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I think that depends on the given aircraft’s configuration. Some it’s just a software change (revert to older version I think).

There are two of those units in each aircraft.


Still therefore confused how software knows about photons originating in the sun.


Caused uncommanded pitch down, could exceed structural integrity of aircraft. There are redundant units - unknown why this can happen given redundancy.


Also not very clear how they attributed the failure to solar radiation.


In my humble opinion, whenever someone dropped the idea... "Maybe it's solar radiation" it never was solar radiation. There was a subtle bug in the system or something. It's just such a cop-out to attribute it to, solar radiation, it's our profession's variant of magic.



I can't find any further information on this intel testing like what altitude they perform the tests at.

AMD has perform testing at data centers of different altitudes and there is some statistical significance in SRAM error rates. And that is typically only around 5000-6000 ft msl.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2503210.2503257

Planes are much higher than that in operation so get larger amounts of unfiltered solar flux.

This may be one of the causes of higher cancer rates in pilots, but eliminating other environmental causes may be difficult

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/aviation/prevention/aircrew-cancer...


These have specific error/data spike patterns. This document as of page 133 as good example of such investigation and conclusions: https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao...


It's an interesting document, but I am unconvinced that data spikes mean environmental radiation driven data corruption. The fact that they have a certain pattern suggests it's not random.

They certainly do put a chapter with potential triggers down there, and it's a good take, you can't just discard the possibility. But above, they also have SW bugs as a potential trigger, so... Essentially, they don't know for sure yet.


> But above, they also have SW bugs as a potential trigger, so

They also did extensive tests and analyses and came to the conclusion that a bug was highly unlikely (they would never say that something is impossible, but it still is exceedingly improbable).

> Essentially, they don't know for sure yet.

That’s not a really fair assessment. Their conclusion is that they could not estimate the likelihood of a radiation effect, so in that sense they don’t know for sure. But they still eliminated a lot of options. Almost all of them, actually.


I think it's a quite fair assessment. It's not an indictment of their engineering or anything, but they can't say for sure what caused the issue and the analyzed all they could. The conclusion is "we don't know, we have some guesses". Probably it irks me the most because "cosmic rays" are impossible to prove. It's the perfect scapegoat. If I had a penny every time that someone put it out as the possible cause of a bug... I'd still be poor, but... well, I'd have a couple of pennies.

EDIT: On a deeper read, I am inclined to be a bit more charitable to this theory because, to my surprise: "As noted in section 3.5.2, the CPU module on units 4167 and 4122 did not incorporate EDAC"

I did not consider these units were _this_ old, so they did not have error correction on them. Nowadays, most every MCU has ECC on them. So, yes, without ECC the odds are quite larger that they DID get a "bit flip"


CGMthrowaway has an interesting comment on the other thread about this subject, that it's likely not solar radiation. "failing solid state relay or contactor on the shared avionics power bus" [1] Related to the previous 2008 incident on Qantas 72 that had similar characteristics.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46083560

  > On the Qantas 72 flight (2008), the ATSB report showed the same power spike that upset the ADIRU also left tidy 1-word corruptions in the flight data recorder. Those aligned with the clock cycle, shared the same amplitude and were confined to single ARINC words. That is pretty much exactly the signature of a failing solid state relay or contactor on the shared avionics power bus (upstream of both FDR and fly by wire).

  > Radation-driven bit flips would be Poisson distributed in time and energy. So that is one way to find out


I don’t think they did. Their analysis indicates that it could, and this analysis happened as part of an investigation of an incident, but they don’t say that was definitely the cause of that incident.


Presumably the same affected units are part of the redundancy package. The article essentially says as much.


Given your destination was the Mac app, why not Swift/SwiftUI rather than Rust/Tauri? Just curious is all.


Thanks for checking it out. The goal is for Desktop Docs to be cross-platform. We've had a lot of requests for Windows support, so we chose Rust to set us up for an upcoming Windows version.


I know it’s probably still not ready for prime time, but I believe the arc browser team was building a windows runtime for swift bec they prefer to use swift everywhere.


I checked it out a while back. It still requires you to write two different UIs in two different frameworks: SwiftUI or Appkit on Mac, and WinUI on Windows. It's just that now you can write WinUI code in Swift instead of C#.


