F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

As a pilot, your comment sounds like it was from an llm. PAPI is controlled from the radio, not a phone call. Why would you call ground instead of tower if there’s a ground frequency? Order a burger and talk to bob? It sounds like the llm is trying to describe a Unicom frequency and conflating that with contacting an FBO over the radio to arrange transportation, possibly food I suppose too.

I take it you never flew VFR over Nebraska corn…

Yes, papi lights are operated by radio. However, not everyone has fancy radios and only has handhelds, their Nokia phone, or their right arm wave…

It’s not all class C+ out there.

I will point out that PAPI lights as part of a PCL system are operated using mic clicks on CTAF radio. These systems are expensive and sometimes you’re landing in a grass field and just need the runway lights so you don’t run into the trees. You can click your mic as many times as you want, you’ll still be in the dark. The only way is to call Phil…

It’s interesting now that a side effect of LLMs is that people can say anything outside their experience is just a hallucination. I didn’t realize how the fear of hallucination could enable this level of belligerence.

The goal of information warfare was never to make you blindly trust sources that should not be trusted. The goal is to fill your brain with conflicting information so you're not sure what or who to trust anymore.

In this post-truth era it's strangely apt that confabulation in particular happened to be a major failure mode of our shiny new AI tech. Almost too apt for it to be a mere coincidence…

I’m more worried about the young generation taking LLM as fact. Or thinking they are talking to an expert in the field. When an expert will say “Let’s find out!”.

They weren’t taught to think, they were taught to ask.

Taught that there’s only “one way” to live. “One way” to a good paying job. “One way” to go to college. When that’s a lie they tell you so that you conform, pay tuition, or pay restitution.

There’s pilots that operate all over the world. Not everything is FAA approved. Not everything is by the book unless you fly commercial.

It's only really a matter of time before open registry forums are completely unusable for normal discussion, whether due to llms or paranoia of llms

How’s Phil going to see someone’s arm at night?

Just to clarify to unfamiliar readers: class deltas exist with ground and tower, and after hours pilot controlled lighting. Untowered class echoes are everywhere, with pilot controlled lighting.

Yes, many untowered airports have pilot controlled lighting via ctaf, as stated in the airport facilities directory. This is very common at class E airports. For example, look at Plattsmouth in Nebraska.

It sounds like your core argument is “some private strips don’t have full infrastructure”. Phil’s private strip does not appear in the AFD, so you as the pilot your flight planning needs to include looking up Phil’s number and calling him to get permission to land and to let him know you’ll need the lights.

If it’s not that then I don’t know what your point is.

By far the funniest thing to me about post-LLM culture is being told stop using an LLM and to learn English. I'm not sure who failed the Turing test.

Look, they said this about us using Google. Oh no. The Dewey Decibel System [sic]

And then twenty years later, I'm pretty convinced that the online siloing has worn us down. A lot of us. But the problems that came weren't what the reactionaries were going on about. It never is.

It's been ten years since my friend and I were saying as I was walking out the door, "This whole internet thing, let just.." "...yeah, let's turn it off." There was profound sense of optimism in the early internet. We saw it together, and we knew it hadn't worked out, that it was stabilizing onto a kind of bad trajectory.

I still don't think the optimism was wrong. I think we're in some kind of perverse equilibrium where there are dams exist that, if they did not, would lead to some wildly different world rushing in, like what if you came to realize one day that 9/11 and all its self-inflicted after-effects never happened levels of mass self-transformation.

Someone else brought up surveillance economy, and that's really relevant here and to what I'm doing. I think the ad-economy alone has a lot of perverse incentive that has basically destroyed journalism and the meaning of credibility for now. But the idea of the surveillance economy is right about how the pieces fit together like cursed legos. We have content that is addictive but not entertaining being used to serve us ads for things we don't need.

It's not just that we need to commercialize open source if it will ever reach mass market. We have to better monetize independent media for its goodness and coherence with reality or we're never going to have a shared set of facts in our social consciousness again.

Now you got it. That is indeed my argument. You definitely should call Phil before you land at his place. You can also call him while you’re at 10DME. Phil likes to walk the dogs and isn’t always by his radio.

But to dismiss basic VFR to say “That’s not in the manual!” “Sounds like LLM nonsense” and say Phil can’t see your arm waving from a Piper is ridiculous.

I'm sure everything you just said was said when books came into vogue.

All of it applies after all, to a tee.

I'm a 98% VFR pilot. I've not once said "That's not in the manual!". Is it ridiculous to think that Phil cannot see a small arm hundreds of feet in the air, at night, in an environment so dark a pilot needs the strip lit up? What type of wave does the pilot need to do to indicate "Can I land?" versus "Hi Phil"? Can Phil distinguish the two at night? At day? At night, a pilot that doesn't know Phil's land won't be flying low enough to see an arm due to hidden obstacles (wires, towers, etc).

Your points are all over the place here, and I have to conclude you don't have any experience in this topic, and you've invented some contrived example that won't happen in practice.

My points are not additive which you seem to assume. There are many ways to contact a strip.

Obviously you can’t wave your arm at night to get someone’s attention. You’re picking arguments against common sense and straw manning them into something I didn’t proclaim.

On a bright sunny day, when I’m in my cub, I often wave. Sometimes I get a wave back to bring her down. To argue that, because you’re some commercial pilot or something with 98% VFR flights, you’ve never been directed by arm signal? Where did you learn to fly?

I stated that in some fields, you may be able to wave your arm and that would be enough. You may use your radio to control the PCL. You may use your radio to tell Fred to turn the lights on. You may call Phil to do the same. You might even phone his telephony system he rigged and press #5 to turn the lights on.

Waving your arms at night will get you no where. Try paramotoring at dusk and see how well your glass cockpit training does then.

lol, fair point. Youngsters will never know the hate for cursive Palmer method.

Many argue after they reach sufficient levels of power in society that this is simply a more accurate representation of reality which was never singularly coherent.