The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
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octodon.social
The two original founders recently retired and our new CEO is a former Captain 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.
If people want to do sleuthing, have fun.
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.
Btw. You can vouch for comments that are marked dead to revive them.
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.
Is having that guy train people genius, or moronic?
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.
The best quote I've ever heard on the subject is "the Navy doesn't have hospitals for careers. It has leper colonies."
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...
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.
I wonder if they would update the theory of “distributed cognition” in an AI ChatGPT Turing complete world with ubiquitous computing. Thoughts?
Wait! Wasn't the last captain of the Zumwalt called James Kirk?
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.)
Attributing the failure to avoid the Exocets to "mis-operation of the aegis system" is pure speculation AFAIK, unless you have evidence that that was the cause?
* 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
"hurt or kill regardless"
which to me sounds like "someone always die" (not "may die"),
which isn't supposed to be the case when firefighters or police are working.
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?
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 common mistake.
Even with the most ideal deployment scenario, assuming it does get widely deployed one day, the real world performance reliability will likely not get anywhere near six sigma, let alone 100%.
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.
https://github.com/scottbez1/smartknob
...or any not-bottom-end-of-market steering wheel for driving video games.
Yeah, good luck jury rigging some servos.
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.
Not impossible for an unlimited budget.
The hack itself would be a small detail line on the overall budget for the changes.
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.
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.
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).
a system which gives feedback there's a problem intuitively seems
better than one which doesn't.
Look at the Sriwijaya Air 737 crash (among others). Even with the throttle levers showing wildly asymmetrical thrust, when the automation gave up the pilots didn't notice, didn't react properly, and crashed the plane.
I see no reason the intuition here isn't correct: it's better to know about this problem when flying than to not know about it. Stories about throttles or automation are a distraction from what we're talking about: mechanically linked sticks.
On that note (back on topic), I still couldn't find any evidence of the crash mentioned above, but maybe I'm just searching wrong. Does anybody know about this crash supposedly caused by Boeing sticks being mechanically linked?
If you're going to double down on the idea that somehow feedback in a control column is a wildly different affair than feedback in the throttle quadrant, Air France recently had a go around where the two pilots provided opposing inputs without realizing it. The inputs were forceful enough to un-synchronize the controls, so yeah, physical feedback is less helpful than one's intuition suggests.
With Air France 447, there should've been an annunciator that conflicting input was being provided (as well as the ability to lock out one set of controls).
However, when you're task saturated it doesn't matter what you're flying — there are plenty of things you're going to miss. Were there strong benefits to feedback (or lack thereof) on FBW controls there would be some sort of mandate from the FAA or EASA one way or another.
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.
because Boeings don’t normally autotrim
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.
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.
On an Airbus this would trigger a "dual input" annunciator, and there's a "priority takeover" button that would lock out one set of controls.
On the Boeing once the torque tube splits each yoke controls one side of the aircraft.
The synchronization and feedback intuitively seem like a good idea, but the reality is that at the point where you need to notice that the other pilot is doing something wrong you're already up shit creek and you're no more likely to notice an increase in force required to move the yoke than you are an annunciator. Linked controls aren't a substitute for CRM.
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.
A contributing factor in the crash of Air France Flight 447 was that Airbus aircraft average the inputs of the two pilots side-stick flight controls (as oppose to Boeing, which connects the two yokes so you can't move one without moving the other). At various points leading up to the crash one pilot understood the situation and was applying the correct input to resolve the issue, but the other pilot was doing the opposite and canceled out the correct input. While there was an audible warning about the conflicting inputs, it was easily lost in the chaos of the moment.
Hundreds of millions perhaps, but even a brand new nuclear aircraft carrier only costs ~13 billion.
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.
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.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Averted_n...
They probably had second thoughts, but they got confirmation that contact 4474 was descending rapidly.
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.
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.
Why would they launch a single fighter to attack a warship?
Of course they might have known that their ability to properly identify the threat was limited, but that raises even more questions...
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.
> All 290 on-board including 16 crew perished. At the time of the incident, Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters and engaged in small arms combat with several Iranian surface craft
Did you miss that bit?
I mean in that context, with the guy stumbling into Iranian waters and shooting at some of their boats it makes more sense that he'd be worried about an attack. But that just makes the situation even stupider and more avoidable in my opinion.
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.
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".
The F-14 is not an attack aircraft! It was designed to intercept incoming air threats and bombers!
