. They have every reason in the world to want you to believe certain stuff. Therefore you should be skeptical and disbelieve them by default.
> That does lead credibility to their claim it was a UI and procedural problem that was fixed.
I don't doubt it was. The author of the mastodon posts this thread is about made very convincing arguments as far as I'm concerned.
>All marketing is inherently a lie or misleading due to inescapable conflicts of interest. They have every reason in the world to want you to believe certain stuff. Therefore you should be skeptical and disbelieve them by default.
What? No it isn't. The easiest marketing is when you don't have to because the good act stands on its own. Marketing is often a lie but it doesn't have to be.
>I don't doubt it was. The author of the mastodon posts this thread is about made very convincing arguments as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah I was familiar with the incident before this post and it seems pretty open and shut to me. These things have happened a few times in the past but this is as far as I know the only case of a US air defense system accidentally shooting down a civilian aircraft. It was taken serious at the time and hasn't happened since. What I find more troublesome is that the details of the investigation and the actions taken were made public yet other nations didn't take similar steps so similar mistakes have been made by other parties since. Notably, Iran themselves.
Those 7 others they couldn't receive. For the 3 cilivian ones they couldn't even know which aircraft it was directed at.
> and were operating under the understanding the plane was a fighter carrying missiles.
If they said they thought it was squawking on military mode II instead of mode III i'd believe em. The recordings say otherwise but few people making a mistake or the like happens.
If they on top of that say they saw it dive whilst their equipment recorded the plane as climbing as well as other discrepancies that don't match up....
Sorry, I don't tend to believe it anymore. I'd assume it much more likely they were covering their asses with lies.
To the commanders, shooting the plane down was somewhat defensible at the time. It was well off course and -due to that- happened to enter soviet airspace not once but twice!
The pilot who actually visually identified the plane did actually see it was a passenger airliner, but passenger airliners are sometimes converted to military configuration. And seeing the flight profile, it could totally have been converted for a MASINT mission or something.
But the behavior of the soviet union during the search and rescue operation afterwards? I'm not sure how that can be excused quite so easily.
To be fair, Iran mistakenly shot down an Ukrainian civilian plane only a few years ago, again on a period of heightened tension. They admitted to the mistake a few days later and I don't remember there was a widespread suggestion of second motives.
It's not really a UX error when your helicopter-carrier invades Iran after one of your helicopters invaded Iran. In wartime. What were these warships even doing in the PERSIAN gulf? And why do they shoot Iranian airplanes in Iranian airspace while they themselves are in Iran?
I image "UX error" wouldn't cut it if a chinese missile cruiser shot down an US airliner while steaming up the Hudson.
What you are failing to comprehend is that the United States has a policy of enforcing international naval freedom, and routinely transits international waters near many nations. The US has no issue with any vessel's location in international waters, regardless of what nation.
Not a policy maker but probably still nope. International means international, and America is a part of the international community and these waters are vital for trade. It's not like you can conquer a nation of millions with a couple of ships 12 miles from the coast.
One only has to see the differences between NATO bombing of serbian power stations vs the russians doing the same with Ukraine, or Israel killing children in gaza vs russian killing children vs the US killing afghan or Iraqi children.
NATO bombing of serbian power stations was done in response of Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, after the horrible crimes against humanity perpetrated by serbian forces in Bosnia.
"russians doing the same" is a blatant lie. What the russians are doing is a genocide.
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 support their govt's actions.
If you watch combat footage from eastern Ukraine, you will learn that many frontline towns and villages have been completely leveled by artillery. See for example[1]. And I don't have to mention Bucha[2] and other war crimes.
The relatively low civilian casualty count isn't because "Russians are so noble", but because:
1. Frontlines are static, giving civilians plenty of time to evacuate
2. Civilians actually have where to evacuate, Ukraine is big and covered by an extremely dense air defense network. Women and children can also freely go to the EU.
3. Ukraine has received an unprecedented amount of humanitarian aid.
Villages being leveled is different from genocide. And Ukraine screeming genocide is also different from actual genocide. Genocide needs numbers and the number are not there in Ukraine's case.
> The relatively low civilian casualty count isn't because "Russians are so noble"
I was not arguing their nobility, I was saying the word genocide may have been to easily used in Ukraine's case.
Given that Russia has literally genocided huge parts of the Ukrainian population in the recent past, it's not such a far-fetched or unreasonable. There is a lot of history here that you're ignoring.
But maybe those millions of people were also not a "real genocide".
And the Jews should also calm down when people start shouting Heil Hitler.
Or the blacks when people start talking about lynchings.
At any rate, whether it is or isn't "genocide" or whether it is or isn't "low on civ casualties" isn't important. It's a stupid invasion and every single casualty is a murder. Whether you want to classify this as "genocide" is a mostly unimportant semantic matter that distracts from the real issue.
Genocide does not need numbers, genocide is defined in international law and that definition has to be met. It's currently being investigated by a number of organizations:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine currently suffers from severe undercount.
The RF forces sieged Mariopol like a medieval city at the start of the war, creating large scale suffering. Afaik there was no water or power and people were melting ice for water.
The civilian casualties on the Ukraine war are at least 100,000+ maybe a multiple of that number.
While we're on the subject of "under-counting", there is no official count of the number of civilians killed during the US Gov's invasion of Iraq. No sense counting what you don't want to know and don't want to be accounted for? US voters / citizens certainly don't care.
Independent sources put it at 100,000+. I've randomly read 2x to 3x that but 100k+ is bad enough.
There is official count of number of civilians murdered by Soviets in 1932-1934 by hunger (Holodomor) - 7 millions as declared by Russian Duma on 02.04.2008.
However, these are adults only, because children deaths are not counted at that time. With school-age children, for which records are stored, number raises to 10.5 million. Number of under school age children died because of artificial hunger in 1932-1934 is still unknown.
I hope, this will help to calculate number of deaths in Iraq.
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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide)
> Russian Federation agents have taken at least 19,546 children to that country from Ukraine since 18 February 2022. Among other violations, Russian Federation citizenship is imposed on them, and they are forbidden to speak and learn the Ukrainian language or preserve their Ukrainian identity
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.
He did carpet bomb a big Ukrainian city, Mariupol, the russians have completely destroyed it and killed most of its residents. The only reason he hasn't carpet bombed other big Ukrainian cities is because his bombers would get shot down by air defence systems.
> Genocide is about the extermination of a people.
Thus resulting a lot of civ casualties. If it's genocide is for ever up to debate. Civ casualties are usually not that debatable. Without a large number (%) of civ deaths in some place there cannot be a genocide.
It can still be genocide without murder. Things like preventing childbirth or deporting/stealing children (like what Putin is wanted for) also fall under genocide.
For the most part "mass murder" and "genocide" have a lot of overlap. But it's not the same crime.
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 normal people like you and me you would probably understand that there's a lot more about that story that you and I will not know in a long time, if ever.
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.
russian soldiers are evil nazis, not normal people. Most of the russian population supports the invasion, destruction of Ukrainian cities and killing of Ukrainian children.
And where did you learn that? My wife is Ukrainian and knows lot of Russians and Belarussians (they're neighbours after all, and no they don't all hate each other!!), they watch each other TV shows and like mostly the same singers (they understand each other pretty well)... a lot of the biggest Ukrainian singers go to live and work in Russia (though obviously they're now being criticized heavily in Ukraine when they choose to stay). You don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.
If you read any news in Ukraine you would know that. I'm Ukrainian and everyone in Ukraine who isn't a russian supporter shares my opinion. Some Ukrainian singers live and work in russia, most stopped going there after 2014, even more after 2022. It's you who doesn't seem to have any idea what you're talking about. Ukrainians and russians do hate each other now. russians celebrate the killing of Ukrainian civillians, and almost every Ukrainian hates them. Belarussians are different, most of the don't support russia and lukashenko.
> I'm Ukrainian and everyone in Ukraine who isn't a russian supporter shares my opinion.
When you say "everyone supports my opinions" you're basically denying people their own voice - I am in touch with Ukrainians and what you say is plain wrong - you don't need to be in Ukraine to know that. Seriously, your opinions are the kind of opinions people in the West generally view as signs of dicatorship and actually associate with Nazis and fascism.
You believe your opinions are right, everyone who is not "a russian supporter" shares them with you, and that ALL russians are nazis - when will you realize you are the problem, not the imaginary nazis both Ukrainians and Russians keep blaming everything on?
Stop making stuff up, just because your wife doesn't hate russians doesn't mean that all Ukrainians don't.
> When you say "everyone supports my opinions" you're basically denying people their own voice - I am in touch with Ukrainians and what you say is plain wrong - you don't need to be in Ukraine to know that. Seriously, your opinions are the kind of opinions people in the West generally view as signs of dicatorship and actually associate with Nazis and fascism.
