One only has to see the differences between NATO bombing of serbian power stations vs the russians doing the same with Ukraine, or Israel killing children in gaza vs russian killing children vs the US killing afghan or Iraqi children.
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/25/us/crew-of-cruiser-that-d...
In my eyes, once Israel started dropping air bombs on civilian buildings killing 1000s of civilians, Israel had given up on its morals. And so had US to fund the operation.
Israel is killing more civilians than Hamas is. Blockade of water, gas, electricity is just inhumane.
Ukraine on the other hand I support. They are defending their territory and neutralizing the attack. Although it seems they may run out of steam, it’s been more than 2 years.
Isreal has been trying to keep their morals for decades using defensive measures. They constructed probaby best in the world air defense systems to protect their civilians daily. They could just send one rocket for one they were targetted by instead and Gaza would be inhabitable decades ago. So when they were rewarded for their restraint on 7 Oct with savagery I'm not really surprised that huge part of the world gives them now blank checkque to do what they believe they need to. Not to mention that what Putin did to Ukrainie softened the morals of people to "it's ok if it's for the right reasons".
The Germans thought the French resistance was savage too.
All occupying forces, as Israel is, believe those attacking it are savages for how they attack.
If your land was occupied by an invading force armed and financed by the US and its allies would you sit back and do nothing while that force murdered your people and stole your property, or would you have done exactly what Hamas did on October the 7th?
If you're seriously suggesting that attacking unarmed civilians intentionally, killing parents in front of their children and then kidnapping the children, slaughtering defenseless party-goers, etc. is what I any resistance movement would do, that's ridiculous. If Hamas would only have attacked military targets, there would be no legitimacy to Israel's actions. However, what actually happened was that they attacked plenty of civilian targets, in a premeditated fashion, in areas that are recognized internationally to be part of Israel.
To paraphrase JFK, those who make peaceful resistance impossible make violent resistance inevitable.
This would justify the retaliation by Israel to any extend.
Something being inevitable is different from it being justified.
Hamas’ and Palestinian Jihad’s violence is a predictable response to Israel’s abandonment of two-party talks and its right wing’s ascendency within its politics. That doesn’t justify gunning down kids at a concert.
Similarly, the IDF levelling much of Gaza in retribution was a predictable repercussion of killing Israeli civilians, including children. That doesn’t make their deaths fair.
Perhaps you should read about what Haganah did to the British before the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Perhaps you shouldn't use something that happened 75 years ago against someone to justify something someone else did a month ago?
Or the Arabs that called Jews dogs that should be subjugated 20 years before that? Don't be ridiculous.
If you're seriously suggesting that the people of the land should play fair when attacking such a brutal occupying regime then that is naive and ridiculous.
The Palestinian resistance forces have no moral duty to fight "fair" as determined by the sponsors of Israel.
If your land was occupied by an invading force armed and financed by the US and its allies would you sit back and do nothing while that force murdered your people and stole your property, or would you have done exactly what Hamas did on October the 7th?
No, I would have accepted one of the many peace proposals the other side offered.
Regardless, your framing of how there are only two binary options – (1) doing nothing to advance my political goals, or (2) resorting to the most savage terrorism imaginable – and no other options between them is appalling and telling.
This is not a valid comparison.
Yes, some Palestinians were displaced, even more Jews were displaced at the same time. Even by total numbers, which is hard, since Jews are always a minority and even if you don't count European Jews and just look at the surrounding countries.
One injustice doesn't excuse the other, but people need to move on. Germans did need to part with land as well.
The stolen property story would need some correcting here.
Israel is a state established by UN resolution. If you really want to blame someone you can blame the British. The British incidentally also promised a Palestinian state to the Palestinians and it was provisioned in the resolution but the Palestinians rejected it.
However, if we really were to do this comparison. The Israelis have have been way to nice. The Palestinians have been on the loosing side of 4-5 wars - its unprecedented. To the victor goes the spoils, thats how it is in the real world.
If there is cause for a Palestinian state, then there is also cause for a Jewish state. Problem is the Palestinians rejects this notion and want the Jewish state gone.
> They could just send one rocket
Putin could do the same to half of Europe, eh. The fact that he doesn't, doesn't mean his actions are justified. Not applying overwhelming force doesn't mean that applying any other type of force is justified.
> Isreal has been trying to keep their morals for decades
There are no morals left, in that conflict, since the 1982 mass murder of thousands of Lebanese civilians in Beirut at the very least - if not earlier. Both sides have happily displayed the worst in human nature, multiple times, over the last 70 years.
> what Putin did to Ukrainie softened the morals of people to "it's ok if it's for the right reasons".
Again, that's hardly new. From Vietnam to Desert Storm to Afghanistan, significant chunks of any public opinion will determine it's ok to apply violence. That doesn't mean it's morally justified - morals are determined in ways that go beyond counting how many individuals are pro or against something.
This is not a "both sides" issue. Thought experiment for you.
Q: What would happen today if Hamas and supporters permanently gave up all their weapons and surrendered? A: Israel would immediately stop any wartime action.
Q: What would happen today if Israel gave up it's defenses and military, took down the borders? A: Iran and Hamas would kill every last Jew in Israel. They have to, it is their charter.
Also, how many Jews and Christians are living in Gaza openly vs Israel? What would happen to them in the above?
Those answers are preposterous and your argument is laughable. This is indeed a "both sides" issue, because otherwise it wouldn't have remained a hot conflict after 70 years. There are legitimate and now multi-generational grievances on both sides, that are really difficult to recompose. You can't engage with simplistic attitudes if you want to be intellectually honest.
You don't like the argument because you know it to be true. The exception is the settlements in the West Bank, but those began after extremism in Israel rose considerably. That is a severe problem, but if people excuse terrorism as resistance, the same would apply here.
As others mentioned, your argument is fundamentally contradicted by facts.
The problem is that, without serious ideological engagement, neither side will ever stop. The current state of play is the failure of the non-solution that is "Two States", aka "Israel and bantustans". Bantustans have historically been unsustainable for any government that tried to implement them.
That's one hell of an exception lol. The only exception being a blatant disregard for Palestinian sovereignty, and proof that Palestinians will never be left alone even if they'd stop fighting (which is mostly the case in the west bank, compared to Gaza) as Israel is clearly seeking their entire territory, if it is is an exception, still disproves your entire point.
Yes that's exactly what happened in the west bank. Once they stopped fighting, they were left alone! Oh wait no, it just led to massive colonial projects backed by the Israeli government. Oopsie!
Missing from your narrative is the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli settlers. The settlers are harassing and seizing land from Palestinians. Those settlers are protected by the Israeli Defense Forces. All of this is well documented and are repeatedly criticised by many well reputable human rights organisations.
So, no, it's not restrain that is rewarded by these savage attacks.
And while I condemn the terrorist attacks on innocent civilians by Hamas, we should not pretend they came out of a vacuum, or that the state of Israel is a pure peace loving innocent victim in all this.
Is there any state in the world that has neighboring enemies who would pass your test of being "a pure peace loving innocent victim"?
If not, then is October 7th style terrorism legitimate against all states? Against yours?
Don’t be ridiculous! If you actually bothered to read my comment, you’d see that I condemn the attack. The world isn’t black and white, and criticising Israel isn’t the same as supporting its enemies.
we should not pretend they came out of a vacuum
And we shouldn't pretend that organized terrorism is justified by the things you've mentioned.
Hamas and Gaza were settler and occupation-free since 2005. The settlers are in the West Bank, which is controlled by Fatah.
Israel is not a state with Christian morale, they are not a part of the "Western world". They have their own religion and morale, which are older than Christianity. Only part of holy books are shared between two.
Who mentioned anything about Christianity??
Some people equate morality with religion.
Religion shapes morale. Morale shapes religion. They are not equal, but they influence each other.
Moreover, human actions is heavily influenced by circumstances. With low birth rate, it's better to protect children. With high birth rate, it's OK to sacrifice some young man to free some space, like farmers do for their crops, thus we see different messages in different circumstances even in countries with same religion and morale.
Moreover, humans are good at placing arbitrary boundaries, for example Catholics are OK to kill other nations en masse because "they are not Catholics, so they have no soul, so they are not humans, they are like pigs". Some versions of Islam even encourages holy war against non-Muslims. Some other minor religions are even promoting cannibalism. Even atheists are promoting mass killings, for example communists want to kill all rich(-ier than them).
So, while Christianity promotes peace, latest 2 world wars and current greatest war since WWII, are between Christians. Guess who will use nuclear weapon for second time in the history? North Korea? Iran? China? USA? Britain? Russia? Ukraine?
From a Western perspective, there's no denying at least some Christian influence. We inherit a morality and philosophical tradition and that was shaped by a Christian-dominated culture for a large chunk of its history.
Highly recommend (not Spider-Man) Tom Holland's book Dominion for more on how that all played out.
War is rarely about morals. But if they did drop them, we would be talking about casualties 20-30 times higher.
This isn't about morals, since that would demand that every death is one too many. Killing just as many Palestinians as Jews were killed would be a fundamentally unmoral justification as well.
