[HN Gopher] The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user inter...
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The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
Author : srijan4
Score : 700 points
Date : 2023-11-29 08:57 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (octodon.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (octodon.social)
| mattszaszko wrote:
| 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.
| gpderetta wrote:
| 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.
| Maxion wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| 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).
| rkagerer wrote:
| 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.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| 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,
| tlb wrote:
| 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.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > 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
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| 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".
| ughitsaaron wrote:
| 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.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| There was no war.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| 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.
| eastern wrote:
| 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
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > 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.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| > 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.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| It might help to read the incident further.
|
| > 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
| ben0x539 wrote:
| 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.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > 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.
| ninkendo wrote:
| 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.
| mike503 wrote:
| I came here wondering if it was iTunes. Or every timesheet webapp
| I've been forced to use.
| harha wrote:
| Nothing beats concur - the app made so only people with an
| assistant can file expenses
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Nothing beats it, really? Not even the tragedy that cut 290
| human lives on which you are commenting?
| zaphar wrote:
| Deltek timekeeping is worse. By a long, long mile. I _wish_
| Deltek was as good as Concur.
| girishso wrote:
| and I was wondering if it was Digg
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| 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).
| locallost wrote:
| 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."
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/25/us/crew-of-cruiser-that-d...
| tpm wrote:
| 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.
| nojvek wrote:
| In my eyes, once Israel started dropping air bombs on
| civilian buildings killing 1000s of civilians, Israel had
| given up on its morals. And so had US to fund the operation.
|
| Israel is killing more civilians than Hamas is. Blockade of
| water, gas, electricity is just inhumane.
|
| Ukraine on the other hand I support. They are defending their
| territory and neutralizing the attack. Although it seems they
| may run out of steam, it's been more than 2 years.
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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".
| Ma8ee wrote:
| 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.
| grumple wrote:
| Hamas and Gaza were settler and occupation-free since
| 2005. The settlers are in the West Bank, which is
| controlled by Fatah.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| shilgapira wrote:
| Is there any state in the world that has neighboring
| enemies who would pass your test of being "a pure peace
| loving innocent victim"?
|
| If not, then is October 7th style terrorism legitimate
| against all states? Against yours?
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Don't be ridiculous! If you actually bothered to read my
| comment, you'd see that I condemn the attack. The world
| isn't black and white, and criticising Israel isn't the
| same as supporting its enemies.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| 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".
| red75prime wrote:
| > we should not pretend they came out of a vacuum
|
| And we shouldn't pretend that organized terrorism is
| justified by the things you've mentioned.
| toyg wrote:
| _> They could just send one rocket _
|
| 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.
| mlrtime wrote:
| 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?
| toyg wrote:
| 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.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| 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.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| 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.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 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!
| mahkeiro wrote:
| 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.
| oddmiral wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| Who mentioned anything about Christianity??
| totetsu wrote:
| Some people equate morality with religion.
| oddmiral wrote:
| 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?
| Tao3300 wrote:
| 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.
| scythe wrote:
| The hot phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War has been going on
| for one year and nine months.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| 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.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 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.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| > 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.
| immibis wrote:
| Okay, bombing a city into rubbles with 0 official
| international condemnation from the west is a thing only
| Israel and the USA can do.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 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
| immibis wrote:
| You say that every country would have reacted to the
| attacks Palestine did on Israel the way Israel did.
|
| Would every country have reacted to the attacks Israel
| did to Palestine the way Palestine did? Or does it only
| work one way?
| immibis wrote:
| Even Germany seems to have given up its claimed "never
| again!" morals.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Except the Soviets had visual confirmation of the target
|
| Vincennes did not (which to be fair should have done - and not
| excusing their actions here)
| dsego wrote:
| That's a good point, why didn't they seek visual confirmation
| first?
| gpderetta wrote:
| 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.
| modo_mario wrote:
| >US had also attacked Iran assets in the year before
| after one US ship was damaged by Iranian mines.
|
| Wasn't this in Iranian territorial waters. I don't quite
| see how that held up as a justification for the
| retaliations.
| areyousure wrote:
| > Wasn't this in Iranian territorial waters.
|
| In case anyone is curious, the topic of discussion
| appears to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Samuel_B.
| _Roberts_(FFG-58)...
|
| All sources appear to indicate that the mine was in
| international waters.
| metabagel wrote:
| They probably would have, if they would have had the
| capability.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| 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.
| bonzini wrote:
| Presumably some mission during the Iran-Iraq war? Iraq was an
| ally of the US at the time.
| kortilla wrote:
| They were in wartime, you answered your own question.
|
| >I image "UX error" wouldn't cut it if a chinese missile
| cruiser shot down an US airliner while steaming up the
| Hudson.
|
| Yes, that would be up for debate if the US were in an active
| war with China.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Iran was at war with Iraq, not the US with Iran.
| AdamN wrote:
| The US and Iran had been in a cold war since 1979 with
| flareups the entire time all the way through to the
| current day.