I said that everyone in Ukraine supports my opinions, because I, unlike you, know what's going on in Ukraine. You have no clue about Ukraine or the opinions of Ukrainians. Some Ukrainians have relatives in russia, many have cut ties with them. I'm not denying people their own voice, just saying that almost all Ukrainians hate russians, which you would know if you lived in Ukraine.
> You believe your opinions are right, everyone who is not "a russian supporter" shares them with you, and that ALL russians are nazis - when will you realize you are the problem, not the imaginary nazis both Ukrainians and Russians keep blaming everything on?
Who doesn't believe their opinions are right? Even if you don't, that doesn't make me 'the problem'.
Why the quotes around russia supporter? A very small part of Ukrainians support russia, some even collaborate with them. I'm not claiming that everyone that doesn't share my opinions is a russia supporter, just saying that every Ukrainian that isn't a russia supporter hates russians because of the oppression and murder of Ukrainians by russia for many centuries and the war raging right now. There is nothing fascist about stating the facts.
Where did I say that ALL russians are nazis? I said that only about russian soldiers.
How am I the problem? Did I invade Ukraine? Did I kill tens to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians? Did I commit horrific war crimes? I haven't done anything to blame me for the war.
Ukrainians, unlike russians, don't blame anything on 'imaginary' nazis.
They blame the war on the russians.
The russians support the invasion, as they supported the war in Georgia, occupation of Crimea and the war in Donbass.
russia is a fascist dictatorship, you need to be a brainwashed russian supporter to disagree with that.
Don't bother. Seriously. You won't convince anyone irrational enough to generalize hundreds of thousands of people into "russian soldiers are evil nazis, not normal people" with rational arguments. The only way to convince such people (that peace is better than killing) is to subject them to long-term, consistent propaganda, but... The only forces capable of doing that are interested in pretty much exactly the opposite outcome.
War is bad. Killing people, whoever they are, is wrong - and all people are just regular humans. There are no monsters, no "evil nazis" in reality, outside of fiction and propaganda. However, understanding that takes effort, and runs counter to many of the incentives built into human psychology.
Like you, I believe there's "a lot more to the story." I feel so helpless, knowing that I have no choice but to sit and watch all the atrocities happening all around the world because almost nobody is interested in stopping them. People who happily support the killing (of the "other side" only, of course) are the biggest reason this keeps happening. Since they're impossible to convince, these things are bound to continue.
There really isn't more to the story. russia has been oppressing and killing Ukrainians since the creation of the russian empire. They have only stopped for a brief period after the fall of the USSR. You are claiming there are no nazis. So Nazi Germany was fiction? russians are nazis, just look on the internet. Monsters do exist - war criminals, mass murderers, brutal dictators. Not all people are regular humans and some need to be punished for their evil actions. Where did you get this unicorns pooping rainbows bullshit? russians, not Ukrainians started this war and happily support the killing of the other side. They are the reason this keeps happening.
> Where did you get this unicorns pooping rainbows bullshit?
It's called "humanism," and it's not bullshit. It mostly says that killing people is wrong. Of course, you think otherwise, so it might seem like bullshit to you.
EDIT:
> So Nazi Germany was fiction?
No. The notion that all soldiers fighting on the Germany side in WW2 were monsters is, however. If the world subscribed to your ideology, there'd be a catacomb of millions buried under Nurnberg (there's no such thing, if you wondered).
> No. The notion that all soldiers fighting on the Germany side in WW2 were monsters is, however. If the world subscribed to your ideology, there'd be a catacomb of millions buried under Nurnberg (there's no such thing, if you wondered).
This is known as "the clean Wehrmacht myth", a belief that somehow, somewhere in the German military, there were units that did not have the blood of innocents on their hands. At least in Germany, that myth was shattered by an influential exhibition in the 1990s that showcased photos explicitly selected to display atrocities that were not committed by special squads in death camps hidden away in the woods, but out in the public, by regular units, on the streets and roads of cities and villages across Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_clean_Wehrmacht
And despite that, there indeed is no catacomb beneath Nürnberg. Virtually all German war criminals received no punishment whatsoever. Out of millions of people involved in the extermination of Jews and other crimes against peoples on occupied territories, only 6656 were ever convicted in Germany, and the vast majority received a sentence of 2 years of imprisonment or less. Only 164 were convicted of murder, yet millions had died. https://www.timesofisrael.com/historian-examines-germanys-mi...
I couldn't believe in the "clean Wehrmacht" myth even if I wanted to. I'm still not convinced all the Wehrmacht soldiers were inherently bad people or monsters. I'm not defending them - what they did across Europe, what led to millions of graves, was wrong. What I'm cautious about, though, is the hatred and emotional judgment that leads to more, not less, bloodshed.
The lack of a catacomb is good. The absence of any punishment for people outside those 7k convicted, however, is not.
> It's called "humanism," and it's not bullshit. It mostly says that killing people is wrong. Of course, you think otherwise, so it might seem like bullshit to you.
Where did I say that killing people is right? War criminals should be executed for their actions, but I'm not saying that every russian should be killed.
You are saying that there are no evil people and that everyone is a regular human. Then what about concentration camp commandants, mass murderers, war criminals? Do you think they are no worse than normal people, and deserve to live a good life? Then what you're saying is definitely bullshit.
> The notion that all soldiers fighting on the Germany side in WW2 were monsters is, however. If the world subscribed to your ideology, there'd be a catacomb of millions buried under Nurnberg (there's no such thing, if you wondered).
Where did I say that all soldiers fighting for Germany in WW2 were monsters?
I invoked Nazi Germany because you said there are no nazis and monsters and everyone is a regular human.
> Why is Russian army staffed by "evil nazis" exclusively, while actual Nazi army... wasn't?
What do you mean by 'actual'? Just because the russian ruling party aren't calling themselves National-Socialists doesn't mean they aren't 'actual' nazis. Search for "rashism". russia is even more evil than Nazi Germany because Germany had one very bad episode in 1933-1945, while russia has been committing atrocities, oppressing and occupying ever since the Grand Duchy of Moscow.
I mean the historical Nazis from WW2. Again: you admitted that not all Wehrmacht soldiers were evil, monsters, or even Nazis (other than nominally). But, in your words, all soldiers fighting for the Russian Federation right now in their aggression on Ukraine - are all bad people.
I'm asking, why do you agree to cut some slack for the former but are unwilling to do so for the latter?
Other than the latter being involved with you, personally, destroying your country and killing your people right now - of course. My grandpa lost 5 of his siblings to Germans in WW2 - they were civilians, killed because his uncle was a butcher, and happened to have a knife with him when they met German soldiers. It made him hate Germans, all of them, no exceptions, and I'm not surprised it turned out like that. He kept this hatred (only second to his hatred of Jews) to the very end of his life, and that's understandable, but it was irrational. I don't believe some Hans or Johann deserves to be hated 70 years later because of what happened back then. Similarly, dehumanizing and demonizing the whole Russian military (EDIT: or even the whole nation), including those poor convicts that supposedly die in droves as fodder for "human wave" tactics, is not rational now. I understand that hatred can be an emotional support for affected individuals, but it doesn't help the situation; instead, it makes it worse.
> Again: you admitted that not all Wehrmacht soldiers were evil, monsters, or even Nazis (other than nominally).
I mostly meant that I don't think all of them should have been executed, 18 million Germans served in the Wehrmacht.
> I don't believe some Hans or Johann deserves to be hated 70 years later because of what happened back then.
The russians have been oppressing and killing Ukrainians for over 300 years, 1991-2014 was just a small pause. Nazi Germany, on the other hand, existed for only 12 years, and Germany is very different now, and most soldiers that fought in WW2 are dead. russians keep doing horrible things since a very long time ago and hating them is completely justified until russia is denazified and becomes a normal country. People like Ivan the Terrible, stalin, putin wouldn't keep coming to power if something wasn't very wrong with the russian nation, and by the way russia consists of many different nations that were subjugated by muscovites. russia has a much longer history of pure evil and that's why I consider most russians evil. While killing all of them is wrong, they should be occupied and reeducated, and never allowed to have a large military and nukes ever again. Given the low population density of russia, most of its sparsely populated lands should be shared between all countries to provide living space for billions of people that isn't affected by global warming.
> The russians have been oppressing and killing Ukrainians for over 300 years
I know - and they did the same here, in Poland. We've lost our sovereignty, our culture was suppressed for centuries, and then we lost our elites in mass killings under Stalin again. I know, and believe me - I don't love Russians, nor do I support them.
They are culturally closer to the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan than to Europeans. Not that Europeans have no skeletons in their closets, esp. regarding the colonies and what they did to Africa - but the Russian Empire and its later incarnations did a lot of bad things. I agree with that.