I think there is different expectation towards Israel, every country would have reacted to an attack like it happend to it and I don't see an alternative to topple the regime in Gaza.
The blockade of essentials is questionable, if done for an extended time. The previous blockade of goods wasn't though, it was requested by the PA and Egypt as well. Arguably it wasn't thorough enough.
That's funny because to me, there's so much more leniency towards Israel. Blockading an entire city for almost two decades, and controlling almost every external aspect of its life while also openly and proudly colonizing the west bank with 0 repercussions is something only Israel can get away with. Bombing a city into rubbles with 0 official international condemnation from the west is also a thing only Israel can do.
Bombing a city into rubbles with 0 official international condemnation from the west is also a thing only Israel can do.
There's plenty to criticize Israel for, but this isn't one of them. If Tijuana started sending terrorists over the border to San Diego, Mexico elected members of a known terrorist organization to public office and started a campaign to kick the US out of California "from the colorado to the sea?" and staged an attack on civilians the US would suddenly have a couple more territories and LockMart Grumman Atomics stock would skyrocket. The same applies for any other neighbor.
The hot phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War has been going on for one year and nine months.
Even Germany seems to have given up its claimed "never again!" morals.
NATO bombing of serbian power stations was done in response of Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, after the horrible crimes against humanity perpetrated by serbian forces in Bosnia. "russians doing the same" is a blatant lie. What the russians are doing is a genocide.
That’s a stupid comparison because the USSR intentionally shot down a plane without trying to contact it and then didn’t cooperate at all on search efforts.
Additionally, the pilot positively identified it was a passenger jet due to the double decker windows but shot anyway because they were shooting down “spy planes”, not anything that was an actual threat.
This is in contrast to the US incident where they tried to contact the plane on 10 different frequencies (3 civil aviation) and were operating under the understanding the plane was a fighter carrying missiles.
There is obviously going to be some media bias, but equivocating these two events is terrible from a “moral outrage” perspective.
That’s a stupid comparison because the USSR intentionally shot down a plane without trying to contact it and then didn’t cooperate at all on search efforts.
I don't know much about either incident, but your summary sounds exactly what the OP is saying: "Here are the reasons the Russians did it. It's different, because they're evil".
One side was lying about thinking it was a spy plane, but the other side legitimately thought the plane had missiles on it?
It's actually astonishing that anyone who's been on this planet for more than a couple decades can take any of these narratives seriously.
"Here are the reasons the Russians did it. It's different, because they're evil"
No. The OP was talking about generally thinking that the Russians are evil and the US is great. Whereas the comment you're replying to gave specific malicious things that happened in the Russian case and didn't in the US case. The difference between the way people acted in the two cases is clear and doesn't require any particular political persuation to understand.
actually I agree with itsoktocry. You assume all those things to be facts, but nobody discussing here was personally present in any of those events. I can assure you that the version of "Russians knew it was a civilian airplane" is not recognized as true in Russia. This even without being able to speak Russian, nor ever being in Russia. But of course, they are bad people :-).
Indeed, if you ignore all the evidence, including the declassified Russian documents[1], you can conclude that Russia did nothing wrong with regard to the KE007 flight.
To be honest, the persistent blind contrarianism of this community is really tiring.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007#So...
I didn't say they didn't do anything wrong, it's really not about that. The comment was on the coverage of the incident that happened in 1983. Nobody in 1983 knew anything about what will be declassified in 1992. You're stuck in a good vs bad box which is what my comment was actually about.
It’s “Russia made no efforts to contact” and “Russia made no efforts to search” both of which indicate it was because Russia was up to no good.
Funny how you ignore the reasons the commenter you’re replying to gives to indicate Russia did it because it was evil, reasons which do not apply to the U.S. case, and pretend they never gave those explanations at all.
The point is that 1) those reasons are themselves assuming a particular value system in order to judge evil (for someone who believes national sovereignty is absolute, neither country need give any reason to justify such decisions), and 2) those reasons are simply the propaganda you've heard, not necessarily what actually happened.
You can't judge evil without a backing value system to do so. Not assuming a value system presumes there is no such thing as evil. Which sure, if that's what you want to advocate for then go for it.
But for those of us who do have a value system we'll continue to use it in deciding whether something is evil or not.
I mean it looks like the private internal memos regarding the Soviet incident were released in 1992, so this is not propaganda. Or if it were it'd make the USSR look better, not really bad.
Russia has declassified documents that confirm what the GP said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007#So...
It's actually astonishing that anyone who's been on this planet for more than a couple decades can take any of these narratives seriously.
The only astonishing thing is that you reflexively rushed to Russia's defense instead of looking up the facts.
These are two separate incidents, with similarities but also important differences.
We don't know how the US military would've reacted if Iran Air 655 would've overflown restricted airspace above the US.
For sure the Soviets fucked up by not trying to call on 121.5 MHz, but is that worse than the US fucking up by being so close (arguably intruding) another country space, and yet not having equipment to monitor civilian air traffic control in the area? I'm not sure.
and yet not having equipment to monitor civilian air traffic control in the area? I'm not sure.
Did you not read the linked article in the thread you’re replying to? The US did have an IFF detection system, it was a core part of how it worked. The issue was a UI failure which confused identification by mixing up two different (real) IFF indicators one from military and one from civilian and made it seem to the captain that the military one was flying towards them. That’s a legit honest mistake.
They had 4 minutes from the “take off” to when it was almost overhead. Navigating Iranian air traffic control radio isn’t exactly a solution in tense situations.
We don't know how the US military would've reacted if Iran Air 655 would've overflown restricted airspace above the US.
Restricted US airspace has been violated many times in history. As have Russians. And many other countries.
Exactly, you would think people would start seeing the games being played.
Look up “mass control hypnosis” if you’ve never heard the term.
It's not stupid. All governments and militaries use propaganda. You'd be a fool to believe anything they say, no matter which country it is. The absolute truth of what happened is unreachable to us, we can only try to piece together a coherent version of the events after the fact. Government narratives are notoriously unreliable sources to base such an understanding upon.
Propaganda doesn't mean its necessarily a lie or misleading. Its just government marketing. It can be truthful or deceitful.
Back to the core issue of accidental shootdowns. I think its important to note that while these tragedies have continued to happen after the US incident in the 80's, none of them involved the US military since. That does lead credibility to their claim it was a UI and procedural problem that was fixed. Both Iran and Russia have shot down civilian air liners in the 21st century. In Russia's case it was 2014 in Ukraine and was judged a war crime by the courts. The man responsible, Igor Girkin, is wanted and likely will never leave Russia for fear of arrest. In Iran's case they accidentally shot down their own airliner in their own air space a few years back. I don't know what became of that.
Propaganda doesn't mean its necessarily a lie or misleading.
Its just government marketing.
All marketing is inherently a lie or misleading due to inescapable conflicts of interest. They have every reason in the world to want you to believe certain stuff. Therefore you should be skeptical and disbelieve them by default.
That does lead credibility to their claim it was a UI and procedural problem that was fixed.
I don't doubt it was. The author of the mastodon posts this thread is about made very convincing arguments as far as I'm concerned.
All marketing is inherently a lie or misleading due to inescapable conflicts of interest. They have every reason in the world to want you to believe certain stuff. Therefore you should be skeptical and disbelieve them by default.
What? No it isn't. The easiest marketing is when you don't have to because the good act stands on its own. Marketing is often a lie but it doesn't have to be.
I don't doubt it was. The author of the mastodon posts this thread is about made very convincing arguments as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah I was familiar with the incident before this post and it seems pretty open and shut to me. These things have happened a few times in the past but this is as far as I know the only case of a US air defense system accidentally shooting down a civilian aircraft. It was taken serious at the time and hasn't happened since. What I find more troublesome is that the details of the investigation and the actions taken were made public yet other nations didn't take similar steps so similar mistakes have been made by other parties since. Notably, Iran themselves.
10 different frequencies (3 civil aviation)
Those 7 others they couldn't receive. For the 3 cilivian ones they couldn't even know which aircraft it was directed at.
and were operating under the understanding the plane was a fighter carrying missiles.
If they said they thought it was squawking on military mode II instead of mode III i'd believe em. The recordings say otherwise but few people making a mistake or the like happens. If they on top of that say they saw it dive whilst their equipment recorded the plane as climbing as well as other discrepancies that don't match up....
Sorry, I don't tend to believe it anymore. I'd assume it much more likely they were covering their asses with lies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
So steelmanning...
To the commanders, shooting the plane down was somewhat defensible at the time. It was well off course and -due to that- happened to enter soviet airspace not once but twice!
The pilot who actually visually identified the plane did actually see it was a passenger airliner, but passenger airliners are sometimes converted to military configuration. And seeing the flight profile, it could totally have been converted for a MASINT mission or something.
But the behavior of the soviet union during the search and rescue operation afterwards? I'm not sure how that can be excused quite so easily.
Also, what was the US navy even doing there? The Persian Gulf is nowhere near the US.
