The military has already mastered fusion (power), and likely has mastered gravity in some form in secret. They aren’t using mainstream compute for these discoveries
Believe me, I know-- my dad did some work on the 360/44 and other large systems.
High end late 1960s compute -- of the sort used to go to the moon or to design big nuclear weapons -- was roughly 486DX4-100 class. Not individual computers; the total computing at DOE or NASA. Of course, it would be hard to replace either with a single 486 because of availability, usage at different geographic locations, etc.
You can assume a single large AMD Threadripper machine ($25k?) outclasses late-1960s DoE by roughly a factor of 50,000. And that assumes you didn't bother to put a GPU in it.
> The military has already mastered fusion (power), and likely has mastered gravity in some form in secret. They aren’t using mainstream compute for these discoveries
Oh what a great CIA campaign that would be to give the impression that U.S. military isn’t up to par - to motivate and trick our enemies into making stupid moves while we keep our true cards hidden.
You say that, but that's literally a Russian conspiracy theory with Ukraine: The US baited Russia into thinking the US was weak because of Afghanistan, and then Russia got all ballsy and walked into Ukraine and it was a trap.
McCain was actually on the money in 2008. He was in the audience when Putin gave that famous "warning to the west" speech in Germany [1].
The quip that Russia is a "gas station with nuclear weapons" about sums it up. The United States being weak or not really has nothing to do with it. They counted on Zelensky cutting and running, the attempted decapitation of Kyiv failed. Russia is swirling the toilet. Without the energy reserves their oligarchs would be worthless. Since most of what is actually valuable about their country is land (where the resources sit) that is sparsely inhabited the end state of China controlling most of what is now Russia is inevitable. By failing in Europe and tying himself to China, Putin has ensured Russian power will continue to erode. Of course, it's not great for China, having to deal with two nuclear armed pariahs on their borders.
The United States is truly blessed simply by being two oceans away from anyone who could remotely challenge it. Properly understood, the Monroe (or "Donroe" doctrine) is less about foreign intervention and more an understanding that if a peer power ever emerged in the Western Hemisphere, most of what appears to make the United States singular would rapidly disappear.
"The United States is truly blessed simply by being two oceans away from anyone who could remotely challenge it." This is tragical misunderstanding of the situation. Both military and ecologically.
This is a genuine comment, rather than snark, though I appreciate it might initially look that way.
Your comment is an example of something that seems to accrue around AI users: casual, even gleeful, spite. You don't get this with every technology; there is no significant strand of the pro-3D printing community, for example, that goes around taunting people who don't use printers themselves.
It's significant, I think, that this sort of attitude is common around AI, but not other technologies, and it does have a meaningful impact on public attitudes around it. I'm not sure whether it's a result of using AI, or a characteristic that leads to a propensity for AI, but there's something here.
I think GP is aware that they're waging a culture war, on the side that stands for brutal pragmatism and embracing the race to the bottom, and they know that casual displays of cynicism are the simplest way to prop up their side.
The gleeful spite and disdain for building community norms isn't an accident, it's an attitude they want to normalize.
Having airworthiness certification done by an independent organization not beholden to Boeing's shareholders makes much more sense to me. Giving the authority to Boeing to do its own airworthiness certification feels like the fox guarding the hen house.
But independents would need to be embedded into the company every step of the way, it would get to be point they would look exactly like Boeing employees.
But what does happen is audits where the work is checked
There has been a history of problems with that exact airframe where people died. People dying is usually considered bad.
Now root cause of the issue that airframe had before was that Boeing was given the leeway to certify it themselves with too little oversight by the FAA. In short: the airframe of the Boeing 737 MAX is so far away from the originally certified 737 airframe it is ridiculous to consider them the same airplane. The adjustments Boeing made via softeare to deal with the physical changes (like putting the much bigger engines forward so they have enough clearance under the wings without having to certifying this as a new airframe) was the cause of the incidents. A truly independent FAA would have never even remotely accepted that.
I did, in fact, spend a bit of time trying to look this up, because as pointed out by other comments, it was not entirely clear what relationship this revocation (which is about inspecting built aircraft vs the design) had to do with the crashes (which were primarily the result of a faulty design). I didn't find a particularly illuminating summary other than maybe the investigation also turned up some other problems.