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| The mentioned iran-iraq war was conducted by then us-ally
| saddam husein on behalf of the us. The us where the
| aggressor.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n4H_E8b-qmo
| nova22033 wrote:
| _these warships even doing in the PERSIAN gulf_
|
| Iran doesn't own the PERSIAN gulf any more than India owns
| the INDIAN ocean.
| naasking wrote:
| Sure, so if a Iranian helicopter carrier parked itself in
| international waters near New York City, everyone would be
| totally chill with that right?
| nova22033 wrote:
| _international waters near New York City, everyone would
| be totally chill with that right?_
|
| I don't know why you think this is a gotcha...The USN
| would probably sniff around but that's it..They're
| international waters
| naasking wrote:
| Yes, but it's also _Iran_. What you 're not getting is
| the "mortal enemy moving a war machine right at your
| gates" bit.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| Would the US have any issue if Iran had more and more
| powerful vessels than the US Navy, all encircling NYC in
| international waters?
| r2_pilot wrote:
| 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.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| It would be surrounded and hounded by the Navy, just like
| the soviet fishing trawlers.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| 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).
| p_l wrote:
| 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).
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "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.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| 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.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| It was shot down at night. There's no way to view the
| livery on a dark plane at just before 2 AM.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yes there is; we call them "lights".
|
| The logo on the tail was lit up.
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KAL007747-2.png
|
| The pilot of the fighter also reported seeing "two rows
| of windows", which can only be a 747 at the time.
| https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/31/us/kal-
| fight-007-anniversary/...
|
| > "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."
| p_l wrote:
| 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)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-
| xpm-1996-12-09-19963440...
|
| > "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.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-4
|
| 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-3_Sentry
|
| 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_KC-135_Stratotanker
|
| 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_EC-135
|
| 4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
| areyousure wrote:
| > 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.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Also, what was the US navy even doing there? The Persian Gulf
| is nowhere near the US.
|
| It's as if Iran had their navy parked on the US east coast, it
| would be seen as an outrage immediately.
| umanwizard wrote:
| 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.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| And what do you think the reaction of Americans would be if
| that happened? And especially if those warships were
| prepared to shoot?
| umanwizard wrote:
| 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).
| switch007 wrote:
| 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
| t0mas88 wrote:
| 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.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention_Reg
| arding_...
|
| 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Elizabeth-
| class_aircraft...
| metabagel wrote:
| It was actually the HMS Defender, a destroyer, which
| sailed into the Black Sea, and the Royal Netherlands
| Navy's HNLMS Evertsen, a frigate.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-
| confiscates-ira...
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Persian-Puzzle-Conflict-Between-
| Ameri...
|
| Additionally, to help explain how messed up the shoot-down
| was, _Sources of Power_ by Klein.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Sources-Power-20th-Anniversary-
| Decisi...
| thereddaikon wrote:
| 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.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Maybe the US shouldn't have invaded several countries in
| the region and encircled Iran.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| This was in the 1980's. Who had the US invaded in the
| middle east?
| dontlaugh wrote:
| The US orchestrated a coup in Iran and later helped Iraq
| invade. All for oil money.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| >Claims the US was invading countries in the middle east
| >Lists things that isn't invading the middle east.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| 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.
| da_chicken wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| 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.
| gpderetta wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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_ ).
| kortilla wrote:
| 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.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _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.
| addicted wrote:
| 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.
| naasking wrote:
| 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.
| twixfel wrote:
| 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.
| zaphar wrote:
| 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.
| peppermint_gum wrote:
| Russia has declassified documents that confirm what the GP
| said:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007#S
| o...
|
| > 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.
|
| The only astonishing thing is that you reflexively rushed
| to Russia's defense instead of looking up the facts.
| berdario wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| > 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.
| angiosperm wrote:
| Yet, the USS Sides steaming nearby identified it
| correctly as a civilian flight with no difficulty.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| Presumably because their operator did not make the same
| mistake as the one on the Vincennes?
