If all humans were suddenly wiped off the face of the earth, AI would go silent, and the hardware it runs on would eventually shut down.

If all AI was suddenly wiped off the face of the earth, humans would rebuild it, and would carry on fine in the meantime.

One AI researcher decades ago said something to the effect of: researchers in biology look at living organisms and wonder how they live; researchers in physics look at the cosmos and wonder what all is out there; researchers in artificial intelligence look at computer systems and wonder how they can be made to wonder such things.

I first learned about em dash reading the GNU Texinfo manual in the 1990s. Now I have to wear a red, slightly long horizontal line on my shirt, and passersby shun me.

I've worked with RMS a good bit over the past few decades, and, in my interactions with him, he has always come across kind, helpful, and professional.

In the age of AI coding, the code itself doesn't matter, much less the code formatting. Just so long as the result functions correctly, we ostensibly never need to see the code again.

Perhaps this is in fact the ultimate code formatting tool -- completely obliterate the need for formatting at all!

someone once told me the only code format that matters is what te debugger spit back out to u once u look at it properly in its true form :D

You can have AI write automated tests before writing the code, so it can QA itself.

You can try. What happens is it cheats you at every turn and finally admits it wasn’t testing anything when you ask why it’s still broken.

Yes, this actually happens.

> Maybe pointless, but I for one disagree with such rulings.

That's a fair position: laws are for the nation (and in a democracy, that's supposed to mean the people), and the laws we make are not divine or perfect.

But until the laws change, it is what it is.

> To retroactively grant propriety AI training rights on all copyrighted material on the basis that it's no different from humans learning is, I think, misguided.

I would say it's not retroactive, it's the default consequence of what already is. Changing the law so this kind of thing is no longer allowed in the future is one thing, but it would be retro-active to say it had always been illegal.

I say retroactive not because the law changed, but because the law was never written with AI training in mind. I don't think existing copyright laws fit this situation, and I feel applying this interpretation to works already under copyright, when the creators of those works surely never envisioned this outcome, is an unfair interpretation.

Not involved with this particular matter. What I would want to see is logs of the behavior of the failing subsystem and details of the failing environment. This may be able to to be reproduced in an environmental testing lab, a systems rig lab, or possibly even in a completely virtual avionics test environment. If stimulating the subsystem with the same environmental input results in the error as experienced on the plane, then a fix can be worked from there. And likewise, a rollback to a previous version could be tested against the same environment.

As an aerospace software engineer, I would guess that, if this actually was triggered by some abnormal solar activity, it was probably an edge case that nobody thought of or thought was relevant for the subsystem in question.

Testing is (should be!) extremely robust, but only tested to the required parameters. If this incident put the subsystem in some atmospheric conditions nobody expected and nobody tested for, that does not suggest that the entire QA chain was garbage. It was a missed case -- and one that I expect would be covered going forward.

Aviation systems are not tested to work indefinitely or infinitely -- that's impossible to test, impossible to prove or disprove. You wouldn't claim that some subsystems works (say, for a quick easy example) in all temperature ranges; you would definite a reasonable operational range, and then test to that range. What may have happened here is that something occurred outside of an expected range.

It's popular to mock aerospace engineering, but it's usually quite robust. Even if people still sometimes make bad decisions.

The goal wasn't to mock Boeing, just to point out what happens when business overrides engineering. The context is the parent post making the point that there is little business value in good engineering.

Ah, I see where you're coming from. I've been hearing a lot of people talk poorly of aerospace as a whole recently, due to some Boeing issues, and I misread your comment as such. Apologies and thanks.

And move slowly. So when things turn bad, they will be bad for a decade - or more. See Boeing.

Boeings (software) issues stem from a removal of their Engineering skillset and replacing it with an outsourcing model don't they?

The earlier Peanuts animated specials had marvelous jazz soundtracks by Vince Guaraldi (and later others, after Vince's passing). Not sure if jazz trio is the most obvious music to accompany cartoons, but somehow this music blended exquisitely with the characters.

Indeed from what I've read, the network was originally skeptical that jazz trio made any sense in a children's animated show, but it was remarkably successful. A couple of other tunes from the show, "Skating" and "Christmas time is here" are recognizable jazz standards to this day.