But, I still don't want to classify all of them as "evil". They think differently, have different values, and are brought up with particular ideology that disregards things like human rights or democracy. They don't know any better, and it's not their fault they were born into such a culture or society. You don't get to choose where you're born!
Still, I understand your point of view. I disagree with forcefully re-educating and assimilating them - that's precisely what they did to us for centuries, and that's wrong. But, as long as we agree that:
> While killing all of them is wrong
We can talk, discuss, and find some common ground. What I'm against is blind rage, blanket hatred, and taking revenge just for the sake of it. But rationally, Russians, as they currently are, pose a real threat, and we need to contain that threat somehow. We should be able to do so without killing and even more bloodshed. At least, that's what I hope for.
I'll repeat: I think most Russians, even the soldiers, are ordinary people. It's just that normal people, when put in certain circumstances (like the famous prison experiment), tend to do evil things. You and me, we'd probably do those things too, had we lived the way Russians live. Let's talk about shaping the circumstances (also through re-educating them, if possible, without a threat of physical violence) so that they can live their lives in ways that don't threaten their neighbors - ways that don't bring the worst of human nature to the front.
In any case, no killing, please. Other than that, though, all options should be on the table (even if I disagree with some).
> The Germans were forcefully re-educated after WW2, do you also disagree with that?
No. But that wasn't under gunpoint, was it? The Allies left quickly, at least in the West, and local authorities enforced the re-education. Similarly, Japan got a new constitution, and the occupation there ended quickly. The DDR/East Germany was different - the occupation there ended basically in 1991, after the fall of the USSR. I'd favor the Marshal plan-like solution rather than the Soviet model.
> The russian leadership and war criminals will have to be killed, and they fully deserve it.
Maybe they deserve it, but killing them is still beyond what I'd consider moral. Make them work in a mine for the rest of their lives, make sure they get no special treatment, and let them die when their time comes.
War criminals are OK to be killed, but only if captured during the war. I'm not too fond of it, but I understand that martial law must be different from peacetime law. If you catch them after the war is won, I'm against killing them. Again, a lifetime of hard labor in a mine would be better than spilling even more blood.
> Do you believe they bombed the theater because they were actively trying to kill Ukrainian children?
Yes. They are also actively bombing clinics (including the maternity ward in Mariupol too, look it up) and they have done that in Syria too. It's pretty well documented. They are evil, but more than that, it's a strategy.
They are currently also bombing civilian areas, fully aware that they are civilian areas.
There might be some normal people in Russia, but certainly the heads of the army, Putin and his inner circle are not normal, and they are doing this.
> They are currently also bombing civilian areas, fully aware that they are civilian areas.
They might be "fully aware" that those areas are used by the "enemy" to stockpile materiel and gather personnel. That would make those areas legitimate targets. Can you prove a) there were no military targets there, or b) the attackers were "aware" there were no military targets there? I can't - nobody can. That's why when you allow a war to happen, we've all lost already. Everything after that is just choosing sides and framing events to align with your expectations/convictions. I don't like that because it distracts from the fundamental problem: that war and killing are just wrong, no matter who does it and how.
> They might be "fully aware" that those areas are used by the "enemy" to stockpile materiel and gather personnel.
You are approaching this from the wrong end. People like doctors or firefighters are multipliers, that is, they make the whole group stronger by a disproportional amount. A doctor can aid themselves and others with above average effectiveness. The same applies to firefighters. A professional firefighter is far more effective in putting out fires, removing debris, and saving people than an untrained civilian. Rationally it makes perfect sense to prioritize them in targeting, as Russians have done. By shooting at field hospitals or doing double-tap missile attacks on cities (first hit a crowded shopping center, and then send another missile 30 min later to hit first responders), you can murder doctors, paramedics and firefighters and harm the whole group by a disproportional amount.
Such perfect rationality combined with utter lack of humanity is why most people would call it pure evil.
Thanks. I was thinking more about the guy who actually put in the coordinates and pressed the button, and whether they were aware of what their action meant. I kind of forgot about the ones who gave the order and were aware of the whole picture. I think, if anyone, these are the people who deserve the hatred, and should be put on trial, definitely.
Good examples with hospitals. Even if there is a personnel in the hospital it is still a war crime to target it.
Russian army is full of war criminals(some of them have been drafter directly from prisons), they simply don't care about crimes. And that is true because international community also don't care, there is no enforcement.
Mass killing of civilians? It is ok for Russians.
Invasion into neighboring country? It is ok for Russians.
Destroying grain storage to cause price spikes and food instability in Africa? It is ok for Russians.
Piracy on the Black Sea? It is ok for Russians.
Blowing ammunition depots in Europe Union? It is ok for Russians.
And list goes on, but nobody cares if oil is flowing.
I am not going to prove anything to you. It's very well publicly documented, within 5 minutes of googling you can see hundreds of cases of russians targeting civilian infrastructure and civilians themselves. The only way you can deny it's happenning is if you decline to believe all of those cases, in which case there is no way you will believe anything anyone writes about the subject.
> the attackers were "aware" there were no military targets there? I can't - nobody can.
Except for obviously targeting civilians, they were for a period of time also targeting grain depots and even quite open about that, thus exposing your lie. A grain depot is not a military target unless the aim of the military operation is starving civilian population, which again is a crime against humanity.
Just look at the facts. russians aren't bombing civillian areas because they are legitimate targets, but because they want to and are encouraged to kill as many civillians as possible. How do you explain Bucha? Were the civillians who were shot also 'legitimate targets'? It's not 'choosing sides' and 'framing events', russia started this war and russia is the bad guy in this war. Why does anyone have to prove anything to you? It won't convince you to stop supporting russia anyway.
> but because they want to and are encouraged to kill as many civillians as possible?
How do you know that? Link please.
> it won't convince you to stop supporting russia anyway.
Exactly this. I'm saying that killing people is wrong and war shouldn't happen, and you're telling me I'm supporting Russia. That's precisely the level of irrationality I was talking about, thanks for demonstrating it.
2) Number of civilian causalities is unknown, because part of territory is under occupation. However, excavation of mass-graves on liberated territories shows that Russians are ready to kill few percents of population. [2]
3) Ukrainian air defense is in much better shape now, so hundreds of Russians missiles are shot in flight. Russians are bombing civilians in cities with cassette bombs from the start of war[3], so low numbers of causalities is caused by good defense, not by good will of terrorist state which performs genocide of Ukrainians right now.
Hamas is using civilians as human shields pretty much literally. They set this war up so that there is as much civilian casualties as possible on their side to claim it's a genocide. In this particular case, Hamas has a written constitution claiming the destruction of Israel and the jewish people ; Hamas ARE the genociders, despite being the weak army in this war.
Ukraine is NOT using its population as human shields. There is no evidence of that. So every civil casualties that Russian inflicts on Ukrainians (which includes destroying infrastructure, sieging cities and deporting children, among other things like what happened in Butcha) is deliberate.
To open: I am not apologising for what Hamas has done at all. I think their actions are revolting. Whatever your view of the history of the region, the aim to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state is unrealistic, extreme and counterproductive.
Nonetheless, I do find the claim they are using human shields as interesting.
Whatever you think of Hamas' aims and methods (and I strongly disapprove of both), Palestinians engaged in conflict are by necessity fighting a guerrilla war against an occupying power. No, Israel is not in direct control of Gaza -- but it does have the capacity to use overwhelming force against any part of it, so it might as well be for the purposes of fighting a war.
Let's assume we are not pacifists and we think armed struggle is _sometimes_ justified (as do both the US and Israel). From the perspective of someone who viewed the establishment of Israel as illegitimate, and the occupation of Gaza unlawful, and Israel's action in Gaza and the West Bank as immoral, what would be the right course of action here?
From that perspective it might seem reasonable to plan and carry out sabotage against Israeli forces (I know that is not all Hamas have done -- they have also murdered civilians, but this is irrelevant to this argument).
There were many resistance movements in the 20th century that are now approved-of by Israel and allies. Was it illegitimate for French resistance fighters (for example) to plan attacks from civilian villages and hide weapons in farmhouses etc? This accusation of using human shields (which predates the current conflict) sometimes strikes me is part of a process to 'other' the Palestinian cause and render it a priori illegitimate, which does't help anyone.
Edit: I recognise this post could upset some people at the moment. It's really not my intention. It's posed as a genuine question and something for us all to reflect on. I might be wrong/misguided but interested to discuss.
It does however have a complete blockade on Gaza, and has done for decades. It also has control over a signifiant amount of territory inside the wall -- get too close and you get shot.
Gaza is on the sea, but you can't import water, fuel, food etc from the sea because Israel will sink any boat trying to.
It's bogus to compare french resistance to Hamas. French resistants had no intention of destroying Germany or killing all germans. If anything, the german military were the one committing a genocide (albeit not against the french I can give you that).
