Did anyone scroll down far enough to see the "automate air traffic controllers"? I guess technically it's aeronautics but I didn't know that was part of NASA
One of the most important things NASA does, ignoring for a moment the unknowable value of say, discovering that Mars once had microbial life, is ASRS https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
You know how (scheduled, ie you buy tickets to SF, no prior relation to the crew, money for a service) aviation is incredibly safe? Well, one way you can continue increasing safety when you've already fixed all the things which keep going wrong enough that they happened and you corrected for them, is collect incidents where things didn't go wrong.
But obviously no pilot is going to just say "I nearly killed everybody" in public 'cos that's career ending, so ASRS collects these reports anonymously and in fact promises you immunity for certain things if you reported them first. So they can see e.g. sure nobody ever died on a plane because a pilot pushed the "kill everybody" button on the new Boeing cost-optimised "It's probably fine" B123-Extra but here are six reports from pilots who pushed "kill everybody" but were able to push "Whoops, no don't do that" in the six seconds left to prevent it. So this means no the FAA should not approve Boeing's request to remove the "unnecessary" Whoops button from future models and actually maybe the FAA OK for the "kill everybody" button should be revisited 'cos it doesn't say anything about pilots pressing it easily by accident in Boeing's request...
I saw that, I was a pilot for many years, and this would actually be kind of cool technology if it could be done right. I'm half tempted to apply.
One of my customers right now is frustrated because they have the tower closed at weird hours at their principle base of operations and they can't depart flights conveniently because of staffing shortages. Clearances are a bitch too... the whole thing is kind of wild and it's kind of a safety hazard when this airport goes uncontrolled. Anything that would help out - even cameras that would let the tower controllers at the primary airport see WTF is happening at the satellite field would be helpful...
Situational awareness is situational awareness. We still do in AK, but we used to have good Flight Service Stations that could provide advisory workload permitting.
AI tooling to provide traffic advisories when there are critical staffing shortages would be a godsend in some parts, and they don't necessarily need to even remotely be close to provide some help.
Obviously, that's not going to work at Teterhole or LGA, but the air traffic system is more than just the east coast. There's tons of staffing shortages across the whole country.
My first thought is, "we should hire more controllers and pay them better" - but if we're not going to do that or if we can't recruit and train fast enough (we can't really), some automation would be good.
NASA has always had significant role in forward looking research in the area of civilian aviation (which it assumed from the agency it replaced, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.)
I've helped an otherwise very successful and capable guy (architect) set up a shortcut on his desktop to shut down his machine. Navigating to the power down option in the menu was too much of a technical hurdle. The gap in needs between the average HNer and the rest of the world is staggering
This. I’m sure everyone has a similar story of how difficult it was to explain the difference between a program shortcut represented as a visual icon on a desktop versus the actual executable itself to somebody who didn’t grow up in the age of computing. And this was Windows… the purported OS for the masses not the classes.
Initially I thought you meant “software architect” and I was flabbergasted at how that’s possible. Took me a minute to realize there’s other architects out there lol.
Oh boy, the gap between the average it professional and ai pros here is already staggering, let alone the rest of the world. I feel like an alien, no matter where.
Yes! Even closing the windows of programs that users no longer need is hard.
It's easy to develop a disconnect with the level that average users operate at when understanding computers deeply is part of the job. I've definitely developed it myself to some extent, but I have occasional moments where my perspective is getting grounded again.
I don't think that's representative of most non-CS professionals. Most people in the fields I know (mostly professors, medical doctors, and businesspeople) can use google chrome, word, powerpoint, and a little of excel decently. There are the occasional few who confuse spreadsheets and databases, but no one who thinks shutting down computers or closing windows is hard. Heck, my ageing dad managed to troubleshoot his printer without any help, and he has no formal computer experience whatsoever.
HN has a long history of patronising the "average user" in the guise of paternal figures who don't realise that what they are doing is belittling the vast majority of tech users. I'm guilty of it myself. But they're capable of a lot more than we think they are.
Ultimately, it comes down to the willingness people have to learn new things. If they're curious enough to think about how things work, they'll be fine.
It's a while since I've used Windows but I seem to remember it giving a choice of sleep, logout, switch session etc. I could totally see someone wanting a single button for it.
lol the only atlassian engineer I knew spent 3 months 4 times a year "working remotely" from various resorts across Europe, I'm sure the 4-hour review of javascript she did per month was really worth that plus the apartment in brooklyn.. absolutely insane
Maybe he realized screaming at cars was more productive than being an actuary so someone who inherited their way through Yale and Blackrock could make the world a worse place.
Forgive my ignorance. How do you folks manage context retention? Say if someone had a sensitive excel document they wanted inference done over, how is that data actually sent to the model and then stored or deleted?
It seems one of the biggest barriers to people's adoption is concern over data leaving their ecosystem and then not being protected or being retained in some way.
Is this is an SLA that a small or medium sized company could get?
If you're concerned, you don't send it outside of the M365 boundary and presumably your admin has Purview Sensitivity Labels in place covering the document to prevent such activity.
I was convinced they were going to go the openclaw or something similar route..pivoting into cybersec/enterprise makes sense if they are trying to copy anthropic, but it doesn't really telegraph any sort of differentiator
This is the key. These frontier model companies are funneling all of their time and resources into scaling, how could they possibly be researching the next phase of AI? Once scaling hits the limit the money is gonna dry up.
Voting with your wallet doesn't exist. Try to boycott Amazon by blocking the AWS IP ranges and see how unusable the internet becomes for everyday tasks. Corporations continue to push the personal responsibility narrative so they can externalize costs of unethical business practices.
how are you making them lose money by blocking their ip ranges? Your are pretty much giving them money because now they dont need to pay for bandwidth.
I don't think they've added enough cyber. My cyber workflow demands more trusted access for cyber so that I can use these cyber-permissive models for my cybersecurity.
It's a source of minor, but persistent, annoyance that security people have tried to abscond with the prefix cyber, morphing it into a synonym for security.
Having grown up reading cyberpunk novels about life in cyberspace, a passing interest in cybernetics (though not of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation variety), it's frustrating to lose a 'this means computer or internet related' prefix.
Incidentally, I recently learned the origin of the term. Cyber - short for cybernetic - is from the greek κυβερνήτης (kybernetes), meaning helmsman. The original use of cybernetics is in the context of automated control systems, so steering a rudder was a good analogy. It is also the origin for the name k8s.
In my headcanon, I still read k8s as "network of cubes", as in Borg cubes, as Kubernetes itself is a poor man's Borg (as in the thing that Google runs on, named after Star Trek Borg, known for cube-shaped ships referred to as "Borg cubes"). The whole kyber thing sounds like an explanation after the fact, to detach from the Collective legacy.
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