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > "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.
| locallost wrote:
| 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 :-).
| peppermint_gum wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flig
| ht_007#So...
| locallost wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > To be honest, the persistent blind contrarianism of
| this community is really tiring.
|
| s/this community/a small faction that is very active on
| this community/
|
| It's not a lot of them but they are really doing
| overtime.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Exactly, you would think people would start seeing the
| games being played.
|
| Look up "mass control hypnosis" if you've never heard the
| term.
| immibis wrote:
| Are you trying to quietly introduce the term? It brings
| up some music videos, some fringe conspiracy theorists,
| and TV Tropes.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| sorry, it's Mass Formation Hypnosis
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| >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.
| modo_mario wrote:
| >10 different frequencies (3 civil aviation)
|
| 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.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
|
| So steelmanning...
|
| 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.
| contravariant wrote:
| 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.
| brabel wrote:
| 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.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| We judge others by their actions and ourselves by our
| intentions.
| chadash wrote:
| > * 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.
| fmajid wrote:
| Iran actually shot down a Ukrainian plane by mistake. They
| took their sweet time admitting it, but did eventually:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_International_Airlines.
| ..
| rglullis wrote:
| 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?
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/front for the last ten
| days: one today, one five days ago, three seven days ago, two
| nine days ago.
| JimDabell wrote:
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| The OpenAI saga was such an outlier in the usual news cycle,
| it is hard to use it as a measure of anything.
| subtra3t wrote:
| 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).
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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).
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Also, lots of OpenAI fans and venture capital/crypto people
| are still on Xitter. It's a special demography that makes
| it more an outlier.
| ImaCake wrote:
| 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.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Mastodon... lol. Is that even still alive? Are you gonna
| say that Threads is thriving as well?
| ImaCake wrote:
| The OP link is to a very much alive mastodon instance...
| so yes its doing fine. No idea about Threads but
| apparently some people use it.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| 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.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| 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
| rglullis wrote:
| Do you care about the channels used by the "main players"
| to broadcast their message, or where the _conversation
| about the events_ were happening?
| graphe wrote:
| Which niches have migrated? The only people that use
| mastodon hate Twitter/Elon if you count that as a niche,
| there are no notable groups on mastodon.
|
| Substack is significantly more threatening and interesting
| to Twitter.
| jansan wrote:
| What you are experiencing is a great example of confirmation
| bias.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I'm just glad to see the entire thread of conversation without
| having to switch to nitter or whatever.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Are you familiar with the libredirect plugin? It can
| automatically rewrite all twitter links to point at nitter
| instead.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| 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.
| georgehotelling wrote:
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| rainworld wrote:
| But it is a feature. Musk's takeover of BLUEBIRD is a
| deliberate act of transmutation, possibly even demolition.
| Aissen wrote:
| Pro-tip to those unused to mastodon web-ui: you can click the eye
| on the top right of the center column (next to Back) to expand
| all posts at once.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| How ironic, a post about a user interface disaster needing an
| explanatory pro-tip for its UI.
| Aissen wrote:
| Luckily, this one will have less dire consequences.
| dsego wrote:
| That's objectively terrible UX.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Maybe my expectations are very very low at this point. But I
| thought it was ok.
| metabagel wrote:
| At least there was no popup a few seconds after starting to
| read the article.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Does anyone know the reasoning for not having the posts
| expanded by default?
| neffo wrote:
| 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.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Wouldn't it be better handled by people following accounts
| they want to and unfollowing bad actors?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| How does this apply to a discussion about the logged out
| view?
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| It's hard for me to understand the advantages of this
| setup. Given the confusion in this thread, it's clearly
| poorly implemented.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| 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.
| isodev wrote:
| 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.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| 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?
| vkaku wrote:
| 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?
|
| 1 - https://news.clearancejobs.com/2023/03/13/lockheed-martin-
| wi...
| jansan wrote:
| I thought it was about Chrome's new sidebar by just reading the
| title.
| vkaku wrote:
| I actually had to Google what that looked like. It's been a
| while.
|
| Haha.
| jgilias wrote:
| The details are in the posted thread.
|
| Basically, heading and location came from one plane,
| identification from another plane, and altitude yet from
| another one for reasons.
| vkaku wrote:
| 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!)
| wruza wrote:
| Tl;dr
|
| - some friend/foe "cursor" was not locked to a jet trajectory
|
| - a fighter jet flew through it later, classifying it as a threat
|
| - dashboard shows no altitudes
|
| - identifier reuse led to invalid ascent/descent check
|
| - captain decided it's a classic attack profile
| squirrel23 wrote:
| 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.
| cies wrote:
| Very impactful mistake, but apparently not a mistake worth
| apologizing for.
|
| From Wikipedia: "the U.S. government did not admit legal
| liability or formally apologize to Iran"
|
| Pinnacle arrogance/exceptionalism. Disgusting.