"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."
"So you got a radar track squaking civillian"
"Yup"
"And it never made any search or track radar emissions"
"Yup"
"And it was climbing out of the area, and despite all your instruments showing it continuing to climb, you all asserted it was diving for an attack run"
"Right"
"And instead of trying to further deconflict, or ask any of the other local navy vessels their interpretation, or just take a risk and accept that as a member of the military sometimes your job is to stand up in the line of fire, you decided that this was definitely an F-14 interceptor, being used to attack an AEGIS vessel whose intended design is to protect an american aircraft carrier from 20 simultaneous incoming Soviet antiship missiles, and was definitely a threat to said vessel"
"Yup"
"And now 290 innocent people are dead"
The captain of the Vincennes also claims they were in "hot pursuit" of a small Iranian gunboat in "self defense" at the time, and was noted by superiors as regularly going beyond his Rules of Engagement in training activities. He had a chip on his shoulder and clearly made up his mind about what he was going to do to that plane well before he had any indication it was a threat. A nearby vessel that was datalinked (ie, was hooked into the same battlefield map and signals) very quickly and clearly concluded it was a civilian flight. Capt Rogers convinced himself otherwise.
All I was saying was that the fact that an F-14 doesn't generally carry anti-ship missiles, is irrelevant to the mission of an anti-air cruiser.
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.
Then again there is a reason I'm not a navy captain with copious amounts of missiles under my control.
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.
given that context, it doesn't seem wild to take an Iranian plane as a serious threat.
A single plane shooting down a ship is not unheard of but the US has done it in pairs to the whole Iran navy.
"Well, I just thought a single F-14 was probably not that big of a deal."
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.
"Sure that plane looks like it's moving fast and diving straight towards us, but it's just an Airbus A300."
- 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...
> 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
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t...
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!
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
Punching in “99” will run much longer than “100”.
Can you explain?
$_.__
$_._1
$_.12
$1.23
$12.34
$
$1
$12
$12.
$12.3
$12.34Plus, 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!
> 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 ½. Or between little- and big-endian by choosing middle-endian.
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.
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!
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.
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
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-au...
and so on..
And that's just for the wipers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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/articles/2010...
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.
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.
Also a bunch of physical HOTAS controls, from four-way switches to the small joystick under pilot's left thumb.
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.
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
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.
not only is it on the touchscreen, it doesn't have a dedicated location, is hard to locate visually, then hard to hard to actually press (small target), all in a moving car and without affecting other controls.
also, turn on cabin lights? flash headlights off and on? sigh.
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.
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.
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.
I was incredibly lucky that day, there is no doubt about it, but, I also did a lot of insane driving during that point in my life. I knew how to handle that car in a variety of conditions from rain, gravel, snow, and ice and any mix of them.
Did I make the right decisions during those fleeting seconds? Possibly, possibly not. One thing I did have, was options. Options are something that has been taken away over the years through weird UX choices.
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.
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.
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.
Great term! Hadn't heard that before but it's just the sort of thing I wish more interrupt-driven UI changes had.
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.
Well in this situation no one went to prison, so I guess no reason to worry for Tesla either
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.
Who would want their TV to spy on them? Who would want an app with nag after nag after nag? businesses want it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Tesla will refuse to go in to gear for genuine reasons, such as:
- refuses forward/reverse if the car is moving too fast in opposite direction
- refuses forward/reverse if the car just turned on and foot isn't on brake
The vast majority are when I'm in a rush, I get in sometimes have to press the stalk about 4 times (in 2 seconds) for drive. It could be because my seatbelt isn't on yet, or the car needs a small amount or time to boot up. To be fair I'm moving off faster (even pressing the stalk down a few times) than my ICE car, and Tesla adding the Chimes really helped.
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!
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.
the steering wheel buttons move depending on which way you are steering.
maybe not a big deal when the radio volume is wrong when backing up.
Critical when you need to use the horn when backing out of a parking space.
One side of the steering wheel has buttons for driving functions: cruise control, following distance, lane assist, etc. The other side has audio controls for radio channel selection and volume, voice input, start/end phone call, and a customizable button that I set to record a voice memo.
Behind the wheel are a pair of regenerative braking paddles that work much like the paddle shifters on some gas cars: left paddle increases regen, right paddle decreases it. That left button comes in handy on the rare occasion when I may want to slow down in a hurry without lighting up the brake lights. (I will leave it to the reader to speculate on why I may want to do that) The drive mode button (eco/standard/sport/winter) is below the horn button.
