The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

https://octodon.social/@jalefkowit/111490485825183949

by srijan4 • 3 years ago

785 522 3 years ago

I'm so conflicted reading this story. On one hand, yes, there were choices made during the design of the system that directly contributed to this tragedy. And a lot of innocent lives were lost, so saying that's "shit happens, it's an edge case" rings very hollow.

On the other hand, this was a very peculiar set of circumstances, very much an edge case. Is it reasonable to expect designers of combat systems to triple check their choices and run more test scenarios to identify and address such edge cases? I'd say yes. However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.

gpderetta7• 3 years ago

Sorry, I don't see where's the edge case. In a given area there are going to be lots of planes. If there is risk of confusing them and making decisions based on non-reconciled information, it seems a pretty critical flaw.

Maxion• 3 years ago

Hard agree here. There are so many small things there that could be improved.

One simple one is identifier re-use, if it is necessary for some reason, then at the very least it shouldn't happen within a specific time frame, so that you may have the same identifier used again as in the scenario.

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

I agree, the described scenario could just be another day at any airport and surrounding airspace (I guess any airport that is dual purpose military and civilian).

rkagerer• 3 years ago

Reusing identifiers after such a short time was a pretty galactic design cockup. I'm a consultant and if I came across that in a design doc or while analyzing a system to form an understanding in my head of how it works, it would have immediately screamed out to me as asking for this kind of trouble. Operator punched the ID in for (civilian) aircraft A, and unknowingly got the trajectory data for (military) aircraft B.

Coding for the 90% common conditions are easy, it's the edge cases where things get hard and true engineering talent shines through. Ignoring them is simply incomplete design.

It's not tolerated in other fields of engineering (eg. civil) and it shouldn't be in ours either.

helsinkiandrew2• 3 years ago

Yes - but the implications of reassigning the number immediately to another contact seems something that should have been noticed in the design phase.

Vincennes assigned her the tracking number 4474; Sides assigned her 4131. Aegis unified the contacts under the number 4131. 4474 was then available for re-use, so Aegis assigned it to a US A-6 bomber, which happened to be descending.
But he didn't realize that its tracking number had changed. He thought it was still tracking number 4474,

tlb• 3 years ago

Global commercial flight traffic averages around 100k flights per day. I don't know what fraction is within the radar range of a big ship in a busy area, but maybe 10k? So it's not trivial to avoid reuse within a day while still having 4-digit numbers. Especially when contacts are assigned numbers independently by multiple ships and then reconciled.

ZephyrBlu• 3 years ago

This was not an edge case, it was a swiss cheese failure that was just waiting to happen.

In a tech company this would correctly be thought of as a systemic failure as opposed to a personal one.

There are so many questionable design choices here for a system that is supposed to be used in high-stress situations. A lot of it reads as someone thinking "ooh yeah it would be cool if it did X" instead of "what's the simplest and dumbest possible way to do this".

ughitsaaron• 3 years ago

Given the stakes of an “edge case” in a war machine, not to mention their cost, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect the number of such cases to be zero.

amadeuspagel• 3 years ago

There was no war.

ben0x5394• 3 years ago

Wikipedia says "The attack occurred during the Iran–Iraq War, which had been continuing for nearly eight years." I guess it wasn't supposed to be a war that the US was involved in directly? But they were apparently getting their helicopter shot at and were doing things in Iranian territorial waters, so I guess they weren't just hanging out.

eastern• 3 years ago

Well, apart from the fact that the Iran-Iraq war had been on right there for eight years, there's all this on the referred Wikipedia page, including the fact that the Vincennes was actually in Iranian territorial waters at the time:

The Flight 655 incident occurred a year after the USS Stark incident, during which the Iraqi Air Force attacked the U.S. Navy guided missile frigate USS Stark on 17 May 1987, killing 37 American sailors.
U.S. naval forces had also exchanged gunfire with Iranian gunboats in late 1987, and the guided missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts had struck an Iranian sea mine in April 1988.
Two months before the incident, the U.S. had engaged in Operation Praying Mantis, resulting in the sinkings of the Iranian frigate Sahand, the Iranian fast attack craft Joshan, and three Iranian speedboats.
Also, the Iranian frigate Sabalan was crippled, two Iranian platforms were destroyed, and an Iranian fighter was damaged. A total of at least 56 Iranian crew were killed, while the U.S. suffered the loss of only one helicopter, which crashed apparently by accident, killing its two pilots.
On the morning of 3 July 1988, USS Vincennes was passing through the Strait of Hormuz returning from an escort duty. A helicopter deployed from the cruiser reportedly received small arms fire from Iranian patrol vessels as it observed from high altitude. Vincennes moved to engage the Iranian vessels, in the course of which they all violated Omani waters and left after being challenged and ordered to leave by a Royal Navy of Oman warship.
Vincennes then pursued the Iranian gunboats, entering Iranian territorial waters.

So yeah, you are right, there was no actual war. But everyone was pretty war-ish

h0l0cube2• 3 years ago

However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.

When it comes to safety-critical systems, the right engineering choice is to lean towards a 'safe' default. For example, the safe default would be to always slave the cursor:

Once "hooked," the contact would be tracked by Aegis. But critically, unless the operator took the additional step of "slaving" the cursor to that contact, as the contact moved away the cursor would not follow it.

And here, don't reassign a tracking number, at least not within in a short timeframe:

Vincennes assigned her the tracking number 4474; Sides assigned her 4131. Aegis unified the contacts under the number 4131. 4474 was then available for re-use, so Aegis assigned it to a US A-6 bomber, which happened to be descending.

Ferret7446• 3 years ago

the safe default would be to always slave the cursor

I don't think so, I imagine that behavior could be frustrating, e.g. if you're cursoring over many contacts. Admittedly I am not an expert either, but that suggestion smells like a classic case of armchair design that would actually cause more problems, because I imagine that the two modes exist for a reason and the designers intentionally chose which default to use, but they didn't anticipate this user error.

Thus, I'd suggest that the UI should have made it extremely obvious whether the cursor was slaved and when a contact gets hooked/unhooked under the cursor.

If I had to make an analogy, I'd compare it to normal and insert mode in Vi(m). The fact that the default is normal mode actually makes sense even though new users may suggest otherwise, but the real problem is that by default it's hard to tell which mode you are in.

ben0x5394• 3 years ago

I think a highly volatile and chaotic use case is exactly where I'd expect them to design a perfect, or at least orders of magnitude less susceptible to operator error, system.

Of course it's hard for me, a spoiled millennial who got into programming via online games, to imagine what war computers were capable of in 1988, but as described in the thread, this scenario sounds so utterly routine that I am surprised that it basically involved a game of telephone to confirm basic facts about a plane.

"A tracked entity gets confused with another tracked entity" or "an entity's status of hostile-or-not gets lost" sounds like exactly the cases that should be impossible to get wrong as a fundamental goal of this kind of operation.

CogitoCogito4• 3 years ago

On the other hand, this was a very peculiar set of circumstances, very much an edge case. Is it reasonable to expect designers of combat systems to triple check their choices and run more test scenarios to identify and address such edge cases? I'd say yes. However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.

Even if this is your position, it doesn't excuse the Navy's blaming of the crew after it happens. Even if the design issues could be written off as a reasonable mistake, the mistake still lies with the design and not with the crew.

ninkendo• 3 years ago

It really peeves me to hear the phrase “edge case” used as a defense of incorrect software. As if software should not be expected to deal with edge cases.

Edge cases are not rare. If you have a lot of people using your system, or people who use it a long time, hitting an edge case increases in likelihood to the point that it becomes inevitable. It’s a fallacy to think that an edge case being mathematically unlikely implies that it is unlikely to ever happen. See also murphy’s law.

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

I wonder how this compared to plain air traffic control technology of that era? Were ATC doing it better? (Obviously there are a lot of ATC-driven disasters of that era too).

locallost3• 3 years ago

Everything's possible, but there would be no debate about UI mistakes if it was Iran shooting down a US plane. They would've done because they are evil by nature, or at least perceived as such. In that case the media and the public buys into its own reality, but of course the UI discussion could be a distraction from the public maybe starting to question if that's actually the reality.

Also from the Wiki page about this shootdown:

In 1991, political scientist Robert Entman of George Washington University compared U.S. media coverage of the incident with the similar shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviet Union five years earlier by studying material from Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS Evening News. According to Entman, framing techniques were used to frame the Korean Airlines incident as sabotage while framing the Iran Air incident as a tragic mistake,[67] stating "the angle taken by the U.S. media emphasized the moral bankruptcy and guilt of the perpetrating nation. With Iran Air 655, the frame de-emphasised guilt and focused on the complex problems of operating military high technology."[68][a] By "de-emphasizing the agency and the victims and by the choice of graphics and adjectives, the news stories about the U.S. downing of an Iranian plane called it a technical problem while the Soviet downing of a Korean jet was portrayed as a moral outrage."

CrzyLngPwd2• 3 years ago

One only has to see the differences between NATO bombing of serbian power stations vs the russians doing the same with Ukraine, or Israel killing children in gaza vs russian killing children vs the US killing afghan or Iraqi children.

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/25/us/crew-of-cruiser-that-d...

tpm3• 3 years ago

NATO bombing of serbian power stations was done in response of Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, after the horrible crimes against humanity perpetrated by serbian forces in Bosnia. "russians doing the same" is a blatant lie. What the russians are doing is a genocide.

raverbashing• 3 years ago

Except the Soviets had visual confirmation of the target

Vincennes did not (which to be fair should have done - and not excusing their actions here)

dsego2• 3 years ago

That's a good point, why didn't they seek visual confirmation first?

knallfrosch2• 3 years ago

It's not really a UX error when your helicopter-carrier invades Iran after one of your helicopters invaded Iran. In wartime. What were these warships even doing in the PERSIAN gulf? And why do they shoot Iranian airplanes in Iranian airspace while they themselves are in Iran?