More to the point, the original poster was implying that there would be a relationship between the reinstatement of Boeing's self-certification and future crashes. Which I think would be worth some deeper analysis beyond 'corporations bad'.
I perused that document. It says quite a bit on how the FAA needs to work on type certificates, but seems limited to that. It says nothing on airworthiness certificates.
I'm assuming you know this, but the reason people say there's a hard difference on this is because they really are two different topics covering two different things.
For the uninitiated, and simplified. For a particular aircraft you are about to board to be legally allowed to fly it needs an airworthiness certificate. An airworthiness certificate says _that_ particular airplane is essentially _identical_ to a prototype (or set of identical prototypes) that the manufacture has flight tested and demonstrated is safe to the certifying authority. The formal acceptance of the prototypes safety is called a "Type" certificate.
The ability to say "we made this identical to our prototypes" is what the FAA is restoring the authority of Boeing to self certify, and is a _normal_ thing for a manufacturer to have. It's _abnormal_ for a manufacturer to not have that, as it's the certifying authority basically saying "you don't know how to physically construct airplanes".
The document referenced says the FAA essentially accepted proofs / was pressured to accept assertions from Boeing that the type was actually safe, when it was not. That's basically saying Boeing didn't know how to _design_ aircraft.
Right, but the crux of OIG's finding is that there isn't a hard difference between the two.
The plane was not built to the spec that FAA type-certified. But at the same time it wasn't clearly out of certification either.
There were significant changes made to MCAS since the the type certification. However, there was no clear delineation of what types of post-certification changes would require another FAA type certification.
The permeability of the two types of certifications and the amount of design changes that can happen between them is the entire problem OIG is pointing out.
> FAA essentially accepted proofs / was pressured to accept assertions from Boeing that the type was actually safe
No, the document says Boeing's ODA team was pressured to accept assertions from Boeing's management. The Boeing ODA team is employed by Boeing. They are given de facto self-certification authority either by actually self-certifying (in the airworthiness case), or by choosing what it flags to FAA for external certification (in the design/type case).
As has been noted in several of the comments, the crashes were a result of a faulty design, not aircraft failing to meet the design.
The self-certification here wasn’t part of the chain of events that led to the crashes; it appears to have been related to other issues the FAA uncovered as a side effect of their investigation.
As has been noted in the actual reports, the crashes (as is true of all crashes) were the result of a specific chain of failures across several functions and organizations.
One component of that chain of failures is the self-certification process. If the FAA had the resource and mandate to actually understand each aircraft design change, then it's very likely (not guaranteed, but very likely) that the MCAS design having a single point of failure on the AoA sensor would have been flagged as problematic by FAA.
The addition of MCAS to the 737 MAX received type approval by the FAA in response to Boeing's documentation, not in response to anything Boeing approved or issued. No aircraft manufacturer has ever been allowed to issue a type certificate.
The self-certification process (airworthiness certificates) is the manufacturer (rather than the regulator's inspectors) stating "this one specific aircraft with serial number _______ has been built according to the design covered by its type certificate". Nothing more.
In other words, an airworthiness certificate only specifies that a specific aircraft is airworthy /because/ it is built according to an airworthy design. Whether the design is safe or not has always only been up to the regulator to decide. In this case, the regulator dropped the ball and approved an unsafe design. If Boeing was not allowed to self-certify their own aircraft, the FAA would still have issued airworthiness certificates for them, including the two aircraft that would have gone on to kill hundreds of people, because they were built according to the design the FAA approved.
No, an early, low-risk version of MCAS was proposed and given type approval by FAA. Then the MCAS design was changed iteratively and continuously without prompting another type approval process. Thenceforth, Boeing's ODA self-certification process was the only statutorily required step that could have caught that the post-type approval changes actually increased the risk significantly.
You should read the OIG report. It actually discusses all of this. It is absolutely possible an FAA cert would've missed the MCAS issue as well, but as OIG points out, one variable was significant commercial pressure on Boeing's ODA to approve the (iterated-since-type-approved)-MCAS. Presumably FAA staff would be less susceptible to this type of commercial pressure.
