RNCTX

I would say all of those things are indicative of the mentality that we're criticizing here.

"If something isn't right, someone has to do something."

The joke in aviation is that "the first two strikes are free." In baseball terms, you get one free screwup per flight, and it'll probably be fine. The second strike... you are pushing your luck. On the third strike you're out.

In this case the pilot continuing to fly while not performing well, ranking officer or not, was strike one.

The more proficient pilot not taking the aircraft away from her was strike two.

The controller not offering more clear instructions and the helicopter crew not demanding more clear instructions despite noticing that the airport was very busy was strike three.

Just because the helicopter crew screwed up does not mean that all of those admin types on the ground didn't also make their own three strikes worth of mistakes.

+1 that emergency landing was pure badass.

To that point, I also co-founded an aviation charity org that does disaster relief. We randomly had a female volunteer show up and offer to assist us during the aftermath of hurricane Florence in NC in 2018. She had a couple of young guys who were flying small private airplanes for local biz owners, one of which is now an airline pilot years later.

She didn't advertise her credentials, she just said "I have experience, and some young guys with airplanes who want to help."

Vetting her on google said she was a full Col with about 3500 total hours of flight time in a Blackhawk, and the former vice commander at Andrews, recently retired.

https://www.jba.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2001689178/

https://www.counton2.com/news/local-news/mt-pleasant-regiona...

She helped us organize local helicopter pilots again in 2024 in western NC, after that hurricane.

Don't judge people in aircraft by their physical stature, lol. You don't have to be a big strong man to sit in a chair, turn knobs, push buttons, and talk on the radio. You do need to be mentally alert, and you need to be able to visualize your surroundings mentally even if you can't see them with your eyeballs. If something doesn't seem right, you need to speak up and figure out how to handle it. That's about it.

I also agree with the article that a controller working 12 aircraft is not necessarily dangerous. As the article says, it depends on who the 12 are. 8 airlines in sequence on the same approach procedure and 4 random IFR general aviation guys like me who all have GPS nav equipment? It's fine. 5 students, 4 helicopters, and 3 bizjets buzzing around to 3 different municipal airports near each other? That's a different story.

Pilot here (small / private airplanes, for about 15 years now, instrument rated but that's it).

1. "See and avoid" is BS, always has been, always will be. ADS-B was supposed to end the reliance on it, but the FAA almost immediately started poking holes in it once it was deemed successful by the companies in Alaska that tested it. Good controllers and TCAS stop this stuff from happening all the time despite the FAA's poor decisions.

2. The few near misses I've personally experienced have been due to inaction, as described in the article. In fairness there are a lot of buttons, knobs, dials, and screens to look after. A slowly developing unsafe situation isn't always at the front of one's mind. But if it doesn't feel right, you gotta say something. Especially if you are in a helicopter and you can just stop. There's no excuse for them continuing ahead without better awareness of their surroundings than they had, when they can just stop.

ex: a new'ish controller let me (in a low wing airplane, descending) get too close to another (high wing airplane, climbing) near Little Rock, AR some years ago. I was flying IFR so I was bound to follow their instructions, which were to fly direct to a waypoint and cross it at a lower altitude. The high wing airplane was not talking to the controller, they were flying visually (likely a student and instructor, they were climbing out of an airport with a lot of flight school activity).

The new guy controller gave me location and trajectory on the high wing airplane twice. After the second such call I told him that I cannot see this traffic below me through my wings, you need to give me a turn. The supervisor took over when I insisted, and gave me a turn and new heading. It didn't dawn on the new controller that the *types* of aircraft involved were what made it dangerous, neither of us can see through our wings so we weren't going to find each other visually. It did dawn on the supervisor when I spoke up to the new guy, who recognized the situation and handled it.

He apologized for the new guy and offered the phone number as he took my flight plan cancellation, I declined. "Not necessary, we're all okay, you handle it. I don't need to put any marks on anyone's chart." That's how it's all supposed to work. "Doing nothing" like the helicopter did in this crash did not allow for that possible safe outcome.

tl;dr: Someone has to take initiative. If the controller doesn't, the pilot should demand instructions from the controller. Flying dangerous machines isn't for tentative / indecisive people.