I image "UX error" wouldn't cut it if a chinese missile cruiser shot down an US airliner while steaming up the Hudson.

bonzini• 3 years ago

Presumably some mission during the Iran–Iraq war? Iraq was an ally of the US at the time.

kortilla3• 3 years ago

They were in wartime, you answered your own question.

I image "UX error" wouldn't cut it if a chinese missile cruiser shot down an US airliner while steaming up the Hudson.

Yes, that would be up for debate if the US were in an active war with China.

throwawayqqq11• 3 years ago

The mentioned iran-iraq war was conducted by then us-ally saddam husein on behalf of the us. The us where the aggressor.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n4H_E8b-qmo

nova220332• 3 years ago

these warships even doing in the PERSIAN gulf

Iran doesn't own the PERSIAN gulf any more than India owns the INDIAN ocean.

formerly_proven• 3 years ago

A not so subtle difference is that the pilot shooting down KAL 007 identified it as a civilian airliner and proceeded to shoot it down anyway.

Another more subtle difference is that in the Iranian Airlines shootdown, the US took responsibility and at least apologized. Meanwhile the Soviets denied anything happening until they couldn't and then claimed it was a spy plane (legitimate target).

p_l3• 3 years ago

Identified it as a Boeing 747, but not as a civilian airliner.

The same types of planes as civilian airliners are often used as platforms for military and spy planes.

FWIW, they would have ended up better off if the original TASS press release was not cancelled just before publication (the one where it was claimed a mistaken shooting due to misidentification).

Tangurena24• 3 years ago

No. The shootdown of KAL 007 took place at night. There was no possible way to identify the aircraft other than via the lights coming out of the windows. A militarized 747 is called an E-4[0]. A militarized 707 is variously called an E-3 (some are AWACS) [1], KC-135 (a now-retired refueling aircraft) [2], or an EC-135 (electronic warfare equipped 707) [3].

The wikipedia page for the shootdown incident [4] lists the time as 1349 GMT. Most readers will go "they shot it down just before 2PM" instead of realizing that the location was 12 hours ahead of GMT. During the time of the USSR, Vladivostok used Moscow time, even though they are 11 timezones ahead.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-4

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-3_Sentry

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_KC-135_Stratotanker

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_EC-135

4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007

dontlaugh8• 3 years ago

Also, what was the US navy even doing there? The Persian Gulf is nowhere near the US.

It's as if Iran had their navy parked on the US east coast, it would be seen as an outrage immediately.

umanwizard2• 3 years ago

The Persian Gulf, despite the name, is not Iranian territorial waters. Anybody can go there. Iran would be well within its rights to send its warships into the Atlantic Ocean, yes.

Tangurena24• 3 years ago

25% of the world's crude oil was shipped out of the Gulf at that time. The Iran-Iraq war had caused the prices of crude to skyrocket as many insurance companies refused to cover any shipping in the region. So the US felt compelled to protect the exports of crude oil from "friendly" nations. While continuing to blockade Iranian imports/exports.

For more details on the political situation at that time, I recommend reading The Persian Puzzle by Pollack.

https://www.amazon.com/Persian-Puzzle-Conflict-Between-Ameri...

Additionally, to help explain how messed up the shoot-down was, Sources of Power by Klein.

https://www.amazon.com/Sources-Power-20th-Anniversary-Decisi...

thereddaikon9• 3 years ago

One of the main jobs of the USN is to protect commercial shipping lanes. This is of US national interest because a lot of commerce flows through international shipping lanes. Its not unique to the US either. Its a historical duty of most nation's blue water navies. The persian gulf does not belong to Iran. Its international waters. But they have a history of using piracy in the persian gulf as a tool of the state and generally acting a destabilizing force in the area. So the US, and other nations often patrol the region to protect civilian shipping.

simne9• 3 years ago

Well, Ukraine is not near US, but Ukraine asked US for support, trying to de-occupy Ukrainian territory, which is defined and agreed by dozen of international treaties.

Absolutely same thing happen at Persian Gulf, allies asked for support from US and help arrived.

da_chicken• 3 years ago

You can't really compare how a nation judges being a victim of it's own mistakes directly to how a nation would judge being a victim of its enemy's mistakes. Obviously there's going to be a whole lot more skepticism and distrust.

mistermann2• 3 years ago

Which is not the same as whether it can be done at all, it's more so that accuracy and epistemic humility are currently low priorities for early 21st century humanity.

gpderetta7• 3 years ago

To be fair, Iran mistakenly shot down an Ukrainian civilian plane only a few years ago, again on a period of heightened tension. They admitted to the mistake a few days later and I don't remember there was a widespread suggestion of second motives.

mistermann2• 3 years ago

According to Entman, framing techniques were used to frame the Korean Airlines incident as...

Framing is a major problem in almost every single problem Humans have, yet it gets almost no attention....which I suspect may not be accidental especially considering how useful it is (it's getting heavy usage in this very thread, wow how surprising).

kortilla3• 3 years ago

That’s a stupid comparison because the USSR intentionally shot down a plane without trying to contact it and then didn’t cooperate at all on search efforts.

Additionally, the pilot positively identified it was a passenger jet due to the double decker windows but shot anyway because they were shooting down “spy planes”, not anything that was an actual threat.

This is in contrast to the US incident where they tried to contact the plane on 10 different frequencies (3 civil aviation) and were operating under the understanding the plane was a fighter carrying missiles.

There is obviously going to be some media bias, but equivocating these two events is terrible from a “moral outrage” perspective.

itsoktocry• 3 years ago

That’s a stupid comparison because the USSR intentionally shot down a plane without trying to contact it and then didn’t cooperate at all on search efforts.

I don't know much about either incident, but your summary sounds exactly what the OP is saying: "Here are the reasons the Russians did it. It's different, because they're evil".

One side was lying about thinking it was a spy plane, but the other side legitimately thought the plane had missiles on it?

It's actually astonishing that anyone who's been on this planet for more than a couple decades can take any of these narratives seriously.

matheusmoreira2• 3 years ago

It's not stupid. All governments and militaries use propaganda. You'd be a fool to believe anything they say, no matter which country it is. The absolute truth of what happened is unreachable to us, we can only try to piece together a coherent version of the events after the fact. Government narratives are notoriously unreliable sources to base such an understanding upon.

modo_mario2• 3 years ago

10 different frequencies (3 civil aviation)

Those 7 others they couldn't receive. For the 3 cilivian ones they couldn't even know which aircraft it was directed at.

and were operating under the understanding the plane was a fighter carrying missiles.

If they said they thought it was squawking on military mode II instead of mode III i'd believe em. The recordings say otherwise but few people making a mistake or the like happens. If they on top of that say they saw it dive whilst their equipment recorded the plane as climbing as well as other discrepancies that don't match up....

Sorry, I don't tend to believe it anymore. I'd assume it much more likely they were covering their asses with lies.

Kim_Bruning• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007

So steelmanning...

To the commanders, shooting the plane down was somewhat defensible at the time. It was well off course and -due to that- happened to enter soviet airspace not once but twice!

The pilot who actually visually identified the plane did actually see it was a passenger airliner, but passenger airliners are sometimes converted to military configuration. And seeing the flight profile, it could totally have been converted for a MASINT mission or something.

But the behavior of the soviet union during the search and rescue operation afterwards? I'm not sure how that can be excused quite so easily.

contravariant• 3 years ago

I mean that's the fundamental attribution error isn't it? If we do it it's because of external factors, if they do it it's because they're inherently bad people.

brabel2• 3 years ago

We see this in much smaller scale everywhere. When someone you don't like does something wrong , it's surely because they're such an idiot... when it's someone you really like, it's definitely due to external causes. Not to mention simple discrimination, which is rampant, seemingly no matter how much we try to make that go away.

CogitoCogito4• 3 years ago

We judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.

chadash• 3 years ago

* there would be no debate about UI mistakes if it was Iran shooting down a US plane*

If Iran shot down a US plane and then immediately admitted it was a mistake and helped investigate, I don’t think this is true. People would still be angry and a UI mistake doesn’t really exonerate you from that anger.

fmajid• 3 years ago

Iran actually shot down a Ukrainian plane by mistake. They took their sweet time admitting it, but did eventually:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_International_Airlines...

arp2425• 3 years ago

Do you think Iran would have acknowledged their mistake? The US immediately did, and ended up putting their money where their mouth is by both fixing the errors that lead to this mistake and paying damages to Iran.

Looking at the details of that Korean Air flight: "the Soviet Union initially denied knowledge of the incident, but later admitted to shooting down the aircraft, claiming that it was on a MASINT spy mission." That's not the same at all. Never mind "The Soviet Union found the wreckage under the sea two weeks later on September 15 and found the flight recorders in October, but this information was kept secret by the Soviet authorities until 1992, after the country's collapse", among a lot of other lies and misinformation.

This a hugely different response. We've seen this again with Russia's shooting of MH-17. I fully believe that too was accidental, yet even for accidents you have to take responsibility. Hell, they even lied to their own people with Kursk.

rglullis4• 3 years ago

Aside: it is the second day in a row that a thread from Mastodon ends up on the frontpage of HN. When was the last time I Twitter thread did the same, and does anyone else doubts that Twitter is no longer at the center of tech-related conversation?

chrismorgan• 3 years ago

Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/front for the last ten days: one today, one five days ago, three seven days ago, two nine days ago.