|
| Oh, and the US back then supported Iraq in its horrific attack on
| Iran.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...
| gifvenut wrote:
| You forgot to mention that Ronald Reagan apologized to the
| Iranian government and the US paid $60 Mil in compensation to
| the families.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| 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.
| cies wrote:
| There also has been no apology for US' use of agent orange
| in Vietnam, nor has there been a payment of compensation.
|
| Why not formally apologize for such a fuck up (Iran
| aircraft), except for arrogance/exceptionalism?
| ben0x539 wrote:
| 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.
| sitkack wrote:
| The US is still pressuring Vietnam to "pay it back for
| the Vietnam war".
| badcppdev wrote:
| Interesting: " April 7, 1997
|
| 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. "
|
| https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/rr1587
| xkbarkar wrote:
| What a terrible platform to present an interesting story. What
| wrong with a good old fashioned article style blog ?
|
| I admit I am so turned off by the format I only made it hlf way
| throught the thread.
| lgrapenthin wrote:
| I gave up when I realized that I have to click on each "tweet"
| to read more
| athesyn wrote:
| the horror
| emsixteen wrote:
| Likewise.
|
| There is apparently an extremely unintuitive "Show more for
| all"[1] button at the top of the initial post.
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/5l15SM8.png
| degenerate wrote:
| 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.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| 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.
| brabel wrote:
| And when you try to scroll down with the keyboard, it moves a
| full "tweet" down so you can't actually read what you were
| trying to.
| subpixel wrote:
| User interface disaster indeed
| ImaCake wrote:
| 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.
| hoherd wrote:
| 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.
|
| I see no benefit to the added interactivity.
| Hamuko wrote:
| You made it further than I did, since the UI is absolutely
| horrendous after the first post.
|
| You can set up a blog on the Internet for free if you want to
| make longform content.
| pavo-etc wrote:
| Here is the thread unrolled:
|
| https://unroller.zachmanson.com/threads/https:/octodon.socia...
| moffkalast wrote:
| tl; dr: They had the wrong contact selected. That's it, that's
| the whole thing.
| dang wrote:
| " _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.)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| m463 wrote:
| 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)
|
| Just a mess. It makes you a worse driver.
| ksjskskskkk wrote:
| 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
| IanHalbwachs wrote:
| Thanks, you've just cured me of my Tesla envy entirely
| seb1204 wrote:
| I test drove a Hyundai ionic 6. All the levers and dials that
| had no use because they were set to 'Auto' made me appreciate
| my model 3 even more.
| noncoml wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/wipers-dont-work-
| pro...
|
| https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/v11-4-7-2023-7-30-a
| u...
|
| and so on..
|
| And that's just for the wipers.
| ImaCake wrote:
| 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?
| macintux wrote:
| Fortunately I bought my Jeep with a manual; as long as I know
| what gear I'm in, I know roughly how fast I'm driving by
| sound.
|
| But I'd be surprised if Jeep is the only example of this
| (outside Tesla). Surely this is the way all cars have been
| going for a while.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Things started going downhill when the physical controls
| became indistinguishable by touch.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| 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.
| smolder wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| outworlder wrote:
| > 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articl
| es/2010...
| thereddaikon wrote:
| None of this is a compelling argument for car OTA
| software updates.
| m463 wrote:
| Need car tires patched OTA!
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| Digital dashes have been a thing for a long, long time.
| They're objectively better in some ways (imho) and costs add
| up!
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| 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.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| 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).
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| A German professor of mine worked at BMW before grad
| school. He worked on the firmware of the tachometer.
|
| The behavior of the tachometer needle was dictated by the
| marketing department.
|
| A BMW engine accelerates smoothly and confidently. The
| tachometer needle never shakes, it rises smoothly and
| confidently.
| don-code wrote:
| This is wholly unsurprising to me - the tachometer on my
| BMW is audibly out of sync with the engine.
| mrpippy wrote:
| Is that the actual sound of the engine, or fake engine
| noise being generated through the speakers?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 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.
| alphager wrote:
| 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.
| hoseja wrote:
| What sort of "physical control" would be appropriate for a
| radar-guided beyond-visual-range anti-air missile?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/STAPLES-Staples-Easy-
| Button/dp/B001FV...
| kps wrote:
| "A left mouse push fires it. We actually asked for a great
| big red button, but they wouldn't give us one." (British
| submarine, not the top-level story UI) https://www.theguard
| ian.com/media/2003/jul/17/tvnews.iraqand...