You are still conflating the process of manufacturing vs able to design a safe aircraft. The ability of Boeing to correctly manufacture an aircraft to it's design was not the cause of 737 Max 8 crashes. The ability of Boeing to create a safe design was. (As an aside: I don't think self certification of a design should be a thing)
Design changes are not part of the self certification process, they’re part of the type certification process, which has always been handled by the FAA.
Design changes de facto are part of the self-cert process because it had no requirement for FAA oversight of post-flight design changes.
DOT OIG disagrees that this played no role. Here's from Page 2 of their report, i.e. the entire "Findings" summary:
While FAA and Boeing followed the established certification process for the 737 MAX 8, we identified limitations in FAA’s guidance and processes that impacted certification and led to a significant misunderstanding of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), the flight control software identified as contributing to the two accidents. First, FAA’s certification guidance does not adequately address integrating new technologies into existing aircraft models. Second, FAA did not have a complete understanding of Boeing’s safety assessments performed on MCAS until after the first accident. Communication gaps further hindered the effectiveness of the certification process. In addition, management and oversight weaknesses limit FAA’s ability to assess and mitigate risks with the Boeing ODA. For example, FAA has not yet implemented a risk-based approach to ODA oversight, and engineers in FAA’s Boeing oversight office continue to face challenges in balancing certification and oversight responsibilities. Moreover, the Boeing ODA process and structure do not ensure ODA personnel are adequately independent. While the Agency has taken steps to develop a risk-based oversight model and address concerns of undue pressure at the Boeing ODA, it is not clear that FAA’s current oversight structure and processes can effectively identify future high-risk safety concerns at the ODA.
You are confidently acting like you understand this process, while repeatedly confusing design certification (of the type) vs. airworthiness certification (of individual airplanes).
Nah, you can figure that out pretty easily yourself, and I get the sense your question is not in good faith. Earlier in this thread you called someone "profoundly lazy" for asking a less simple question.
There are many types of designation in the system; your quote above is _not_ about Production Certification ODA staff (which this article is about), and indeed there is no world where Production Certification ODA would be expected to find the MCAS issue your quote is about. Those would be Type Certification ODA folks.
You should go read the OIG report. Kind of a bummer because they put all this work into a document that you're just sitting here exemplifying the exact misunderstanding that they found as the major issue.
Not sure if you just gave up halfway through the 4-sentence long comment, but I was actually suggesting that you use it to go find the thousands of pages of high-quality source information.
No what you see down the chain of comments are people confidently repeating the exact pattern that the OIG report on this failure actually blames for it.
They keep insisting there's some binary distinction between type certification and production certification. The entire crux of OIG's diagnosis is that this is actually a much more permeable and fluid process, and the permeability of it is exactly what allowed a faulty MCAS design to make it to production.
You would probably have gotten a better response by explaining this before posting vague, dismissive comments around the subject. If your post in response to the first question was the one that's like 6 responses deep in the argument here it would have been a pretty good contribution to the discussion.
Sorry to say, tokens aren’t going anywhere, people aren’t going to suddenly stop using AI, and this whole paradigm shift of how people are changing how they work - is a full blown reality.
There is no reversal, no “eh we don’t think the tokens/AI are worth it”. Accept the new reality.
It doesn’t take a genius or system architect to figure out AI use in banking both internally and for consumers is a huge benefit especially for capital one.
Maybe we should critique the actual agentic products they are creating rather than critique the entire AI spend.
Don’t underestimate how banks operate. Things move very slowly in banking, so they absolutely need to justify it. Many banks still use GPT Mini, and even that requires approval from two levels of management. Even upgrading from Java 8 to Java 17 requires extensive justification.
Forget AI—you even have to justify using a MacBook.
This was clearly - at least designed with AI. Which is not bad by default. But a common thing I’ve come across with designing with AI is it not understanding that people can’t see light text with light background - which is shown here.
Clearly you spent effort in the knowledge and the amazing web view graph which feels great to use on iPhone. But an equal effort needs to be made on all the small corners off the rest of it
I’m chiming in here to say I did pretty much build an entire iOS app with agents, and it launched it on the App Store for me, along with a social push.
I only used Xcode to preview the builds on my device and then guide the prompts more
The military has already mastered fusion (power), and likely has mastered gravity in some form in secret. They aren’t using mainstream compute for these discoveries