JimDabell2• 3 years ago

A lot of the recent OpenAI events that were posted here were links to Twitter and I’ve seen plenty of people point this out as evidence that Twitter still is at the centre.

rglullis4• 3 years ago

The OpenAI saga was such an outlier in the usual news cycle, it is hard to use it as a measure of anything.

ImaCake4• 3 years ago

This is part of the current cycle of fragmentation. Twitter is no longer the centre, but it still holds certain cultural niches. Other niches have migrated to Mastodon or elsewhere.

I am personally pretty excited to see this diversification and fragmentation as it should help provide more niches for more people.

jansan2• 3 years ago

What you are experiencing is a great example of confirmation bias.

dpkirchner2• 3 years ago

I'm just glad to see the entire thread of conversation without having to switch to nitter or whatever.

marssaxman• 3 years ago

Are you familiar with the libredirect plugin? It can automatically rewrite all twitter links to point at nitter instead.

georgehotelling• 3 years ago

One difference is that Twitter no longer shows threads to logged-out users, while Mastodon does. If someone posted the same thread to both sites, the Mastodon one would be better to link to.

rootusrootus6• 3 years ago

I think this is a misfeature that will hurt Twitter going forward. I don't bother clicking a link to a Twitter thread any more because I know I'm just going to get prompted to log into the account I don't have. And I don't care enough to use an alternate tool, so I just move on. I expect I'm not alone.

Aissen2• 3 years ago

Pro-tip to those unused to mastodon web-ui: you can click the eye on the top right of the center column (next to Back) to expand all posts at once.

4gotunameagain• 3 years ago

How ironic, a post about a user interface disaster needing an explanatory pro-tip for its UI.

Aissen2• 3 years ago

Luckily, this one will have less dire consequences.

dsego2• 3 years ago

That's objectively terrible UX.

gpderetta7• 3 years ago

Maybe my expectations are very very low at this point. But I thought it was ok.

metabagel3• 3 years ago

At least there was no popup a few seconds after starting to read the article.

CogitoCogito4• 3 years ago

Does anyone know the reasoning for not having the posts expanded by default?

neffo• 3 years ago

Posts aren't limited to an arbitrary length in activity pub, this is the same UI logic for showing a thread in the main feed. Twitter does something similar for bluecheck long posts.

isodev• 3 years ago

Not sure but the good news is, that’s just one of many UIs to pick from in Mastodon and the fedivers in general. There are also countless apps with various takes on threads, so I’m sure one can find something they like.

oneeyedpigeon2• 3 years ago

Is there a way, as either the reader or the writer, to set that as a default? Or do you need to remember it and manually do it every time you read a thread like this?

vkaku3• 3 years ago

I first thought this was a post about flat design, then went and read the whole toot. Man, who'd expect UI to be bad enough for life and death operations.

Someone should post more details about the actually confusing UI that lead to this event. Would be a good lesson to most of us.

It also appears that Lockheed won a contract for using this system in 2023 [1]. Can someone share if they actually fixed the UI issues with it recently?

1 - https://news.clearancejobs.com/2023/03/13/lockheed-martin-wi...

jansan2• 3 years ago

I thought it was about Chrome's new sidebar by just reading the title.

vkaku3• 3 years ago

I actually had to Google what that looked like. It's been a while.

Haha.

jgilias• 3 years ago

The details are in the posted thread.

Basically, heading and location came from one plane, identification from another plane, and altitude yet from another one for reasons.

vkaku3• 3 years ago

Thank you. Did go through the whole thing. Talk about complicated systems, lack of documentation, work stress and then branding it a personnel failure. Totally unlike most systems today (not!)

wruza• 3 years ago

Tl;dr

- some friend/foe “cursor” was not locked to a jet trajectory

- a fighter jet flew through it later, classifying it as a threat

- dashboard shows no altitudes

- identifier reuse led to invalid ascent/descent check

- captain decided it’s a classic attack profile

squirrel23• 3 years ago

What an insane story. Crazy to think that some of these engineering errors led to such a disastrous outcome...

I do resonate with someone's comments in the above sections reflecting on whether or not such a narrative would be given if it was say, a UI mistake from an enemy country.

cies7• 3 years ago

Very impactful mistake, but apparently not a mistake worth apologizing for.

From Wikipedia: "the U.S. government did not admit legal liability or formally apologize to Iran"

Pinnacle arrogance/exceptionalism. Disgusting.

Oh, and the US back then supported Iraq in its horrific attack on Iran.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...

gifvenut• 3 years ago

You forgot to mention that Ronald Reagan apologized to the Iranian government and the US paid $60 Mil in compensation to the families.

ben0x5394• 3 years ago

After having become an expert on the incident from having skimmed half of the wikipedia article, I note that it mentions both Reagan considering his letter an apology and the US government not having made a formal apology, so I imagine there is some clever political distinction between the two.

xkbarkar• 3 years ago

What a terrible platform to present an interesting story. What wrong with a good old fashioned article style blog ?

I admit I am so turned off by the format I only made it hlf way throught the thread.

lgrapenthin• 3 years ago

I gave up when I realized that I have to click on each "tweet" to read more

athesyn• 3 years ago

the horror

emsixteen• 3 years ago

Likewise.

There is apparently an extremely unintuitive "Show more for all"[1] button at the top of the initial post.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/5l15SM8.png

RheingoldRiver• 3 years ago

That kinda seems feature-rather-than-bug honestly - I read the entire thing because I'm fascinated by UI/UX stories like this, and clicking to open each tab is nbd, but if it had been a topic I wasn't that interested in, I wouldn't've read it. Which means I'm less likely to fall into an attention-grabbing rabbit hole on social media.

brabel2• 3 years ago

And when you try to scroll down with the keyboard, it moves a full "tweet" down so you can't actually read what you were trying to.

subpixel• 3 years ago

User interface disaster indeed

ImaCake4• 3 years ago

As a counterpoint; I really like threaded posts like these. Each post in the thread becomes a kind of sub-heading or meta-paragraph which allows the user to disengage at well defined stops.

At the same time, it’s understandable that people don’t like it. The format has its problems, but I find I will read less of a blog post than a thread all else being equal.

hoherd• 3 years ago

But it does not allow the reader to quickly skim the article. It requires the user to interact with each paragraph in order to enable the user to skim it for interesting words.

Old fashioned non-interactive subheadings would allow the user to "disengage at well defined steps" and also to quickly scan ahead.

I see no benefit to the added interactivity.

Hamuko• 3 years ago

You made it further than I did, since the UI is absolutely horrendous after the first post.

You can set up a blog on the Internet for free if you want to make longform content.

pavo-etc• 3 years ago

Here is the thread unrolled:

https://unroller.zachmanson.com/threads/https:/octodon.socia...

moffkalast• 3 years ago

tl; dr: They had the wrong contact selected. That's it, that's the whole thing.

dang3• 3 years ago

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

(I know these things are indeed annoying—but that's why we have this rule.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

m4635• 3 years ago

I wonder when a tesla will show up in a courtroom with a situation like this.

I'm not talking about autopilot.

I'm talking about the continuous (past ridiculous) removal of physical controls from their vehicles.

For example, the original model S/X had dedicated controls for lots of functions - turn signals, gear shift, wipers, autopilot, steering wheel tilt, etc. On the steering wheel, there were two buttons and a scrollwheel on each side of the steering wheel. Press the center of the steering wheel for the horn. The door had mirror adjustment and windows + lock

Unfortunately a few critical controls were on the touchscreen - defrost front and back were big ones, but all the climate controls, and other nonsense too - all pretty much hidden with multiple taps, or small targets or both.

not all of this is bad - putting lots of detailed but non-critical settings like miles vs km are the perfect thing to have on a touchscreen.

but it needed more dedicated controls.

When the Model 3 came out, it started removing controls. There are two stalks, the turn signal also sort of controls headlights and wipers, the shifter is overloaded with autopilot. It has two scrollwheels without buttons, you have to push them left and right.

all other controls are on the touchscreen.

It really needs dedicated controls for important things.

And then the updated model S/X came out. wow.

there are NO stalks. turn signals are touch areas on the steering wheel. so are high beams, horn, wipers. the scroll wheels do different things at different times.

shifter? nope - it guesses what direction you want to go. many more things involve the touchscreen, like going into park. (there is also a touch drive selector in the center console, but you have to look down and touch it to wake, then to select)

Just a mess. It makes you a worse driver.

ksjskskskkk• 3 years ago

I'm more worried when spacex "pivots" to iron dome like products.

you will get a barrage of missiles raining down from space on top of some kindergartens because the autofire ai correlated a bunch of Toyota suvs moving to the same point with terrorists

IanHalbwachs• 3 years ago

Thanks, you've just cured me of my Tesla envy entirely

seb1204• 3 years ago

I test drove a Hyundai ionic 6. All the levers and dials that had no use because they were set to 'Auto' made me appreciate my model 3 even more.

ImaCake4• 3 years ago

Its not just Tesla. Recent Jeep models have a digital speedometer with no analog backup. From an engineering perspective these changes just introduce needless risk of complex failure for no real gain. Surely the speedometer is not the make or break cost item on a car?

macintux• 3 years ago

Fortunately I bought my Jeep with a manual; as long as I know what gear I'm in, I know roughly how fast I'm driving by sound.

But I'd be surprised if Jeep is the only example of this (outside Tesla). Surely this is the way all cars have been going for a while.