It's as if Iran had their navy parked on the US east coast, it would be seen as an outrage immediately.
The Persian Gulf, despite the name, is not Iranian territorial waters. Anybody can go there. Iran would be well within its rights to send its warships into the Atlantic Ocean, yes.
And what do you think the reaction of Americans would be if that happened? And especially if those warships were prepared to shoot?
This happens all the time. There is a documentary for example on the HMS Elizabeth carrier from the UK and how they deliberately navigated through Crimea waters (together with the Dutch navy) to make a point that they're allowed to do so because that water is Ukrainian and not Russian.
In the same documentary you also see Chinese ships follow around the British group, and Russian jets overflying it. All in international waters, all legal, both not appreciated by the UK side of things.
The Montreux Convention[0] prohibits large warships from transiting the Bosporous Strait. That carrier displaces 65,000 tons, the upper limit of the treaty only permits warships of 15,000 tons or less. The UK is one of the signatories to that treaty.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention_Regarding_...
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Elizabeth-class_aircraft...
It was actually the HMS Defender, a destroyer, which sailed into the Black Sea, and the Royal Netherlands Navy’s HNLMS Evertsen, a frigate.
It would be a minor news article that most people would not care about, just like when China/Russia sail near US territory in the Pacific (which actually does happen).
American foreign policy is fully subscribed to the idea of American exceptionalism, as are many of their citizens and media outlets. Hypocrisy means nothing to them and won’t shame them in to not doing something
US seizes Iranian cargo on even non Iranian vessels [1] with impunity. Iran sending warships would be as harshly responded to as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-confiscates-ira...
One of the main jobs of the USN is to protect commercial shipping lanes. This is of US national interest because a lot of commerce flows through international shipping lanes. Its not unique to the US either. Its a historical duty of most nation's blue water navies. The persian gulf does not belong to Iran. Its international waters. But they have a history of using piracy in the persian gulf as a tool of the state and generally acting a destabilizing force in the area. So the US, and other nations often patrol the region to protect civilian shipping.
Maybe the US shouldn't have invaded several countries in the region and encircled Iran.
This was in the 1980's. Who had the US invaded in the middle east?
The US orchestrated a coup in Iran and later helped Iraq invade. All for oil money.
Claims the US was invading countries in the middle east >Lists things that isn't invading the middle east.
I’m describing the beginning of a process that later included direct invasion. Arming and goading Iraq is more covert, but still ends up with an invasion.
25% of the world's crude oil was shipped out of the Gulf at that time. The Iran-Iraq war had caused the prices of crude to skyrocket as many insurance companies refused to cover any shipping in the region. So the US felt compelled to protect the exports of crude oil from "friendly" nations. While continuing to blockade Iranian imports/exports.
For more details on the political situation at that time, I recommend reading The Persian Puzzle by Pollack.
https://www.amazon.com/Persian-Puzzle-Conflict-Between-Ameri...
Additionally, to help explain how messed up the shoot-down was, Sources of Power by Klein.
https://www.amazon.com/Sources-Power-20th-Anniversary-Decisi...
It's not really a UX error when your helicopter-carrier invades Iran after one of your helicopters invaded Iran. In wartime. What were these warships even doing in the PERSIAN gulf? And why do they shoot Iranian airplanes in Iranian airspace while they themselves are in Iran?
I image "UX error" wouldn't cut it if a chinese missile cruiser shot down an US airliner while steaming up the Hudson.
these warships even doing in the PERSIAN gulf
Iran doesn't own the PERSIAN gulf any more than India owns the INDIAN ocean.
Sure, so if a Iranian helicopter carrier parked itself in international waters near New York City, everyone would be totally chill with that right?
international waters near New York City, everyone would be totally chill with that right?
I don't know why you think this is a gotcha...The USN would probably sniff around but that's it..They're international waters
Yes, but it's also Iran. What you're not getting is the "mortal enemy moving a war machine right at your gates" bit.
What you are failing to comprehend is that the United States has a policy of enforcing international naval freedom, and routinely transits international waters near many nations. The US has no issue with any vessel's location in international waters, regardless of what nation.
It would be surrounded and hounded by the Navy, just like the soviet fishing trawlers.
They were in wartime, you answered your own question.
I image "UX error" wouldn't cut it if a chinese missile cruiser shot down an US airliner while steaming up the Hudson.
Yes, that would be up for debate if the US were in an active war with China.
Iran was at war with Iraq, not the US with Iran.
The US and Iran had been in a cold war since 1979 with flareups the entire time all the way through to the current day.
The mentioned iran-iraq war was conducted by then us-ally saddam husein on behalf of the us. The us where the aggressor.
Presumably some mission during the Iran–Iraq war? Iraq was an ally of the US at the time.
A not so subtle difference is that the pilot shooting down KAL 007 identified it as a civilian airliner and proceeded to shoot it down anyway.
Another more subtle difference is that in the Iranian Airlines shootdown, the US took responsibility and at least apologized. Meanwhile the Soviets denied anything happening until they couldn't and then claimed it was a spy plane (legitimate target).
Identified it as a Boeing 747, but not as a civilian airliner.
The same types of planes as civilian airliners are often used as platforms for military and spy planes.
FWIW, they would have ended up better off if the original TASS press release was not cancelled just before publication (the one where it was claimed a mistaken shooting due to misidentification).
“It’s a Boeing” could be waved away this way. 747s aren’t used as military or spy planes with the exception of Air Force One and the E-4, neither of which would ever be there unescorted and unannounced.
They also don't have a large an obvious "Korean Air" livery on them. Military aircraft are marked appropriately. I wouldn't necessarily expect a soviet fighter pilot to read english but I would expect him to recognize what a civil airliner looks like. The USSR had their own and also wore colorful liveries.
It was shot down at night. There's no way to view the livery on a dark plane at just before 2 AM.
Yes there is; we call them "lights".
The logo on the tail was lit up.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KAL007747-2.png
The pilot of the fighter also reported seeing "two rows of windows", which can only be a 747 at the time. https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/31/us/kal-fight-007-anniversary/...
“I could see two rows of windows, which were lit up,” Soviet pilot Col. Gennadi Osipovitch told CNN in 1998, describing the 747’s telltale double-deck configuration. “I wondered if it was a civilian aircraft. Military cargo planes don’t have such windows.”
Cargo don't. Converted intelligence/C4I planes? Often do.
Also, logos like that aren't that well readable especially at speed, and the actual shootdown happened in a way that could be mistaken for evasive maneuveurs.
Essentially, I feel that if we're going to let UX take part of the blame for Iran Air 655, we have to allow wider narrative for KAL007 as well (Personally I think humans are directly at fault for both cases)
No. The shootdown of KAL 007 took place at night. There was no possible way to identify the aircraft other than via the lights coming out of the windows. A militarized 747 is called an E-4[0]. A militarized 707 is variously called an E-3 (some are AWACS) [1], KC-135 (a now-retired refueling aircraft) [2], or an EC-135 (electronic warfare equipped 707) [3].
The wikipedia page for the shootdown incident [4] lists the time as 1349 GMT. Most readers will go "they shot it down just before 2PM" instead of realizing that the location was 12 hours ahead of GMT. During the time of the USSR, Vladivostok used Moscow time, even though they are 11 timezones ahead.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-4
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-3_Sentry
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_KC-135_Stratotanker
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_EC-135
4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
The wikipedia page for the shootdown incident [4] lists the time as 1349 GMT.
In case anyone is curious, the Wikipedia page mention of this time is as follows: "at 13:49 UTC (49 minutes after take-off), KAL 007 reported that it had reached its Bethel waypoint". Bethel is a city in the U.S. state of Alaska.
Except the Soviets had visual confirmation of the target
Vincennes did not (which to be fair should have done - and not excusing their actions here)
That's a good point, why didn't they seek visual confirmation first?
Another US ship was attacked by Iraqi Exocet missiles beyond visual range on the same region just one year before. US had also attacked Iran assets in the year before after one US ship was damaged by Iranian mines. Tensions were very high.
US had also attacked Iran assets in the year before after one US ship was damaged by Iranian mines.
Wasn't this in Iranian territorial waters. I don't quite see how that held up as a justification for the retaliations.
Wasn't this in Iranian territorial waters.
In case anyone is curious, the topic of discussion appears to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Samuel_B._Roberts_(FFG-58)...
All sources appear to indicate that the mine was in international waters.
They probably would have, if they would have had the capability.
You can't really compare how a nation judges being a victim of it's own mistakes directly to how a nation would judge being a victim of its enemy's mistakes. Obviously there's going to be a whole lot more skepticism and distrust.
Which is not the same as whether it can be done at all, it's more so that accuracy and epistemic humility are currently low priorities for early 21st century humanity.
I mean that's the fundamental attribution error isn't it? If we do it it's because of external factors, if they do it it's because they're inherently bad people.
We see this in much smaller scale everywhere. When someone you don't like does something wrong , it's surely because they're such an idiot... when it's someone you really like, it's definitely due to external causes. Not to mention simple discrimination, which is rampant, seemingly no matter how much we try to make that go away.
