Posts by Lyndication

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

Re: Why aren't these people facing jail time?

Ok damn the images of Unit 811 online are pretty terrifying. I'd have been screaming through my oxygen mask the entire rest of the flight.

Reddit rolling out AI bouncer to halt harassment

Re: I think the aggro redditors have a different plan

More likely that the WSBs "apes" end up being fodder for some investment firm to further pump and dump it. The ijits think that Gamestop is a video game infinite money glitch.

Reddit is utterly woeful now. Any interesting subreddit lives in fear of hitting r/All and becoming swamped by raging Gamers and report bots. The whole site is sinking into an utterly toxic mire.

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Re: Wouldn't suprise me

Having supported my partner through similar during a period of very personal, very targeted discrimination, we found that you can only really even build a case in the UK by sending the right responses with the right verbiage that then officially begins the formal process. Without help from a very well-informed friend, they would've been able to ride out a "timer" on starting the case.

Even then, it only escalated things up to a CEO level, who didn't care, and left her hanging with either going back to work or taking it to court.

Re: Wouldn't suprise me

It isn't equal if it's something that affects one group much more than others. As noted, it's a 29 : 2 ratio against women per a quote in the article.

If one were to institute a policy forcing work on Christmas Day, there would be some demographics who really wouldn't be bothered, and some who would feel incredibly affected by it and angry as a result.

Amazon hopes to avoid labor regulation by simply abolishing national watchdogs

Go whole hog and have your Fulfilment Centre staff servitorised a la Warhammer 40K.

In Amazon's ideal future I suppose they will work their staff harder and harder until the bottles of pee pile like mountains in their warehouses.

Japanese Yakuza boss charged with nuclear trafficking by the US

Re: "weapons-grade plutonium"

I assume the worry includes "dirty bomb" ideas rather than building a fission device. A barrel of nuclear waste would be a horrendous thing to detonate in a city.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

Re: Violent Elizabeth Putin

Wild seeing Trans people grouped alongside Putin in your example but go off I guess.

OSIRIS-REx probe sucked up more asteroid crumbs than hoped

Re: A Steady State Universe, trillions of years in age

All evidence points to the universe not being Steady State, and we know the age of the universe because the distance we can detect light from is directly tied to it.

A trillions of year old universe would allow us to see much further.

ChatGPT? Sure, I've heard it. But is AI coming for my job?

Re: Resistance to adaptation

>Obviously those policies are incompatible with one another.

Honestly, no. Government subsidies to help first time buyers keep house prices high, by redirecting tax money into offsetting the utter unaffordability of modern housing.

Angry mob trashes and sets fire to Waymo self-driving car

Re: The place not to be

Unsurprising given the absurd cost of living. Having the very poor so close to the very wealthy rarely makes for a happy home. Especially when it's so very hard to stay out of that poverty in San Fran.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

Re: But is Dark Matter real?

Alternative Gravity theories such as MOND do exist and are actively studied, but the body of evidence from observation, especially after JWST, is that it isn't accurate.

In fact Dr Banik, one of the major theorists around MOND, recently published a paper ultimately discrediting it:

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/527/3/4573/7342478?login=false

Like all good scientists, he's done the math, checked the scopes, and realised it comes up short. He's looking into whether the equation can be adapted or if the theory can evolve from here, but overall it seems highly likely that Gravity remains a universal constant inline with Relativity Theory in classical Physics.

An exciting time nonetheless.

Japan recovers moon lander data, puts craft to sleep due to solar panels' bad attitude

Re: Power later?

Gotta hope the onboard electronics survive the cold of the Moon first.

I think there's also an element of incline in its current position, at the edge of a crater, so it's possible it'll only start getting light later in the lunar day.

Users now keep cellphones for 40+ months and it's hurting the secondhand market

Secondary phone retailers are hungry for inventory ass

Matron!

An immature chuckle at that typo aside, it is good news that the churn of smartphone E-waste seems to be slowing down. My old phone was very much on its deathbed so late last year I stumped up for a second hand Fairphone 4. If half the marketing on the thing is true, it should be much better for the industry, and I can only assume it's even more green to buy it pre-used!

Ban on Apple watches with blood oxygen sensors confirmed after failed appeal

I can only assume that if you have a linked iPhone, as most do, it checks the SW version and forces an update anyway.

YouTube video lag wrongly blamed on its ad-blocking animus

Re: I can smell something... smells a lot like bullshit

If you can't handle the digital equivalent of slight-head-shake-and-sigh from other people then I don't really know how you manage online.

Worth noting that a significant number of the downvotes are likely through trying to be combative about it, drawing attention to it as though you're persecuted, and generally posting in an abrasive and derisive.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

Re: Makes me feel better about my work

This is true and why we only use them for verifiable primary parts, e.g., resistors, capacitors, nuts, bolts. Items that are then sourced via reputable sellers in the UK with full CoC but ultimately are traceable back to that Shenzhen factory line because the UK doesn't make these things.

PCB Assemblies and up are built in the UK though, including the boards themselves. We're not buying stuff off AliBaba here, it's the exact opposite of traceable and reliable.

Re: Makes me feel better about my work

>I work for a company making the widgets that go into your doodads.