Two stalks for headlight/turn signal/etc. and wiper/washer control.
Dual screens: one in front of the driver with driving info: speed and speed limit, how much battery you're using or regening, etc. A touchscreen in the center for infotainment stuff.
Below the center screen is a dual mode touch panel for climate controls or radio/map/nav controls. I just leave this in climate mode. Physical knobs at each end of this panel that change roles for the two modes. The left side of this panel has front/rear defrost, recirculation, and auto climate which remain there in both modes.
The center console has physical buttons to turn the EV on or off, a physical R/N/D knob, and physical buttons for parking camera/auto parking and a couple of related features.
At the front of the center console are dedicated buttons for driver/passenger seat heating/ventilation and steering wheel heat. Oddly, these are touch buttons in my GT-Line but physical buttons (better!) in the lower-end Wind trim. In Australia the GT-Line keeps the physical buttons here.
Behind the steering wheel next to the door are physical buttons for panel illumination level, charge door and rear hatch opening, and a couple of other things.
The driver door has traditional buttons for mirror adjustment, lock/unlock, windows, and child lock.
After driving gas cars all my life, the first time I got in an EV6 it felt very comfortable, like a real car and not a science experiment.
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).
Not sure what you’re referring to with “the destruction of libraries”, but all of the others happened more than ten years ago.
I am personally pretty excited to see this diversification and fragmentation as it should help provide more niches for more people.
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
Substack is significantly more threatening and interesting to Twitter.
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...
Haha.
Basically, heading and location came from one plane, identification from another plane, and altitude yet from another one for reasons.
* 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.
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.
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?
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.
Tricking an enemy plane to respond seems "fair", but would a plane disguising itself as friendly count as perfidy?
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.
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?
Pretending to not be the enemy will get you close before the enemy realizes and everybody loses.
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.
Military IFF transponders don't emit unless they get interrogated by a valid code, and then only briefly.
The interrogating plane would typically only interrogate if you show up as a radar contact, and at that point, being able to say "I'm friendly" is very useful. You're not hidden anyway.
Note that the name "Identification Friend or Foe" is misleading; IFF can only positively identify friendlies. A nonresponsive bogey (unknown) may still be a friendly with bent IFF, wrong codes, etc.
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.
Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic about terms of war in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, war in Ukraine looks not like war of one country against another country, but this war like Democracy and free market against Communism.
And rumors said, military support for Russia from North Korea is larger, than support for Ukraine from US.
Just now military power of Ukraine is near to equal to Russian, but this is not sufficient to return occupied Ukrainian territories in some overseen time. I'm not sure, if we could afford Korean variant of large part of country sacrificed to communists to end war, because Russia will not stop there, they want to occupy territories of other countries - Poland, Baltic states.
So, we working hard, to make Ukrainian military more powerful with new technologies. All possible to save people lives. And yes, we use robotic units at real war, but their intelligence extremely limited, even GPT-3 is too resource demand to be useful, only image recognition technology now is practical at field.
Certainly China is funding NK support. So they use NK to covertly provide military support to Russia while they front as the "good guys" that support "peace" and only provide economical support to Russia.
I hope, we will end this war before AGI appear.
If my country was being attacked and America gave us weapons to fight back I'd also say "god bless America" even though I don't believe in god and I'm very aware of all attrocities America has committed in wars across the globe(and still does). Is that so hard to imagine?
>>Not very different from Russia to me.
Did you think about this sentence for more than 2 seconds before you typed it?
So was it really hard for him to put himself in the shoes of the people to whom America did what Russia is doing to his country? I guess being in the same situation would make him to better empathize with these peoples. But maybe not.
> If my country was being attacked and America gave us weapons to fight back I'd also say "god bless America" even though I don't believe in god and I'm very aware of all attrocities America has committed in wars across the globe(and still does). Is that so hard to imagine?
I don't know. What would you think if some random Syrian guy wrote "God bless Russia" in a post talking about the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 which was, allegedly, shot sown by Russian forces in the Dombass?
I've literally addressed it. These two are not mutually exclusive. I'm going to be thankful to the country giving me weapons to fight my invader, even if that country is a scumbag too. That shouldn't be difficult concept to grasp. Do you think Ukraine should be like "uhm no thanks US, we don't want your missiles, we're good". What country under active invasion would do that??