| dun44 wrote:
| Typically two different jettison mechanisms, one with a
| dedicated "emergency jettison" pushbutton.
|
| Also a bunch of physical HOTAS controls, from four-way
| switches to the small joystick under pilot's left thumb.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The commander of the Vincennes actually had to turn at least
| one key to enable fire of the missile
| dav_Oz wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| More like we'll be deeply thankful for driverless trains.
| MobileVet wrote:
| This is on point.
|
| I purposely didn't buy a Tesla because I wanted to drive a car,
| not a toy.
|
| Are touch interfaces all bad? No, but in situations where heavy
| focus is required and the inputs are dynamically changing, they
| are a disaster.
| mavhc wrote:
| 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.
|
| Does voice control not work for defrost?
|
| I'd rather have a cheaper car with less parts
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
| withinboredom wrote:
| > 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.
| leetcrew wrote:
| > 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.
| withinboredom wrote:
| 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.
| leetcrew wrote:
| 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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.
| kqr wrote:
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 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.
| outworlder wrote:
| > 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.
| kqr wrote:
| > coyote time
|
| Great term! Hadn't heard that before but it's just the sort
| of thing I wish more interrupt-driven UI changes had.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 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.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| What do you mean when you say the train "should not have
| been there"?
| eadmund wrote:
| 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.'
| immibis wrote:
| they even call it X!
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > I wonder when a tesla will show up in a courtroom with a
| situation like this.
|
| Well in this situation no one went to prison, so I guess no
| reason to worry for Tesla either
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| > shifter? nope - it guesses what direction you want to go.
|
| I honestly thought you were making this up, or at the very
| least exaggerating. I can't believe it's true. It just makes no
| sense.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| Tesla have a habit of doing things that make no sense and
| making a success out of it regardless.
| immibis wrote:
| Capitalism has a habit of doing things that make no sense
| and making a success out of it regardless.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| 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.
| outworlder wrote:
| 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.
|
| The real life implementation is far stupider.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| I have a disaster storey to share about this.
|
| 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.
| outworlder wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >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.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| 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!
| gosub100 wrote:
| > 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!
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| gosub100 wrote:
| 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)
| steeve wrote:
| Thank you.
| grotorea wrote:
| 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...
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| spacecadet wrote:
| 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...
| immibis wrote:
| 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?
| marvin wrote:
| It's the place where both the audience and all the
| interesting authors are.
| dang wrote:
| " _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._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| (What _would_ be interesting is hearing more about the Aegis
| design team, if you want to share)
| spacecadet wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| cryptos wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| But it's about bad UI.
|
| Irony.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| Not reading your 20-post twitter vomit - just make a blog post
| dude.
| immibis wrote:
| In other good news, Mastodon is now so good a Twitter clone
| that you think it's Twitter.
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| until you try and follow or like the post and learn that the
| instance this was posted on has blocked your instance...
| immibis wrote:
| If it was Twitter, you'd be completely banned.
| bogantech wrote:
| People use the name Coke generically for cola too but it
| doesn't mean RC cola is any good
| shallmn wrote:
| The next greatest UI disaster being Mastodon on a smart phone.
| subroutine wrote:
| 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.
| astrobase_go wrote:
| I think your company is PSE, correct?
| smcl wrote:
| I think if they wanted to name the company they would have
| done so in the comment
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Or at least frame it in a more passive tone like "would you
| be comfortable disclaiming the name of the company where
| you work?"
| krisoft wrote:
| 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.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I don't want to know the company's name, but it's
| interesting to know the history of this event and how it
| came about.
|
| If people want to do sleuthing, have fun.
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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.
| jen729w wrote:
| Disagree. I sometimes have cause to comment here and
| obliquely reference my own project, without its name.
|
| Because its name isn't important to the context, and
| mentioning it seems gauche; I don't want to 'make the
| conversation about me'.
|
| It's _not_ because I really don't want anyone here to
| know about it: if that was the case, I would have kept my
| trap shut in the first place.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Same here. With all the detail provided it's not hard to
| figure out the company.
|
| Btw. You can vouch for comments that are marked dead to
| revive them.
| subroutine wrote:
| Indeed it is!
|
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The car of the best mechanic in town is usually drives a
| jalopy or the yard of the landscapers tends to be unkempt
| kind of a situation.
| skipants wrote:
| The cobbler's children have no shoes
| bostik wrote:
| The shoemaker's children have no feet.
| jayp1418 wrote:
| This is how every software UI should be designed as well.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Hopefully without people having to die first.
| 93po wrote:
| does the developer dying inside a little bit while making
| it count?