In the same post where the author of this blog article says they "don't like getting notifications about activity in my repo, and instead prefer to 'work offline' and 'only check in when I want' to... the author also details how they lost their domain which was bought by an ad spamming site guy.

I mean, are the scripts writing themselves here, boys?

> Being able to click a button and experience 0ms navigation is not something any customer has ever brought to my attention.

"it's too slow" is a thing a lot of customers have mentioned to me over the years.

Awesome.

I modified a library card software (Blacklight) into a searchable PDF industrial manual system awhile back on a one-off basis. It couldn't go any further than a contract project that delivered the source code because it's hard to do anything programmatically (at the time) to a PDF without Ghostscript.

I've often thought of rewriting it with Python (and Postgres, to get rid of Solr or Elastic as the search backend), maybe now's the time...

I trust you long enough for a second look because I ctrl-f'd the readme and found "pdfium" so I know I don't have to retread old ground in your github issues about how there's really only a couple of ways to parse a PDF with a semblance of reliability, lol...

(for anyone else reading this getting started with documents.. Adobe and Chrome are really the only PDF rendering libraries that work. PDF.js aka Firefox has always been broken, and Apple's is problematic as well, in both cases rearing their heads in terms of incorrect word / letter spacing).

In New Orleans they called it the "Katrina cough".

People would just get sick from random things and die 6 months or a year after they'd survived the hurricane. Happened to one relative on my father's side of the family. He just never shook the cough, right up until the day he died.

I will say that while I was in my 30s at the time, I took advantage of the architectural salvage goldmine that was New Orleans after Katrina. You could get priceless lumber, flooring, etc from salvaged 18th and 19th century houses that got flooded, which was great... until you didn't wear enough protective equipment while cleaning them up, and then you also got the cough.

The difference in 35 and 75 is the old uncle on my father's side of the family died from it, while I just suffered the worst sinus infection I ever had, and was fine after a few weeks.

Let's not

The declining phase of all capitalist markets is arbitrary, random rent-seeking, when the technological innovation value has waned.

As the article mentions, I can tell you that there is a stark divide between people who flew airplanes / helicopters in the civilian world before 1990 and after 1990, when noise cancelling headphones became prevalent.

Old guard can't hear anything, and has weird preferences for what small airplanes are 'good' or 'bad', whereas the younger crowd doesn't.

I personally owned a small airplane a few years ago that never made it as a viable product and wound up bankrupt, but for the remaining fleet still flying around and needing parts support. The company that made them went bankrupt in the late 1990s / early 2000s and one of the biggest knocks against it was how loud it was inside the cabin.

But with noise cancelling headphones all of that disappears and it's really a wonderful, comfortable little bird, and has had a resurgence in popularity as noise cancelling headphones became ubiquitous.

Even when I owned one I had no idea how loud it was inside the cabin until I inadvertently sat on the noise cancelling on/off switch on the cord of my headset one day and suddenly couldn't understand what the air traffic controller was saying, lol.

1. No, generally speaking corporate management in the 21st century does not make decisions based on effectiveness of their product or their workforce. They make decisions based on finance centered around the upcoming year or quarter. Tesla isn't interested in making good cars. Tesla is interested in selling tax credits. Period.

2. Even if #1 isn't true in an edge case, don't care.

letThemFight.gif

Thanks!

I'm coming from the other side of the equation. I work for a (small-ish, niche) CRM company, and have insisted that all new customers be very explicitly told that they have to set up SPF and DKIM properly during their migration/implementation.

It would be nice to have something to send them to point out "here's where X% of your emails will go to spam if you don't do this, plus you're Y% of an annoyance on our mail server's reputation, too" but there's not any hard data to be found.

Perhaps designing a society around profit motives was a poor decision.

I would think that after a couple of years of COVID people would have learned that hiding from culture isn't a solution to bad culture.

Maybe they can't log into Twitter anymore

(Twitter's auth flow is entirely broken if you had SMS 2FA before the Musk takeover and pay-to-play. It won't let you log in with the only 2FA method you have, and redirects you to a form to reclaim a locked account after the failure which... requires you to be logged in).

Indeed. I can deduce from that statement that Patreon probably allows content creators to post to the Vimeo upload API, but all of this is smells incredibly sketchy.

Patreon IS VERY MUCH subcontracting hosting, and quite nefariously at that.

