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andyst

62 karma · joined April 4, 2018

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andyst··on American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died
Possibly the website has been hugged to death, but the principle resonates with me from the headline. In the large and old enterprises I've worked with, there is such a stark shift from I suppose, lifetime service to the consultant economy as the workforce transition follows the boomer generation out, and forecasting where that might leave us.

Short term drivers like a bad quarter or to be seen "disrupting" as a measure of progress, rather then genuine demonstrations of skills, turf out tenured employees often mid-career.

Or perhaps being in the engine room of many companies, doesn't often give you the lifestyle you want anymore, so the race to the top is the optimal spot to go for. Even if it means going up and falling down a few times on the heirarchy, its worth it.

The value of the nature of not having custodians of certain crafts, like aviation or really at the guts of any industry, seems to me its really going to set us back towards really transactional style of operating businesses that are only financially engineered and not really innovating the product in a way they should.

just random thoughts around how to have a fulfilling career, when most of the effort is in sales & marketing, and not much in operations when the funding pot gets allocated across a business.

andyst··on Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
valve would have the money......
andyst··on Microsoft turns to AWS as GitHub faces AI capacity crunch
and programming is just typing!
andyst··on We Think the SpaceX IPO Is Overvalued
well the good news is, you are exactly who they are looking for! you could just buy some merch though, which has the same effect

otherwise using ROIC or CAGR might be more optimal way to evaluate your investments

andyst··on Why airlines are always going bankrupt
nation state owned airlines dumping prices into unprotected domestic markets

rising cost bases in legacy fleet costs, engineering costs. a lot of airlines fail near their capital renewal programs as fleet age > 25yrs

pure domestic competition beomes a race to the bottom between full service and low cost carriers removing any premium

andyst··on Porsche sold more electrified cars in Europe in 2025 than pure gas-powered cars
in the australian market theres often comparison between how BYD/(chinese brands) may unseat Tesla (as the scale EV first mover), but I haven't seen what I think is the prize, which is BYD want to take on Toyota as the de facto king of global car making. They want the whole car market, not just EV and are already setup to take that on.
andyst··on America's top companies keep talking about AI – but can't explain the upsides
the AI umbrella has been helpful to my BigCorp to justify more machine learning work, or discrete optimisation and scheduling problems

agentic ai which is a huge buzz in enterprise feels more like workflow and rpa (again) and people misunderstanding that getting the happy flow working is only 20% of the job.

andyst··on Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized
I (still!) have an uncle who had a similar mindset, broke his leg half way through a race and only realised when he stopped at the end, that he couldnt walk any further

finally when they had to (successfully) defib him during a race, that shook him into assessing his health not running for the sake of running

There's a mindset with distance runners that I have seen over and over, just sometimes way too much of a generally good thing

andyst··on Are we the baddies?
especially the australian airline example and perhaps with much broader applicability, I know that companies are completely happy with managable competition (Australian domestic airlines are functionally 2 players, and similarly across many large industries here that's true) where over time once they can establish profitable gimmicks neither party really wants to rock the boat and they're able to lock in that margin forever more. It doesn't suit established players to compete on that, they both open up losing situations in the game theory compared to silent non-competition.

In high capital businesses like airlines and supermarkets it seems to play out all over the place these days.

andyst··on Has the decline of knowledge work begun?
I somewhat resonate with this. Working in mature industries where competition has condensed down to larger players with enormous scale and embedded product distribution, don't need to compete _much_ on innovation or product, just on price.

I don't think specifically AI has done this compared to a broader view of constant stream of digitilisation of every departments function.

Orgs don't need grads to learn the ropes from the bottom and make their way up the career ladder, when the ladders might only be 3-4 rungs high now.

andyst··on DOGE employees don't understand the basics of SQL
When seeing the approach to how Elon/DOGE applied themselves to air traffic control after the incidents, I'm not falling into the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. This group is just incompetent and going to re-learn all the mistakes within each domain that led to industry getting to where it has through a series of hard won lessons.
andyst··on Musk: The DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the ATC system
the existing systems deliver the international standards for air traffic management that needs to move in sync for all parties, ATC, Airports, Airlines, Manufacturers and Regulators. Technology suppliers to each of those parties where they differ will need to be involved in anything material.

there are many systems involved to manage different parts of flight, are built to spec and integrated deeply across all the parties

even if the systems are old in some cases, they deliver the agreed standards, so updates need to be agreed via organisations like ICAO or IATA and rolled out via a predictable timeline through a managed change process

this is all integrated with human processes, such as for the flight deck

andyst··on The emotional trial of clinical trials: like online dating with death risk
Having been through similar processes with family, scouring medical journals and trials for the answer as if its stack overflow, you're in a period of high stress I think I can understand that may have led to the authors perspective and expectations shaping the narrative here.
andyst··on The Fed's Big Problem, There Are Two Economies but Only One Interest Rate
the australian economy digs up dirt from the ground and sells it for a lot, it covers all our issues. theres a lot more that could be said, but it fundamentally comes down to that
andyst··on A generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments
Having played counter-strike on dial-up '99 and not having unlimited internet time, the bots - Botman, PODbot, NNBot and many others using neural nets was ground breaking then.

The goals of those niche bots were certainly different but in some ways the recent hype doesn't surprise me as much having experienced that period too.

I reflect that the limited internet then drove innovation in offline play that had really stagnanted till recently, I'm looking forward to the first game that really pushes the limit with their NPCs using some of this new tech

andyst··on The New Audi A3 Is Amess with In-Car Subscriptions
this is what happens when businesses are led by mbas and accountants, I'm sure the numbers look fantastic
andyst··on Open Source does not win by being cheaper
in the event of an incident, the exec or departments reputational liability
andyst··on Qantas is bringing back Airbus A380s from the California desert
Victorville preferable due to lower humidity then alice, for longer term storage its desirable

Alice is more fun because you can find snakes on your planes when you go to get them

andyst··on Bill Gates warns Covid lockdowns could drag on into 2022
You're misinterpreting this article by skipping to a certain section, each of the graphs and the options you select combine together.
andyst··on Why Thomas Cook Collapsed
Not specifically. The article indicates changing market preferences for travel, digitisation of agency functions, emergence of low cost carriers and market disruption in airbnb as the underlying causes.

Although they may have had 150k stranded customers it seems they were left with a low yielding segment selling products the market didn't need.

andyst··on First Japan-Built Airliner in 50 Years Takes on Boeing and Airbus
Such a difficult game to get into, convincing legacy airlines who have entrenched and certified workforces and expensive engineering supply chains, the business case of adding another manufacturers equipment is almost insurmountable. Even making a great aircraft isn't enough let alone accounting for what airbus and boeing can respond with if you pose a threat.
andyst··on Why airlines make flights longer on purpose
The article confuses the differing responsibilities of airlines, airports and air services (ATC) who then work together to deliver a realistic schedule.

Airlines are motivated to maximise fleet utilisation so the narrow focus on padding is a misleading and overemphasised element to judge the intent of this specific delay mitigation.

The industry is moving towards increasing collaboration, the article I think avoids mentioning the IATA recommended ACDM approach instead pitching a companies PoC from one of their sources.