Exactly like a car going down a hill, a descending plane doesn't need any thrust for anything in particular. Planes are notoriously aerodynamic and can trade altitude for speed easily. (Note how gliders don't need any thrust at all.)
There are SOME planes where you want to avoid the "no thrust" situation because their implementation of "no thrust" can lead to weird aerodynamics or prop pitch behavior, or can stress the engine.
Supercapacitors are heavy and basically useless for any kind of propulsion. Note how neither e-bikes nor EVs use them. You need a proper lithium battery if you need any usable amount of energy.
> you'd have to nose down at a very aggressive angle to actually pick up speed
Sorry but what the hell are you talking about? Airliners are heavy, very aerodynamic, very easy to overspeed and they regularly actively brake on descent!
Unless there are other constraints on the approach, the point of the entire descent phase is to have the engines IDLING the whole time. The FMC actually calculates the descent profile backwards, starting from the earliest known constraint (e.g. a certain point at 5000 ft) and extending that back into the air accounting for the expected weight and drag of the plane. The descent phase often begins more than a hundred kilometers from the destination. Remember how they tell you in the cabin that the plane is starting to descent and you should put your laptop away etc? That's when the engines go to idle and if everything goes right, they won't spool up again until just dozens of second before touchdown. The goal of the entire industry is to have that happen as often as possible, on as many airports as possible.
If the plane is a bit heavier or less draggy than expected, or if the approach requires a steeper descent at some point, the airplane will calculate all that (in advance!) and let the pilot know (e.g. a DRAG REQUIRED message) and will require spoiler deployment. This is very common.
I think what they're trying to say is that there are regimes in which the HSD actually shunts energy from one electric motor to the other (i.e. one of them is "braking" and acting like a generator and the other one driving) and a big part (maybe the majority even) of all power goes through that path. This works even if the battery is empty, because the electricity isn't coming from the outside, it's coming from the spinning ICE.
I’ll check this out. The macOS photo library situation is really embarrassing. I actually migrated from Affinity to DxO Photolab (expensive!) a few years ago just for that.
> If LLMs reach a point of sufficiently high competence to the point that they're capable of producing usable software from vague, and sometimes contradictory instructions - the same software engineers have to regularly deal with, then at that point software will simply be an expectation of ability in any job.
I don’t understand how people can say this and then continue talking about software. So we’re saying machines can now casually do complex and cognitively demanding jobs like software development (or 90% of all white-collar jobs out there) and we’re NOT worried about the lynching mob going door to door and hanging IT people on lampposts? And I’m being serious, the impact this would have on societies would be unprecedented.
> if in the future there's a prompt specific language, it would be committed. I dont think we've reached there yet, but i dont doubt this is on the path to the future
You mean, like a ... programming language? Honestly I can't tell these days what is satire and what isn't.
I work at a certain level, like Ruby code. That's what I write, debug and maintain. I don't really care about the internals of the interpreter or about the source code of Linux, because these layers are taken care of, they're reliable and they're being developed by competent people. I [think I] know what Ruby code should look like in order to remain [reasonably] fast, maintainable and reliable, and it's my job to build a product out of that kind of code. If I keep writing code like that, I know for sure that I'll be able to keep building the product, because the layers underneath are deterministic. It's like the certificate chain of trust, but with "surely these people are not idiots". And that's simply not the case with LLMs.
Not only can the LLM be a massive idiot, but also an unpredictable one. I can try to warn it, steer it, police it or review as much as you ask me to, but ultimately you're asking me to delegate my job and my responsibilities to an intermediate whose reasoning I don't understand, who has no loyalty, no sense of pride, no sense of ethics, can't be taught and can't be fired.
My understanding is that this is still an unsolved problem. At some point you lose touch with the code and you start working with a mental model that’s subtly inaccurate. You just sort of hope that the people below have are competent and are building stuff that matches your mental model (that you’re communicating well!).
For me, the issue is that the model can explain what the code IS, not what it’s supposed to be or aspiring to be. The code doesn’t explain the original constraints (because it already fits within them) and it doesn’t show the tried and discarded approaches. It’s like rewriting a MIDI roll back into sheet music. Or better, it’s like the difference between being the author of an opera, and having read reviews of it.
Fun thing about the sodium filled valves — these are also used in cars. The engine in my previous econobox, a 3-cylinder 1.0 TSI (EA211) uses them in the 81 kW variant.
I don’t think it’s pretty well established, there are cars that will happily stop and start the engine multiple times per minute, e.g. Toyota hybrids with their “HSD” drivetrain. It just requires some engineering.
Not exactly. You do want a deflagration and not a detonation, but "explosion" is more loosely defined and, depending on who you're talking to, a self-sustaining subsonic flame front and a sharp pressure spike are a perfectly valid explosion.
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