jjwiseman
Joined 19 years ago
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https://heavymeta.org/
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Comment · 10 days ago
When I started at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne in 1988, the computer labs were still filled with PLATO terminals. They were extremely cool--nice displays, and many were also touch screens. I did my physics homework on them, and played games but I definitely didn't use them to their full extent.
Looking at photos of them now they appear blocky and relatively ugly, but I remember them fondly.
Comment · 1 month ago
First, OpenAI is not claiming that the model wasn't trained on those sessions. What they've said is “We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem.” and “We did not use their prompts or proofs to prompt our models or direct our agents.” and “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”
They also said “Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge … and Tristan Buckmaster….” They say the rumor was that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved, and that this prompted them to launch "an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems."
It's not obvious to me that's an unethical thing to do, if it happened as they described.
Comment · 1 month ago
Mark Litwintschik's blog is one of the best engineering blogs on the internet. Always practical, with detailed write-ups that make it easy to reproduce workflows. Thanks, Mark.
Comment · 1 month ago
The Winter 2016 edition of the Center for Land Use Interpretation's newsletter, "The Lay of the Land", has more information on the cards: https://clui.org/newsletter/winter-2016/los-alamos-rolodex
There's also a book: https://clui-shop.square.site/product/los-alamos-rolodex/292...
I saw the exhibit in person back when it was on display. If you're ever in LA you should try to stop in to the CLUI's Culver City location, they always have something interesting.
Comment · 2 months ago
Earlier discussion of the University of Chicago Law School's policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024980
Comment · 2 months ago
In this case it was an own-goal. If the U.S. military hadn't jammed this flight's GPS it wouldn't have been jammed.
Worldwide, it's an issue that is going to require changes to the infrastructure of aviation: Training, procedures, equipment. That's what I mean when I say "they should have just used VORs and ILS" shows an unsophisticated understanding of aviation safety. "Just use the training you're already supposed to have" isn't enough. We need to make sure that crew and ATC aren't just improvising when there are GPS outages. Manufacturers need to ensure that equipment has been thoroughly tested against GNSS jamming and spoofing -- The Embraer Phenom used to start "UNEXPECTED ROLLING AND YAWING OSCILLATIONS (DUTCH ROLL) AT HIGH AIRSPEEDS,"[1] after it lost GPS; recently there have been many reports of inertial navigation systems becoming "contaminated" after GPS interference such that they give completely wrong positions for the rest of the flight, even after GPS returns.
You're right that just stopping the U.S. military from jamming civilian aircraft GPS doesn't solve the problem for the rest of the globe. That will take more effort, and it's why aviation authorities and industry have been looking at the problem for years. But it would mostly solve the problem for now, in the U.S., where significant GPS interference is rare outside of military exercises.
1. https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/notice/genot_7110_...
Comment · 2 months ago
It's not interesting: they were not in restricted airspace at any point during the flight. If they were, probably the NTSB, a YouTuber, or I would have mentioned it.
Comment · 2 months ago
There are sooo many GPS interference exercises NOTAMed! Here's an animation I made of GPS interference NOTAMS in effect on any given day in the U.S. from 2022 to 2023: https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1722275349554487750
And they affect thousands of aircraft--Here's a thread where I analyze an earlier exercise at White Sands, called NAVFEST: https://bsky.app/profile/lemonodor.bsky.social/post/3ml7afb2...
* Approximately 4000 aircraft experienced significant GPS interference
* 90% of which were commercial jets
* The military appears to have been jamming outside the posted NOTAM hours
2750 aircraft jammed during the window, 1250 jammed outside the window.
* Used to be called JAMFEST but "the Joint Spectrum Center became
uncomfortable with the idea of associating its RFAs with events with the
word 'jam' in their names."Comment · 2 months ago
I run GPSJAM.org, have been studying and tracking the effects of GPS interference on aviation for the past 5 years, and I was a source for this article. I'm not a pilot and I don't work for any aviation agency.