| dmix wrote:
| Fun fact the Captain of the Vincennes went to school for
| psychology and his father was a US Navy Psychologist in WW2.
| lostlogin wrote:
| 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?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_C._Rogers_III
| angiosperm wrote:
| 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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."
| waihtis wrote:
| 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.
| billbrown wrote:
| 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_.
| csours wrote:
| Convenience links:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Sources-Power-People-Make-
| Decisions/d...
|
| https://www.hpb.com/search?q=sources+of+power+klein&search-
| b...
| handy2000 wrote:
| Apologies for hijacking the conversation. Would you be able
| to recommend any reading specifically on complex UI for
| critical operations?
| kqr wrote:
| It's probably not what you are looking for but the DoD
| _Design Criteria for Human Engineering_ are pretty good.
| jonah wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
| subroutine wrote:
| Indeed a seminal work. Don is also at UCSD, and is a
| founder of the UCSD Design Lab.
|
| https://designlab.ucsd.edu/
| sizzle wrote:
| He retired (finally!) I believe. And indeed it is a
| seminal written work, User Centered Systems Design.. what
| a clever title!
| vigormortis wrote:
| 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.
|
| Anyway, here are the links:
|
| This is the introduction and table of contents:
|
| https://hci.ucsd.edu/hutchins/citw.html
|
| Amazon link
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Wild-Bradford-Edwin-
| Hutchin...
| dylan604 wrote:
| >"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.
| cameldrv wrote:
| 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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.
| sizzle wrote:
| 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?
| rbanffy wrote:
| > our new CEO is a former Captain of the USS Zumwalt.
|
| Wait! Wasn't the last captain of the Zumwalt called James Kirk?
| pesfandiar wrote:
| 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.
| subroutine wrote:
| 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.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Yes precisely, and (to GP) that's software and UX design.
| Not comparing with, it's that exact thing (in that case)
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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.
| angiosperm wrote:
| 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.)
| HFguy wrote:
| Aegis is a particular system. Not a generic term for
| these systems. I don't believe UK ships used it.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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.
| cutemonster wrote:
| I wonder what "jobs that hurt or kill regardless" you have in
| mind
| khazhoux wrote:
| * I'm stressed from working at a game studio --> but no one
| will die
|
| * I'm stressed from working on avionics or medical
| software, or designing bridges/etc --> someone may die if I
| make a mistake
|
| * I'm stressed from working as a firefighter or police
| officer --> someone (or myself) may die even if I don't
| make any mistakes
| pesfandiar wrote:
| Anything to do with "defense" industry
| simne wrote:
| Greetings from Ukraine, country at war.
|
| 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.
| d3w4s9 wrote:
| Sarcastically, on a mobile phone, a persistent sidebar takes up
| valuable space from the content. Somehow Mastodon thinks this is
| good UI.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| vitiral wrote:
| 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.
| jakobnissen wrote:
| 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.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Another good write up of this incident is on the excellent
| Admiral Cloudberg blog:
|
| https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t...
|
| 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.
|
| https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...
|
| 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?
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| The tragic AF447 flight comes up somewhat regularly on the site
| -- see this recent conversation [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089363
| dredmorbius wrote:
| CFIT is a particularly spectacular form of failure.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain
| >
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| 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.
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yes, but then no one would consider the feedback to be the
| equivalent of a mechanically linked system, like what
| Boeing uses.
| masklinn wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| The moment one pilot does tug hard on the stick though,
| then the same problem is still there.
|
| So it will work most of the time except when you really
| need to, when the other pilot is panicking and won't
| provide accurate answers.
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| 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
| sign you need to more deeply study the issue.
| hn8305823 wrote:
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Cirrus SR-22
|
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| ...it's a spring and a servo. Or a brushless motor.
|
| https://github.com/scottbez1/smartknob
|
| ...or any not-bottom-end-of-market steering wheel for driving
| video games.
| outworlder wrote:
| 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?
|
| Yeah, good luck jury rigging some servos.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > It's not something that can be changed on airbus cockpits
|
| You'd need to run cables between them and redesign the sticks
| to have mechanical hooks, and it'd be a very ugly hack, but
| it's hardly impossible.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Impossible for it to still be viable for a commercial
| airliner competing on costs, especially long term upkeep
| costs.
|
| Not impossible for an unlimited budget.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| masklinn wrote:
| 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.
| cco wrote:
| 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.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| is there really no mechanical connection between the stick
| and the control surfaces on an airbus? that seems really
| dangerous.
| jaywalk wrote:
| 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.
| cesarb wrote:
| > 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).
| f1shy wrote:
| Yes it is true. The force needed is pretty high.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Which accident was that? Thanks!
| immibis wrote:
| Don't remember, sorry.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| 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.
| Lt_Riza_Hawkeye wrote:
| 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
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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.
| quench wrote:
| >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
|
| Air France seemed to manage ithttps://www.avweb.com/aviation-
| news/air-france-crew-fought-e...
|
| Also glad to see that airbus are planning to put force feedback
| side-sticks in future.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > Air France seemed to manage it [on a Boeing]
|
| 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.
| masklinn wrote:
| 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_.
| moritz64 wrote:
| A quite recent UX disaster at Paypal.
|
| 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.
|
| Thoughtful design matters!