>>What would you think if some random Syrian guy wrote "God bless Russia" in a post talking about the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 which was, allegedly, shot sown by Russian forces in the Dombass?
I have no idea, because I don't see how that's related.
Unfortunately, some important things have not done by Ukraine, some have not done by West, and now we have this huge mess.
[1] https://blog.prototypr.io/dangerous-drop-downs-%EF%B8%8Fbad-...
[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_al...
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
Unless the transponder is bent, M4 is badly updated for some reason, etc. etc. Better do a RAYGUN call or ask AEW&E to declare.
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.
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.
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.
> 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,
So in the design phase that should come up as an issue and you would surely use 5 digit numbers
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".
> 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
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
Irony.
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."
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/25/us/crew-of-cruiser-that-d...
I also would abstain from using "russians" (or USAers, or Israelis) when referring to actions of the respective govts. Keeps the discussion cleaner of generalizations wrt people that may totally not support their govt's actions.
The RF forces sieged Mariopol like a medieval city at the start of the war, creating large scale suffering. Afaik there was no water or power and people were melting ice for water.
The civilian casualties on the Ukraine war are at least 100,000+ maybe a multiple of that number.
Independent sources put it at 100,000+. I've randomly read 2x to 3x that but 100k+ is bad enough.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/ir...
However, these are adults only, because children deaths are not counted at that time. With school-age children, for which records are stored, number raises to 10.5 million. Number of under school age children died because of artificial hunger in 1932-1934 is still unknown.
I hope, this will help to calculate number of deaths in Iraq.
It won't and there is not reason to think it will. It was a completely different situation. So keep your hopes to yourself.
Russia is doing textbook genocide by "reeducating" ukrainians childrens: https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15395.doc.htm
> Russian Federation agents have taken at least 19,546 children to that country from Ukraine since 18 February 2022. Among other violations, Russian Federation citizenship is imposed on them, and they are forbidden to speak and learn the Ukrainian language or preserve their Ukrainian identity
This war --as bad as it is-- is nothing close to some of the worst wars we've seen in the last 100 years.
Stealing children actually meets the definition of genocide.
The relatively low civilian casualty count isn't because "Russians are so noble", but because:
1. Frontlines are static, giving civilians plenty of time to evacuate
2. Civilians actually have where to evacuate, Ukraine is big and covered by an extremely dense air defense network. Women and children can also freely go to the EU.
3. Ukraine has received an unprecedented amount of humanitarian aid.
[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/ublj5l/luhan...
> The relatively low civilian casualty count isn't because "Russians are so noble"
I was not arguing their nobility, I was saying the word genocide may have been to easily used in Ukraine's case.
Genocide does not need numbers, genocide is defined in international law and that definition has to be met. It's currently being investigated by a number of organizations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_of_Ukr...
But maybe those millions of people were also not a "real genocide".
And the Jews should also calm down when people start shouting Heil Hitler.
Or the blacks when people start talking about lynchings.
At any rate, whether it is or isn't "genocide" or whether it is or isn't "low on civ casualties" isn't important. It's a stupid invasion and every single casualty is a murder. Whether you want to classify this as "genocide" is a mostly unimportant semantic matter that distracts from the real issue.
Anders Puck Nielsen just made a good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9n77DPJ7AE
Thus resulting a lot of civ casualties. If it's genocide is for ever up to debate. Civ casualties are usually not that debatable. Without a large number (%) of civ deaths in some place there cannot be a genocide.
For the most part "mass murder" and "genocide" have a lot of overlap. But it's not the same crime.
2) Number of civilian causalities is unknown, because part of territory is under occupation. However, excavation of mass-graves on liberated territories shows that Russians are ready to kill few percents of population. [2]
3) Ukrainian air defense is in much better shape now, so hundreds of Russians missiles are shot in flight. Russians are bombing civilians in cities with cassette bombs from the start of war[3], so low numbers of causalities is caused by good defense, not by good will of terrorist state which performs genocide of Ukrainians right now.
[1]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20221118IP...
[2]: https://www.space.com/ukraine-mass-grave-bucha-satellite-pho...
[3]: https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2023/02/21/deat...
Ukraine is NOT using its population as human shields. There is no evidence of that. So every civil casualties that Russian inflicts on Ukrainians (which includes destroying infrastructure, sieging cities and deporting children, among other things like what happened in Butcha) is deliberate.