All politicians leaders of Palestinian people have eventually refused a 2-states solution. Israël does recognize a few groups as valid diplomatic partners but not Hamas, who is in charge right now. And yes that will lead to a lot of harsh suffering for Palestinian people, partly/mostly because of the way Hamas has handled things.
Note that I'm not downplaying what Israël has done in the region so far, and I'm not giving them excuses ; they do what they think is best for their security, rightfully or wrongfully, given that their neighbour is lead by a terrorist group. I'm not sure how I would react as a civilian or a leader of either country and I would certainly not advise anything to anyone. But clearly Hamas is the agressor just like Russia is the agressor in Ukraine (and both have intention of destroying not only the state but also the people).
I agree in part. But my question was basically this: when Hamas is eliminated and less extreme groups come to power, but are still committed to armed struggle … how should they proceed? Would it be legitimate to use guerilla tactics like the French resistance?
I have no idea. I guess Palestinians need something like the next Arafat, who actually commits to a 2-states solution. Or whatever leading group that is non-terrorist and that Israël feels safe negotiating with (there are a few). I feel that would be the best solution for most people involved.
That is, if and when Hamas is eradicated, which is a big if. A war with Iran isn't out of the question. Thing is Hamas represents like 35% of votes ? It's both a lot and very little. Maybe 10% of those 35% would actually be ok to take an assault weapon and resist. Meaning the vast majority would probably be ok to negotiate even a mediocre deal but owning their land and borders ? Can we even make a forecast like this ?
Edit : Bottom line, Palestinians will obviously and sadly be in a terrible position to negotiate, if and when that happens...
The problem Israel has is that negotiating with some people they select to make a deal won’t make other people think it’s right and accept it.
You need far fewer than 10% if a population to cause havoc for decades to come. I’m not condoning it, but the reality is that unless settlements are moved and Israel takes some bitter medicine this will reoccur in 10 years time when the next round of radicalised people come of age.
Remember, Netanyahu had been actively using Hamas as a way to divide the Palestinians and make 2 state solution less likely. the approach of Israel over the past 20 years doesn’t make the attacks right or justify them, but it made them more likely because it has humiliated a large enough population living very close to them and left them with no other effective options beyond nonviolent resistance. I wish they had chosen that, but it’s easier to say than live with.
I've so far only seen acquisitions of Hamas using human shields. One could argue the hostages are humans shields, but (a) IDF bombs Gaza regardless, (b) they are not prominently shown (as the IDF documentedly did), and (c) at least some of them survived and were traded for palestinians (that were often held without trial, so could we call them "hostages" as well?).
Isreal has been trying to keep their morals for decades using defensive measures. They constructed probaby best in the world air defense systems to protect their civilians daily. They could just send one rocket for one they were targetted by instead and Gaza would be inhabitable decades ago. So when they were rewarded for their restraint on 7 Oct with savagery I'm not really surprised that huge part of the world gives them now blank checkque to do what they believe they need to. Not to mention that what Putin did to Ukrainie softened the morals of people to "it's ok if it's for the right reasons".
Missing from your narrative is the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli settlers. The settlers are harassing and seizing land from Palestinians. Those settlers are protected by the Israeli Defense Forces. All of this is well documented and are repeatedly criticised by many well reputable human rights organisations.
So, no, it's not restrain that is rewarded by these savage attacks.
And while I condemn the terrorist attacks on innocent civilians by Hamas, we should not pretend they came out of a vacuum, or that the state of Israel is a pure peace loving innocent victim in all this.
No, exactly. That is why I wrote "I condemn the terrorist attacks on innocent civilians by Hamas". But my comment was an answer praise of Israel's constraint, like Israel was completely innocent in this conflict.
And the following two paragraphs seems to be incomprehensible to many:
Israel is an apartheid state. Palestines have the right to resist that oppression. Hamas (or any Palestine organisation) has no right to attack innocent civilians.
Hamas is a terror organisation. Israel has the right to defend itself. Israel has no right to attack innocent civilians.
I agree that death of any innocent civilian is regrettable but I question that all Palestinian citizens are innocent. Some of them fully support Hamas and worked with Hamas and for Hamas and would like to see all Jews dead just as much as Hamas and do everything in their power so that nobody can tell apart innocent civilian from a guilty one or from Hamas. I also question who's fault is it that these innocent civilians die. If a murderer is hiding between regular people shooting at cops who hunt him and at the people as well and cops try to stop him and accidentally shoot some of other people as well in the messy situation the blame is heavily on the murderer himself and very slightly on the police who undoubtedly did the right thing, were just a bit bad on technical implementation, though as good as they could be, given the circumstances.
I don't think all Palestinians are innocent. I know there are Israelis that are war criminals. None of those facts are excuses to kill Palestinians or Israeli indiscriminately. Letting people die just because they happen to belong to a certain ethnical group is plain racism.
Israel has long passed a scale of the killing that could be explained as "collateral damage".
"the civilian death toll as of 20 November is 16,413, with nearly 34,000 injured. This would mean one in every 142 Palestinian civilians killed in a month and a half."
"With an estimated 70% of the dead being women and children – and many of the slain men unlikely to have been combatants "
There's surely a lot of evil being done, but I'm not entirely convinced by the article about civilian losses. 42% are children (compared to 6% in Ukraine, 8.6% in Iraq and 10% in Syria). How could an attacker ever achieve that even they tried?
If those atypical numbers are true it shows that defenders are not protecting their children like any sane population would but rather place them in obvious military targets to turn them into martyrs.
Personally I believe that those numbers should be treated as indication that they are not accurate. Author of the article prefers to take them as a proof of unique evilness of Israel.
Gaza’s population is very young, so these numbers reflect the demographics. If anything, it shows that Israel is indiscriminate in its killing in Gaza. Bombs tend to be that way.
But of course, we don’t know what and who to trust. Maybe we should ask why Israel is suppressing any reporting from the strip if they are interested in that the world gets to know the truth about what is happening there.
Population of Syria is nearly just as young. I don't see anything to justify 4 times as high children death percentage there.
I think reporters are there, after all they are getting killed too. Again I can't blame Israel for trying to keep repoters away since their deaths are very impactful and also since Palestinians have a huge history of faking deaths and injuries for reporting purposes. Maybe history is the wrong word because there are cases of this even as recent as last hostage-prisoner exchange.
So the fighters in Syria are more discriminatory when they kill than the IDF.
It’s a well known fact that Israel is limiting information coming out from Gaza. If all the reports about their indiscriminate killings were false, wouldn’t it be in their interest if more independent reporters were there, not fewer?
You have already made up your mind, and no evidence will ever make you change your mind. You are trying to explain away all the evidence, and when you can’t, you’ll just say it is lies created by Hamas.
Well that appears to demonstrate that Hamas works and prevents even greater harm than the harm carried out by Hamas. Probably not a message Israel wants to send.
It's not ridiculous. Your statement reads as "I condemn it, but they really had it coming", which a reasonable person could understand to mean "I don't really condemn it".
Only if you read it in complete isolation. It was an answer to someone who praised Israel for its restraint, like Israel was this pure white dove in the region
Here I know it get too complicated for many: I admit, Israel had something coming. I don't support attacks on civilians. Those two statements can be simultaneously true.
Israel is an apartheid state. Hamas is a terror organisation, I don't agree with the actions of Israel. I don't agree with the actions of Hamas. I think Palestines have the right to resist. I don't think anyone, Hamas or Israel, has the right to attack innocent civilians.
> If your land was occupied by an invading force armed and financed by the US and its allies would you sit back and do nothing while that force murdered your people and stole your property, or would you have done exactly what Hamas did on October the 7th?
No, I would have accepted one of the many peace proposals the other side offered.
Regardless, your framing of how there are only two binary options – (1) doing nothing to advance my political goals, or (2) resorting to the most savage terrorism imaginable – and no other options between them is appalling and telling.
Israel is a state established by UN resolution.
If you really want to blame someone you can blame the British. The British incidentally also promised a Palestinian state to the Palestinians and it was provisioned in the resolution but the Palestinians rejected it.
However, if we really were to do this comparison. The Israelis have have been way to nice. The Palestinians have been on the loosing side of 4-5 wars - its unprecedented. To the victor goes the spoils, thats how it is in the real world.
If there is cause for a Palestinian state, then there is also cause for a Jewish state. Problem is the Palestinians rejects this notion and want the Jewish state gone.
Yes, some Palestinians were displaced, even more Jews were displaced at the same time. Even by total numbers, which is hard, since Jews are always a minority and even if you don't count European Jews and just look at the surrounding countries.
One injustice doesn't excuse the other, but people need to move on. Germans did need to part with land as well.
The stolen property story would need some correcting here.