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| 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
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Then there's microwaves and other timers.
|
| Punching in "99" will run much longer than "100".
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm adding a tangent to a tangent, but "POS terminals" has to
| be one of the greatest naming decisions in history.
| jpc0 wrote:
| I couldn't agree more.
| _giorgio_ wrote:
| Always felt wrong. Now it's even more wrong.
| gosub100 wrote:
| 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?
| constantly wrote:
| 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.
|
| Can you explain?
| ipqk wrote:
| Because lots of people send mostly whole numbers to friends
| and family. If I want to send $5 instead of typing "5" I now
| have to type "500"
| paledot wrote:
| 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: $ $1 $12
| $12. $12.3 $12.34
| timenova wrote:
| 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!
| Findecanor wrote:
| 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.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Out of all places, Bank of America actually does this right.
| Any large wire transfer requires re-entering your credentials.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| 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.
| eadmund wrote:
| >> 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 1/2. Or between little- and big-endian by
| choosing middle-endian.
| SamBam wrote:
| 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.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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!
| upofadown wrote:
| Admiral Cloudberg has a detailed discussion of the incident,
| including the user interface behaviour:
|
| * https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t...
|
| 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.
| century19 wrote:
| If I remember correctly, the Lockerbie / Pan Am attack was in
| response to this.
| swader999 wrote:
| Ironic that a decent article about UX is splattered across a
| bunch of Twitter posts.
| smcl wrote:
| > 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the moment, it's really hard to step back and ask yourself
| "Does this make any sense?" when you're primed to react in some
| particular way.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Especially with an element of "I might personally get blown
| up" involved.
| graphe wrote:
| Yet the Cuban missile crisis with the stake of the entire
| world didn't escalate.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| There were some close calls during the Cold War. https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
| graphe wrote:
| For some reason I mixed this with the Cuban missile
| crisis, I thought it had something to do with it.
| cozzyd wrote:
| My favorite is https://blog.ucsusa.org/david-wright/the-
| moon-and-nuclear-wa...
| Merad wrote:
| 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.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Ave
| rted_n...
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov
| ghaff wrote:
| And my understanding is the US military leadership was
| generally in favor of attacking Cuba not knowing there
| were already nuclear warheads there.
| rbanffy wrote:
| With proper training, that should be irrelevant.
|
| They probably had second thoughts, but they got
| confirmation that contact 4474 was descending rapidly.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| angiosperm wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| > 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.
| outworlder wrote:
| > In this situation the idea that Iran would launch a fighter
| against them is not that wild.
|
| Why would they launch _a single_ fighter to attack a warship?
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| gpderetta wrote:
| 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...
| krisoft wrote:
| > Does scrambling a single fighter ever happen, don't
| they always fly in pairs?
|
| The USS Stark was hit by missiles from a single aircraft
| just a year before the incident in question. So no, they
| don't always fly in pairs.
| 8372049 wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| A single F-14 which only barely can even attack a surface
| vessel! It didn't have an anti-ship missile!
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| 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.
| blobcode wrote:
| 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.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Yup. Some quick googling shows F-14 had LANTIRN pods added
| and upgraded software to support smart bombs in the
| mid-90s.
|
| All models appear to completely lack the necessary software
| and hardware to use self-guided ground-attack weapons.
|
| A hefty unguided bomb would be possible, but a WW2 dive
| bomber would have better accuracy. You're probably better
| off using the gun.
|
| With a lot of luck, you could mission-kill a frigate. Radar
| arrays don't like to be rapidly disassembled.
| toss1 wrote:
| ... 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".
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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!
| wavemode wrote:
| "So... the fighter was in range of your missiles."
|
| "Yep."
|
| "And rapidly diving directly toward your fleet."
|
| "Mmhmm."
|
| "But you didn't fire on it? Why not?"
|
| "Well, it was an F-14, you see. Doesn't possess anti-ship
| missiles."
|
| "Yes... that's precisely the sort of tactical advantage
| you were put there to exploit."
|
| "Wouldn't have been sporting."