Nonetheless, I do find the claim they are using human shields as interesting. Whatever you think of Hamas' aims and methods (and I strongly disapprove of both), Palestinians engaged in conflict are by necessity fighting a guerrilla war against an occupying power. No, Israel is not in direct control of Gaza -- but it does have the capacity to use overwhelming force against any part of it, so it might as well be for the purposes of fighting a war.
Let's assume we are not pacifists and we think armed struggle is _sometimes_ justified (as do both the US and Israel). From the perspective of someone who viewed the establishment of Israel as illegitimate, and the occupation of Gaza unlawful, and Israel's action in Gaza and the West Bank as immoral, what would be the right course of action here?
From that perspective it might seem reasonable to plan and carry out sabotage against Israeli forces (I know that is not all Hamas have done -- they have also murdered civilians, but this is irrelevant to this argument).
There were many resistance movements in the 20th century that are now approved-of by Israel and allies. Was it illegitimate for French resistance fighters (for example) to plan attacks from civilian villages and hide weapons in farmhouses etc? This accusation of using human shields (which predates the current conflict) sometimes strikes me is part of a process to 'other' the Palestinian cause and render it a priori illegitimate, which does't help anyone.
Edit: I recognise this post could upset some people at the moment. It's really not my intention. It's posed as a genuine question and something for us all to reflect on. I might be wrong/misguided but interested to discuss.
All politicians leaders of Palestinian people have eventually refused a 2-states solution. Israël does recognize a few groups as valid diplomatic partners but not Hamas, who is in charge right now. And yes that will lead to a lot of harsh suffering for Palestinian people, partly/mostly because of the way Hamas has handled things.
Note that I'm not downplaying what Israël has done in the region so far, and I'm not giving them excuses ; they do what they think is best for their security, rightfully or wrongfully, given that their neighbour is lead by a terrorist group. I'm not sure how I would react as a civilian or a leader of either country and I would certainly not advise anything to anyone. But clearly Hamas is the agressor just like Russia is the agressor in Ukraine (and both have intention of destroying not only the state but also the people).
That is, if and when Hamas is eradicated, which is a big if. A war with Iran isn't out of the question. Thing is Hamas represents like 35% of votes ? It's both a lot and very little. Maybe 10% of those 35% would actually be ok to take an assault weapon and resist. Meaning the vast majority would probably be ok to negotiate even a mediocre deal but owning their land and borders ? Can we even make a forecast like this ?
Edit : Bottom line, Palestinians will obviously and sadly be in a terrible position to negotiate, if and when that happens...
You need far fewer than 10% if a population to cause havoc for decades to come. I’m not condoning it, but the reality is that unless settlements are moved and Israel takes some bitter medicine this will reoccur in 10 years time when the next round of radicalised people come of age.
Remember, Netanyahu had been actively using Hamas as a way to divide the Palestinians and make 2 state solution less likely. the approach of Israel over the past 20 years doesn’t make the attacks right or justify them, but it made them more likely because it has humiliated a large enough population living very close to them and left them with no other effective options beyond nonviolent resistance. I wish they had chosen that, but it’s easier to say than live with.
It does however have a complete blockade on Gaza, and has done for decades. It also has control over a signifiant amount of territory inside the wall -- get too close and you get shot.
Gaza is on the sea, but you can't import water, fuel, food etc from the sea because Israel will sink any boat trying to.
Fairly certain Hamas wasn't the one who shoved 2.5 million people in a tiny location with no way out.
https://twitter.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/171364155785989337...
I've so far only seen acquisitions of Hamas using human shields. One could argue the hostages are humans shields, but (a) IDF bombs Gaza regardless, (b) they are not prominently shown (as the IDF documentedly did), and (c) at least some of them survived and were traded for palestinians (that were often held without trial, so could we call them "hostages" as well?).
Vincennes did not (which to be fair should have done - and not excusing their actions here)
Wasn't this in Iranian territorial waters. I don't quite see how that held up as a justification for the retaliations.
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.
I image "UX error" wouldn't cut it if a chinese missile cruiser shot down an US airliner while steaming up the Hudson.
>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.
Iran doesn't own the PERSIAN gulf any more than India owns the INDIAN ocean.
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
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).
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).
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.”
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)
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.
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
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.
It's as if Iran had their navy parked on the US east coast, it would be seen as an outrage immediately.
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.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention_Regarding_...
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Elizabeth-class_aircraft...
