My father is in his 80’s, has poor hearing aids, but still goes out daily with his dSLR and Merlin to see what’s around him and he still gets great shots. I’m really happy Merlin exists.
If you use LLMs in lieu of searching Stack Overflow, you're going to go faster and be neither smarter nor dumber. If you're prompting for entire functions, I suspect it'll be a crutch you learn to rely on forever.
Personally I think there's a middle ground to be had there.
I use LLMs to write entire test functions, but I also have specs for it to work from and can go over what it wrote and verify it. I never blindly go "yeah this test is good" after it generates it.
I think that's the middle ground, knowing where, and when it can handle a full function / impl vs a single/multi(short) line auto-completion.
It’s not just the orders of magnitude difference in number of rounds fired; it’s the size and power of the rounds. SEALs don’t shoot soda cans with .22 rifles.
The FAA has their hands full investigating problems _after_ they become problems. Are airplanes in a race to the bottom or is there an opportunity to inject quality and reliability into this industry?
> FAA has their hands full investigating problems _after_ they become problems
The FAA is constantly auditing, certifying and testing airmen, airplanes and plants. They have their hands full. But it's totally incorrect to say they're an ex post facto investigations agency.
> The FAA is constantly auditing, certifying and testing airmen, airplanes and plants.
Are they?
Much of the work that would be done to inspect and certify the planes being manufactured was outsourced to the manufacturers to increase efficiency.
They build their planes, inspect their planes, inspect and approve modifications and major repairs to their planes, and issue their own airworthiness certificates for their planes.
For a long while, the FAA was barely even involved in rubber stamping whoever Boeing et al appointed as FAA inspectors at their plants, never mind inspecting and certifying the planes themselves—in 2016 the Transportation Department said more than 85% of the tasks associated with certification were delegated from the FAA to the manufacturer’s own inspectors. By 2018, the FAA said that Boeing was handling 96% of the certification process.
There were some reforms around 2021 (737 MAX crashes were 2018 and 2019), but they were mostly focused on improving the self inspection program, not solving the fundamental problem of having companies certify their own work.
> But it's totally incorrect to say they're an ex post facto investigations agency.
While the inspections and certifications have been delegated by the FAA and _technically_ are still done in the name of the FAA, the reality certainly looks much more like the FAA proper is only involved _after_ significant safety issues.
I really don’t think it’s quite as clear cut as you make it out to be.
Seems like there is a lot of criticism of the FAA while ignoring real time cuts to their budget. Looking at 2005 they had 14bn, 22.5bn in today’s money. Last years budget was 18.5bn.
I am sure there is waste and opportunities for improvement but… that ignores the significant increase in flights, new planes etc. that has ballooned much faster than the crude time value of money calc above. Criticising them for doing less with, umm, less seems a bit rich. Especially as others (not necessarily you in this comment) then use that a reason for more cuts to agencies.
> Seems like there is a lot of criticism of the FAA while ignoring real time cuts to their budget.
Certainly wasn’t my intention! I don’t _think_ I said anything in there that was assigning blame to the FAA, merely pointing out that in practice they are no longer actively preventing issues.
I know their overall budget has been decreased and there are sources implying that’s the cause of the failures, but I couldn’t (on my phone, to be fair) find any good source comparing the portion of their budget that went to these programs specifically over time. So I chose to stick to what I could source and mostly let people draw their own conclusions.
For instance, while I have Thoughts(TM) I left it to the reader to take a wild fuckin’ guess which political party controlled the presidency, house, and senate in the years we decided outsourced the regulatory role of the FAA to those they regulate.
We should separate two propositions: 1) whether or not the operations of the agency are too weighted toward ex post facto investigations and therefore, and 2) whether or not the people involved are competent and doing they best they can
It’s perfectly possible that the FAA has correctly optimized for the constraints they are under and the FAA is not sufficiently effective at delivering its charter.
The outsourcing of some routine operations to manufacturers was a presidential mandate during Bush Jr. administration, to make aviation business more "agile" or something /s
I think the FAA generally performs audits, not inspections.
They usually make sure the paperwork is in order. Less likely that they make sure the paperwork is actually correct, and vastly less likely that they make sure that the actual things happening in the shop are correctly done.
I worked in an FAA repair station that repaired commercial jet engine parts. We always got the same FAA inspector every year. We never seemed nervous when he would show up.
The only auditor that seemed to really be digging to find stuff was the GE financial auditor to make sure they were getting their repair royalties.
Oh and one time an auditor for an airline snuck in and stole one of his airline’s parts, or something like that. He was making the point that we had zero access control and literally anyone could just walk into the building.
They should really start testing the employees. It doesn’t matter what the paperwork says if the employees are incompetent.
There is a concept of a “moral minimum” where having a regulation might produce worse work than if the regulation didn’t exist, because companies will frequently work up to the minimum required by law and no more.
This strikes me as an extremely weak argument for removing regulation. Like yea that's a nice thought if you already believe in efficacy of private organizations, but on the other hand trust in any organization goes out the window the second a profit motivation is introduced.
I’m not proposing deregulation. But it is possible to have bad regulations that don’t produce the desired outcome. Basically, you can’t just regulate by specifying every little detail. An analogy could be drawn to overfitting a system.
Would this have been written in C, asm, or something else? I suppose with Atari & Mac II both being Motorola processors the assembly would have been a direct lift except for any Apple-specific UI.
My favorite part of the story was the latent assertions looking for the bug. Any new code I write is peppered with these, though only active in debug builds. I've never learned to enjoy stepping through a debugger.
Most of the classic games from this era were written in 6502 assembly language. There were a number of popular macro assemblers available, C compilers were a bit more exotic. Given that the entire executable fit in 48K, there was no runtime library here.
There's an urban legend that Nasir Gebelli wrote his most popular games with the tiny mini-assembler in the Apple ][ ROM, opcode by opcode.
if a theater can show a movie half as many times as usual it would make sense to rise prices.
At the limit if a movie came out to be 12 hours long then it would objectively cost the theater more to show (both in opportunity cost and direct costs)
I'm told that theaters make their money on food. As long as people are there eating popcorn and drinking soda they profit so it doesn't matter who those people are or what they are seeing. It's not as if theaters pay more for heat, water, and air conditioning if it's the same asses in seats vs new ones.
On other hand you could theoretically fit double the number of people if not more in 1 hour film vs 3 hour film.. And they likely would buy almost same amount of drinks and popcorn.