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I happen to agree with you. I was just speculating what
| could have been done.
|
| I have had to make decisions under stress. If I had been
| in the captain's chair, I absolutely would have fired.
|
| A verified enemy plane diving towards my ship in an
| active war zone?
|
| If I had been thinking at all, I'd be thinking about the
| British losing a ship in the Falklands just 6 years ago.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Probably I would as well.
|
| Then again there is a reason I'm not a navy captain with
| copious amounts of missiles under my control.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| 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.
| leetcrew wrote:
| 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.
| wil421 wrote:
| Iraq attacked the USS Stark a year before. They used a business
| jet with an Exocet missile attached to it. This was by mistake
| but it still happened.
|
| A single plane shooting down a ship is not unheard of but the
| US has done it in pairs to the whole Iran navy.
| sillywalk wrote:
| I thought it was an F-1 Mirage?
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| "Captain, why where you derelict in your duty to protect your
| ship and crew?"
|
| "Well, I just thought a single F-14 was probably not that big
| of a deal."
| snakeyjake wrote:
| >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.
| Nition wrote:
| It sounds like the real pro strat for an attack would have been
| to launch a single F-14 with a commercial jet taking off right
| up close behind you.
|
| "Sure that plane looks like it's moving fast and diving
| straight towards us, but it's just an Airbus A300."
| sillywalk wrote:
| 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._ "
|
| ...
|
| [1] https://www.newsweek.com/sea-lies-200118
|
| [2]
| https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1993/august/vince...
|
| [3]
| https://archive.org/details/FormalInvestigationintotheCircum...
| cutemonster wrote:
| And, from your [2]:
|
| > _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-dub wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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?
| Angostura wrote:
| Yes it's Mastodon, designed for short posts. I doubt anyone is
| measuring engagement
| Ndymium wrote:
| This can be configured in the instance settings and I've seen
| some support up to 5000 characters.
| nottorp wrote:
| Well if 1 line is the default, it leaves a bad taste. There
| was no need to clone twitter.
| architect01 wrote:
| 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"
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] https://blog.prototypr.io/dangerous-drop-
| downs-%EF%B8%8Fbad-...
|
| [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_al..
| .
| throw555chip wrote:
| It's important to note there are misrepresentations in the
| Wikipedia article:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
|
| For the most truthful view of what happened that day:
|
| https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Air-flight-655
| aristofun wrote:
| It's not a ui problem per se.
|
| it is a problem of shitty developers responsible for critical
| decisions.
|
| Unfortunately they are everywhere.
|
| Every a little bit advanced internet user face the pain 12 times
| a day.
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| "I hope it's not a civilian flight" -- low ranking guy in the CIC
| who was ignored.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Is this related to Reagan firing over 11 thousand air traffic
| controllers?
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > every large aircraft in the world is equipped with a device
| called an IFF -- "identification friend or foe."
|
| This is weird, I'm sure I don't have all the facts. In a
| conflict, why would a military aircraft ever want to identify
| itself?
| proaralyst wrote:
| So you don't get shot down by your own air defense
| monetus wrote:
| - as demonstrated by more than one aircraft since the war in
| Ukraine began.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| 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.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| 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.
| gpderetta wrote:
| > spoof a valid "friend" IFF
|
| Tricking an enemy plane to respond seems "fair", but
| would a plane disguising itself as friendly count as
| perfidy?
| simne wrote:
| 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.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| More interestingly why not fake it and claim to be civilian?
|
| Logically speaking:
|
| - no identification: risk being shot down by both sides
|
| - correct identification: risk being shot down by the enemy
|
| - fake civilian identification: no risk of being shot down?
| Armisael16 wrote:
| It's a war crime. If you start doing it the other side won't
| shoot at nothing - they'll shoot at everything, civilians
| included.
| ls612 wrote:
| It's only a war crime if you lose.
| rightbyte wrote:
| 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.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Civilian flights get recorded from takeoff to landing. If you
| start pulling this stunt a lot, you'll get caught really
| quickly.
| outworlder wrote:
| 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.
| singingboyo wrote:
| 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.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| The quote is from the 2nd or 3rd post in the thread. The ui
| is pretty bad so it's not obvious at first that it is a
| thread.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| 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.
| function_seven wrote:
| I immediately thought of RFC-3514.
|
| https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| 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.
| edrxty wrote:
| 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.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| 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.
| digging wrote:
| This event was not officially described as a user interface
| error, though.
| thr0w__4w4y wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse470/Public/Handouts/Therac/Side_...
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