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points by ethin 1 day ago | 0 comments

I have a bad feeling that this is not going to end well. Especially given that this administration is... Rather incompetent. I hope that safety is like number one on their list of priorities but somehow I doubt it

[–] charcircuit 1 day ago

I would rather things be done "incompetently" than nothing being done at all.

[–] 10111001 1 day ago

> I would rather things be done "incompetently" than nothing being done at all.

Engineers of today aren't better than engineers of yesterday, they just have access to new technology (and new footguns).

I'd rather have a well-designed legacy system that does the job well, than an incompetently designed "modernized" system that doesn't.

[–] genxy 1 day ago

> Engineers of today aren't better than engineers of yesterday

Our ability to wield technology has gone up, while our ability to engineer and understand that technology (as a whole) has gone down.

Age should be the most suspect of arguments against the design of a system. Enumerate specifically its flaws and not just that it is old. System design doesn't wear out, it is abstract, like mathematics.

[–] xp84 1 day ago

Every time I'm in a place of business with shiny computers, I'm reminded of the difference in efficiency between the newest systems and the 'green screen' terminals and other similar tech that was everywhere in 1990.

Most of those were extremely optimized for their specific purposes - for instance, screens were carefully designed to fit all the necessary information to complete a task without any scrolling. They had extremely low latency despite all the hardware being potato-grade compared to what we have today.

When latency existed, simple things like the keyboard buffer allowed the skilled user to get ahead of the machine and move onto another task, while the processing caught up.

Today, it's all a webapp with a ton of React, probably 5,000 npm modules, and you get to watch skeletal loading rectangles pulsating after every click (or branded animations on the "customer-facing" flavor). Instead of having muscle memory of hands on a keyboard (usually a specialized one which gave a dedicated key to every important function), the user must move their arm to find touch targets placed at arbitrary places across a 24" touchscreen, and often hunting for functions inside ••• menus.

Obviously, no usability testing has been done on any of these. Or if it has, the only thing tested was "Can a 17-year-old with zero skills ploddingly complete a transaction (the happy path only!), after only 15 minutes of training?"

So yeah, I never listen to any "newer = better" takes.

[–] pauljonas 1 day ago

I worked on a lot of those "green screen" (or "orange screen") apps.

Limited to keyboard and 24x80 screen, but yes, the apps were lean & responsive -- sub-second response time, and keyboard muscle memory. And some shops I worked in capped your DB calls to <25 per transaction. In stark contrast to some of the Laravel apps I've worked in recent years where the SQL logs showed me 300-400+ DB calls on a given request :(

[–] genxy 23 hours ago

Your comment reads like poetry.

[–] AngryData 1 day ago

I don't. Incompetence costs lives. Using old tech that has worked for decades costs a couple dollars extra to maintain for a system worth millions.

[–] charcircuit 1 day ago

You can justify any waste with that argument. Saying things will cost lives is just a way to interject bureaucracy to slow down a project. You are the enemy of progress even if you don't realize it.

[–] AngryData 1 day ago

An enemy of progress for not wanting some halfbaked replacement for tech that has worked for decades? Yeah okay.

If it ain't broke, don't "fix" it.

[–] ethin 1 day ago

Why? Do you want more people to die? The only way to migrate a system like this safely is to do it competently and slowly.

[–] charcircuit 1 day ago

Yes it's a risk I'm willing to take. But because of redundancy it will be 0.

[–] wat10000 1 day ago

Nothing being done at all means the system continues working as it is. Something being done incompetently means more people die.

[–] charcircuit 1 day ago

You need to be willing to take risks or nothing will get done. It's okay to accept that people will die. People die every second of every day.

[–] wat10000 23 hours ago

“Willing to take risks” does not imply “let incompetent buffoons manage a major change to air traffic control.”

[–] superxpro12 1 day ago

what an absolutely awful take.

[–] charcircuit 1 day ago

And what an absolutely awful summarization of your argument. The take of let's not change anything ever and trust the process won't work long term.

[–] whimsicalism 1 day ago

I find the frequent comments like this honestly bizarre, they act like the entire civil service turns over every 4 years.

[–] ethin 1 day ago

Far from it. I know for a fact the civil service (normally) doesn't change per administration. But the key word is "normally". Pretty much nothing this administration has done is normal. Do you really expect most of the people involved in this transition to know what they're doing, given that many of them are yes-men?

[–] readthenotes1 1 day ago

I agree, nothing says poor priorities like upgrading the air traffic control system. It removes the opportunity for graft, only supports the monied elite who can afford to fly and don't care about climate change, and diminishes the opportunities for crises to exploit.

Instead, the United States government should have continued the policies and values that led to Next Gen, ERAM, STARS, and AAS.

[–] iberator 1 day ago

what do you mean. a lot of poor people fly as well. I won't would even risk to say that poor people fly more often. For example migrant workers flying lets say Bulgaria-Ireland every few months

[–] ethin 1 day ago

I think what readthenotes1 is trying to say is what I was hinting at in my comment: this administration cannot be trusted to do this properly or in the service of actually making the ATC system better. They're instead doing it because the 1% says that modern == better (which for a safety-critical system is usually not actually true). The proper thing this administration should be doing is to do this as a failover at first but keep the existing ATC system running until the new system is just as safe and as capable as the original, but I get the feeling they won't do that.