FireBeyond (u/FireBeyond)

FireBeyond commented on JetBlue flight averts mid-air collision with US Air Force jet reuters.com/world/america... · Posted by u/divbzero

ceejayoz · 3 hours ago

Military planes often deliberately have them on; not every mission is secretive. You can often see NATO planes on FlightAware in the Black Sea clearly keeping an eye on the Ukraine theatre.

Example: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/FORTE10/history/20230821...

FireBeyond · a few seconds ago

[delayed]

FireBeyond commented on JetBlue flight averts mid-air collision with US Air Force jet reuters.com/world/america... · Posted by u/divbzero

phantasmish · an hour ago

I can just about guarantee it has nothing to do with targeting and a lot to do with making Venezuela unsure when strikes are about to start, both for security of the forces launching the eventual strikes (if any) and to harass/wear-down Venezuelan air defenses by keeping them very alert.

If our aircaft were flying transponders-on during all these exercises then suddenly went dark, it’d signal imminent attack. This keeps them guessing. Possibly we’re even playing around with having them on some of the time for some aircraft, and off at other times.

We don’t do that with AWACS and such near Russia because we’re not posturing that we may attack them any day now, and want to avoid both accidental and “accidental” encounters with Russian weapons by making them very visible. In this case, an accidental engagement by Venezuelan forces probably isn’t something US leadership would be sad about.

FireBeyond · 2 minutes ago

I live near JBLM in Washington. I am routinely overflown by helicopters and planes (C-17s) often with their transponders off (I have an ADS-B receiver running on a VM). These are training flights that are not going anywhere outside of the Puget Sound region. For added fun, I'm also pretty close to several Sea-Tac approaches.

FireBeyond commented on We put Flock under surveillance: Go make them behave differently [video] youtube.com/watch?v=W420B... · Posted by u/huvarda

zbentley · 4 hours ago

> alerts LE to just ... "check in on you".

This is currently an epidemic. Drivers are targeted for “random” checks by police for a number of non-falsifiable factors (e.g. the evergreen “your license plate light was out…huh, looks fine now”) that overwhelmingly correlate with driver income and race.

That’s not whataboutism; I am genuinely not sure if ALPR/automated policing systems stand to make that situation worse or better. Are Flock and friends likely to be abused in the same way that human police traffic stop reasons are?

FireBeyond · 3 hours ago

I have every reason to believe so.

Flock's founders belief is that he wants to eliminate all crime (literally) with Flock.

So in his eyes, false positives are inherently acceptable, and preferable to false negatives.

And I feel that (actually, I know that, though I wasn't in Sales, but I did work at Flock) one of their selling points to agency is almost a "whitewashing" of such practices. "Oh, our PD wasn't targeting anyone, we were just acting on the recommendations of the Flock surveillance system".

FireBeyond commented on We put Flock under surveillance: Go make them behave differently [video] youtube.com/watch?v=W420B... · Posted by u/huvarda

nceqs3 · 10 hours ago

The anti ALPR narrative is not based in reality. I for one support using tech to automatically flag when a stolen car is spotted. With the sky high cost of car insurance in CA, which disproportionately impacts low income drivers, you would think liberal legislators would be in favor of reducing one of the largest reasons insurance is expensive. Restricting tech used by police just means more LE time spent on easily automatable tasks, and forces LE to use their own judgement (which many would argue has bias). The ACLU and EFF are so discredited on tech issues. They simply support criminals. The ACLU is fighting DUI laws in CA right now for instance. SF is a hell-hole because of these crime loving activist groups.

Thank you, Flock!

FireBeyond · 9 hours ago

I can't wait for the day when Flock's "proactive AI" flags the way you are driving or your vehicle movements as suspicious and alerts LE to just ... "check in on you".

Or when they enable the mics in their devices to just start recording your conversations with your friend in a public place and does the same. "AI didn't like what you were talking about, so alerted the local PD".