I mean I guess that makes sense as it’d be a pretty big project to port Appkit to windows APIs, but that’s not really a great benefit in terms of cross-platform development. I guess if you’re building something like a browser, you’re going so low level anyways that most of those cross-platform bells and whistles don’t provide much benefit.


Have you started your windows version testing? Any issues you've seen in the differences between browsers tauri would use on the different OSs?


We haven't started testing for windows yet. Are you on Windows? Happy to let you know when we're releasing that version.


App looks great, I'm on Windows so I can't wait to see it!


Thanks! If you're interested in that version, drop us a note: hello [at] desktopdocs dot com. We'll shoot you an update when it's ready!


I wanted to ask the same question. Swift is a fairly nice language and seems to offer many of the benefits of Rust. As another commentator asked, I am also interested in details of integrating CLIPs.

I like the narrative, BTW, on why you needed to port your app.


Thanks! Mentioned it on the other comment - but we're using the Ort crate in rust and bunlding onnxruntime with the app. Definitely considered Swift and I know it's gotten a lot better since I last used it, but cross-platform support was what got us to use Rust over Swift.

As far as porting over goes, we are much happier maintaining the new version.


Curious as well. I’m planning to build a desktop app, haven’t use swift for a long time and I’m pretty new to rust. Tauri looks very promising. I really don’t like electron apps. They’re so slow to start even on lightning fast machines. Thanks for any insights!


After our Electron experience, I wish I had moved out of my comfort zone (JS) sooner. Electron just requires a lot of optimization and you have to be really tight with your imports to avoid loading things you don't immediately need.

The smaller bundle size with Tauri and blazing speed are well worth the effort.


Don’t know if this is real or not but if the person was hired in 2000 they likely received stock at $35/sh worst case. And follow on grants. It’s $450 now so I assume, at least financially, the arrangement worked well?


Even if they sold all stock immediately upon vest, they made several million dollars in the worst case scenario. Likely much more.


Receiving millions of dollars in the past doesn't necessarily make being laid off today less painful. What if he invested those millions of dollars in Enron, Lehman Brothers, or Mt. Gox?


Novel approach to optical detection which is faster than current approaches and can be incorporated on an IC.


Great summary of need and reasearch


If you are self funding, and/or funding from friendly, unsophisticated investors initially, consider first an S-Corp (that’s just an IRS election) then transition to C when you have your first professional funding and need multiple classes of stock. Easy taxes, your portion of the losses just go on your 1040. Only a single class of stock is allowed though thus the transition when you take investment from professional investor.


Look in the Starlink app, under visibility after it has run for 24h and it will show you where all the obstructions are. Quite handy. Clear is blue, red is obstruction.


Common to have unique SN in a processor. Let the SW vendors do copy protection too. E.g. at Sonos we used them to associate with the software signed certificate such that you couldn't run a given Players software on another Player without the same SN. When making products via contract manufactures, especially in China, it was a wise procedure.


When I built my pc the cpu came with some free game or game coupon or something. It wasn’t in the box, I instead had to download and run some AMD software that verified that I was in fact using the CPU. I’m under the impression that it detected my specific CPU not just make/model but some sort of unique ID. Presumably this stops people from claiming the code and reselling the cpu,(or at least without reselling it as “new”) or from spinning up a VM and trying to redeem random promos without owning the real CPU.

Thought it was interesting that they did that but didn’t think much more of it. I don’t even remember what the promo was. Might have just been extended warranty or something?


In November I activated such an AMD Promo for my Ryzen 5000X. The game I got was Far Cry 6. Hilarious because the game keeps getting delayed to now mid September or so of this year, almost a year after I bought the CPU. Not exactly the best Promo to show off the power of the CPU :)


There are a lot of unique identifiers in a PC, not just on the CPU but various ones in the motherboard (BIOS) too...

from spinning up a VM

...and you can change them, even if not easily, for a VM. AFAIK the Windows licensing/activation relies on the same uniqueness.


Just can just run Bochs, emulate a modern AMD CPU, and with of patience, dump the game files.


That is glorious and horrifying. Sounds like it protects your business from counterfeits and hobby hackers at the same time :)

Also, I have a Sonos system and it works great!


Horrifying should indeed be the reaction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895086


For now (see other comment with link). I'll never touch Sonos again. They burnt their bridges.


Well, until your choices are buy a new Sonos device or get bricked.


Impressive they are putting a full steerable phased array terminal at customers home.


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