JumpCrisscross4• 3 years ago

these changes just introduce needless risk of complex failure for no real gain

Analog speedometers are more complex and can’t be patched OTA. Eliminating them from the fleet means one less part to procure and inventory for manufacturing and service. Given the downside is losing precise speed awareness (you should still be able to judge rough speed visually—that’s the back-up), this seems like a fair trade-off.

Contrast that with e.g. brake lines, where digital systems can add redundancy. (That doesn’t mean they always do.) Or physical mirrors, which add critical redundancy to cameras.

aqfamnzc• 3 years ago

Digital dashes have been a thing for a long, long time. They're objectively better in some ways (imho) and costs add up!

mannykannot3• 3 years ago

While it is important for cars to have speedometers so that drivers can learn to judge their speed, with a little bit of caution, a journey during which the speedometer fails can be completed both safely and within speed limits.

bdavbdav• 3 years ago

The analog speedometer it replaced has been digital behind the scenes for ages. The cluster is just sat on a CAN (or similar) bus and controlling a servo for the analog gauge. The pure digital speedometer is significantly less failure prone (and indeed when it does fail, it’s obvious).

alphager• 3 years ago

The analog gauges have been digital for a long time; there's a signal processor that decides how far the gauge should move and a motor that actually moves it.

hoseja• 3 years ago

What sort of "physical control" would be appropriate for a radar-guided beyond-visual-range anti-air missile?

ceejayoz7• 3 years ago

https://www.amazon.com/STAPLES-Staples-Easy-Button/dp/B001FV...

dun44• 3 years ago

Typically two different jettison mechanisms, one with a dedicated "emergency jettison" pushbutton.

Also a bunch of physical HOTAS controls, from four-way switches to the small joystick under pilot's left thumb.

mrguyorama5• 3 years ago

The commander of the Vincennes actually had to turn at least one key to enable fire of the missile

dav_Oz• 3 years ago

In the near future we will ask ourselves how people back then were doing this virtuoso thing called "driving" and be deeply grateful for the autopilot technology which Tesla was pioneering.

immibis11• 3 years ago

More like we'll be deeply thankful for driverless trains.

MobileVet• 3 years ago

This is on point.

I purposely didn’t buy a Tesla because I wanted to drive a car, not a toy.

Are touch interfaces all bad? No, but in situations where heavy focus is required and the inputs are dynamically changing, they are a disaster.

mavhc• 3 years ago

The left scroll wheel can: play/pause/next/previous/vol up/down in Normal mode

If you press the wiper button on the steering wheel it can change wiper speed

Long press is a custom function

When there's a call it answers/declines, mute/unmute, and ends a call

The right one actives autosteer/tacc/fsd, adjusts follow distance and max speed

There's 3 buttons for left/right/high beam on the left, and on the right, buttons for wiper mode, voice, rear camera, and in the middle, horn.

Not sure I need a button for steering wheel tilt, should only be when stopped. Also do I change gear so often I need a dedicated stalk? It's not a manual car. Direction/park is only done when stopped too.

Does voice control not work for defrost?

I'd rather have a cheaper car with less parts

dmix4• 3 years ago

Yeah I’ve always been suspect of these critiques of Teslas UI. Besides the climate control you don’t really need to tap on the tablet for anything critical to driving WHILE driving. At least that was my experience in my brief experience with a 3.

I’d still add maybe another physical dial for stuff like climate, maybe even make them programmable. But that’s for convenience.

I find the rare times you need to use xdrive on BMWs which is a physical dial + a few buttons just as distracting as using a tablet while driving.

withinboredom5• 3 years ago

When there's a call it answers/declines, mute/unmute, and ends a call

Literally do not care about a phone call when it is raining. Hopefully, it at least has coyote time on it so when you adjust the wiper speed it will ignore a phone call.

Not sure I need a button for steering wheel tilt, should only be when stopped.

I've had to adjust while driving. I don't remember for what reason, but I know I've had to do it a few times in my hundreds of thousands of miles of driving.

do I change gear so often I need a dedicated stalk? It's not a manual car. Direction/park is only done when stopped too.

When you need it, you need it. I was once driving towards a non-gated, non-indicated railroad crossing in my hometown. There was only a train about once a day that went through there, but that day, there was a train that should not have been there. I slammed on the brakes, pulled the emergency brake, and threw the car into park. I stopped with less than an inch between me and the train.

I also destroyed my transmission by putting it in park at high speed. Worth it.

eadmund2• 3 years ago

My God, they’ve finally made Marcus J. Ranum’s comment reality: ‘If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles — but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.’

alexey-salmin• 3 years ago

I wonder when a tesla will show up in a courtroom with a situation like this.

Well in this situation no one went to prison, so I guess no reason to worry for Tesla either

ryanjshaw• 3 years ago

shifter? nope - it guesses what direction you want to go.

I honestly thought you were making this up, or at the very least exaggerating. I can't believe it's true. It just makes no sense.

InsomniacL3• 3 years ago

Tesla have a habit of doing things that make no sense and making a success out of it regardless.

thereddaikon9• 3 years ago

IIRC they got in trouble in Germany for this already because certain controls were mandated by law to be a certain way and they flaunted it. I just bought a new car and a make or break decision for me was the control layout. Too many automakers jumped on the touchscreen bandwagon. Its fine for some things like android auto. But all touchscreen all the time was stupid in star trek and stupid in real life. Having physical controls for things like the lights, wipers and hvac is critical.

outworlder7• 3 years ago

Even in Star Trek it wasn't this horrible. The touch buttons were mostly unchanged and in the same place. See the 'pilot' consoles in the first episode all the way to the last, they are exactly the same. No weird 'modes' or different screens.

It is not too farfetched to assume they had some form of haptic feedback (or something even better). They might as well feel like actual buttons to them.

The real life implementation is far stupider.

InsomniacL3• 3 years ago

I have a disaster storey to share about this.

Sometimes the car does not want to go in to drive/reverse for some unknown reason.

Not long after I first got my tesla, I was making a 3 point turn to go on to my driveway. I moved forward, then stopped, turned the wheel, pressed the stalk to go in to reverse, pressed the accelerator and WENT FORWARD, right in to my old car denting the door. There was no indication the car declined to go in to reverse apart from the icon on the screen.

Now, Tesla released an update so the car makes an audible noise when changing to drive/reverse and a separate noise when the car refuses your instruction. It's much better but annoyingly the car still refuses quite often to go in to Drive/Reverse when you tell it to, especially when you just get in to it. I now out of habit press the gear stalk 4 or 5 times when first getting in to drive it.

outworlder7• 3 years ago

I wonder if this issue is behind all the reports of people randomly crashing into weird obstacles. Often it's claimed that they are confusing the break and accelerator pedals and one pedal driving is cited. But there's a bunch of other EVs that also have one pedal driving and they seem fine.

Mind you, my (much cheaper) EV will beep at me if I try to engage a mode and it refuses. Be it forward, reverse or park. But in the 'ready to drive' state it has never refused reverse or drive; I don't know why it ever would.

mrguyorama5• 3 years ago

annoyingly the car still refuses quite often to go in to Drive/Reverse when you tell it to

How the everloving F** does this even happen? I cannot imagine an ICE car "refusing" switching gears. I know electric vehicles don't manage driving direction through physical gears and linkages like ICE vehicles but this feels like an absurd regression.

rurp• 3 years ago

Holy cow! I have driven a Tesla handful of times and found the UX both terrible and dangerous, but this is a new one to me. Even with all of the other issues those cars have I'm shocked to learn that they will refuse to shift direction. I literally can't imagine myself ever owning a vehicle that would refuse basic commands by design.

registeredcorn• 3 years ago

The idea of a car "refusing" to do what I tell it to do infuriates me. I already have enough problems with various computer programs trying to second guess my decisions. I don't want my toaster, vacuum, or metal buggy telling me it knows better, too!

gosub1003• 3 years ago

there are NO stalks. turn signals are touch areas on the steering wheel. so are high beams, horn, wipers

I didn't realize how important wipers were till last winter. I was on a 2-lane road at highway speed going into a turn. There had been light snow the previous day which was thawed on the roads, so it was wet and muddy conditions. A truck in the oncoming lane either hit a puddle or otherwise deposited a large splash of muddy water on my windshield instantly, and due to the turn coming up I had to see where I was going. I had about 1 second to find the wipers (it was someone else's vehicle) or I would have gone off the road or into oncoming traffic. That's not the time to hastily search for the wiper button on a touch screen!

rootusrootus6• 3 years ago

I'm not a fan of the removal of the stalks, but this deserves clarification.

On the 2017-2023 Model 3, there's a button at the end of the left stalk that immediately activates the wiper. It's basically a mist button, which is also common on most every other car I've driven. So you can always get the wipers to activate instantly without getting anywhere near the touchscreen.

On the 2024 Model 3, with no stalks, there is a steering wheel button on the right that serves the same function. Push for mist, hold for wash. Same as the button on the pre-2024 model.

Stalkless is probably still going to be a deal killer for me, but still.

steeve• 3 years ago

Thank you.

Stratoscope• 3 years ago

This makes me appreciate my Kia EV6.

One side of the steering wheel has buttons for driving functions: cruise control, following distance, lane assist, etc. The other side has audio controls for radio channel selection and volume, voice input, start/end phone call, and a customizable button that I set to record a voice memo.

Behind the wheel are a pair of regenerative braking paddles that work much like the paddle shifters on some gas cars: left paddle increases regen, right paddle decreases it. That left button comes in handy on the rare occasion when I may want to slow down in a hurry without lighting up the brake lights. (I will leave it to the reader to speculate on why I may want to do that) The drive mode button (eco/standard/sport/winter) is below the horn button.

