A few months ago, I didn't imagine I would have completely dumped Google for a huge quality improvement in knowledge acquisition and navigation. The Internet is shiny again!! :)
I use GPT4 for questions, and Kagi (paid) for search.
I would love to dump Amazon's search. Maybe someone can scrape Amazon (and other stores) and create a universal agnostic LLM product concierge. Please!
Besides the conflicts of interest ads/trash-products, searching for a product based on highly specific specs has always been hard.
Exactly where Tesla’s marketing failed. It irritates me as a pilot that they have given it a new definition.
Autopilots have been around a long time, and have a very specific meaning. They require training, knowing what their limitations are, constant monitoring, and frequent manual input.
I’m not sure what Tesla thought they were doing by billing it as a “hands off” term.
As much as I dislike Musk and the mess Tesla has created with "Full self-driving", I don't think you can blame Tesla marketing for the public misconception of what an aircraft autopilot does.
Because, the Tesla autopilot feature is actually rather similar to a simple aircraft autopilot, with very similar limitations. At its core, it's really just a lane following driver assist, combined with adaptive cruise control. If you ignore the "adaptive" part, it's roughly equivalent to an aircraft autopilot in heading mode, plus autothrottle.
Tesla marketing did lean into that misconception, benefited from it and might have made it worse. But they didn't create it, and the public misconception predates Tesla by a long margin... it just didn't really matter before then.
From what I can tell, the misconception arises from the fact that the public know flying an aircraft is hard, the fact that pilots do so much training proves that. Therefore, they assume an aircraft autopilot must be advanced to handle the perceived complexity of keeping an aircraft stable in the air.
The introduction of autoland, and the way it was presented in magazine articles by journalists, probably made the problem much worse.
The actual algorithms used for autopilots are really simple.
A simple autopilot will do nothing more than hold the wings level so the pilot doesn't need to continually keep their hands on the controls. From there, more functionality is added as layers.
Heading mode makes the autopilot always point towards a compass heading. Nav mode is a computer that changes requested compass heading every time it reaches a Nav point.
A more advanced autopilot will add modes for speed-hold and altitude-hold that trade between altitude and speed. When combined with the auto-throttle, the autopilot can implement constant rate climbs and decent.
The autoland mode simply updates to heading mode and constant rate decent to follow the glide slope.
While it's true that a modern autopilot can takeoff, fly to a destination and land without the pilots touching the flight controls, the pilot is required to constantly switch between the various modes, feed nav points, and adjust the autopilots mode. At the same time, the pilots are doing a bunch of other tasks to keep the plane flying and safe.
The simplicity is very intentional. Pilots are expected to know what the autopilot is doing at any point and understand why the autopilot is doing that. They are expected to spot when it's doing something weird very quickly and disconnect it.
Constant adjustment based on density altitude changes, waypoint changes, ATC inputs, depending on turbulence - disable or alter inputs, it is required to be constantly monitored (I am a low hour pilot, but have had one need to be disconnected due to malfunction).
It’s basically a glorified cruise control for airplanes. It will fly a general route, but anything beyond that requires manual input (at least for small plane autopilots).
A good example might be a cop rerouting traffic. This would be an ATC route change in the airplane world necessitating you to reprogram waypoints. I’m afraid of what Tesla’s “autopilot” does in this situation.
One last addition edit - in the airplane world, the PIC has ultimate control and responsibility over the airplane. There are a ton of disclaimers and training that goes along with a real autopilot that makes sure you know what its limitations are. Tesla also has failed here IMO.
Ah, that’s too bad. I think (please correct if I’m wrong) those have some trouble in canyons at higher latitudes. The nice thing about Iridium is if you wait a few minutes, a bird will usually show up overhead. It’s nice for SAR missions we help with in the mountains.
I suspect you're right about the advantages of Iridium. All I can say is that we live in Oregon and I've been able to get out of canyons pretty well. I've used it on the John Day, Deschutes and Grande Ronde, mostly to coordinate with shuttles or check in back home. I cannot speak to other geographies. The profound advantages of two-way instant communication in an emergency would justify hiking uphill a ways too. I'm rarely surrounded by sheer cliffs. But I'm sure there are circumstances where Iridium -- or Starlink! -- would work better. We bought a v2 standard Starlink setup for tailgating and camping and it's truly awesome. That technology in phones is a game changer. In truth, my wife and I have iPhone 14 Pro and 15 Pro, respectively. If the Inmarsat sat phone doesn't work, you can be sure we'd hit the button on the iPhones, which makes for a nice backup as I believe they use the Globalstar LEO satellites.