* there would be no debate about UI mistakes if it was Iran shooting down a US plane*
If Iran shot down a US plane and then immediately admitted it was a mistake and helped investigate, I don’t think this is true. People would still be angry and a UI mistake doesn’t really exonerate you from that anger.
Iran actually shot down a Ukrainian plane by mistake. They took their sweet time admitting it, but did eventually:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_International_Airlines...
According to Entman, framing techniques were used to frame the Korean Airlines incident as...
Framing is a major problem in almost every single problem Humans have, yet it gets almost no attention....which I suspect may not be accidental especially considering how useful it is (it's getting heavy usage in this very thread, wow how surprising).
To be fair, Iran mistakenly shot down an Ukrainian civilian plane only a few years ago, again on a period of heightened tension. They admitted to the mistake a few days later and I don't remember there was a widespread suggestion of second motives.
We judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.
I wonder when a tesla will show up in a courtroom with a situation like this.
I'm not talking about autopilot.
I'm talking about the continuous (past ridiculous) removal of physical controls from their vehicles.
For example, the original model S/X had dedicated controls for lots of functions - turn signals, gear shift, wipers, autopilot, steering wheel tilt, etc. On the steering wheel, there were two buttons and a scrollwheel on each side of the steering wheel. Press the center of the steering wheel for the horn. The door had mirror adjustment and windows + lock
Unfortunately a few critical controls were on the touchscreen - defrost front and back were big ones, but all the climate controls, and other nonsense too - all pretty much hidden with multiple taps, or small targets or both.
not all of this is bad - putting lots of detailed but non-critical settings like miles vs km are the perfect thing to have on a touchscreen.
but it needed more dedicated controls.
When the Model 3 came out, it started removing controls. There are two stalks, the turn signal also sort of controls headlights and wipers, the shifter is overloaded with autopilot. It has two scrollwheels without buttons, you have to push them left and right.
all other controls are on the touchscreen.
It really needs dedicated controls for important things.
And then the updated model S/X came out. wow.
there are NO stalks. turn signals are touch areas on the steering wheel. so are high beams, horn, wipers. the scroll wheels do different things at different times.
shifter? nope - it guesses what direction you want to go. many more things involve the touchscreen, like going into park. (there is also a touch drive selector in the center console, but you have to look down and touch it to wake, then to select)
Just a mess. It makes you a worse driver.
Its not just Tesla. Recent Jeep models have a digital speedometer with no analog backup. From an engineering perspective these changes just introduce needless risk of complex failure for no real gain. Surely the speedometer is not the make or break cost item on a car?
The analog speedometer it replaced has been digital behind the scenes for ages. The cluster is just sat on a CAN (or similar) bus and controlling a servo for the analog gauge. The pure digital speedometer is significantly less failure prone (and indeed when it does fail, it’s obvious).
A German professor of mine worked at BMW before grad school. He worked on the firmware of the tachometer.
The behavior of the tachometer needle was dictated by the marketing department.
A BMW engine accelerates smoothly and confidently. The tachometer needle never shakes, it rises smoothly and confidently.
This is wholly unsurprising to me - the tachometer on my BMW is audibly out of sync with the engine.
While it is important for cars to have speedometers so that drivers can learn to judge their speed, with a little bit of caution, a journey during which the speedometer fails can be completed both safely and within speed limits.
On the Volvo 240, the analog speedometer tends to get sticky after you've done a couple hundred thousand miles. Sometimes it will reset if you just hit the dash hard enough, sometimes you just have to guess the speed based on the RPM and gear and experience.
Fortunately I bought my Jeep with a manual; as long as I know what gear I'm in, I know roughly how fast I'm driving by sound.
But I'd be surprised if Jeep is the only example of this (outside Tesla). Surely this is the way all cars have been going for a while.
Things started going downhill when the physical controls became indistinguishable by touch.
these changes just introduce needless risk of complex failure for no real gain
Analog speedometers are more complex and can’t be patched OTA. Eliminating them from the fleet means one less part to procure and inventory for manufacturing and service. Given the downside is losing precise speed awareness (you should still be able to judge rough speed visually—that’s the back-up), this seems like a fair trade-off.
Contrast that with e.g. brake lines, where digital systems can add redundancy. (That doesn’t mean they always do.) Or physical mirrors, which add critical redundancy to cameras.
Why do cars need to be patched OTA? Why isn't the code for something as mission critical as a car not written right before it was shipped? I never needed an ECU update on a car before? And my infotainment rarely needed one to the point where the handful of times it did get a firmware update it was handled during servicing just fine.
Digital dashes have been a thing for a long, long time. They're objectively better in some ways (imho) and costs add up!
The analog gauges have been digital for a long time; there's a signal processor that decides how far the gauge should move and a motor that actually moves it.
The left scroll wheel can: play/pause/next/previous/vol up/down in Normal mode
If you press the wiper button on the steering wheel it can change wiper speed
Long press is a custom function
When there's a call it answers/declines, mute/unmute, and ends a call
The right one actives autosteer/tacc/fsd, adjusts follow distance and max speed
There's 3 buttons for left/right/high beam on the left, and on the right, buttons for wiper mode, voice, rear camera, and in the middle, horn.
Not sure I need a button for steering wheel tilt, should only be when stopped. Also do I change gear so often I need a dedicated stalk? It's not a manual car. Direction/park is only done when stopped too.
Does voice control not work for defrost?
I'd rather have a cheaper car with less parts
When there's a call it answers/declines, mute/unmute, and ends a call
Literally do not care about a phone call when it is raining. Hopefully, it at least has coyote time on it so when you adjust the wiper speed it will ignore a phone call.
Not sure I need a button for steering wheel tilt, should only be when stopped.
I've had to adjust while driving. I don't remember for what reason, but I know I've had to do it a few times in my hundreds of thousands of miles of driving.
do I change gear so often I need a dedicated stalk? It's not a manual car. Direction/park is only done when stopped too.
When you need it, you need it. I was once driving towards a non-gated, non-indicated railroad crossing in my hometown. There was only a train about once a day that went through there, but that day, there was a train that should not have been there. I slammed on the brakes, pulled the emergency brake, and threw the car into park. I stopped with less than an inch between me and the train.
I also destroyed my transmission by putting it in park at high speed. Worth it.
I also destroyed my transmission by putting it in park at high speed. Worth it.
absolutely not worth it. modern cars (ie, anything with abs and disk brakes) achieve maximum deceleration when you mash the brake pedal and allow the car to modulate the clamping force. using the emergency brake and putting the car in park just locks up the wheels. the whole point of abs is to avoid this. you destroyed your transmission to increase your stopping distance.
This was most certainly not anywhere near a modern car. Further, it was a gravel road, which is a case where I'm not sure ABS brakes work better, but I could be wrong.
My God, they’ve finally made Marcus J. Ranum’s comment reality: ‘If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles — but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.’
Yeah I’ve always been suspect of these critiques of Teslas UI. Besides the climate control you don’t really need to tap on the tablet for anything critical to driving WHILE driving. At least that was my experience in my brief experience with a 3.
I’d still add maybe another physical dial for stuff like climate, maybe even make them programmable. But that’s for convenience.
I find the rare times you need to use xdrive on BMWs which is a physical dial + a few buttons just as distracting as using a tablet while driving.
What sort of "physical control" would be appropriate for a radar-guided beyond-visual-range anti-air missile?
“A left mouse push fires it. We actually asked for a great big red button, but they wouldn't give us one.” (British submarine, not the top-level story UI) https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/17/tvnews.iraqand...
Typically two different jettison mechanisms, one with a dedicated "emergency jettison" pushbutton.
Also a bunch of physical HOTAS controls, from four-way switches to the small joystick under pilot's left thumb.
shifter? nope - it guesses what direction you want to go.
I honestly thought you were making this up, or at the very least exaggerating. I can't believe it's true. It just makes no sense.
Tesla have a habit of doing things that make no sense and making a success out of it regardless.
In the near future we will ask ourselves how people back then were doing this virtuoso thing called "driving" and be deeply grateful for the autopilot technology which Tesla was pioneering.
More like we'll be deeply thankful for driverless trains.
Thanks, you've just cured me of my Tesla envy entirely
I test drove a Hyundai ionic 6. All the levers and dials that had no use because they were set to 'Auto' made me appreciate my model 3 even more.
IIRC they got in trouble in Germany for this already because certain controls were mandated by law to be a certain way and they flaunted it. I just bought a new car and a make or break decision for me was the control layout. Too many automakers jumped on the touchscreen bandwagon. Its fine for some things like android auto. But all touchscreen all the time was stupid in star trek and stupid in real life. Having physical controls for things like the lights, wipers and hvac is critical.