If Patreon is charging users for access to content, Patreon is obligated to serve it to those users, which in turn means Patreon is obligated to provide the hosting. Content creators on Patreon aren't users, they are content creators. The end user is the user. The end user is the one paying the money here.

If Patreon wants to, in turn, bill content creators for that hosting that's between them and the content creators, but the end user has absolutely ZERO reason to care whether Joe Schmo YouTube influencer paid his video hosting bill.

If I am a user and I've paid for content on Patreon which disappears, my legal recourse is with Patreon, not the content creator. I didn't pay the content creator, Patreon took my money and if the videos aren't there, Patreon has failed to provide the service for which the money was paid. Whether or not the content creator has a claim against Vimeo or Patreon is immaterial to this.

This isn't rocket science, I don't know why you are struggling to figure it out. Replace "Patreon" with "Netflix". Imagine Netflix's customers paying for access to their movies and TV shows, but Netflix decides that movie producers have to pay for the hosting because they don't like the size of their AWS bills. When the movies disappear because the movie producers don't like the size of the AWS bill either, do you think Netflix would get away with keeping the money but telling their own end user "oh sorry the movie producer was supposed to pay the AWS bill for their film's downloads, but they didn't pay the hosting bill so it disappeared, not my problem."

Or if you prefer, replace "Patreon" with "Cambridge University Press." Imagine you bought a book from said book publisher's website, and it never arrives in the mail. When you inquire about where your book is, Cambridge University Press says "oh yeah we have rights to print and distribute that book, but printing presses cost a lot so we told the book author to just print them himself. If he didn't pay for the printing and send it to you, that's not our problem, piss off."

Obviously these are ridiculous scenarios, and would land Netflix and/or Cambridge University Press in their attorneys' offices to take a look at the claims filed against them bright and early tomorrow morning if they tried to do such things.

Thanks for the detail, as we know people exaggerate on social media and it wasn't clear from the few posts I could find about it whether this was an opt-in or not.

The first post has a mention further down in the tweet thread about that particular creator also getting a ~$3000.00 invoice from Vimeo.

https://twitter.com/hate5six/status/1481511608979533826?s=21

Patreon needs to be a publisher or be a payment processor, but don't charge people for both while only actually doing one or the other.

I suspect a lot of content people have paid for is going to start disappearing next week, it seems that these guys got one-week notices to pay up to Vimeo.

It will be interesting to see what Patreon does then, because your analysis is mistaken in that their hands are not clean here. All the EULAs in the world don't absolve them from charging for a service and then failing to deliver it. By refusing to publish the videos themselves, if Vimeo pulls any of the content down Patreon has opened themselves up for a class action, I would think. The end user subscriber does not have a reason to care about Patreon's subcontracting status, all they would need to know is they paid for content and it did not arrive.

Shouldn't be surprising to hear that the FAA doesn't really do anything with this stuff. They appoint a corporate-filled board of avionics companies to do all of the work for them, and then rubber stamp what those companies want.

All cell phone towers seem to be aimed toward the ground.

I've flown a GA aircraft all around the lower 48, and only get a cell phone signal briefly when flying directly over a cell tower.

> I actually know the team that does security vuln automation for Google Play. They've found millions of vulns in apps over the years. One of the challenges they face is precisely this sort of headline: how do you use static analysis to find vulns and ensure that you don't inundate users with false positives, forcing them down the admittedly limited support channels.

Pay people to do tiered support.

"but that costs money"

Make less. Or don't have an app store.

Nothing says "CEO" like offering up the firing of ~3 dozen employees to try and cover up his own misdeeds.

> Things don't have to be this way. :(

You're right, all you have to do to eliminate it is get rid of all of the ridiculous metrics that people try to apply to human interaction, ban billion dollar "platforms" like the social media companies, and reduce everything back down to face to face scale.

We would be better off, I'm not being facetious.

TTL is a thing.

lol, I'm not surprised that this is the most downvoted reply here, nor am I surprised that it's a good one.

I don't see any contractual terms posted.

"You own your content" does not qualify. Lots of content companies have predatory contracts that give them perpetual licenses to content buried on page 13-b.

Utility companies operate at the pleasure of the state. The state implements right of ways that contain the equipment.

Right of ways are real, tweets are not.

Yep. Just keeping dirt and water out goes a long way for parts longevity, too.