Posts by Anonymous Cow-Pilot

Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes

Re: Air safety is an International issue

I don't know where you are getting this idea that GPS is our main tool for navigation. It isn't; it's a secondary source at best. GPS is jammed in many countries and by many governments (including the UK armed forces in various parts of the UK). Satellites go unserviceable all the time, leading to unreliable 3d fixes (not such a problem if you just need a 2d fix for car navigation). Not having GPS available as a data source is something that happens routinely. It is not adding anything to our task list - not least because when GPS is available we don't trust it.

GPS is not used in landing systems, it has no bearing on ILS approach procedures.

Re: Air safety is an International issue

We can do a lot more than straight and level flight over a short distance without GPS - we could easily fly the whole route with no GPS at all. GPS is highly accurate but very unreliable. We never assume its going to work, and we trust it the least if it disagrees with other sources.

Messing around on 121.5 is really not good, though. Its the international distress frequency used by aircraft and sea vessels to request assistance. It should only be used in an emergency per international law. The same law requires us to act on receiving a transmission on that frequency, so it's not dissimilar to calling in a bomb threat. Even if we know its likely a Chinese vessel causing problems we legally aught to investigate.

Thought you'd opted out of online tracking? Think again

Its difficult because legitimate interest is supposed to cover things like an online retailer providing your name and address to a logistics provider so they can ship a package to you (or just provide a quote), or you consenting to your details being shared with stripe or Shopify for a small retail site. However, as you suggest, an advertiser has a legitimate interest in advertising to you from their own perspective (they aren't pretending that they want to advertise to you, so legitimate is the correct word to describe their interest).

OpenAI CEO heralds AGI no one in their right mind wants

Re: It's useful. (Unlike most must-have tech)

ChatGPT is not good at writing useful code for applications - it doesn't have enough training data for that and often gets it wrong. What it is good at is solving programming problems of the types set in programming exams and interviews. A significant side effect of this is that it makes it look really good to development managers and other people whose job involves assessing the programming competence of developers....

Re: It's useful. (Unlike most must-have tech)

Be aware that ChatGPT and Copilot both make it your job to check any code that it generates before using, including testing, security auditing and IP checking. The first two are pretty easy to do, however, if you have any idea how to systematically IP check code then I would be keen to hear it. IP checking code is not an established discipline and there appear to be no published tools for it, so I don't see any situation in which it won't take longer than just writing the code yourself.

Uncle Sam backs right-to-repair battle against Big Ag's John Deere

It is standard journalism terminology. It means they were asked for a comment, but there was not much time between when they were asked and when the article was published. It is possible they will return a comment post-publication, in which case the article will be updated. The text serves to tell the reader that John Deere has not declined to comment, just not commented yet, so if you want to see their comment, you may want to check back in a day or so.

Microsoft's AI Bing also factually wrong, fabricated text during launch demo

Re: Hype, Hype and yet more Hype

If you have to write functions to interact with your data structures (such as setters/getters, functions to manage lists etc) then your using the wrong frameworks and development tools. I can't remember the last time I manually wrote that type of code.

This is the issue with ChatGPT (and copilot, which I subscribe to for personal use but rarely accept the suggestions of) - its great at producing boilerplate code where everyone writes the same stuff, but modern tools and frameworks don't need you to do that. What it is not good at is writing the code that is specific to your application - which is what developers actually spend more time doing. What ChatGPT and Copilot are actually good at is solving computing problems of the type set at university and in programming exams. This means they look good to the type of people who spend their time assessing developers, rather than actually developing code themselves.

So far my favorite Copilot suggestion is from when I asked it to create a function to assign a UUID to a component. It created the following code - return "1234567890"; .......

Craig Wright's crypto wallet claim against Bitcoin SV devs back before judges

Re: Puzzled

There is an interesting angle to this that Satoshi should have a better understanding of what can or cannot be done on the BTC blockchain (and likely its forks) than anyone else. So if it is proven that the Bitcoin SV devs cannot do what Craig claims, it seems clear he is not Satoshi.

US warns aging air-traffic control code won't be fixed until 2030

Re: It'll Be Soooo Cooool ... When We Add A.I.!

The NOTAM system doesn't need AI to sift out junk, because us pilots already have access to tools that present only the NOTAMs relevant to the route we select. Pretty much every flight management computer and GA route planning app can do that already. There are also websites that will do it very quickly. It also does not need AI - the problem to be solved is a simple geospacial one - show all the NOTAMs within X nautical miles of the route you are planning on flying, plus any global ones (which we are legally obliged to check for every flight).

Chinese surveillance balloon over US causes fearful gasbagging

Re: It's a good platform to use!

Its not worth wrapping it in high explosive - the weapon you try and use to shoot it down will already likely have high-explosive charges, and given your shooting at a balloon most projectiles will fly right through it without detonating, fall to the ground and detonate there. (remember the balooin is significant;y higher than even fighter jets travel). A significant advantage of using a balloon is that any attempt to shoot it down is likely to result in more damage being caused on the ground by the fired munitions than to the balloon. You have to cause considerable collateral damage just to get the balloon to lose enough buoyancy to significantly descend, and even then it will take a day or so for it to descend from that height to ground level.

Microsoft Office 365 Cloud has a secret lining

Re: Is that not an oxymoron ...

It is essentially the customers cloud. My understanding is that this "SKU" is basically "pelase build and run a completely private instance of M365 for us to the agreed specification".