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by jessriedel 186 days ago
I thought some combination of error correction and redundant systems was already widespread in airplanes to prevent cosmic-ray induced errors. (GPT agrees.) What am I missing? I've read multiple articles on this, and none of them address the fact that the problem, at the level of detail described in the article, should have been prevented by technology available and widely deployed for decades.
2 comments
pengaru 186 days ago
> GPT agrees

What do you think this adds? These things are sycophant confident idiots; they will agree and agree they're incorrect at the slightest challenge in the same interaction.

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jessriedel 186 days ago
I'm quite aware of the limitations. That's why I bothered to post a comment. But it's definitely better to do due diligence by asking first, since many responses can then be checked. Mentioning it in the comment shows the effort, similar to "Google turned up nothing".
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pengaru 185 days ago
"my sycophant agrees" simply isn't adding anything of substance
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jessriedel 184 days ago
If that's your honest impression, it's incorrect and I urge you to spend more time working with frontier models.
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RealityVoid 186 days ago
You're missing that the systems were designed in the 90's and they had no edac on them but instead relied on redundancy and a consensus system. The fact bit flips happened is not why they grounded the things and updated sw, they grounded them to address the consensus algorithm in the other CPU that did not get the bit flips.
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jessriedel 186 days ago
Do you have a source on that? The current article describes the software very differently:

> In any case, the software updates rolled out by the company appear to be quick and easy to install. Many airlines completed them within hours. The software works by inducing "rapid refreshing of the corrupted parameter so it has no time to have effect on the flight controls", Airbus says. This is, in essence, a way of continually sanitising computer data on these aircraft to try and ensure that any errors don't end up actually impacting a flight.

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RealityVoid 184 days ago
Yes, my understanding of this was wrong and based on reading the failure analysis of another issue that was related to the ELAC but the SEU failure happened in the ADIRU.

I take my analysis on this back, it was true only for the other incident. I can't edit my answers anymore now. Not sure what is going on with this failure, would love to read a detailed analysis report as the other one I went through.

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