Two stalks for headlight/turn signal/etc. and wiper/washer control.

Dual screens: one in front of the driver with driving info: speed and speed limit, how much battery you're using or regening, etc. A touchscreen in the center for infotainment stuff.

Below the center screen is a dual mode touch panel for climate controls or radio/map/nav controls. I just leave this in climate mode. Physical knobs at each end of this panel that change roles for the two modes. The left side of this panel has front/rear defrost, recirculation, and auto climate which remain there in both modes.

The center console has physical buttons to turn the EV on or off, a physical R/N/D knob, and physical buttons for parking camera/auto parking and a couple of related features.

At the front of the center console are dedicated buttons for driver/passenger seat heating/ventilation and steering wheel heat. Oddly, these are touch buttons in my GT-Line but physical buttons (better!) in the lower-end Wind trim. In Australia the GT-Line keeps the physical buttons here.

Behind the steering wheel next to the door are physical buttons for panel illumination level, charge door and rear hatch opening, and a couple of other things.

The driver door has traditional buttons for mirror adjustment, lock/unlock, windows, and child lock.

After driving gas cars all my life, the first time I got in an EV6 it felt very comfortable, like a real car and not a science experiment.

FearlessNebula• 3 years ago

Anton Yelchin was killed due to traumatic asphyxiation when he thought he parked his Jeep and got out of the car and it then rolled into him and crushed him against a gate. Arguably the blame falls on GM for building one of those stateless shifters that always pops back to the center.

grotorea• 3 years ago

Since we're on the topic, you know how much HN complains about touchscreens on cars? Now find out how replacing old school analog controls with software touchscreens UI partly led to the USS John S. McCain colliding: https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...

xp842• 3 years ago

This is a fascinating article. I feel like I am in my life constantly fighting against either haphazard UI like the one featured there, and the Apple-style UIs which attempt to optimize for beauty by shoving nearly everything (regardless of usefulness) into layers of "••• junk drawers" or little (i) icons.

On a ship worth hundreds of billions of dollars, it was never considered that the Big Red Button should have a plain English red sign saying "Emergency Take-Control-Here Button. Press to return control to THIS station."

The software designers as well could have used plain and direct language too, and made it easy to do the right thing, and require deliberateness to do a weird thing. If it's wildly irregular to have 2 people independently doing port/starboard thrust control, the process should be like "Transfer Thrust Control", followed by a modal with a giant "BOTH SIDES" button and two tiny "Port only" "Stbd Only" buttons.

Also when you are moving around something as important as control of your ship, why not have a simple voice announcement, what does a loudspeaker cost, 20 dollars a piece? "The Thrust control has been transferred to the Lee Helm" or "All Controls were transferred to the Bridge because the Red Take-Control Button was pressed at that station."

Sometimes I think only thoughtless people and Jony Ive-worshipers are doing UI design.

Nekhrimah• 3 years ago

What's the bet that there was no single approved requirements document covering this design.

JshWright• 3 years ago

If it's wildly irregular to have 2 people independently doing port/starboard thrust control, the process should be like "Transfer Thrust Control", followed by a modal with a giant "BOTH SIDES" button and two tiny "Port only" "Stbd Only" buttons.

A contributing factor in the crash of Air France Flight 447 was that Airbus aircraft average the inputs of the two pilots side-stick flight controls (as oppose to Boeing, which connects the two yokes so you can't move one without moving the other). At various points leading up to the crash one pilot understood the situation and was applying the correct input to resolve the issue, but the other pilot was doing the opposite and canceled out the correct input. While there was an audible warning about the conflicting inputs, it was easily lost in the chaos of the moment.

dralley• 3 years ago

On a ship worth hundreds of billions of dollars

Hundreds of millions perhaps, but even a brand new nuclear aircraft carrier only costs ~13 billion.

spacecadet2• 3 years ago

Had family members on the Aegis design team... I got another UI disaster... y'all had a chance to end this insane twitter thread UX and you chose to continue it. Why on earth do people post content like this... how much effort do you want me to put in? all that extra energy clicking, making requests...

immibis11• 3 years ago

Twitter thread UX makes sense for Twitter, but why do people post things on Twitter, the social media for short messages, that are so long they need threads?

marvin• 3 years ago

It’s the place where both the audience and all the interesting authors are.

dang3• 3 years ago

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(What would be interesting is hearing more about the Aegis design team, if you want to share)

spacecadet2• 3 years ago

Nice try, but my complaint illustrates the issue. Im not complaining about white button text, Im complaining about the awful UX of "twitter threads", which all of the twitter clones seem to have blindly adopted, instead of taking the opportunity to improve on it.

cryptos• 3 years ago

This could have been an article worth reading, instead it is chunked in tweets (or whatever they are named now) on X. I'd be interested in the topic, but hate the reading experience to much to read it.

JKCalhoun• 3 years ago

But it's about bad UI.

Irony.

VoodooJuJu• 3 years ago

Not reading your 20-post twitter vomit - just make a blog post dude.

immibis11• 3 years ago

In other good news, Mastodon is now so good a Twitter clone that you think it's Twitter.

FinnKuhn• 3 years ago

until you try and follow or like the post and learn that the instance this was posted on has blocked your instance...

bogantech• 3 years ago

People use the name Coke generically for cola too but it doesn't mean RC cola is any good

subroutine4• 3 years ago

Interesting to see this on HN. I currently work for the company that redesigned the HMI/UI following this incident. Or rather, it's how my company was founded. In the aftermath, the US Navy Command in San Diego contacted several UCSD professors in the Cognitive Science and Psychology department who specialized in high-impact decision making under stress and cognitive load. The Navy was apparently impressed with the detailed analysis and recs provided by these faculty and continued to collaborate with these folks on this an other projects. Eventually they were getting so much work from the Navy they founded a company focused on human factors engineering and interface design for complex systems.

The two original founders recently retired and our new CEO is a former Captain of the USS Zumwalt.

astrobase_go• 3 years ago

I think your company is PSE, correct?

smcl4• 3 years ago

I think if they wanted to name the company they would have done so in the comment

subroutine4• 3 years ago

Indeed it is!

I'm fine with our name being mentioned. I didn't include it above because our website is trash, which doesn't bode well for a company with professional graphics designers and human factors engineers on staff haha.

jayp1418• 3 years ago

This is how every software UI should be designed as well.

withinboredom5• 3 years ago

Hopefully without people having to die first.

dmix4• 3 years ago

Fun fact the Captain of the Vincennes went to school for psychology and his father was a US Navy Psychologist in WW2.

lostlogin• 3 years ago

From the wiki: “Rogers' next assignment was as commanding officer of the United States Navy Tactical Training Group at Naval Base Point Loma, a group responsible for training officers in handling combat situations.”

Is having that guy train people genius, or moronic?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_C._Rogers_III

waihtis• 3 years ago

Any good reading on this? Might be some interesting learning opportunities for (cyber)security monitoring, which is a total mess right now. Stakes are a bit less severe, but still.

billbrown• 3 years ago

I suggest you check out the work of Gary Klein and the Naturalistic Decision Making community, as the Vicennes work was one of the founding projects. He features it in his 1997 book _Sources of Power_.

jonah• 3 years ago

Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things is a great intro to human factors and covers a number of high-stakes environments as well as more mundane things like door handles. Highly recommended reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

vigormortis• 3 years ago

I would recommend Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild". He examines the performance of the crew of a ship acting as distributed intelligence and the many factors that go into making them an effective unit (or not).

Ed was also part of the UCSD Cognitive Science department at the time of the Vincennes incident and I suspect it was his work, along with Don Norman's, that drew the attention of the Navy. At the time, I was doing an undergraduate independent study in his lab, where we spent hours watching videos of airline pilots in 747 flight simulators, looking out for errors while using the flight guidance system. Our "textbook" was the operations manual for the 747 guidance and autopilot system.

An example of the sort of UI things we were looking for:

"Improvements" such as replacing the analog altimeter and airspeed indicators with digital readouts deprived pilots of operational awareness as they could no longer estimate rate of descent by watching the movement of the hands of the analog meters.

Anyway, here are the links:

This is the introduction and table of contents:

https://hci.ucsd.edu/hutchins/citw.html

Amazon link

https://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Wild-Bradford-Edwin-Hutchin...

rbanffy5• 3 years ago

our new CEO is a former Captain of the USS Zumwalt.

Wait! Wasn't the last captain of the Zumwalt called James Kirk?

pesfandiar3• 3 years ago

Software engineers sometimes wonder about the importance of their jobs by comparing them to other engineering fields where mistakes can hurt or kill fellow human beings. And then there are jobs that hurt or kill regardless of the quality of your work.

subroutine4• 3 years ago

I'm not sure what you are implying. The nature of the work described above was to prevent a disaster like the shooting down of commercial Flight 655 from ever happening again.

psunavy035• 3 years ago

Go read about the software bug that literally killed people by miscalculating the radiation dose given by a medical machine. There is software which can hurt or kill fellow human beings. Industrial controls, aircraft flight controls, the list goes on.

cutemonster5• 3 years ago

I wonder what "jobs that hurt or kill regardless" you have in mind

pjmlp• 3 years ago

Real software engineers care a lot, those with fake engineering titles after a bootcamp, not so much.

d3w4s9• 3 years ago

Sarcastically, on a mobile phone, a persistent sidebar takes up valuable space from the content. Somehow Mastodon thinks this is good UI.

2-718-281-828• 3 years ago

When a foreign country kills US citizens, it's terrorism. When the US kills foreign civilians it's collateral damage or a UI disaster ... business as usual.