I'm more worried when spacex "pivots" to iron dome like products.
you will get a barrage of missiles raining down from space on top of some kindergartens because the autofire ai correlated a bunch of Toyota suvs moving to the same point with terrorists
there are NO stalks. turn signals are touch areas on the steering wheel. so are high beams, horn, wipers
I didn't realize how important wipers were till last winter. I was on a 2-lane road at highway speed going into a turn. There had been light snow the previous day which was thawed on the roads, so it was wet and muddy conditions. A truck in the oncoming lane either hit a puddle or otherwise deposited a large splash of muddy water on my windshield instantly, and due to the turn coming up I had to see where I was going. I had about 1 second to find the wipers (it was someone else's vehicle) or I would have gone off the road or into oncoming traffic. That's not the time to hastily search for the wiper button on a touch screen!
I wonder when a tesla will show up in a courtroom with a situation like this.
Well in this situation no one went to prison, so I guess no reason to worry for Tesla either
This is on point.
I purposely didn’t buy a Tesla because I wanted to drive a car, not a toy.
Are touch interfaces all bad? No, but in situations where heavy focus is required and the inputs are dynamically changing, they are a disaster.
I have a disaster storey to share about this.
Sometimes the car does not want to go in to drive/reverse for some unknown reason.
Not long after I first got my tesla, I was making a 3 point turn to go on to my driveway. I moved forward, then stopped, turned the wheel, pressed the stalk to go in to reverse, pressed the accelerator and WENT FORWARD, right in to my old car denting the door. There was no indication the car declined to go in to reverse apart from the icon on the screen.
Now, Tesla released an update so the car makes an audible noise when changing to drive/reverse and a separate noise when the car refuses your instruction. It's much better but annoyingly the car still refuses quite often to go in to Drive/Reverse when you tell it to, especially when you just get in to it. I now out of habit press the gear stalk 4 or 5 times when first getting in to drive it.
I'm so conflicted reading this story. On one hand, yes, there were choices made during the design of the system that directly contributed to this tragedy. And a lot of innocent lives were lost, so saying that's "shit happens, it's an edge case" rings very hollow.
On the other hand, this was a very peculiar set of circumstances, very much an edge case. Is it reasonable to expect designers of combat systems to triple check their choices and run more test scenarios to identify and address such edge cases? I'd say yes. However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.
Yes - but the implications of reassigning the number immediately to another contact seems something that should have been noticed in the design phase.
Vincennes assigned her the tracking number 4474; Sides assigned her 4131. Aegis unified the contacts under the number 4131. 4474 was then available for re-use, so Aegis assigned it to a US A-6 bomber, which happened to be descending.
But he didn't realize that its tracking number had changed. He thought it was still tracking number 4474,
Global commercial flight traffic averages around 100k flights per day. I don't know what fraction is within the radar range of a big ship in a busy area, but maybe 10k? So it's not trivial to avoid reuse within a day while still having 4-digit numbers. Especially when contacts are assigned numbers independently by multiple ships and then reconciled.
I don't know what fraction is within the radar range of a big ship in a busy area maybe 10k? So it's not trivial to avoid reuse within a day while still having 4-digit numbers
So in the design phase that should come up as an issue and you would surely use 5 digit numbers
However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.
When it comes to safety-critical systems, the right engineering choice is to lean towards a 'safe' default. For example, the safe default would be to always slave the cursor:
Once "hooked," the contact would be tracked by Aegis. But critically, unless the operator took the additional step of "slaving" the cursor to that contact, as the contact moved away the cursor would not follow it.
And here, don't reassign a tracking number, at least not within in a short timeframe:
Vincennes assigned her the tracking number 4474; Sides assigned her 4131. Aegis unified the contacts under the number 4131. 4474 was then available for re-use, so Aegis assigned it to a US A-6 bomber, which happened to be descending.
the safe default would be to always slave the cursor
I don't think so, I imagine that behavior could be frustrating, e.g. if you're cursoring over many contacts. Admittedly I am not an expert either, but that suggestion smells like a classic case of armchair design that would actually cause more problems, because I imagine that the two modes exist for a reason and the designers intentionally chose which default to use, but they didn't anticipate this user error.
Thus, I'd suggest that the UI should have made it extremely obvious whether the cursor was slaved and when a contact gets hooked/unhooked under the cursor.
If I had to make an analogy, I'd compare it to normal and insert mode in Vi(m). The fact that the default is normal mode actually makes sense even though new users may suggest otherwise, but the real problem is that by default it's hard to tell which mode you are in.
It might help to read the incident further.
The next aircraft taking off on that runway was an Iranian military F-14 fighter. The cursor was only left on the runway for around 90 seconds, but that was long enough for the Vincennes to get an IFF response corresponding to a military fighter. So Flight 655 was reclassified from an unknown contact to a potentially hostile one.
The default was that the automated system conflated two completely distinct aircraft. The IFF ("identification friend or foe") for a military aircraft was attributed to a civilian airliner
Sorry, I don't see where's the edge case. In a given area there are going to be lots of planes. If there is risk of confusing them and making decisions based on non-reconciled information, it seems a pretty critical flaw.
I agree, the described scenario could just be another day at any airport and surrounding airspace (I guess any airport that is dual purpose military and civilian).
Hard agree here. There are so many small things there that could be improved.
One simple one is identifier re-use, if it is necessary for some reason, then at the very least it shouldn't happen within a specific time frame, so that you may have the same identifier used again as in the scenario.
There was no war.
Well, apart from the fact that the Iran-Iraq war had been on right there for eight years, there's all this on the referred Wikipedia page, including the fact that the Vincennes was actually in Iranian territorial waters at the time:
The Flight 655 incident occurred a year after the USS Stark incident, during which the Iraqi Air Force attacked the U.S. Navy guided missile frigate USS Stark on 17 May 1987, killing 37 American sailors.
U.S. naval forces had also exchanged gunfire with Iranian gunboats in late 1987, and the guided missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts had struck an Iranian sea mine in April 1988.
Two months before the incident, the U.S. had engaged in Operation Praying Mantis, resulting in the sinkings of the Iranian frigate Sahand, the Iranian fast attack craft Joshan, and three Iranian speedboats.
Also, the Iranian frigate Sabalan was crippled, two Iranian platforms were destroyed, and an Iranian fighter was damaged. A total of at least 56 Iranian crew were killed, while the U.S. suffered the loss of only one helicopter, which crashed apparently by accident, killing its two pilots.
On the morning of 3 July 1988, USS Vincennes was passing through the Strait of Hormuz returning from an escort duty. A helicopter deployed from the cruiser reportedly received small arms fire from Iranian patrol vessels as it observed from high altitude. Vincennes moved to engage the Iranian vessels, in the course of which they all violated Omani waters and left after being challenged and ordered to leave by a Royal Navy of Oman warship.
Vincennes then pursued the Iranian gunboats, entering Iranian territorial waters.
So yeah, you are right, there was no actual war. But everyone was pretty war-ish
Wikipedia says "The attack occurred during the Iran–Iraq War, which had been continuing for nearly eight years." I guess it wasn't supposed to be a war that the US was involved in directly? But they were apparently getting their helicopter shot at and were doing things in Iranian territorial waters, so I guess they weren't just hanging out.
Given the stakes of an “edge case” in a war machine, not to mention their cost, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect the number of such cases to be zero.
Reusing identifiers after such a short time was a pretty galactic design cockup. I'm a consultant and if I came across that in a design doc or while analyzing a system to form an understanding in my head of how it works, it would have immediately screamed out to me as asking for this kind of trouble. Operator punched the ID in for (civilian) aircraft A, and unknowingly got the trajectory data for (military) aircraft B.
Coding for the 90% common conditions are easy, it's the edge cases where things get hard and true engineering talent shines through. Ignoring them is simply incomplete design.
It's not tolerated in other fields of engineering (eg. civil) and it shouldn't be in ours either.
It really peeves me to hear the phrase “edge case” used as a defense of incorrect software. As if software should not be expected to deal with edge cases.
Edge cases are not rare. If you have a lot of people using your system, or people who use it a long time, hitting an edge case increases in likelihood to the point that it becomes inevitable. It’s a fallacy to think that an edge case being mathematically unlikely implies that it is unlikely to ever happen. See also murphy’s law.
I think a highly volatile and chaotic use case is exactly where I'd expect them to design a perfect, or at least orders of magnitude less susceptible to operator error, system.
Of course it's hard for me, a spoiled millennial who got into programming via online games, to imagine what war computers were capable of in 1988, but as described in the thread, this scenario sounds so utterly routine that I am surprised that it basically involved a game of telephone to confirm basic facts about a plane.
"A tracked entity gets confused with another tracked entity" or "an entity's status of hostile-or-not gets lost" sounds like exactly the cases that should be impossible to get wrong as a fundamental goal of this kind of operation.
This was not an edge case, it was a swiss cheese failure that was just waiting to happen.
In a tech company this would correctly be thought of as a systemic failure as opposed to a personal one.
There are so many questionable design choices here for a system that is supposed to be used in high-stress situations. A lot of it reads as someone thinking "ooh yeah it would be cool if it did X" instead of "what's the simplest and dumbest possible way to do this".
On the other hand, this was a very peculiar set of circumstances, very much an edge case. Is it reasonable to expect designers of combat systems to triple check their choices and run more test scenarios to identify and address such edge cases? I'd say yes. However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.
