The terrible human toll in Gaza has many causes.
A chilling investigation by +972 highlights efficiency:
An engineer: “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed.”
An AI outputs "100 targets a day". Like a factory with murder delivery:
"According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”"
"The third is “power targets,” which includes high-rises and residential towers in the heart of cities, and public buildings such as universities, banks, and government offices."
9 Times the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Miscalculated Badly at the Expense of #Taxpayers, #Wildlife
The agency has a history of diving into big #construction projects that exceed projected costs, fall short on projected benefits and, in some cases, create new problems that #engineers hadn’t bargained for.
I’m looking to measure angles on physically small things. So, basically I want calipers, but for angles. I don’t want to hold a protractor up to it and go “ummm… that looks like maybe 38°. I think”.
Small things, as in I want to measure angles on things where the widest points of the angle are less than 1cm apart.
I'm talking sub-degree precision.
[EDIT: answer: "Vernier Bevel Protractor" or "Universal Bevel Protractor"]
Congrats, @drcaberry. You are a fantastic #educator and I really appreciate what you do for your students to develop the next generation of #engineers.
@paul_ipv6 posted about #project managers, fanciful #schedules, and his response involving a Magic 8-Ball. It reminded me of a story I've told about one place I worked. I've never told it here.
I was working at a small-to-medium-sized IT/#software company that had a few internal products, but mostly did outsourced R&D work for a behemoth company - one of the largest on the planet at the time.
It was classic #waterfall planning. HugeCo's R&D department would send us a high-level #spec.
Eventually HugeCo's SVP would pull their #thumb out and #approve the project, and it would get back to us fairly quickly. But now, it's October 15.
And our bosses would tell us we still had to #deliver it by the originally proposed date - 31 March. The one that we said we could meet if we started work on 15 June. I don't know how HugeCo expressed this to our pres & VP. But they were happy for the business.
What they did next drove us #engineers up the frigging wall.
If you have any skills or talents that you can use to try to avert the coming #climatecatastrophe then get off your arse and do something.
Thats not saying "I will fly less and recycle more". Its coming freely together with other people to come up with new ideas and inventions to sort things out. If we can come up with #opensource software like #Linux then we can come up with open source solutions to #software and #hardware problems to help everyone
Its not just #scientists, #engineers and the like. If you are good at say editing #video or #audio you can help make content promoting the other people creating new technology. #Economists, #politicians and more can come up with #equitable and fair means of generating money with the new #technologies. They can also tax the rich motherfuckers until the pips squeak to pay for them too.
Heading to meet my favourite #engineers that happen to all be #woman <3 I have a bag full of #empanadas and another bag full of #BoardGames Let's see if I can make them start to love board games
Today, I published an op-ed with Wired about #ChatGPT. Looking at the #history of technological developments and innovations for #engineers, we can see a long pattern where management and capital see opportunities to get rid of engineers or weaken their #labor power, try a new technology, and end up either making things worse or making engineering more powerful. https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-coding-software-crisis/
@enobacon#transportation#engineers and #planners treat bicycles as a form of recreation. You’ll know that has changed when people of #all_ages_and_abilities can travel by #bicycle from anywhere to everywhere for short in-town trips. OAR 660-12-0600 requires metropolitan cities in #Oregon to plan consistent with that outcome. The real question is whether these communities will fund the construction of a bicycle transportation network meeting the needs of people of #all_ages_and_abilities.
New #energy sources in aviation, and aerial #innovation in general, are subject to a lot of passion. Many commenters have very strong opinions about them. But we're #engineers, isn't it? We look at facts, not feelings. There is a wide ocean of possibilities between "this is all 💩" and "everything will be electric & #hydrogen". For instance, electric & hybrid propulsion systems or #EHPS are part of the future of #aviation – and not just #AAM by the way. 🚁🛩️✈️🔋
It’s broken record time again: We desperately need to do better at teaching ethics to people in STEM.
I’ve just reported an LLM project to the platforms it uses, as an imminent threat to life. It “enables a user to have an interactive dialogue about medical conditions, symptoms…” with ChatGPT.
It does NOT MATTER how many disclaimers you put in front of that. It is an imminent threat to life, and you will not implement it.
@jrenken my university made us take 4 or 5 ethics courses in the CompSci program. I didn't quite get why until we covered the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal (tl;dr every corp everywhere is employing technologists to systematically skirt regulations).
Software engineers more than any other group of craftspeople have enormous power and responsibility for the implementation of the specific horrors we face today regardless of which psychotic billionaires demand their creation
I found a hidden name in the Intel 8088 processor. The 8088 was a derivative of the 8086 processor introduced in 1979 and best known as the processor in the IBM PC. I dissolved the chip's metal layer and found "רפי", the name in Hebrew of Rafi Retter, the chip's engineer.
I don't understand the perception of The Calling of the Engineer as cult-like (something I overheard from a PEng in transit to my ceremony earlier this year).
It's not secretive (they self-publish their own history online). It's not exclusionary (you only need to be graduating ApSc from an accredited uni). You just go sit in a big room and think about how you shouldn't build stuff that hurts people. Then you get some bling at the end.
Since I've started work I've noticed that no one else wears the ring in the office. I guess it's electronics so maybe things are different in Civil or Mech practices? After all, it's way harder to accidentally kill someone with a cloud server than with a bridge.
Although, it's way easier to inconvenience (or mislead, or confuse) people in the digital realm than in meat-space. And I think that those softer harms are probably under-acknowledged.