JumpCrisscross4• 3 years ago

When a foreign country kills US citizens, it's terrorism

No, it’s an act of war if deliberate. As this would have been. It is unusual (though not unprecedented) to refer to the actions of states’ militaries as terrorism.

vitiral• 3 years ago

Intent is important. If I accidentally step on your toe it doesn't necessarily say anything about my character. If I I intentionally step on your toe you know I'm an asshole.

Intent and regret tells you what someone will do in the future.

jakobnissen• 3 years ago

That's a completely unreasonable take. There is no reason to believe that the killing was intentional, so it can't possibly be terrorism.

Equating an accidental shootdown of a civilian plane during a war, with the intentional killing of civilians as a stategy employed by e.g. jihadist is deeply disingenuous.

quietbritishjim4• 3 years ago

Another good write up of this incident is on the excellent Admiral Cloudberg blog:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t...

Another article in that series is also related to a UX mistake: Air France Flight 447.

This crashed, in part, because the inputs from two control sticks (one for pilot and other for copilot) were averaged if they disagreed, unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place, and you'd feel the other pilot fighting you. When the plane stalled, one pilot correctly pushed down to come out of the stall (after which they would be able to pull back up) while the other pulled up instead (which is wrong but does feel like the instinctively correct thing to do). The inputs cancelled out so had almost no effect. By the end both pilots were pulling up, but that hadn't been the case earlier on when the problem could have been resolved.

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...

The captain had been on a rest brake and only re-entered the cabin at the last moment. He finally figured out the problem but it was too late to do anything.

“Go on, pull,” Dubois said. Was this comment a sardonic resignation to fate?

gregsadetsky• 3 years ago

The tragic AF447 flight comes up somewhat regularly on the site — see this recent conversation [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089363

dredmorbius• 3 years ago

CFIT is a particularly spectacular form of failure.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain>

MichaelZuo5• 3 years ago

It's not something that can be changed on airbus cockpits, since the nature of side sticks makes them impossible to be mechanically linked, unless there was some very complex motor system built into each stick that provided force feedback equal in strength to a pilot tugging hard on it.

masklinn6• 3 years ago

unless there was some very complex motor system built into each stick that provided force feedback equal in strength to a pilot tugging hard on it

It does not have to be “equal in strength to a pilot tugging hard on it” since there is normally no significant load applied by the stick to the hand (only the centering springs). So most every feedback should be noticeable.

And force feedback is being deployed right now on commercial planes. The Irkut MC-21 was supposed to be the first airliner featuring them, but the invasion of ukraine and subsequent sanctions nixed that (as the provider of the sticks is the french company Ratier-Figeac). Gulfstream’s 7th gen (GVII) also have active sticks, provided by BAE.

hn8305823• 3 years ago

The Cirrus SR-22 (the best selling general aviation plane every year since 2003) has mechanically linked side sticks. They aren't fly by wire like the Airbus but it shows they can be linked without a complex motor system.

KennyBlanken• 3 years ago

...it's a spring and a servo. Or a brushless motor.

https://github.com/scottbez1/smartknob

...or any not-bottom-end-of-market steering wheel for driving video games.

rbanffy5• 3 years ago

It's not something that can be changed on airbus cockpits

You'd need to run cables between them and redesign the sticks to have mechanical hooks, and it'd be a very ugly hack, but it's hardly impossible.

cco• 3 years ago

I believe Airbus is planning to add force feedback to the side sticks for this error case. But I don't know that.

Many aircraft controls already have force feedback in the form of stick pushers [1], a device to violently shake the control yoke when the aircraft is at risk of stalling. Those have been around since the 60's.

So this is not only possible, but it's been around for a long time though Airbus had chosen to use a verbal warning only instead of a stick shaker.

thescriptkiddie• 3 years ago

is there really no mechanical connection between the stick and the control surfaces on an airbus? that seems really dangerous.

cesarb• 3 years ago

unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place

I don't know if it's true, but I recall reading somewhere that this physical connection is a breakable link, so if one of the controls gets stuck the other control can still be used to fly the airplane (after some application of strong force to break the connection).

f1shy• 3 years ago

Yes it is true. The force needed is pretty high.

immibis11• 3 years ago

It also caused one accident, where both pilots thought the controls were jammed because the other pilot was pulling in the opposite direction. This is no better than averaging. At least Airbus gives an alarm.

masklinn6• 3 years ago

unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place, and you'd feel the other pilot fighting you.

Note that it’s not quite that flagrant: because Boeings don’t normally autotrim (famously aside from the 737 MAX, whose MCAS was not documented and trained for — I think the more recent Boeings like 777 and 787 are FBW and do autotrim) it’s possible to fight your co-pilot while thinking you’re not trimmed, or even that you have excessive air load:

excessive air loads on the stabiliser may require effort by both pilots to correct miss-trim. In extreme cases it may be necessary to aerodynamically relieve the air loads to allow manual trimming.

inferiorhuman4• 3 years ago

  because Boeings don’t normally autotrim

Yeah they do. On the 737/757/767 they have a mach trim system to account for mach tuck. On the 737, at least, they also have a speed trim system to keep the plane under control at lower speeds when autopilot is off.

quench• 3 years ago

unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place

Air France seemed to manage ithttps://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/air-france-crew-fought-e...

Also glad to see that airbus are planning to put force feedback side-sticks in future.

quietbritishjim4• 3 years ago

Air France seemed to manage it [on a Boeing]

Hence my "at the time" bracket. Since then, newer Boeing planes have actually removed the physical connection between the sticks! Absolutely bonkers decision given the background. (I put "at least" at the end of my bracket because I wasn't 100% sure I rememebered correctly.) But maybe there is a good reason - e.g. like a sibling comment suggested, if one gets stuck.

moritz64• 3 years ago

A quite recent UX disaster at Paypal.

The Paypal iOS app used to behave strange with numbers. The interface was designed that you had to type in the amount you wanted to send in cents. If you wanted to send USD 50, you had to type 5000. Paypal then would add a comma after the second digit from the right. What made it even stranger: The numbers were aligned right, so it had the feeling of typing backwards. I never really got used to it.

A few weeks ago, without a note, the whole interface changed. Now you HAVE to fill in the comma. If you just type in 5000 like you did before, you would send USD 5000 instead of USD 50. I personally know of one person who send way to much money and I suspect it is because of this UX change.

Thoughtful design matters!

ajsnigrutin2• 3 years ago

The price in cents is the way "it was always done" in retail, back when POS terminals were not directly connected to cash registers and the worker had to manually type in the amount. But yeah, sudden change in US design will causemany errors everywhere.

dmix4• 3 years ago

I find gas station pumps 25% are with the cents approach but usually if you type in 60 and press enter it will work

It’s definitely one of those UI concepts that’s different depending on context. similar to password with some websites making up random rules that vary sufficiently enough where automated password entry doesn’t work nor does using a reusable password for sites you don’t care about

bee_rider• 3 years ago

I’m adding a tangent to a tangent, but “POS terminals” has to be one of the greatest naming decisions in history.

_giorgio_• 3 years ago

Always felt wrong. Now it's even more wrong.

gosub1003• 3 years ago

I dont know what you mean by aligned right (if it aligned left it would have to know how much you intended to transfer before you started), but wells fargo web (and I think app) uses this, and I prefer it for making small payments. They know you're going to type the decimal anyway, so they save you a step. I get mildly annoyed that other banking sites make me type it. If I'm paying $83.21 I still have to type 4 digits, why not save me the step?

constantly• 3 years ago

I’m confused by the “aligned left” comment. Analogously this seems like saying left alignment in my word processor would mean the word processor would need to know what I was going to type before I type it.

Can you explain?

ipqk• 3 years ago

Because lots of people send mostly whole numbers to friends and family. If I want to send $5 instead of typing "5" I now have to type "500"

paledot• 3 years ago

When I've encountered it, the interface has looked like this (as I'm in the process of filling it in):

    $_.__
    $_._1
    $_.12
    $1.23
    $12.34

Typically it also rejects non-numeral inputs, so if you muscle-memory a decimal point it gets ignored and your input (hopefully) proceeds normally. Whereas a "left-aligned" input would be the style that we're accustomed to from general text input:

timenova• 3 years ago

Perhaps a better design could be two number fields clearly demarcating the two halves of the value.

Plus, you cannot fill more than digits after the decimal place for most currencies, so IMO the design they went with (even though it is done that way on POS terminals) is bad for web and phone apps.

For example, if some system showed a value to transfer at $25.645, and the person input 25645 by mistake, instead of 2564, they would end up sending $256!

Findecanor• 3 years ago

I made a similar mistake, sending too little, back when PayPal had changed to use the user's local currency as the default instead of the currency I had my balance in.

notjustanymike• 3 years ago

Out of all places, Bank of America actually does this right. Any large wire transfer requires re-entering your credentials.

davidmurdoch• 3 years ago

Using a "comma" to refer to the decimal separator when talking about USD while writing in English about software (written in a computer language that uses a decimal point) took me on a mental rollercoaster. So much so that it led me to read the Wikipedia page on the decimal separator. My favorite part:

Unicode defines a decimal separator key symbol (⎖ in hex U+2396, decimal 9110) which looks similar to the apostrophe. This symbol is from ISO/IEC 9995 and is intended for use on a keyboard to indicate a key that performs decimal separation.

eadmund2• 3 years ago

> Unicode defines a decimal separator key symbol (⎖ in hex U+2396, decimal 9110) which looks similar to the apostrophe. This symbol is from ISO/IEC 9995 and is intended for use on a keyboard to indicate a key that performs decimal separation.