If you're seriously suggesting that attacking unarmed civilians intentionally, killing parents in front of their children and then kidnapping the children, slaughtering defenseless party-goers, etc. is what I any resistance movement would do, that's ridiculous. If Hamas would only have attacked military targets, there would be no legitimacy to Israel's actions. However, what actually happened was that they attacked plenty of civilian targets, in a premeditated fashion, in areas that are recognized internationally to be part of Israel.
Something being inevitable is different from it being justified.
Hamas’ and Palestinian Jihad’s violence is a predictable response to Israel’s abandonment of two-party talks and its right wing’s ascendency within its politics. That doesn’t justify gunning down kids at a concert.
Similarly, the IDF levelling much of Gaza in retribution was a predictable repercussion of killing Israeli civilians, including children. That doesn’t make their deaths fair.
> do you have full rights to complain about what you made inevitable happening?
No, it undermines the complaint’s legitimacy.
That doesn’t mean we must be unsympathetic; but it is a factor. Also, these decisions are often made by individuals within groups. Collective punishment is immoral. It’s also quite likely to produce blowback.
Putin could do the same to half of Europe, eh. The fact that he doesn't, doesn't mean his actions are justified. Not applying overwhelming force doesn't mean that applying any other type of force is justified.
> Isreal has been trying to keep their morals for decades
There are no morals left, in that conflict, since the 1982 mass murder of thousands of Lebanese civilians in Beirut at the very least - if not earlier. Both sides have happily displayed the worst in human nature, multiple times, over the last 70 years.
> what Putin did to Ukrainie softened the morals of people to "it's ok if it's for the right reasons".
Again, that's hardly new. From Vietnam to Desert Storm to Afghanistan, significant chunks of any public opinion will determine it's ok to apply violence. That doesn't mean it's morally justified - morals are determined in ways that go beyond counting how many individuals are pro or against something.
This is not a "both sides" issue. Thought experiment for you.
Q: What would happen today if Hamas and supporters permanently gave up all their weapons and surrendered? A: Israel would immediately stop any wartime action.
Q: What would happen today if Israel gave up it's defenses and military, took down the borders? A: Iran and Hamas would kill every last Jew in Israel. They have to, it is their charter.
Also, how many Jews and Christians are living in Gaza openly vs Israel? What would happen to them in the above?
Christian have been living in Gaza and West banks for the last 2000 years… (and a Church was bombed in Gaza killing 18 Christians). In fact the number of Christian has only started to decrease for the last 70 years as they suffer the exact same treatment as Muslims.
Yes that's exactly what happened in the west bank. Once they stopped fighting, they were left alone! Oh wait no, it just led to massive colonial projects backed by the Israeli government. Oopsie!
That's an odd question. Obviously I'd rather live in the more peaceful side, but that has nothing to do with anything. If you had to chose between living in nazi occupied Paris and Stalingrad, which one would you chose? Does that mean that the Russians made a bad choice resisting the invaders?
For some people, living comfortably isn't the most important thing they can have. Not getting conquered, invaded, or literally colonized is a good thing. Don't you agree?
If Israel wants peace, it shouldn't push for massive colonization efforts and shouldn't use its army to back any colonist living in the Westbank when an armed group finally decides to lay down arms.
If psychopathy is the only way for a group to prevent its own annihilation (whether it happens now or slowly), you will almost always get psychopathic behavior. That's true for everyone, hell in fact even Israel has that embedded in it's very own defense strategy with the Samson option. Which makes the Israeli side even less credible
> Not getting conquered, invaded, or literally colonized is a good thing. Don't you agree?
Actually I don't. It depends on the circumstances and the price. Sometimes getting colonized is the best outcome possible. Especially if the alternative is getting wiped out by way stronger opponent.
US colonized large part of Mexico. Are people there better or worse because of that?
> Especially if the alternative is getting wiped out by way stronger opponent.
That's a personal judgement which fundamentally contradicts the populations' rights to self-determination, i.e. the basis of international law since WWI (famously enshrined by Woodrow Wilson, among others). It's the basis for US support for the independence of Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine, Taiwan, etc - all countries threatened by a "way stronger opponent" claiming their territory. US attitudes to Israel are fundamentally contradictory of pretty much all fundamental principles guiding US foreign policies for more than 100 years, they are simply baffling from the outside.
> US colonized large part of Mexico. Are people there better or worse because of that?
Considering the local population at the time (which was itself not even indigenous) was often displaced, I'd say people were worse off. The US also colonized the entirety of Native American land, and people there are definitely worse off. Your principle simply doesn't stand up to logical examination.
Are the people who are descendants of the Mexican citizens who survived the ordeal and now are US citizens better off than current Mexican citizens or not?
As for Poland and Baltic states it has nothing to do with any principles. It's about US weakening Russia. If US didn't have a business in that those countries would have zero support for their aspirations for independence. And they wouldn't be better off under the Russian rule because I'm not claiming it's always the case just it's sometimes the case. And only when you are subdued by more civisationally advanced country.
> I'm not claiming it's always the case just it's sometimes the case
Lol, that's a solid foundation for a logical argument. "Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit", is a football-manager level of philosophy...
In the end, if we cannot build a coherent foreign policy based on solid humanitarian principles in the third millennium, what hope do we have to survive as a species? If might makes right, sooner or later we'll just nuke each other.
Oh and btw, your lovely american-mexican war reintroduced slavery to slavery-free territories, and was a great success for non-native populations. Colonization tends to be good for colonizers rather than the colonized, unsurprisingly. Obviously this is great, if one is among the colons.
> if we cannot build a coherent foreign policy based on solid humanitarian principles in the third millennium, what hope do we have to survive as a species?
Apparently we can't do that since we are keeping protected a group of people that want to have specific ethnicity dead so much that they put it into their constitution. I'm all for harmonic and humanitarian future, but to ever hope achieving that sworn murderers must be subdued.
> "Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit", is a football-manager level of philosophy...
But notice it's a practical philosophy that reflects reality. Wishing very hard that it wasn't exactly true won't change it.
> Colonization tends to be good for colonizers rather than the colonized, unsurprisingly.
Why do the Indians own more property in London than the British? Why the British are now a minority in their own capital? Could it ever have happened if UK didn't go on a colonization spree a while ago? In the long run being conquered sometimes brings insane benefits. Circling back to the topic I believe Palestinians would get immense benefits in the long run for laying down arms and joining the Israelis on their terms.
Those "sworn murderers" would be a tiny minority with no support, like any openly-racist group in most societies, if the mainstream wasn't so openly discriminated against by the same folks the "murderers" purposely hate.
Most armed movements in contested territories are historically overcome not by "subduing", but by actually addressing the grievances of the mainstream population who helps them. Look at Northern Ireland: the IRA was never defeated by military means, but they were engaged politically to solve the mainstream grievances that were well-founded: removing most anti-catholic discrimination across society, allowing free movement across the Irish border, and allowing each person to define themselves as Irish if they wanted to (rather than British). Until Israel takes a serious integrationist approach that removes its apartheid-style structures, the mainstream in Gaza will continue to support armed resistance, because they have nothing to lose from doing so and nothing to gain from not doing so.
> notice it's a practical philosophy
No, it's just fatalistic shortsightedness. If you can't imagine a better world, obviously you can't build it.
> Why do the Indians own more property in London than the British?
Because they resisted their occupation, reclaimed their immense land and resources, and fought to get back on a level playing-field. Definitely not because they accepted white-man rule!
(And if you claim that living in London is something to crave, man, you've probably never been there for more than a week :)
Mhmmm, I get what you are saying. And I even agree on a personal level. But I still think that there is a double standard as to who seems to be allowed to use violence in those cases. It's fine to even disagree with Palestinians, and I also understand that Israel has a right to exist at this point.
But the issue is when the west supports fully and unconditionally one side but condemns another for doing the same. It generates alienation and resentment especially when we try to rationalize that support and morally justify it, when in reality we just don't care when our side does it.
Which again, I understand, but the sugar coating is what triggers me.
I think Isreal wasn't given free pass ever. And now, only after it suffered worse atrocity ever, its free pass only lasted few weeks for most people. There's a huge disproportion of strength there and it's natural to root for a little guy. But when you look closer at the conflict and motivations of its participants it's easier. Because one side wants to have peace for itself to thrive and the other wants them dead and gone and it's not shy about advertising that intention at any opportunity.
Palestinians have a right to exist and to defend themselves but what they were doing with crude rockets and attacks wasn't a defence. It was an attempt at genocide. And people only fail to recognize it at such because it was so inept due to Israel defensive power.
Is that why it immediately started colonizing it's neighbor when it could get away with it (as in, when it didn't cost too much to keep the colonies secure)? Also, what other country in the world is allowed to literally push settlements outside of its territory, and then slowly conquer said settlements? Actually,which other country it allowed to colonize anything without international condemnation?