FireBeyond commented on Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away mathstodon.xyz/@dpiponi/1... · Posted by u/ColinWright

kec · a day ago

Civilian GPS (as in, the DoD’s Navstar) alone isn’t accurate enough to actually place you on a specific road. To compensate, auto navigation systems will snap you to the nearest road parallel to your current heading. Tesla likely didn’t consider the edge case of ferries and other off road situations in their mapping software and you hit some corner case bug.

FireBeyond · a day ago

This used to be true, but the DoD turned off "selective availability" (the intentional degrading of the civilian signal) back in 2000, and the current generation of satellites do not have the capability (https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability). What they do have though is a separate, encrypted, military broadcast that can be used for those purposes (I think the plan in those situations is to turn off civilian GPS entirely - but I think that there's no reason for that, now, due to the other navigation systems like GLONASS).

FireBeyond commented on Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away mathstodon.xyz/@dpiponi/1... · Posted by u/ColinWright

FireBeyond · a day ago

Maps has gone backwards on CarPlay, too. Hysteresis is completely broken - I stop at a traffic light and the map will jump back and forth between two resolutions, often once a second, which is extremely distracting.

I also love that Find My says my partner was "last seen" at home "8,912 days ago".

Apple just doesn't give as much of a shit any more.

FireBeyond commented on Workday project at Washington University hits $266M theregister.com/2025/12/1... · Posted by u/sebastian_z

alephnerd · 2 days ago

> Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities

Yep, and WUSTL - like most Universities - is a major medical network in it's region. Ime, the bulk of the costs that arose from Higher Ed contracts I dealt with were due to the fact that most Higher Ed institutions were also medical networks.

But the issue is, medical PHI is important, and outages can lead to liability and potentially patient risk.

> At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity

Pretty much, because the TCO for a Cobol system limping along would eventually become unsustainable - especially if you had dozens of BUs with their own internal data practices.

FireBeyond · 2 days ago

What the hell PHI / EHR work is Workday doing?

The answer should be "none".

FireBeyond commented on Workday project at Washington University hits $266M theregister.com/2025/12/1... · Posted by u/sebastian_z

rwmj · 2 days ago

ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it? Is there no product demo at all during the purchase process? Do the sales people actively hide it or something?

FireBeyond · 2 days ago

I love that ServiceNow has completely broken the back/forward behavior in its own unique way.

Yes, many other sites also break this navigation, but SN takes it to a whole other level.

Want to open and edit multiple records in different tabs? You're a braver soul than I. Better also double check what record you go back to when you click Update. Which is of course different to when you right click and choose Save.

What comes after UI16 for user interface design? Well, UIB, of course. UI16 still looks straight out of 2016.

FireBeyond commented on macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt developer.apple.com/docum... · Posted by u/guiand

icedchai · 3 days ago

Outside of YouTube influencers, I doubt many home users are buying a 512G RAM Mac Studio.

FireBeyond · 3 days ago

I doubt many of them are, either.

When the 2019 Mac Pro came out, it was "amazing" how many still photography YouTubers all got launch day deliveries of the same BTO Mac Pro, with exactly the same spec:

18 core CPU, 384GB memory, Vega II Duo GPU and an 8TB SSD.

Or, more likely, Apple worked with them and made sure each of them had this Mac on launch day, while they waited for the model they actually ordered. Because they sure as hell didn't need an $18,000 computer for Lightroom.

FireBeyond commented on When did the job market get so rude? theatlantic.com/culture/2... · Posted by u/nlawalker

FireBeyond · 3 days ago

Hah, you should see some of the bullshit your compatriots are trying to pull.

Start-up, competing with Duolingo, wanted me to "sign up for our service, go through the introductory levels, come up with five specific areas we could improve and how you'd go about them and in what order", as part of your application.

So, "Pump our metrics, give us specific business advice and then we'll see if maybe we'd grant you the courtesy of a conversation". The only way that could be more toxic is if you had to supply a credit card to sign up...