Egad, settling the ./, issue by selecting ⎖ is like settling the debate between 0-based arrays and 1-based by numbering them from ½. Or between little- and big-endian by choosing middle-endian.

upofadown• 3 years ago

Admiral Cloudberg has a detailed discussion of the incident, including the user interface behaviour:

* https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t...

Reading the different takes on the incident leaves one with the impression that there was a lot more going on there than just the stuff with the user interface.

century19• 3 years ago

If I remember correctly, the Lockerbie / Pan Am attack was in response to this.

swader999• 3 years ago

Ironic that a decent article about UX is splattered across a bunch of Twitter posts.

smcl4• 3 years ago

they saw this contact heading towards them labeled as an F-14 fighter.

What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship. Was there no moment where they thought "maybe there has been a mistake?" - like where Stanislav Petrov chose to interpret the Soviet early warning system telling him an ICBM was incoming as being a result of some faulty instruments.

Granted the stakes were slightly different - downing one airliner is less severe than risking starting a global nuclear annihilation.

ghaff2• 3 years ago

In the moment, it's really hard to step back and ask yourself "Does this make any sense?" when you're primed to react in some particular way.

ceejayoz7• 3 years ago

Especially with an element of "I might personally get blown up" involved.

mannykannot3• 3 years ago

Maybe (probably?) it did seem crazy, but the officers sought verification from the system and seemed to get it.

They were probably unaware that there was an airliner in their vicinity, as it had been incorrectly tagged as an F-14. I don't know where the actual F-14 was, but quite possibly nowhere in the vicinity of the ship.

krisoft3• 3 years ago

What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship.

What is sudden about that? "Two months before the incident, the U.S. had engaged in Operation Praying Mantis, resulting in the sinkings of the Iranian frigate Sahand, the Iranian fast attack craft Joshan, and three Iranian speedboats. Also, the Iranian frigate Sabalan was crippled, two Iranian platforms were destroyed, and an Iranian fighter was damaged. A total of at least 56 Iranian crew were killed"

And on the very day their helicopter received small arm fire from an Iranian patrol vessel, which they were pursuing when the shoot-down happened.

In this situation the idea that Iran would launch a fighter against them is not that wild.

outworlder7• 3 years ago

In this situation the idea that Iran would launch a fighter against them is not that wild.

Why would they launch a single fighter to attack a warship?

smcl4• 3 years ago

I looked into this "small arms fire" you mentioned. You're right that it wasn't out of nowhere, but the actual story seems to be somewhat more nuanced than your very carefully worded depiction suggests:

All 290 on-board including 16 crew perished. At the time of the incident, Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters and engaged in small arms combat with several Iranian surface craft

Did you miss that bit?

I mean in that context, with the guy stumbling into Iranian waters and shooting at some of their boats it makes more sense that he'd be worried about an attack. But that just makes the situation even stupider and more avoidable in my opinion.

xen2xen1• 3 years ago

As far as I understand it, a single F14 could launch a single Exocet missile, and make a VERY large hole in an aircraft carrier, and if the conditions were right, putting it to the bottom of the sea. Or the same for a battleship. I seem to recall that being a large concern even then, if not especially then.

blobcode• 3 years ago

To my knowledge, the F-14 never carried any anti-ship missile, especially on the early-model Iranian Tomcats, as the F-14 only received an air-to-ground upgrade package in the 90’s.

leetcrew3• 3 years ago

a US frigate (uss stark) was severely damaged by a single Iraqi plane in the previous year. the captain did not expect an Iraqi attack, so he tried to warn the plane off multiple times, ultimately allowing it to fire two missiles which hit his ship. the missiles would likely have been shot down if the Stark's countermeasures were working correctly. but they weren't, and 37 Americans died.

given that context, it doesn't seem wild to take an Iranian plane as a serious threat.

wil421• 3 years ago

Iraq attacked the USS Stark a year before. They used a business jet with an Exocet missile attached to it. This was by mistake but it still happened.

A single plane shooting down a ship is not unheard of but the US has done it in pairs to the whole Iran navy.

sillywalk2• 3 years ago

I thought it was an F-1 Mirage?

ARandomerDude• 3 years ago

"Captain, why where you derelict in your duty to protect your ship and crew?"

"Well, I just thought a single F-14 was probably not that big of a deal."

snakeyjake• 3 years ago

What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship.

Limited hit and run attacks were typical Iranian behavior at the time.

The US tested to see if the F-14 could launch a Harpoon anti-ship missile just a couple of years prior to this because Iran had both F-14s and Harpoons. The test was successful.

It is highly unlikely that Iran ever equipped the F-14 with Harpoons but the thought that they would because it was a capability they possessed was a very real fear at the time.

Nition• 3 years ago

It sounds like the real pro strat for an attack would have been to launch a single F-14 with a commercial jet taking off right up close behind you.

"Sure that plane looks like it's moving fast and diving straight towards us, but it's just an Airbus A300."

smcl4• 3 years ago

Doesn't sound like the guy Will Rogers made that decision though. It sounds like he just blindly trusted his instruments, knowing he could act with impunity. He was right - after all is said and done he killed 290 innocent people and he ended up getting something called the "Legion of Merit" so it doesn't sound like it bothered too many people there.

sillywalk2• 3 years ago

UI failings aside, a few points, mostly from the US Naval Institute's Proceedings[2] (which has references to the Official Investigation "Fogarty report"[3])

- it was standard practice to illuminate Iranian military aircraft with missile fire control radar as a warning for them to turn around. "When you put that radar on them, they went home. They were not interested in any missiles," Captain Carlson recalled.

- the captain of the Vincennes was known as trigger-happy and the Vincennes was nicknamed the Robo-Cruiser.

- the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time of the shoot-down

- data from USS Vincennes' tapes, information from USS Sides and reliable intelligence information corroborate the fact that TN 4131 was on a normal commercial air flight plan profile…squawking Mode III 6760, on a continuous ascent in altitude from take-off at Bandar Abbas to shoot down."

- "Capt. Rogers was a difficult student. He wasn’t interested in the expertise of the instructors and had the disconcerting habit of violating the Rules of Engagement in the wargames." [2]

- Commander Lustig, the air-warfare coordinator, even won the navy's Commendation Medal for "heroic achievement," his "ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire," enabling him to "quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure.

- all hands aboard the Vincennes and the Elmer Montgomery received combat action ribbons."

...

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/sea-lies-200118

[2] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1993/august/vince...

[3] https://archive.org/details/FormalInvestigationintotheCircum...

cutemonster5• 3 years ago

And, from your [2]:

Then Vice President George Bush had gone before the United Nations on 14 July and declared, "One thing is clear, and that is that USS Vincennes acted in self-defense…It occurred in the midst of a naval attack initiated by Iranian vessels [...]
As it came to pass, none of this was true.
However, the truth of the matter would have given the Democratic candidate for President, Michael Dukakis, ammunition to embarrass George Bush.
There were good reasons for spinning the story in a way that put the Iranians in the worst possible light.

And so the trigger happy captain got that ribbon instead

michael1999• 3 years ago

All evidence is that Captain Will Rogers was a very different kind of person than Stanislav Petrov. The US military is famous for preferring "forward leaning" types.

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t...

a-dub• 3 years ago

i wonder if ideas like side by side deployments were on their radars back then. maybe pretty expensive, but it seems like with systems of people and machines that complicated you'd want live validation of everything before cutting over.

nottorp2• 3 years ago

Is this a mastodon instance? Mastodon is a twitter clone that doesn't allow long posts? All the posts but the first come collapsed and I have to click on each to read it. Is someone measuring engagement?

Angostura• 3 years ago

Yes it’s Mastodon, designed for short posts. I doubt anyone is measuring engagement

Ndymium2• 3 years ago

This can be configured in the instance settings and I've seen some support up to 5000 characters.

nottorp2• 3 years ago

Well if 1 line is the default, it leaves a bad taste. There was no need to clone twitter.

architect01• 3 years ago

The whole thing would have been avoided if the US didn't push their Navy around Iran why the hell is there a US navy ship there to begin with and why the hell is it that easy for them to shout at whatever is moving in the sky yes it might have been a UI issue but the root of the problem is "a US navy ship next to iran's border"

arp2425• 3 years ago

It was protecting neutral shipping traffic during the Iraq-Iran war.

jimmySixDOF• 3 years ago

That time when a badly implemented government contract drop down menu UI design was blamed for the false alarm Hawaiian incoming ballistic missile emergency sms [1] only for it later to turn out to have been caused by regular old human communication error and poor safeguards [2].

[1] https://blog.prototypr.io/dangerous-drop-downs-%EF%B8%8Fbad-...

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_al...

throw555chip• 3 years ago

It's important to note there are misrepresentations in the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

For the most truthful view of what happened that day:

https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Air-flight-655

aristofun• 3 years ago

It’s not a ui problem per se.

it is a problem of shitty developers responsible for critical decisions.

Unfortunately they are everywhere.

Every a little bit advanced internet user face the pain 12 times a day.

GartzenDeHaes• 3 years ago

"I hope it's not a civilian flight" -- low ranking guy in the CIC who was ignored.

timbit42• 3 years ago

Is this related to Reagan firing over 11 thousand air traffic controllers?

next_xibalba3• 3 years ago

every large aircraft in the world is equipped with a device called an IFF -- "identification friend or foe."

This is weird, I'm sure I don't have all the facts. In a conflict, why would a military aircraft ever want to identify itself?

proaralyst• 3 years ago

So you don't get shot down by your own air defense

monetus• 3 years ago

- as demonstrated by more than one aircraft since the war in Ukraine began.

next_xibalba3• 3 years ago

Why would it need to be interoperable then? Presumably it tells adversaries that you’re friend OR foe though. The friend bit is obvious. The foe… still not seeing the logic.

