It would be a crying shame if someone were to figure out a way to force those e ink displays to refresh fast enough that it kills the batteries on those things…

Nate Silver is a prime example of this thing that happens a lot with technical people. They get good at describing what is and then they start to think they understand “why”. Sometimes a good understanding can lead you to the why of a situation, but often you need actual experts to analyze the data you’ve collected.

The whole thing about the way his methods work is based on not actually understanding the interactions of the inputs he’s selected.

His book was interesting, but I wouldn’t trust his analysis too much.

It’s not the iPads themselves, it’s the addition of Bluetooth and/or wifi to support them. I agree that they can alleviate a lot in terms of paperwork reduction etc. My issue is the additional exposed surface.

It doesn’t, that’s just a very common reaction to these types of articles. I recall having some very intense discussions around stuff like iPads in cockpits. I’m on the “not a fan” side, but I’m also not making avionics software anymore either.

Certification is expensive. But updated dbs are pretty huge and seem to only get bigger over time. Stuff like radio firmware tends to be in the hundreds of KBs though, so for that it really wouldn’t be a big deal either way.

These should be USB sticks, but otherwise this is preferable to something like wifi.

You do not want to stop requiring physical access to avionics for updates and reprogramming.

The fewer surfaces for entry into the avionics systems the better and if that means an engineer schlepping a database update on a thumb drive to the cockpit that’s what you want.

I spent the better part of a decade on avionics, and while this as a headline sounds bad it’s one of the few things Boeing shouldn’t be mocked for right now.

It’s a surprisingly good comparison especially when you look at the reactions: frame breaking vs data poisoning.

The problem isn’t progress, the problem is that some of us disagree with the Idea that what’s being touted is actual progress. The things llms are actually good at they’ve being doing for years (language translations) the rest of it is so inexact it can’t be trusted.

I can’t trust any llm generated code because it lies about what it’s doing, so I need to verify everything it generates anyway in which case it’s easier to write it myself. I keep trying it and it looks impressive until it ends up at a way worse version of something I could have already written.

I assume that it’s the same way with everything I’m not an expert in. In which case it’s worse than useless to me, I can’t trust anything it says.

The only thing I can use it for is to tell me things I already know and that basically makes it a toy or a game.

That’s not even getting into the security implications of giving shitty software access to all your sensitive data etc.