In another country? Probably there's none. In their own country, on territories claimed by some minority as their own? I bet there's a few at least. Something in Azerbaijan for sure.
It's not "their country", nobody (and I mean nobody) recognizes Gaza and West Bank as part of Israel. You could get away with "in their colonies", but then your argument would fall apart again.
Those answers are preposterous and your argument is laughable. This is indeed a "both sides" issue, because otherwise it wouldn't have remained a hot conflict after 70 years. There are legitimate and now multi-generational grievances on both sides, that are really difficult to recompose. You can't engage with simplistic attitudes if you want to be intellectually honest.
You don't like the argument because you know it to be true. The exception is the settlements in the West Bank, but those began after extremism in Israel rose considerably. That is a severe problem, but if people excuse terrorism as resistance, the same would apply here.
As others mentioned, your argument is fundamentally contradicted by facts.
The problem is that, without serious ideological engagement, neither side will ever stop. The current state of play is the failure of the non-solution that is "Two States", aka "Israel and bantustans". Bantustans have historically been unsustainable for any government that tried to implement them.
That's one hell of an exception lol. The only exception being a blatant disregard for Palestinian sovereignty, and proof that Palestinians will never be left alone even if they'd stop fighting (which is mostly the case in the west bank, compared to Gaza) as Israel is clearly seeking their entire territory, if it is is an exception, still disproves your entire point.
War is rarely about morals. But if they did drop them, we would be talking about casualties 20-30 times higher.
This isn't about morals, since that would demand that every death is one too many. Killing just as many Palestinians as Jews were killed would be a fundamentally unmoral justification as well.
I think there is different expectation towards Israel, every country would have reacted to an attack like it happend to it and I don't see an alternative to topple the regime in Gaza.
The blockade of essentials is questionable, if done for an extended time. The previous blockade of goods wasn't though, it was requested by the PA and Egypt as well. Arguably it wasn't thorough enough.
That's funny because to me, there's so much more leniency towards Israel. Blockading an entire city for almost two decades, and controlling almost every external aspect of its life while also openly and proudly colonizing the west bank with 0 repercussions is something only Israel can get away with. Bombing a city into rubbles with 0 official international condemnation from the west is also a thing only Israel can do.
Israel withdrew from Gaza and a requirement was a blockade of weapons and material that could be weaponized. That was also demanded by the PA and Egypt for obvious reasons.
> Bombing a city into rubbles with 0 official international condemnation from the west is also a thing only Israel can do.
There's plenty to criticize Israel for, but this isn't one of them. If Tijuana started sending terrorists over the border to San Diego, Mexico elected members of a known terrorist organization to public office and started a campaign to kick the US out of California "from the colorado to the sea?" and staged an attack on civilians the US would suddenly have a couple more territories and LockMart Grumman Atomics stock would skyrocket. The same applies for any other neighbor.
I think if Tijuana was under military and civilian blockade for 2 decades, with a nominal "autonomy" that involves anything but actually allowing any meaningful development (a port, electricity etc), and with the American navy openly attacking and murdering anyone who tries to help (like with the flotilla attack)... even Americans would probably not be surprised if said city wouldn't be super peaceful. And even America would've been condemned by Europe or something for even doing all of those things I listed above.
Especially if the US was already promoting and military enforcing colonization of more peaceful mexican territory around Tijuana lol
Israel is not a state with Christian morale, they are not a part of the "Western world". They have their own religion and morale, which are older than Christianity. Only part of holy books are shared between two.
From a Western perspective, there's no denying at least some Christian influence. We inherit a morality and philosophical tradition and that was shaped by a Christian-dominated culture for a large chunk of its history.
Highly recommend (not Spider-Man) Tom Holland's book Dominion for more on how that all played out.
Religion shapes morale. Morale shapes religion. They are not equal, but they influence each other.
Moreover, human actions is heavily influenced by circumstances. With low birth rate, it's better to protect children. With high birth rate, it's OK to sacrifice some young man to free some space, like farmers do for their crops, thus we see different messages in different circumstances even in countries with same religion and morale.
Moreover, humans are good at placing arbitrary boundaries, for example Catholics are OK to kill other nations en masse because "they are not Catholics, so they have no soul, so they are not humans, they are like pigs". Some versions of Islam even encourages holy war against non-Muslims. Some other minor religions are even promoting cannibalism. Even atheists are promoting mass killings, for example communists want to kill all rich(-ier than them).
So, while Christianity promotes peace, latest 2 world wars and current greatest war since WWII, are between Christians. Guess who will use nuclear weapon for second time in the history? North Korea? Iran? China? USA? Britain? Russia? Ukraine?
I mean that's the fundamental attribution error isn't it? If we do it it's because of external factors, if they do it it's because they're inherently bad people.
We see this in much smaller scale everywhere. When someone you don't like does something wrong , it's surely because they're such an idiot... when it's someone you really like, it's definitely due to external causes.
Not to mention simple discrimination, which is rampant, seemingly no matter how much we try to make that go away.
25% of the world's crude oil was shipped out of the Gulf at that time. The Iran-Iraq war had caused the prices of crude to skyrocket as many insurance companies refused to cover any shipping in the region. So the US felt compelled to protect the exports of crude oil from "friendly" nations. While continuing to blockade Iranian imports/exports.
For more details on the political situation at that time, I recommend reading The Persian Puzzle by Pollack.
One of the main jobs of the USN is to protect commercial shipping lanes. This is of US national interest because a lot of commerce flows through international shipping lanes. Its not unique to the US either. Its a historical duty of most nation's blue water navies. The persian gulf does not belong to Iran. Its international waters. But they have a history of using piracy in the persian gulf as a tool of the state and generally acting a destabilizing force in the area. So the US, and other nations often patrol the region to protect civilian shipping.
I’m describing the beginning of a process that later included direct invasion. Arming and goading Iraq is more covert, but still ends up with an invasion.
The Persian Gulf, despite the name, is not Iranian territorial waters. Anybody can go there. Iran would be well within its rights to send its warships into the Atlantic Ocean, yes.
US seizes Iranian cargo on even non Iranian vessels [1] with impunity. Iran sending warships would be as harshly responded to as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It would be a minor news article that most people would not care about, just like when China/Russia sail near US territory in the Pacific (which actually does happen).
American foreign policy is fully subscribed to the idea of American exceptionalism, as are many of their citizens and media outlets. Hypocrisy means nothing to them and won’t shame them in to not doing something
This happens all the time. There is a documentary for example on the HMS Elizabeth carrier from the UK and how they deliberately navigated through Crimea waters (together with the Dutch navy) to make a point that they're allowed to do so because that water is Ukrainian and not Russian.
In the same documentary you also see Chinese ships follow around the British group, and Russian jets overflying it. All in international waters, all legal, both not appreciated by the UK side of things.
The Montreux Convention[0] prohibits large warships from transiting the Bosporous Strait. That carrier displaces 65,000 tons, the upper limit of the treaty only permits warships of 15,000 tons or less. The UK is one of the signatories to that treaty.
Ah yes, it were two ships part of the Queen Elizabeth strike group, but not the carrier itself. The command was given by the admiral that was on board the Elizabeth.
Now that you write that it makes sense why they would send only two ships and not move the group around there.
Well, Ukraine is not near US, but Ukraine asked US for support, trying to de-occupy Ukrainian territory, which is defined and agreed by dozen of international treaties.
Absolutely same thing happen at Persian Gulf, allies asked for support from US and help arrived.
After the US supported a coup in 2014, installing a government and military structure that would help NATO push east (despite previous agreement) and later violate the Minsk agreements.
The world would be a better place if you stayed at home.
> As opposed to the non-downvotes and non-flagged comments parroting NATO propaganda with no sources whatsoever?
As if that makes your comment any more true. These comments are based on facts. Just because they support NATO doesn't mean that they are false. Your comment, unlike imaginary 'NATO propaganda', is completely divorced from reality and full of lies.
> Americans’ obsession with Russia is quite the thing.
Why did you assume that I'm American? I'm Ukrainian and know the history of my country better that some pro-russian stranger on the internet. And the 'obsession' is completely justified when russia keeps commiting war crimes, destroying cities and massacring civillians.
> There are other countries out there where disagree with you without being pro-Russian.
Disagreeing with US' actions is one thing, supporting russia is another.
Your comment is clearly the latter.
One of its most notable events was the burning of a trade union building by self-proclaimed neo-Nazis. When fascists kill trade unionists and then end up part of the army, it tends to be a coup.
In reality, crime gangs supported by Russians, first tried to use firearms on maidan, and also had large supply of flammable fluid.
But when feel resistance, these gangs tried to hide in trade union building with those flammable fluid barrels, and just accidentally burned themselves, and maidan activists tried to rescue ALL people when burning happen.