Now that you write that it makes sense why they would send only two ships and not move the group around there.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-confiscates-ira...
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...
Absolutely same thing happen at Persian Gulf, allies asked for support from US and help arrived.
The world would be a better place if you stayed at home.
One of its most notable events was the burning of a trade union building by self-proclaimed neo-Nazis. When fascists kill trade unionists and then end up part of the army, it tends to be a coup.
In reality, crime gangs supported by Russians, first tried to use firearms on maidan, and also had large supply of flammable fluid.
But when feel resistance, these gangs tried to hide in trade union building with those flammable fluid barrels, and just accidentally burned themselves, and maidan activists tried to rescue ALL people when burning happen.
Only propagandist sources could consider trade unions storing flammable fluid barrels in building full of people, when unrest happen.
Americans’ obsession with Russia is quite the thing. There are other countries out there where disagree with you without being pro-Russian.
As if that makes your comment any more true. These comments are based on facts. Just because they support NATO doesn't mean that they are false. Your comment, unlike imaginary 'NATO propaganda', is completely divorced from reality and full of lies.
> Americans’ obsession with Russia is quite the thing.
Why did you assume that I'm American? I'm Ukrainian and know the history of my country better that some pro-russian stranger on the internet. And the 'obsession' is completely justified when russia keeps commiting war crimes, destroying cities and massacring civillians.
> There are other countries out there where disagree with you without being pro-Russian.
Disagreeing with US' actions is one thing, supporting russia is another. Your comment is clearly the latter.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s declassified documents from the USSR. If you don’t want to believe them in your support for the USSR, who are we supposed to believe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007#So...
> 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.
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.
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.
We have to deal with the facts and reality as it exists, not as it "could have been" in a reality that does not exist.
And in the reality that exists, the US acted with infinite more grace and compassion than the Soviet Union. They found the wrecking and kept it a secret for years. I find it extremely unlikely the US would do anything like that in any circumstances even remotely similar.
> is that worse than the US fucking up by being so close (arguably intruding) another country space
It's not so much about that they messed up, but how they dealt with it. Do you accept responsibility and take action to prevent it in the future, or do you lie and cheat and do everything you can to weasel your way out of responsibility?
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.
To be honest, the persistent blind contrarianism of this community is really tiring.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007#So...
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.
Look up “mass control hypnosis” if you’ve never heard the term.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_International_Airlines...
Looking at the details of that Korean Air flight: "the Soviet Union initially denied knowledge of the incident, but later admitted to shooting down the aircraft, claiming that it was on a MASINT spy mission." That's not the same at all. Never mind "The Soviet Union found the wreckage under the sea two weeks later on September 15 and found the flight recorders in October, but this information was kept secret by the Soviet authorities until 1992, after the country's collapse", among a lot of other lies and misinformation.
This a hugely different response. We've seen this again with Russia's shooting of MH-17. I fully believe that too was accidental, yet even for accidents you have to take responsibility. Hell, they even lied to their own people with Kursk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
For the most truthful view of what happened that day:
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.
Intent and regret tells you what someone will do in the future.
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.
https://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse470/Public/Handouts/Therac/Side_...
- 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
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...
Why not formally apologize for such a fuck up (Iran aircraft), except for arrogance/exceptionalism?
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. "
I know people who have worked with military systems, and as dumb as the process around developing these things tend to be, due to the asinine cluelessness of the decision makers, none of them would have accepted even a fraction of the idiocy on display here.
I mean, not “slaving” the cursor still feeds garbage data into the system, immediately reusing 4 digit codes in a way that is pretty much guaranteed to create confusion, no real cooperation or coordination between the same system running on ships in the same battle group, supposedly essential data displayed without the actual essential details shown to decision makers in charge of death and destruction…
It would be laughable if it was the worlds strongest military we were talking about.
The people in charge of deciding to make this “system” in this way should be in prison.
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.
I admit I am so turned off by the format I only made it hlf way throught the thread.
There is apparently an extremely unintuitive "Show more for all"[1] button at the top of the initial post.
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.
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.
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.
You can set up a blog on the Internet for free if you want to make longform content.
https://unroller.zachmanson.com/threads/https:/octodon.socia...
(I know these things are indeed annoying—but that's why we have this rule.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(What would be interesting is hearing more about the Aegis design team, if you want to share)
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.
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.
Lies.
Reagan acknowledged and apologized within days.