We just need to continue the chain to find the person who makes the thingummies that go into your widgets that go into my doodads now.

Should be in the traceability record somewhere, right?

>Everything we do from material delivery to programming(me) to inspection to delivery has to be certified, everything damn little thing.

Yyyyup, and we're a small player who doesn't actually touch the big Airliners. Our customers are all small fry. Even so, when I do a repair under Part 145 I still have to be able to tell you the exact factory batch of a replacement nut, who torqued it, which exact driver they used, and what it's calibration date was at the time of working.

Makes it a pain sometimes because parts might go out of stock with white market retailers. Sometimes I'm sitting with very expensive kit I *could* fix with grey market supplies, but if we can't trace them right back to the line in Shenzhen they came from, then no dice.

Makes me feel better about my work

I work for a much smaller, lower stakes, company that makes lil doodads that go in private aircraft. Think Cessnas or a North Sea rig chopper.

These little doodads are required to be fully EASA compliant - and thus CAA and FAA by harmonisation - which involves lengthy design processes detailing the exact torque value of every damn nut and bolt that assembles them as well as calibration records for the driver that torques the nuts *ahem.*

It's honestly bewildering how this can have occurred, as larger companies like Boeing are under much deeper scrutiny with the regulators practically living in there. Then again, maybe that's the issue? Either way, it makes me feel top-of-my-field that I'm Part21 compliant in a way Boeing don't seem to be actually capable of.

Purely through torqueing some damned bolts correctly.

DARPA's air-steered X-65 jet heads into production with goal of flying by 2025

Re: What could go wrong...

Except the UK has both the highest tax burden for a long time, and the smallest expenditure on things like Welfare and Healthcare.

It's genuinely the worst of both worlds and it's down to successive administrations' poor management and vision.

Top LLMs struggle to make accurate legal arguments

Re: "they don't understand law and can't form sound arguments"

A human can explain their reasoning, typically. GPT et al typically can't.

A human can also undertake abstract thought and create new ideas, while an ML algorithm tends towards the most common trends in its data set by design.

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

Re: "the only figure that really matters is hospitalisations"

Hey I've seen this one before. February 2020 vintage, right?

NASA pushes back timing of ISS deorbit vehicle contract

Re: Silly question

It's possible that parts may have ultimately locked/seized, or even cold-welded together. Ultimately it might have been considered a benefit if two mated parts welded together back when assembly and making it airtight were the big concerns.

Plus it took a lot of manhours and flight time with a fair amount of risk to assemble it, and the craft that facilitated that process is now gone. Disassembly could be a bit of a nightmare, and every nut and bolt that slips out of the astronauts' hands is another space hazard.

Tiny bits of space junk reveal their wherabouts when they collide, boffins hope

DSN is also quite highly-tasked right now, as I understand it? I can't assume it can give a large proportion of its capacity to the task for a long time.

It may be used for proof-of-concept after the computer modelling phase is done, so they can verify it actually works then look at dedicated systems?

Amazon on the hook for predictably revolting use of concealed clothes hook spy cam

Re: I imagine gun manufacturers and sellers are watching very closley

An AR15 with civvy .556 ain't much better when plates are rendering .556 almost obsolete, hence the step-up to newer high-pressure 6.8mm cartridges to defeat modern plate. You're not far off turning up with the ol' family Springfield at that point, and that's to say nothing of mechanised/airborne support.

I find it laughable that any weekend militia group thinks they can take on the same US Army they lionise with granddaddy's Vietnam era rifles.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

Re: The interview is lengthy...

The people of the Levant have been awaiting the Messiah to come there and tell them how to settle their multi-generation issues that have seen horrific actions in each direction.

I understand that he'll be posting a Twitter poll soon to settle everything.

Bitcoin's thirst for water is just as troubling as its energy appetite

If you pump water out of a river then turn it to steam, it's unlikely to return to that river in any rapid amount of time. Particularly if you're actually pumping an aquifer instead. It's an issue Phoenix Arizona is struggling with due to its arid climate.

Returning heated water to a river can sterilise it if the river temperature is already high, by causing oxygen to escape out of the solution.

Moreover, while plants/animals do consume water, they use it as a solvent for internal chemical reactions within cells and subsequently to expel waste. That's a good portion what goes down the u-bend when all is said and done.

Re: Don't care

But crypto innately cannot be mass adopted, the system is deliberately inefficient. If the entire world ran on crypto then the energy and water demands would be impossible to meet.

Not to mention all the other issues, like achingly-slow transaction times and changeable gas fees.

AI offers some novel crystal materials that could form future chips, batteries, more

Re: Hmmmm..

They note that the outputs are then fed through traditional computer modelling software to verify them. It sounds like this is how they winnowed down 2.2 million concepts to a few hundred potential recipes, and further down to 51 sample test candidates.

Presumably part of this process involves the materials scientists having some notion of what's physically possible and also what may be materially useful.

Hubble science instruments still out after going down 3 times in a week

Re: I hope someone will step up to the plate

I could only dream of being worth $500,000 personally. I think my sum total of assets I own plus my pension kitty is slightly less than accrued student and medical debt, so personally I'm actually worth less than nothing.

I will happily provide -$200 to the cause though.