I'm very curious to see what the final NTSB report says, but their preliminary report along with commentary from other analysts seems to show that this was a crew that made bad choices and died because of it. It also seems to show that GPS interference was a contributing factor to the accident, and that they'd likely be alive if the U.S. military hadn't been jamming GPS.
I think pilots need to be prepared to fly without GNSS, and also it might be a bad idea for the military to regularly deny GPS to thousands of civilian aircraft with tens or hundreds of thousands of passengers.
Lack of GPS isn't a critical safety issue, but it is a safety issue. GPS interference removes options, hurts situational awareness, disables or degrades other safety equipment (like TAWS, the Terrain Awareness and Warning System that is specifically designed to warn pilots that they're about to hit a mountain), and adds to crew and ATC workload and distraction.
Saying that this situation is what pilots train for and they should have just used VORs and ILS reveals an overly macho, unsophisticated understanding of aviation safety. We've added GPS, ADS-B, TCAS, GPWS, TAWS, etc. because they make flight safer. The airline industry and governments are concerned about GPS interference because of the aviation safety issues--if you're not concerned, you're thinking about the problem in a very narrow way ("I would never have trouble if my GPS died.").
In fact they think it's an urgent problem.
2024: "Aviation sector seeks urgent solutions for GPS interference" https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/aviation-...
From a 2023 presentation by Eurocontrol at the UN International Committee on GNSS/Interference Detection and Mitigation https://rntfnd.org/wp-content/uploads/Aviation-GNSS-interfer...:
• GPS Problem reports dominate over all other type of safety reports
• Redundant systems are the only reason why aviation has been able to
maintain normal operations despite GNSS RFI!
• GNSS integrated into many systems; exact RFI impact difficult to
predict, manufacturers had to issue aircraft specific
guidance → Complexity and workload increase
Aviation Safety Impact
• Aviation Safety is built on two main principles:
• Trust your instruments
• Follow standard operating procedure
• GNSS RFI causes pilots to have to question both principles!
• Chief Operations Officer of one major airline:
Navigation is not my problem. My problem is “normalization of
deviance”!
• Incidents have occurred simply due to pilot distraction because of
having to deal with too many system alerts
From 2021, "FAA Files Reveal a Surprising Threat to Airline Safety: The U.S. Military GPS Tests" https://spectrum.ieee.org/faa-files-reveal-a-surprising-thre...:
Early one morning last May, a commercial airliner was approaching El
Paso International Airport, in West Texas, when a warning popped up in
the cockpit: “GPS Position Lost.” The pilot contacted the airline’s
operations center and received a report that the U.S. Army’s White
Sands Missile Range, in South Central New Mexico, was disrupting the
GPS signal. “We knew then that it was not an aircraft GPS fault,” the
pilot wrote later.
The pilot missed an approach on one runway due to high winds, then
came around to try again. “We were forced to Runway 04 with a predawn
landing with no access to [an instrument landing] with vertical
guidance,” the pilot wrote. “Runway 04…has a high CFIT threat due to
the climbing terrain in the local area.”
This is far from the most worrying ASRS report involving GPS jamming.
In August 2018, a passenger aircraft in Idaho, flying in smoky
conditions, reportedly suffered GPS interference from military tests
and was saved from crashing into a mountain only by the last-minute
intervention of an air traffic controller. “Loss of life can happen
because air traffic control and a flight crew believe their equipment
are working as intended, but are in fact leading them into the side of
the mountain,” wrote the controller. “Had [we] not noticed, that
flight crew and the passengers would be dead. I have no doubt.”
Comment · 3 months ago
A few months ago I built a piloting harness for LLMs[1] in X-Plane. You can give the AI pilot instructions as though you are ATC, and I imagined what it might be like to scale it up and make an ATC game out of it, talking to dozens of AI pilots. The most open-ended ATC sim ever…
Comment · 5 months ago
Mr. Show, "Change for a Dollar": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyocQT4Vn2g