I honestly see a heck of a lot of wedding photographers using them in some capacity now.
I also see a lot of outdoor photographers using them to save on weight (and pairing with some type of spotting scope when needed).
Digital cameras are definitely not on the brink of collapse, but I do see phones being used to either augment or replace specific scenarios more and more.
Another thing they've done more recently is HDR video (to my cave man brain, this means brighter brights).
They've paired this with much higher brightness on the screens, which makes the videos look much more realistic. I first noticed this on my M1 Pro screen, which absolutely blew me away (1600 nits peak brightness).
That's the biggest telltale "filmed on iPhone" trait I'm noticing right now. Yes, you can create HDR videos in other ways, and I'm sure it will be more popular on other platforms soon.
Fed it into bing-ai and basically said either Day After Tomorrow or Interstellar, or a bit of both. I mean, its definitely NOT good.
My biggest concern is the AMOC collapsing, everything I've read about that says its gonna be a rough weekend when that happens.
From Bing Chat:
A warmer and lighter Gulf Stream could affect the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is a large-scale system of ocean currents that transports heat and nutrients around the globe. A slowdown or collapse of this circulation could have drastic effects on regional and global climate, such as cooling Europe, altering rainfall patterns, and changing ocean productivity2.
A closer Gulf Stream could alter the coastal ocean dynamics and ecosystems along the East Coast of the United States. It could increase coastal erosion, flooding, and storm surges by raising sea level and intensifying waves3. It could also affect marine life by changing water temperature, salinity, and nutrient availability. Some species could benefit from warmer waters, while others could face habitat loss or competition from invasive species4.
A changing Gulf Stream could also influence the weather and climate of both North America and Europe. It could modify the jet stream, which is a band of fast-moving air that steers weather systems across the continents. A weaker or more variable jet stream could lead to more extreme weather events, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, and storms2. It could also affect the paths and intensity of hurricanes, which draw energy from the warm water of the Gulf Stream5.
The thermohalice cycle is a prime exchanger of water. Hot gulf stream water goes north, cools, and sinks, displacing existing cold water there & oxygenating lower levels of ocean.
We risk losing this major ocean oxygenator. I haven't heard any good theories for what happens instead, if theres still some kind of gulf stream but it mainly hugs the coast. There's been incredible warming of the Gulf of Maine in the past couple decades, for example, and that seems nowhere near deep enough to have this kind of thermohalice exchange.
Was this really its best hope? I still have my fingers crossed for an Alcubierre drive using antimatter as an energy source.
Hasn’t work been done in this area recently? I remember seeing an article saying it might technically be possible with a hilariously large energy source, but I don’t know if that has been disproven.
Antimatter was to be used to generate the energy required, by annihilation of regular matte, not the antigravity itself. "Exotic matter" is undefined as of yet in that it could still exist as something else. Some people are confusing the two ideas, even though some (few) people probably did actually think anywhere would anti-gravitate, as it were.
It’s still better than nothing at all! If you can physically see the connector, that’s a huge help. For USB-A, you often had to look into the cable to figure out which way it went.
I agree that HDMI can be heads or tails based on if it’s tucked behind a TV, but sometimes I can feel enough to get it right. That was never so with the original USB.
I think it's easier said than done in practice. What it means to have secure defaults varies based on what the production environment looks like, and the reality is that most software is feature rich and isn't usually intended to run in production out of the box, which is what makes a lot of the default configurations insecure.
IIRC typing "apt install sshd" (or whatever the package name is), is enough for Ubuntu to start a systemd service with password authentication enabled, so we are definitely far away from having secure defaults even for the most basic things.
very much this. one package I work with to be secure requires an LDAP server already setup correctly plus TLS packages already to go signed by a proper root certificate. Secure by default in that case would be tough.
I’ll usually go to an LLM for a very specific search term, then Google to find a reference or validate.