Only propagandist sources could consider trade unions storing flammable fluid barrels in building full of people, when unrest happen.
A not so subtle difference is that the pilot shooting down KAL 007 identified it as a civilian airliner and proceeded to shoot it down anyway.
Another more subtle difference is that in the Iranian Airlines shootdown, the US took responsibility and at least apologized. Meanwhile the Soviets denied anything happening until they couldn't and then claimed it was a spy plane (legitimate target).
No. The shootdown of KAL 007 took place at night. There was no possible way to identify the aircraft other than via the lights coming out of the windows. A militarized 747 is called an E-4[0]. A militarized 707 is variously called an E-3 (some are AWACS) [1], KC-135 (a now-retired refueling aircraft) [2], or an EC-135 (electronic warfare equipped 707) [3].
The wikipedia page for the shootdown incident [4] lists the time as 1349 GMT. Most readers will go "they shot it down just before 2PM" instead of realizing that the location was 12 hours ahead of GMT. During the time of the USSR, Vladivostok used Moscow time, even though they are 11 timezones ahead.
> The wikipedia page for the shootdown incident [4] lists the time as 1349 GMT.
In case anyone is curious, the Wikipedia page mention of this time is as follows: "at 13:49 UTC (49 minutes after take-off), KAL 007 reported that it had reached its Bethel waypoint". Bethel is a city in the U.S. state of Alaska.
Identified it as a Boeing 747, but not as a civilian airliner.
The same types of planes as civilian airliners are often used as platforms for military and spy planes.
FWIW, they would have ended up better off if the original TASS press release was not cancelled just before publication (the one where it was claimed a mistaken shooting due to misidentification).
“It’s a Boeing” could be waved away this way. 747s aren’t used as military or spy planes with the exception of Air Force One and the E-4, neither of which would ever be there unescorted and unannounced.
They also don't have a large an obvious "Korean Air" livery on them. Military aircraft are marked appropriately. I wouldn't necessarily expect a soviet fighter pilot to read english but I would expect him to recognize what a civil airliner looks like. The USSR had their own and also wore colorful liveries.
> “I could see two rows of windows, which were lit up,” Soviet pilot Col. Gennadi Osipovitch told CNN in 1998, describing the 747’s telltale double-deck configuration. “I wondered if it was a civilian aircraft. Military cargo planes don’t have such windows.”
Cargo don't. Converted intelligence/C4I planes? Often do.
Also, logos like that aren't that well readable especially at speed, and the actual shootdown happened in a way that could be mistaken for evasive maneuveurs.
Essentially, I feel that if we're going to let UX take part of the blame for Iran Air 655, we have to allow wider narrative for KAL007 as well (Personally I think humans are directly at fault for both cases)
The only converted 747s with the distinctive double row of windows in military use are the Air Force One and E-4 aircraft I already mentioned. Neither of which is going to be anywhere near Soviet airspace without the Soviets knowing long, long in advance.
I also quoted the pilot himself. Further from him:
> "I was just next to him, on the same altitude, 150 meters to 200 meters away," he recalled in conversations with a reporter during the weekend. From the flashing lights and the configuration of the windows, he recognized the aircraft as a civilian type of plane, he said. "I saw two rows of windows and knew that this was a Boeing," he said. "I knew this was a civilian plane. But for me this meant nothing. It is easy to turn a civilian type of plane into one for military use."
It wasn't a "oops we thought it was an RC-135" scenario.
> According to Entman, framing techniques were used to frame the Korean Airlines incident as...
Framing is a major problem in almost every single problem Humans have, yet it gets almost no attention....which I suspect may not be accidental especially considering how useful it is (it's getting heavy usage in this very thread, wow how surprising).
You can't really compare how a nation judges being a victim of it's own mistakes directly to how a nation would judge being a victim of its enemy's mistakes. Obviously there's going to be a whole lot more skepticism and distrust.
Which is not the same as whether it can be done at all, it's more so that accuracy and epistemic humility are currently low priorities for early 21st century humanity.
> * there would be no debate about UI mistakes if it was Iran shooting down a US plane*
If Iran shot down a US plane and then immediately admitted it was a mistake and helped investigate, I don’t think this is true. People would still be angry and a UI mistake doesn’t really exonerate you from that anger.
Do you think Iran would have acknowledged their mistake? The US immediately did, and ended up putting their money where their mouth is by both fixing the errors that lead to this mistake and paying damages to Iran.
Looking at the details of that Korean Air flight: "the Soviet Union initially denied knowledge of the incident, but later admitted to shooting down the aircraft, claiming that it was on a MASINT spy mission." That's not the same at all. Never mind "The Soviet Union found the wreckage under the sea two weeks later on September 15 and found the flight recorders in October, but this information was kept secret by the Soviet authorities until 1992, after the country's collapse", among a lot of other lies and misinformation.
This a hugely different response. We've seen this again with Russia's shooting of MH-17. I fully believe that too was accidental, yet even for accidents you have to take responsibility. Hell, they even lied to their own people with Kursk.
Another US ship was attacked by Iraqi Exocet missiles beyond visual range on the same region just one year before. US had also attacked Iran assets in the year before after one US ship was damaged by Iranian mines. Tensions were very high.
When a foreign country kills US citizens, it's terrorism. When the US kills foreign civilians it's collateral damage or a UI disaster ... business as usual.
> When a foreign country kills US citizens, it's terrorism
No, it’s an act of war if deliberate. As this would have been. It is unusual (though not unprecedented) to refer to the actions of states’ militaries as terrorism.
Intent is important. If I accidentally step on your toe it doesn't necessarily say anything about my character. If I I intentionally step on your toe you know I'm an asshole.
Intent and regret tells you what someone will do in the future.
That's a completely unreasonable take. There is no reason to believe that the killing was intentional, so it can't possibly be terrorism.
Equating an accidental shootdown of a civilian plane during a war, with the intentional killing of civilians as a stategy employed by e.g. jihadist is deeply disingenuous.
Would just like to jump in and remind folks of the Therac-25 incident just a couple years before this (1985 and 1987), and the user interface was also identified as a contributing factor.
The whole thing would have been avoided if the US didn't push their Navy around Iran
why the hell is there a US navy ship there to begin with
and why the hell is it that easy for them to shout at whatever is moving in the sky
yes it might have been a UI issue
but the root of the problem is "a US navy ship next to iran's border"
i wonder if ideas like side by side deployments were on their radars back then. maybe pretty expensive, but it seems like with systems of people and machines that complicated you'd want live validation of everything before cutting over.
After having become an expert on the incident from having skimmed half of the wikipedia article, I note that it mentions both Reagan considering his letter an apology and the US government not having made a formal apology, so I imagine there is some clever political distinction between the two.
I guess because they think it doesn't benefit them and will make future diplomacy harder? I don't know if that falls under arrogance, but I also don't know how to ascribe comprehensible motivations to the state department or whoever is in charge of that.
Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Vietnamese Finance Minister Nguyen Sinh Hung agreed today that Vietnam will repay the United States approximately $145 million in economic debts owed by the former Republic of Vietnam.
"
I’m guessing it’s not a popular opinion around here, but what’s described is so insanely dog shit I would have been fired and sued if I had been responsible for developing anything even close to how stupid this system was.
I know people who have worked with military systems, and as dumb as the process around developing these things tend to be, due to the asinine cluelessness of the decision makers, none of them would have accepted even a fraction of the idiocy on display here.
I mean, not “slaving” the cursor still feeds garbage data into the system, immediately reusing 4 digit codes in a way that is pretty much guaranteed to create confusion, no real cooperation or coordination between the same system running on ships in the same battle group, supposedly essential data displayed without the actual essential details shown to decision makers in charge of death and destruction…
It would be laughable if it was the worlds strongest military we were talking about.
The people in charge of deciding to make this “system” in this way should be in prison.
Touch LCD screens are a no-no for navy ships because there are no tactile feedback mechanism for your finger to feel as the ship slaps down after every giant waves.
Less dire direct consequences then. If we go down this path, I'm sure there must be other UIs that have much higher use that the one in the article that might have even worse impact at scale. Or even niche use (but more users) in critical (medical…) systems.
Is there a way, as either the reader or the writer, to set that as a default? Or do you need to remember it and manually do it every time you read a thread like this?
Not sure but the good news is, that’s just one of many UIs to pick from in Mastodon and the fedivers in general. There are also countless apps with various takes on threads, so I’m sure one can find something they like.
Posts aren't limited to an arbitrary length in activity pub, this is the same UI logic for showing a thread in the main feed. Twitter does something similar for bluecheck long posts.
If you want to jump to the conversation/replies to the OP's multi-post, this is a lot less scrolling than if each part of the OP's multi-post was automatically expanded. There's an advantage of the setup for you. This might be desirable as it could encourage participating in the conversation, though an argument can be made that it comes with a risk of people skipping the content and joining the conversation with incomplete context.