Even if this is your position, it doesn't excuse the Navy's blaming of the crew after it happens. Even if the design issues could be written off as a reasonable mistake, the mistake still lies with the design and not with the crew.
Interesting to see this on HN. I currently work for the company that redesigned the HMI/UI following this incident. Or rather, it's how my company was founded. In the aftermath, the US Navy Command in San Diego contacted several UCSD professors in the Cognitive Science and Psychology department who specialized in high-impact decision making under stress and cognitive load. The Navy was apparently impressed with the detailed analysis and recs provided by these faculty and continued to collaborate with these folks on this an other projects. Eventually they were getting so much work from the Navy they founded a company focused on human factors engineering and interface design for complex systems.
The two original founders recently retired and our new CEO is a former Captain of the USS Zumwalt.
I think your company is PSE, correct?
I think if they wanted to name the company they would have done so in the comment
There have been only 5 "former Captain of the USS Zumwalt". That is a very small subset of humans. There have been more humans walking on the moon than former Captains of the USS Zumwalt.
Their names are a matter of public record and one can answer which works as a CEO with 5 simple google searches.
If they didn't want to name the company they shouldn't have identified it willingly and precisely.
I don't want to know the company's name, but it's interesting to know the history of this event and how it came about.
If people want to do sleuthing, have fun.
Making clear allusions to the company without directly naming it allows anybody in this conversation who cares to figure it out easily, but doesn't get this discussion automatically indexed with that company's name. Naming the company in a response is rude and unnecessary.
I, for one, am glad it was mentioned. There's nothing secret about it and it saves me some trouble. Thanks for taking one for the team, Guy who figured it out
Same here. With all the detail provided it’s not hard to figure out the company.
Btw. You can vouch for comments that are marked dead to revive them.
Or at least frame it in a more passive tone like "would you be comfortable disclaiming the name of the company where you work?"
Any good reading on this? Might be some interesting learning opportunities for (cyber)security monitoring, which is a total mess right now. Stakes are a bit less severe, but still.
I suggest you check out the work of Gary Klein and the Naturalistic Decision Making community, as the Vicennes work was one of the founding projects. He features it in his 1997 book _Sources of Power_.
Apologies for hijacking the conversation. Would you be able to recommend any reading specifically on complex UI for critical operations?
It's probably not what you are looking for but the DoD Design Criteria for Human Engineering are pretty good.
This is how every software UI should be designed as well.
Hopefully without people having to die first.
does the developer dying inside a little bit while making it count?
Fun fact the Captain of the Vincennes went to school for psychology and his father was a US Navy Psychologist in WW2.
Aside: it is the second day in a row that a thread from Mastodon ends up on the frontpage of HN. When was the last time I Twitter thread did the same, and does anyone else doubts that Twitter is no longer at the center of tech-related conversation?
A lot of the recent OpenAI events that were posted here were links to Twitter and I’ve seen plenty of people point this out as evidence that Twitter still is at the centre.
This is part of the current cycle of fragmentation. Twitter is no longer the centre, but it still holds certain cultural niches. Other niches have migrated to Mastodon or elsewhere.
I am personally pretty excited to see this diversification and fragmentation as it should help provide more niches for more people.
Mastodon… lol. Is that even still alive? Are you gonna say that Threads is thriving as well?
The OP link is to a very much alive mastodon instance… so yes its doing fine. No idea about Threads but apparently some people use it.
But your claim is that twitter is no longer the center and many niches have migrated to Mastodon. I highly doubt this, unless you can point out an actual niche where Mastodon has more active discussions than twitter.
My claim is not "many niches migrated to Mastodon", but "Twitter is not at the center of tech discussion". At least, not for the hacker types. Even here, the majority of HN links that show up as a Twitter thread are about technology "businesses", not tech itself.
I don’t know how you can say that. The whole fiasco with open AI recently was a good example of how Twitter was the place where you could really stay up-to-date with everything going on. All the main players were posting there.
I love HN, but just because there wasn’t a lot of links to Twitter doesn’t mean it’s not the center of tech discussion
Which niches have migrated? The only people that use mastodon hate Twitter/Elon if you count that as a niche, there are no notable groups on mastodon.
Substack is significantly more threatening and interesting to Twitter.
The OpenAI saga was such an outlier in the usual news cycle, it is hard to use it as a measure of anything.
You can't call any piece of evidence that happens to not support your theory as being an outlier. And even then the OpenAI saga is probably the most important development in tech in the last 10 years (conservatively).
Perhaps, in terms of how much it's affecting Silicon Valley; though I'd say iPhone adoption, the tail-end of Flash, the death of ActiveX, the destruction of libraries, and the growth of Amazon were all more impactful, there.
Probably not, in terms of how much 2040s tech will be based on this stuff. Language models are good for machine translation, and real-time image transcription, but everything else I've seen them do has better solutions (which have been around for decades in many cases, but don't have much funding).
Also, lots of OpenAI fans and venture capital/crypto people are still on Xitter. It’s a special demography that makes it more an outlier.
I'm just glad to see the entire thread of conversation without having to switch to nitter or whatever.
Are you familiar with the libredirect plugin? It can automatically rewrite all twitter links to point at nitter instead.
What you are experiencing is a great example of confirmation bias.
One difference is that Twitter no longer shows threads to logged-out users, while Mastodon does. If someone posted the same thread to both sites, the Mastodon one would be better to link to.
Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/front for the last ten days: one today, one five days ago, three seven days ago, two nine days ago.
they saw this contact heading towards them labeled as an F-14 fighter.
What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship. Was there no moment where they thought "maybe there has been a mistake?" - like where Stanislav Petrov chose to interpret the Soviet early warning system telling him an ICBM was incoming as being a result of some faulty instruments.
Granted the stakes were slightly different - downing one airliner is less severe than risking starting a global nuclear annihilation.
In the moment, it's really hard to step back and ask yourself "Does this make any sense?" when you're primed to react in some particular way.
Especially with an element of "I might personally get blown up" involved.
Yet the Cuban missile crisis with the stake of the entire world didn't escalate.
There were some close calls during the Cold War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
For some reason I mixed this with the Cuban missile crisis, I thought it had something to do with it.
1. More time to think. An incoming F-14 is a minutes/seconds scenario; the Cuban crisis lasted 10 days.
2. "X did not happen" does not mean "Y was not a factor in X". The "about to get blown up" factor was part of the reason the Cuban missile crisis happened; it's also probably part of the resolution.
We got _incredibly_ lucky. A Soviet submarine trying to get through the blockade believed that war had broken out and wanted to attack the US fleet with nuclear torpedoes [0]. Normally only two men aboard the sub had to approve the nuclear launch, and they both wanted to fire. This particular sub happened to have a third officer [1] on board who also needed to approve the launch, and he may have literally saved the world by disagreeing with the other two officers.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Averted_n...
As far as I understand it, a single F14 could launch a single Exocet missile, and make a VERY large hole in an aircraft carrier, and if the conditions were right, putting it to the bottom of the sea. Or the same for a battleship. I seem to recall that being a large concern even then, if not especially then.
Iraq attacked the USS Stark a year before. They used a business jet with an Exocet missile attached to it. This was by mistake but it still happened.
A single plane shooting down a ship is not unheard of but the US has done it in pairs to the whole Iran navy.
Maybe (probably?) it did seem crazy, but the officers sought verification from the system and seemed to get it.
They were probably unaware that there was an airliner in their vicinity, as it had been incorrectly tagged as an F-14. I don't know where the actual F-14 was, but quite possibly nowhere in the vicinity of the ship.
a US frigate (uss stark) was severely damaged by a single Iraqi plane in the previous year. the captain did not expect an Iraqi attack, so he tried to warn the plane off multiple times, ultimately allowing it to fire two missiles which hit his ship. the missiles would likely have been shot down if the Stark's countermeasures were working correctly. but they weren't, and 37 Americans died.
given that context, it doesn't seem wild to take an Iranian plane as a serious threat.
What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship.
What is sudden about that? "Two months before the incident, the U.S. had engaged in Operation Praying Mantis, resulting in the sinkings of the Iranian frigate Sahand, the Iranian fast attack craft Joshan, and three Iranian speedboats. Also, the Iranian frigate Sabalan was crippled, two Iranian platforms were destroyed, and an Iranian fighter was damaged. A total of at least 56 Iranian crew were killed"
And on the very day their helicopter received small arm fire from an Iranian patrol vessel, which they were pursuing when the shoot-down happened.
In this situation the idea that Iran would launch a fighter against them is not that wild.
"Captain, why where you derelict in your duty to protect your ship and crew?"
"Well, I just thought a single F-14 was probably not that big of a deal."
A quite recent UX disaster at Paypal.
The Paypal iOS app used to behave strange with numbers. The interface was designed that you had to type in the amount you wanted to send in cents. If you wanted to send USD 50, you had to type 5000. Paypal then would add a comma after the second digit from the right. What made it even stranger: The numbers were aligned right, so it had the feeling of typing backwards. I never really got used to it.