Towaway69• 3 years ago

More interestingly why not fake it and claim to be civilian?

Logically speaking:

- no identification: risk being shot down by both sides

- correct identification: risk being shot down by the enemy

- fake civilian identification: no risk of being shot down?

Armisael16• 3 years ago

It’s a war crime. If you start doing it the other side won’t shoot at nothing - they’ll shoot at everything, civilians included.

rightbyte• 3 years ago

You tell your enemies where you are so they wont get close. Its sabre rattling. A favorite engagement for soldiers is firing at other soldiers somewhat out of practical range.

Pretending to not be the enemy will get you close before the enemy realizes and everybody loses.

PoignardAzur• 3 years ago

Civilian flights get recorded from takeoff to landing. If you start pulling this stunt a lot, you'll get caught really quickly.

echoangle• 3 years ago

It's like wearing the Uniform of your enemy as a Soldier, sure you can do it but it's a war crime...

outworlder7• 3 years ago

I have tried to find the sentence you quoted in the article and was not able to. But it is not true that "every large aircraft (...) carries an IFF". IFF is strictly military. What civilian aircraft do have (large and small) is a transponder. The article talks about this but in a confusing way.

singingboyo• 3 years ago

Eh. Military aircraft would also have a transponder, they just wouldn't necessarily have active broadcasts.

Civilian aircraft do broadcast actively (ADS-B). But they also respond to secondary radar for Mode A/C, which are basically cases of IFF Mode III (okay, maybe not exact term, but the idea applies.) So it's still a challenge-response/IFF, just in this case always responding.

Military aircraft use different modes and presumably don't respond unless interrogated with an appropriate challenge, but the principles are the same.

next_xibalba3• 3 years ago

The quote is from the 2nd or 3rd post in the thread. The ui is pretty bad so it’s not obvious at first that it is a thread.

83720493• 3 years ago

As already pointed out, civilian transponders are not really "IFF", they're a tool for ATC to keep track of you.

Military IFF transponders don't emit unless they get interrogated by a valid code, and then only briefly.

The interrogating plane would typically only interrogate if you show up as a radar contact, and at that point, being able to say "I'm friendly" is very useful. You're not hidden anyway.

Note that the name "Identification Friend or Foe" is misleading; IFF can only positively identify friendlies. A nonresponsive bogey (unknown) may still be a friendly with bent IFF, wrong codes, etc.

Johnny5552• 3 years ago

There seems to be a lot of trust in IFF in this incident, what would stop Iran from reprogramming their F-14's IFF to identify as as civilian aircraft (or if reprogramming isn't feasible, retrofitting a stolen civilian airliner's IFF system into an electronics pod on their F-14, I'm sure the Iranian government wouldn't have any trouble getting an aircraft from Iranian Airlines)?

Do warships do any verification beyond reading the IFF ping aside from looking for attack patterns like climbinb/decending, etc, it still seems possible for an attacker to get within missile range while still appearing on radar to be a civilian craft.

function_seven• 3 years ago

I immediately thought of RFC-3514.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514

toast03• 3 years ago

what would stop Iran from reprogramming their F-14's IFF to identify as as civilian aircraft

If you do that, you paint a target on civilian aircraft launched from your country's airfields. Especially if your airfields are military and civilian dual-use like the airfield in this case.

Johnny5552• 3 years ago

Sure, it might only work once, but it sure would complicate war efforts if the "good guys" kept shooting down civilian airliners carrying passengers of various nationalities.

edrxty• 3 years ago

First, very slight correction to the thread, most civilian craft have transponders, not IFF. They're kinda the same thing in practice but transponders just give out a static number, IFF is a cryptographic challenge response.

I don't know how the navy does it when abroad, but anything entering or leaving a sensitive area will generally be on an ICAO style flight plan (entering US ADIZ/TFRs/DC SFRA etc) and it's a simple matter of checking to see if the thing responding with "hi I'm mode c or s (civilian aircraft) 1234" is doing what it should be.

There are also some other sidebands that get used like NCTR which looks at the radar return to attempt to identify the type of aircraft but they weren't well developed in the 80s.

If the aircraft is not responding at all to transponder interrogations you can assume it's hostile and presently attacking you or the pilot is forgetful and didn't flip the switch (choose wisely).

You can obviously put a mode c/s civilian transponder on a cruise missile or better yet fill a remotely piloted 747 full of explosives if you're feeling especially squirrelly and that's totally been done. That's also part of why these events keep happening, everyone's kinda understandably jumpy.

83720493• 3 years ago

Great answer! For anyone wondering, NCTR is non-cooperative target recognition.

If the aircraft is not responding at all to transponder interrogations you can assume it's hostile and presently attacking you or the pilot is forgetful and didn't flip the switch (choose wisely).

Unless the transponder is bent, M4 is badly updated for some reason, etc. etc. Better do a RAYGUN call or ask AEW&E to declare.

WheatMillington2• 3 years ago

When Americans shoot down an airliner they get to describe it as a "user interface error". After denying they did it for a long period first, of course.

digging• 3 years ago

This event was not officially described as a user interface error, though.

arp2425• 3 years ago

After denying they did it for a long period first, of course.

Lies.

Reagan acknowledged and apologized within days.

simne9• 3 years ago

Greetings from Ukraine, country at war.

You may wonder, but computers extremely important in our life, I bet, you don't release how we depend on high tech now (was not such before war).

I will list how I remember, not by importance.

1. Electric grid is core of infrastructure, and it depend on computers. Even if in many cases could use decentralized power sources, but need it to feed bank networks for money payments; water supply, heating, also need electricity. And Russians actively use hacker attacks to turn off power in Ukraine.

2. Air defense. God bless America and developers of Patriot! After last spring we received this wonderful tech, we could feel much safer, just periodically hear "Citizens may hear explosion, as system automatically intercept ballistic missile. Alarm siren was not triggered".

3. For our people in trenches, information is literally life, because Russians have large number old, but dangerous tech, like artillery and air approx 1960s. And now also got cheap new tech from East - most annoying drones (UAV).

So if one side got knowledge, where some opponent military unit, they immediately fire on it if possible.

Even become usual thing, artillery duels, when artillery units on each side, try to destroy each other. And as they are long distance units, they don't see opponent, just know from intelligence, that on some coordinates appear opponent.

lebed2045• 3 years ago

that's truly incredible how much lives can be saved with good electronics and it-systems. I wish the war ends asap, before the autonomous ai-powered drones comes into play... because at that point this might become complete skynet-like hell.

simne9• 3 years ago

Thank you!

Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic about terms of war in Ukraine.

Unfortunately, war in Ukraine looks not like war of one country against another country, but this war like Democracy and free market against Communism.

And rumors said, military support for Russia from North Korea is larger, than support for Ukraine from US.

Just now military power of Ukraine is near to equal to Russian, but this is not sufficient to return occupied Ukrainian territories in some overseen time. I'm not sure, if we could afford Korean variant of large part of country sacrificed to communists to end war, because Russia will not stop there, they want to occupy territories of other countries - Poland, Baltic states.

So, we working hard, to make Ukrainian military more powerful with new technologies. All possible to save people lives. And yes, we use robotic units at real war, but their intelligence extremely limited, even GPT-3 is too resource demand to be useful, only image recognition technology now is practical at field.

simne9• 3 years ago

Must admit, I absolutely agree with your concerns, that it is extremely bad if AGI will be used at war.

I hope, we will end this war before AGI appear.

severino2• 3 years ago

It's hilarious that someone that says it's in Ukraine, "country at war", writes that God bless an state that has brought that same war to hundreds of places in the world. In an article discussing an incident where the country that God should bless killed 290 innocent civilians because they wanted to. Not very different from Russia to me.

gambiting2• 3 years ago

What a weird take. Is it really so hard to put yourself in their shoes?

If my country was being attacked and America gave us weapons to fight back I'd also say "god bless America" even though I don't believe in god and I'm very aware of all attrocities America has committed in wars across the globe(and still does). Is that so hard to imagine?

>Not very different from Russia to me.

Did you think about this sentence for more than 2 seconds before you typed it?

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

Or, life is complicated.

thr0w__4w4y• 3 years ago

Would just like to jump in and remind folks of the Therac-25 incident just a couple years before this (1985 and 1987), and the user interface was also identified as a contributing factor.

https://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse470/Public/Handouts/Therac/Side_...

egberts1• 3 years ago

Touch LCD screens are a no-no for navy ships because there are no tactile feedback mechanism for your finger to feel as the ship slaps down after every giant waves.

cannabis_sam• 3 years ago

I’m guessing it’s not a popular opinion around here, but what’s described is so insanely dog shit I would have been fired and sued if I had been responsible for developing anything even close to how stupid this system was.

I know people who have worked with military systems, and as dumb as the process around developing these things tend to be, due to the asinine cluelessness of the decision makers, none of them would have accepted even a fraction of the idiocy on display here.

I mean, not “slaving” the cursor still feeds garbage data into the system, immediately reusing 4 digit codes in a way that is pretty much guaranteed to create confusion, no real cooperation or coordination between the same system running on ships in the same battle group, supposedly essential data displayed without the actual essential details shown to decision makers in charge of death and destruction…

It would be laughable if it was the worlds strongest military we were talking about.

The people in charge of deciding to make this “system” in this way should be in prison.

silexia• 3 years ago

The Wikipedia article on the incident reads like it was written by an Iranian government employee.

The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

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