The fade effect on the line of text shown is in line with how "click to show more" is done in many places all over the web. It took me a thoroughly minimal amount of mental capacity to realize there was more. I clicked, and got more. It's really not that confusing.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
(I know these things are indeed annoying—but that's why we have this rule.)
navigate the UI disaster to read about the UI disaster...
I don't consider this story a UI disaster. Generating different 4-digit codes across terminals for the same object, and recycling those codes regularly... that's a data handling disaster.
That kinda seems feature-rather-than-bug honestly - I read the entire thing because I'm fascinated by UI/UX stories like this, and clicking to open each tab is nbd, but if it had been a topic I wasn't that interested in, I wouldn't've read it. Which means I'm less likely to fall into an attention-grabbing rabbit hole on social media.
As a counterpoint; I really like threaded posts like these. Each post in the thread becomes a kind of sub-heading or meta-paragraph which allows the user to disengage at well defined stops.
At the same time, it’s understandable that people don’t like it. The format has its problems, but I find I will read less of a blog post than a thread all else being equal.
But it does not allow the reader to quickly skim the article. It requires the user to interact with each paragraph in order to enable the user to skim it for interesting words.
Old fashioned non-interactive subheadings would allow the user to "disengage at well defined steps" and also to quickly scan ahead.
Had family members on the Aegis design team... I got another UI disaster... y'all had a chance to end this insane twitter thread UX and you chose to continue it. Why on earth do people post content like this... how much effort do you want me to put in? all that extra energy clicking, making requests...
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
Nice try, but my complaint illustrates the issue. Im not complaining about white button text, Im complaining about the awful UX of "twitter threads", which all of the twitter clones seem to have blindly adopted, instead of taking the opportunity to improve on it.
We have the rule because people often complain about UI annoyances and there isn't any new information in that—especially after it has been repeated countless thousands of times.
I rather agree with you about the UI annoyance stuff but HN threads get super boring when things like this are repeated all the time instead of discussion focusing on the interesting parts of an article.
Twitter thread UX makes sense for Twitter, but why do people post things on Twitter, the social media for short messages, that are so long they need threads?
It's not a text article though, it's a public microblogging forum like Twitter, implemented with a protocol for which this just happens to be a web interface. And a forum with more features than the one we're on, most of which would be quite inconvenient to implement in a purely static website.
Now, maybe what you're actually trying to say is that the content of the Mastodon thread should have been static website instead. That might be your preferred method of consuming this information, and that would be a valid desire. I can't say I'm a fan of twitter-style threads either.
Having said that, that does not take into account what the author of the thread wanted to accomplish. In all likelihood they're on Mastodon precisely because they want interaction with strangers. Otherwise they would have written the static website version. So it's a matter of misaligned needs.
Also, note that Mastodon is built on a protocol - it does not need a web app. So you could build a thread unroller or use an existing one to meet your static website needs, although I have to warn you: current implementations use JavaScript for that[0].
There’s a big gap between “static website” and “requires JS to render anything”. All you need is “serves meaningful HTML which it then enhances with JS”, possibly in the form of server-side rendering (I think it uses React?).
The tragedy of Iran Air Flight 655, which was shot down by the USS Vincennes in 1988, highlights significant user interface (UI) flaws in the Aegis Combat System used by the U.S. Navy. Here's a breakdown of the key UI problems that contributed to this incident:
IFF Console Operation Flaw: The aircraft identification friend or foe (IFF) system, crucial for distinguishing between civilian and military aircraft, had a critical operational flaw. Although Flight 655's IFF correctly identified it as a civilian airliner, the Aegis system required operators to manually follow the contact with a cursor. In this instance, the operator did not "slave" the cursor to Flight 655, causing the system to query the IFF of a different aircraft, an Iranian F-14, from the same location.
Dashboard Design Issue: Aegis' large displays, used for senior decision-making, failed to show critical information like altitude. This omission made it challenging to assess the intent of an approaching aircraft. Flight 655's climbing trajectory, a non-threatening maneuver, wasn't immediately apparent to the captain from these displays.
Tracking Number Confusion: Aegis' feature of unifying data across multiple ships led to a fatal misunderstanding. Both the Vincennes and its escort, USS Sides, tracked Flight 655 but assigned it different tracking numbers. When Aegis unified these contacts, it chose one tracking number and recycled the other, which was then assigned to a U.S. bomber. This led to confusion about the altitude of Flight 655, as the captain, unaware of the tracking number change, received data about the wrong aircraft, believing it was descending rapidly.
These UI issues, combined with the high-stress environment and other factors, contributed to the crew's misunderstanding of the actual situation, ultimately leading to the tragic decision to fire on the civilian airliner. This case underscores the critical importance of intuitive, clear, and comprehensive user interface design, especially in high-stakes environments like military operations.
Mastodon is a microblogging service, so not meant for large bodies of text. This is why the text entry box is small, the columns are somewhat narrow (especially in deck mode) etc.
Platforms like https://writefreely.org/ , which are designed to be for blogging and long-form writing, are the place to write this. Write Freely federates so one can follow accounts and interact with posts via Mastodon etc.
I used to think this as well, but lately I've noticed these stories which span multiple tweets have a common feature, which seems to emerge out of the size constraint regardless of the author: concise, beat-driven storytelling.
The size limit results in each post being a coherent sentence or three, advancing the story by a small but consistent amount. If these same authors used the medium of a free-form blog post to tell the same stories, I think we'd see much more meandering, and the pacing wouldn't be as consistent.
Not saying I don't enjoy a good blog post, but for what it is, I don't mind the (1/x) tweet story format as much as I used to.
I agree. I've always hated the twitter-style threads people write. I can't stand it. There are websites that compile a thread into a better reading blog style format however.
That's a good point, at least Twitter has third-party tools like Thread Reader to mitigate this annoyance. I wonder if there is an equivalent for Mastodon?
It is actually only the mastodon implementation that forces the size limit. It can actually be any size. I forked the original repo and had to change 2 variables to be able to toot 5000 characters instead of 500.
Mastodon folks don't seem to like anyone. They've removed discoverability features before because they don't like discoverability. Thankfully, there's Pleroma and other alternatives.
Hi yeah I also hate web things that should be documents and want to be apps instead but I think it's still pretty hard to make the case that this is as bad as Facebook's impact on like everything.
I gave up on trying to read it on the desktop. I have Firefox with JavaScript enabled but after expanding every paragraph by clicking on it, it automatically collapses when I try to scroll using the cursor keys and completely disoriented me while the content I was trying to read dissapears from my view and the page stutters and different collapse paragraphs light up.
I guess I'll never know the details of the greatest user interface disasters in history but at least got to experience a smaller one myself.
You are apparently unaware that the default Mastodon web client is only one way of many which you can use to interface with a Mastodon instance. If you feel that there should be a plain HTTP(S) interface to its open API, feel free to advocate for one — or to create it yourself!
Nope, sorry. I am too old and frustrated by modern web accessibility issues that I am not going to waste my time and "contribute" to this mess. A few years back, I would have tried to make the world a better place. These days, I have learnt that we blind people are no longer a factor for anything anymore. I bet LGBTQ people have a way higher chance to get what they want/need then people with disabilities hurt by the digital divide.
If you made this about accessibility in the first place, (and avoided the useless war between the poor with the LGBTQ people here) I bet your post would have been better received.
By the way you make a very good point about accessibility and the fact that you basically need two operating systems (the actual OS running on your PC and a modern Web Browser) to read simple text that should have been rendered as such in the first place.
The poor? Are you refering to people with disabilities by any chance? I hope not, because that would be quite condescending. Being forgotten by society might feel like alienation, but to assume people with disabilities are automatically poor is quite a stretch. Some of us have paying dayjobs, you know...
Besides, why do I have to out myself as a blind user to be allowed to ask for plaintext postings without being immediately downvoted/punished? I think it is quite revealing about the audience here recently. And no, I am not writing posting for maximum popularity.
> The poor? Are you refering to people with disabilities by any chance?
I reckon that's a figure of speech in my language that probably doesn't translate well (or possibly at all) to English. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be condescending or to imply people with disability are actually poor. It's something more akin to the term "rat race", but not quite.
> why do I have to out myself as a blind user to be allowed to ask for plaintext postings without being immediately downvoted/punished?
You don't have to and that's not what I said. I said "If you made this about accessibility in the first place".
EDIT:
Oh, and I didn't downvote, but probably the downvotes are more about the "as bad as Meta" comment without specifying you were actually talking about accessibility.
When Americans shoot down an airliner they get to describe it as a "user interface error". After denying they did it for a long period first, of course.
The two original founders recently retired and our new CEO is a former Captain of the USS Zumwalt.