A few weeks ago, without a note, the whole interface changed. Now you HAVE to fill in the comma. If you just type in 5000 like you did before, you would send USD 5000 instead of USD 50. I personally know of one person who send way to much money and I suspect it is because of this UX change.
Thoughtful design matters!
I dont know what you mean by aligned right (if it aligned left it would have to know how much you intended to transfer before you started), but wells fargo web (and I think app) uses this, and I prefer it for making small payments. They know you're going to type the decimal anyway, so they save you a step. I get mildly annoyed that other banking sites make me type it. If I'm paying $83.21 I still have to type 4 digits, why not save me the step?
When I've encountered it, the interface has looked like this (as I'm in the process of filling it in):
$_.__
$_._1
$_.12
$1.23
$12.34
$
$1
$12
$12.
$12.3
$12.34Because lots of people send mostly whole numbers to friends and family. If I want to send $5 instead of typing "5" I now have to type "500"
I’m confused by the “aligned left” comment. Analogously this seems like saying left alignment in my word processor would mean the word processor would need to know what I was going to type before I type it.
Can you explain?
The price in cents is the way "it was always done" in retail, back when POS terminals were not directly connected to cash registers and the worker had to manually type in the amount. But yeah, sudden change in US design will causemany errors everywhere.
I find gas station pumps 25% are with the cents approach but usually if you type in 60 and press enter it will work
It’s definitely one of those UI concepts that’s different depending on context. similar to password with some websites making up random rules that vary sufficiently enough where automated password entry doesn’t work nor does using a reusable password for sites you don’t care about
Then there’s microwaves and other timers.
Punching in “99” will run much longer than “100”.
I’m adding a tangent to a tangent, but “POS terminals” has to be one of the greatest naming decisions in history.
Using a "comma" to refer to the decimal separator when talking about USD while writing in English about software (written in a computer language that uses a decimal point) took me on a mental rollercoaster. So much so that it led me to read the Wikipedia page on the decimal separator. My favorite part:
Unicode defines a decimal separator key symbol (⎖ in hex U+2396, decimal 9110) which looks similar to the apostrophe. This symbol is from ISO/IEC 9995 and is intended for use on a keyboard to indicate a key that performs decimal separation.
> Unicode defines a decimal separator key symbol (⎖ in hex U+2396, decimal 9110) which looks similar to the apostrophe. This symbol is from ISO/IEC 9995 and is intended for use on a keyboard to indicate a key that performs decimal separation.
Egad, settling the ./, issue by selecting ⎖ is like settling the debate between 0-based arrays and 1-based by numbering them from ½. Or between little- and big-endian by choosing middle-endian.
Perhaps a better design could be two number fields clearly demarcating the two halves of the value.
Plus, you cannot fill more than digits after the decimal place for most currencies, so IMO the design they went with (even though it is done that way on POS terminals) is bad for web and phone apps.
For example, if some system showed a value to transfer at $25.645, and the person input 25645 by mistake, instead of 2564, they would end up sending $256!
Out of all places, Bank of America actually does this right. Any large wire transfer requires re-entering your credentials.
Always felt wrong. Now it's even more wrong.
I made a similar mistake, sending too little, back when PayPal had changed to use the user's local currency as the default instead of the currency I had my balance in.
What a terrible platform to present an interesting story. What wrong with a good old fashioned article style blog ?
I admit I am so turned off by the format I only made it hlf way throught the thread.
I gave up when I realized that I have to click on each "tweet" to read more
Likewise.
There is apparently an extremely unintuitive "Show more for all"[1] button at the top of the initial post.
navigate the UI disaster to read about the UI disaster...
I don't consider this story a UI disaster. Generating different 4-digit codes across terminals for the same object, and recycling those codes regularly... that's a data handling disaster.
And when you try to scroll down with the keyboard, it moves a full "tweet" down so you can't actually read what you were trying to.
the horror
That kinda seems feature-rather-than-bug honestly - I read the entire thing because I'm fascinated by UI/UX stories like this, and clicking to open each tab is nbd, but if it had been a topic I wasn't that interested in, I wouldn't've read it. Which means I'm less likely to fall into an attention-grabbing rabbit hole on social media.
As a counterpoint; I really like threaded posts like these. Each post in the thread becomes a kind of sub-heading or meta-paragraph which allows the user to disengage at well defined stops.
At the same time, it’s understandable that people don’t like it. The format has its problems, but I find I will read less of a blog post than a thread all else being equal.
But it does not allow the reader to quickly skim the article. It requires the user to interact with each paragraph in order to enable the user to skim it for interesting words.
Old fashioned non-interactive subheadings would allow the user to "disengage at well defined steps" and also to quickly scan ahead.
I see no benefit to the added interactivity.
User interface disaster indeed
Here is the thread unrolled:
https://unroller.zachmanson.com/threads/https:/octodon.socia...
tl; dr: They had the wrong contact selected. That's it, that's the whole thing.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
(I know these things are indeed annoying—but that's why we have this rule.)
You made it further than I did, since the UI is absolutely horrendous after the first post.
You can set up a blog on the Internet for free if you want to make longform content.
Pro-tip to those unused to mastodon web-ui: you can click the eye on the top right of the center column (next to Back) to expand all posts at once.
Does anyone know the reasoning for not having the posts expanded by default?
Posts aren't limited to an arbitrary length in activity pub, this is the same UI logic for showing a thread in the main feed. Twitter does something similar for bluecheck long posts.
Wouldn't it be better handled by people following accounts they want to and unfollowing bad actors?
How does this apply to a discussion about the logged out view?
It's hard for me to understand the advantages of this setup. Given the confusion in this thread, it's clearly poorly implemented.
If you want to jump to the conversation/replies to the OP's multi-post, this is a lot less scrolling than if each part of the OP's multi-post was automatically expanded. There's an advantage of the setup for you. This might be desirable as it could encourage participating in the conversation, though an argument can be made that it comes with a risk of people skipping the content and joining the conversation with incomplete context.
The fade effect on the line of text shown is in line with how "click to show more" is done in many places all over the web. It took me a thoroughly minimal amount of mental capacity to realize there was more. I clicked, and got more. It's really not that confusing.
Not sure but the good news is, that’s just one of many UIs to pick from in Mastodon and the fedivers in general. There are also countless apps with various takes on threads, so I’m sure one can find something they like.
How ironic, a post about a user interface disaster needing an explanatory pro-tip for its UI.
That's objectively terrible UX.
Luckily, this one will have less dire consequences.
Maybe my expectations are very very low at this point. But I thought it was ok.
At least there was no popup a few seconds after starting to read the article.
Is there a way, as either the reader or the writer, to set that as a default? Or do you need to remember it and manually do it every time you read a thread like this?
Another good write up of this incident is on the excellent Admiral Cloudberg blog:
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t...
Another article in that series is also related to a UX mistake: Air France Flight 447.
This crashed, in part, because the inputs from two control sticks (one for pilot and other for copilot) were averaged if they disagreed, unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place, and you'd feel the other pilot fighting you. When the plane stalled, one pilot correctly pushed down to come out of the stall (after which they would be able to pull back up) while the other pulled up instead (which is wrong but does feel like the instinctively correct thing to do). The inputs cancelled out so had almost no effect. By the end both pilots were pulling up, but that hadn't been the case earlier on when the problem could have been resolved.
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...
The captain had been on a rest brake and only re-entered the cabin at the last moment. He finally figured out the problem but it was too late to do anything.
“Go on, pull,” Dubois said. Was this comment a sardonic resignation to fate?
It's not something that can be changed on airbus cockpits, since the nature of side sticks makes them impossible to be mechanically linked, unless there was some very complex motor system built into each stick that provided force feedback equal in strength to a pilot tugging hard on it.
unless there was some very complex motor system built into each stick that provided force feedback equal in strength to a pilot tugging hard on it
It does not have to be “equal in strength to a pilot tugging hard on it” since there is normally no significant load applied by the stick to the hand (only the centering springs). So most every feedback should be noticeable.
And force feedback is being deployed right now on commercial planes. The Irkut MC-21 was supposed to be the first airliner featuring them, but the invasion of ukraine and subsequent sanctions nixed that (as the provider of the sticks is the french company Ratier-Figeac). Gulfstream’s 7th gen (GVII) also have active sticks, provided by BAE.
The Cirrus SR-22 (the best selling general aviation plane every year since 2003) has mechanically linked side sticks. They aren't fly by wire like the Airbus but it shows they can be linked without a complex motor system.
unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place
Air France seemed to manage ithttps://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/air-france-crew-fought-e...
Also glad to see that airbus are planning to put force feedback side-sticks in future.
Air France seemed to manage it [on a Boeing]
Hence my "at the time" bracket. Since then, newer Boeing planes have actually removed the physical connection between the sticks! Absolutely bonkers decision given the background. (I put "at least" at the end of my bracket because I wasn't 100% sure I rememebered correctly.) But maybe there is a good reason - e.g. like a sibling comment suggested, if one gets stuck.
unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place
I don't know if it's true, but I recall reading somewhere that this physical connection is a breakable link, so if one of the controls gets stuck the other control can still be used to fly the airplane (after some application of strong force to break the connection).
Yes it is true. The force needed is pretty high.
unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where they're physically connected so you can't have contradictory inputs in the first place, and you'd feel the other pilot fighting you.
Note that it’s not quite that flagrant: because Boeings don’t normally autotrim (famously aside from the 737 MAX, whose MCAS was not documented and trained for — I think the more recent Boeings like 777 and 787 are FBW and do autotrim) it’s possible to fight your co-pilot while thinking you’re not trimmed, or even that you have excessive air load:
excessive air loads on the stabiliser may require effort by both pilots to correct miss-trim. In extreme cases it may be necessary to aerodynamically relieve the air loads to allow manual trimming.
The tragic AF447 flight comes up somewhat regularly on the site — see this recent conversation [0].
Very impactful mistake, but apparently not a mistake worth apologizing for.
From Wikipedia: "the U.S. government did not admit legal liability or formally apologize to Iran"
Pinnacle arrogance/exceptionalism. Disgusting.
Oh, and the US back then supported Iraq in its horrific attack on Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...
You forgot to mention that Ronald Reagan apologized to the Iranian government and the US paid $60 Mil in compensation to the families.
After having become an expert on the incident from having skimmed half of the wikipedia article, I note that it mentions both Reagan considering his letter an apology and the US government not having made a formal apology, so I imagine there is some clever political distinction between the two.
There also has been no apology for US' use of agent orange in Vietnam, nor has there been a payment of compensation.
Why not formally apologize for such a fuck up (Iran aircraft), except for arrogance/exceptionalism?
The US is still pressuring Vietnam to “pay it back for the Vietnam war“.
Interesting: " April 7, 1997
Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Vietnamese Finance Minister Nguyen Sinh Hung agreed today that Vietnam will repay the United States approximately $145 million in economic debts owed by the former Republic of Vietnam. "
I guess because they think it doesn't benefit them and will make future diplomacy harder? I don't know if that falls under arrogance, but I also don't know how to ascribe comprehensible motivations to the state department or whoever is in charge of that.
I first thought this was a post about flat design, then went and read the whole toot. Man, who'd expect UI to be bad enough for life and death operations.
Someone should post more details about the actually confusing UI that lead to this event. Would be a good lesson to most of us.
It also appears that Lockheed won a contract for using this system in 2023 [1]. Can someone share if they actually fixed the UI issues with it recently?
1 - https://news.clearancejobs.com/2023/03/13/lockheed-martin-wi...
The details are in the posted thread.
Basically, heading and location came from one plane, identification from another plane, and altitude yet from another one for reasons.
Thank you. Did go through the whole thing. Talk about complicated systems, lack of documentation, work stress and then branding it a personnel failure. Totally unlike most systems today (not!)
I thought it was about Chrome's new sidebar by just reading the title.
I actually had to Google what that looked like. It's been a while.
Haha.
Had family members on the Aegis design team... I got another UI disaster... y'all had a chance to end this insane twitter thread UX and you chose to continue it. Why on earth do people post content like this... how much effort do you want me to put in? all that extra energy clicking, making requests...
Twitter thread UX makes sense for Twitter, but why do people post things on Twitter, the social media for short messages, that are so long they need threads?
It’s the place where both the audience and all the interesting authors are.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(What would be interesting is hearing more about the Aegis design team, if you want to share)
Nice try, but my complaint illustrates the issue. Im not complaining about white button text, Im complaining about the awful UX of "twitter threads", which all of the twitter clones seem to have blindly adopted, instead of taking the opportunity to improve on it.
I came here wondering if it was iTunes. Or every timesheet webapp I've been forced to use.
Nothing beats concur - the app made so only people with an assistant can file expenses
Deltek timekeeping is worse. By a long, long mile. I wish Deltek was as good as Concur.
Nothing beats it, really? Not even the tragedy that cut 290 human lives on which you are commenting?
and I was wondering if it was Digg
Not reading your 20-post twitter vomit - just make a blog post dude.
In other good news, Mastodon is now so good a Twitter clone that you think it's Twitter.
People use the name Coke generically for cola too but it doesn't mean RC cola is any good
until you try and follow or like the post and learn that the instance this was posted on has blocked your instance...
When a foreign country kills US citizens, it's terrorism. When the US kills foreign civilians it's collateral damage or a UI disaster ... business as usual.
Intent is important. If I accidentally step on your toe it doesn't necessarily say anything about my character. If I I intentionally step on your toe you know I'm an asshole.
Intent and regret tells you what someone will do in the future.
That's a completely unreasonable take. There is no reason to believe that the killing was intentional, so it can't possibly be terrorism.
Equating an accidental shootdown of a civilian plane during a war, with the intentional killing of civilians as a stategy employed by e.g. jihadist is deeply disingenuous.
When a foreign country kills US citizens, it's terrorism
No, it’s an act of war if deliberate. As this would have been. It is unusual (though not unprecedented) to refer to the actions of states’ militaries as terrorism.
Is this a mastodon instance? Mastodon is a twitter clone that doesn't allow long posts? All the posts but the first come collapsed and I have to click on each to read it. Is someone measuring engagement?
This can be configured in the instance settings and I've seen some support up to 5000 characters.
Yes it’s Mastodon, designed for short posts. I doubt anyone is measuring engagement
This could have been an article worth reading, instead it is chunked in tweets (or whatever they are named now) on X. I'd be interested in the topic, but hate the reading experience to much to read it.
But it's about bad UI.
Irony.
Tl;dr
- some friend/foe “cursor” was not locked to a jet trajectory
- a fighter jet flew through it later, classifying it as a threat
- dashboard shows no altitudes
- identifier reuse led to invalid ascent/descent check
- captain decided it’s a classic attack profile
Admiral Cloudberg has a detailed discussion of the incident, including the user interface behaviour:
* https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t...
Reading the different takes on the incident leaves one with the impression that there was a lot more going on there than just the stuff with the user interface.
Is this related to Reagan firing over 11 thousand air traffic controllers?
It's important to note there are misrepresentations in the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
For the most truthful view of what happened that day:
Ironic that a decent article about UX is splattered across a bunch of Twitter posts.
What an insane story. Crazy to think that some of these engineering errors led to such a disastrous outcome...
I do resonate with someone's comments in the above sections reflecting on whether or not such a narrative would be given if it was say, a UI mistake from an enemy country.
The next greatest UI disaster being Mastodon on a smart phone.
I wonder how this compared to plain air traffic control technology of that era? Were ATC doing it better? (Obviously there are a lot of ATC-driven disasters of that era too).
That time when a badly implemented government contract drop down menu UI design was blamed for the false alarm Hawaiian incoming ballistic missile emergency sms [1] only for it later to turn out to have been caused by regular old human communication error and poor safeguards [2].
[1] https://blog.prototypr.io/dangerous-drop-downs-%EF%B8%8Fbad-...
[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_al...
Since we're on the topic, you know how much HN complains about touchscreens on cars? Now find out how replacing old school analog controls with software touchscreens UI partly led to the USS John S. McCain colliding: https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...
Sarcastically, on a mobile phone, a persistent sidebar takes up valuable space from the content. Somehow Mastodon thinks this is good UI.
If I remember correctly, the Lockerbie / Pan Am attack was in response to this.
It’s not a ui problem per se.
it is a problem of shitty developers responsible for critical decisions.
Unfortunately they are everywhere.
Every a little bit advanced internet user face the pain 12 times a day.
The whole thing would have been avoided if the US didn't push their Navy around Iran why the hell is there a US navy ship there to begin with and why the hell is it that easy for them to shout at whatever is moving in the sky yes it might have been a UI issue but the root of the problem is "a US navy ship next to iran's border"
i wonder if ideas like side by side deployments were on their radars back then. maybe pretty expensive, but it seems like with systems of people and machines that complicated you'd want live validation of everything before cutting over.
"I hope it's not a civilian flight" -- low ranking guy in the CIC who was ignored.
Everything's possible, but there would be no debate about UI mistakes if it was Iran shooting down a US plane. They would've done because they are evil by nature, or at least perceived as such. In that case the media and the public buys into its own reality, but of course the UI discussion could be a distraction from the public maybe starting to question if that's actually the reality.
Also from the Wiki page about this shootdown:
In 1991, political scientist Robert Entman of George Washington University compared U.S. media coverage of the incident with the similar shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviet Union five years earlier by studying material from Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS Evening News. According to Entman, framing techniques were used to frame the Korean Airlines incident as sabotage while framing the Iran Air incident as a tragic mistake,[67] stating "the angle taken by the U.S. media emphasized the moral bankruptcy and guilt of the perpetrating nation. With Iran Air 655, the frame de-emphasised guilt and focused on the complex problems of operating military high technology."[68][a] By "de-emphasizing the agency and the victims and by the choice of graphics and adjectives, the news stories about the U.S. downing of an Iranian plane called it a technical problem while the Soviet downing of a Korean jet was portrayed as a moral outrage."