It appears that all the engineers -- system designer, material
engineer and structural analyst -- thought that OceanGate CEO was going to
kill himself:
If you ever find <name-of-the-engineer>, he’s not going
to have a whole lot of nice to say. He was very frustrated
with the company. (...) And I understand why. He thought
Stockton was going to kill himself.
And the director himself declined to dive on Titan when asked:
Now, the question is, why wouldn’t the engineer get inside
his own vehicle? It was because of what I felt -- and I have a
background in Navy diving in EOD operations. I knew firsthand
that the operations group was not the right group for that role,
and I told him as much, that I don’t trust operations and who he
has there.
The number of stupid decisions that went in the design and construction of the Titan is astonishing. One of my favorites was that, after putting on the carbon fiber around the tube, they would sand imperfections to make the surface perfectly smooth, severing layers in the process! It shouldn't require an engineering degree from MIT to recognize this as ill-advised.
Even without that, the material is just wrong. It’s strong in tension, not so much compression. Tends towards sudden brittle fractures. Doesn’t like impacts, as it tends to have issues with delaminating.
It’s just not what you ever want as a sub hull. It’s dumb.
Yes, using carbon fiber was also a very bad decision; it was known for a very long time that it was only good for single-use sub, because after the first dive it was too damaged to continue. In 2014, Virgin Oceanic, which had similar plans with similar technology, closed shop because it didn't make economic sense to build a new sub for each dive.
But weight is absolutely an issue; the basic and tried-and-true metal sphere design allows for only three people. Since size and thickness grow exponentially, making a sphere for more than three people becomes more and more difficult. And it should also be possible to lift the vehicle with a crane.
But if you want to carry paying passengers (like Oceangate did), having only two per dive is very limiting. That's why they went with a tube design, and carbon fiber to limit weight. But it couldn't work, and it didn't.
Ok yes "exponentially" was hyperbolic. Mass scales linearly with volume, but volume is proportional to the cube of the radius (not linear).
Also, in practice, small imperfections can have a disproportionate impact on the resistance of the sphere so design codes typically apply conservative reductions that can have a big impact on actual thickness requirements.
I read the report when it come out. From memory, no. It never had any components or certification for human pressure vessels. IIRC theres no existing regs for carbon fiber and it would have cost like $50M to do the design and test work. They did buy some things, like the viewport, from companies who do certified parts, but instead opted for the same design minus any test certs to save money. The craft was never certified or inspected by the uscg. It did have a registration for a while, but they had to play find-a-new-district-sign-off shell games for a while, then… just stopped bothering.
“Strong in tension, not compression” is a meme, and obviously wrong. It is certainly stronger in tension, but it is also remarkably strong in compression. That’s why it’s used - yes, in compression - in modern passenger aircraft. You don’t even need to know that, though; the simple fact is that the Titan had a double-digit number of deep dives. If it was weak in compression it would not have survived diving to 3.7 kilometers deep or even a fraction of that depth _once_.
That said, yes, it’s a difficult material to use properly, and they were a bunch of cowboys slapping things together. It’s no surprise that they missed several critical steps and created a sub doomed to fail.
N.b. all of this was kickstarted by James Cameron saying that carbon fiber has “no strength in compression” in a New York Times “science” article, which the Times printed directly.
James Cameron certainly knows a lot about submarines, but if he says something factually incorrect then it’s factually incorrect, period. Carbon fiber does not have “no strength in compression” and it is used in compression in countless applications, for example airplane wings. Again, the fact that the sub - built at absurdly low cost for its size, built by a bunch of cowboys that didn’t know what they were doing - DID survive to 3.7 km deep on several occasions is proof sufficient. If CF had no compressive strength than the whole thing would have failed at a tiny fraction of that depth. If CF had no compressive strength then what kept the sub together during the successful dives? Hopes and dreams?
I’m not here to defend the decision to use carbon fiber, and as I’ve said I completely agree that there are many issues with using it in this application. Delamination, water ingress, bonding the titanium to the carbon fiber, difficulty of manufacture including varying layer thickness and voids, sensitivity to impact, the list goes on. But _those_ are the issues, not the compressive strength.
Speaking of which I heavily recommend reading interview the prime ancestor comment to this chain linked. It’s really clear he knows what he is talking about.
I don't like this interpretation of things. Its worthwhile to experiment and try things. They were basically mentally ill as a group and rejected genuine concern. Everyone wants to shit on the build but it was the human relations that killed it.
Also, honestly, the build. That “genuine concern” they ignored was that the build was critically flawed. I don’t think anyone here would have these takes if a small group of curious engineers tried their hand at a composite submersible, it was when they kept doing it after all the qualified engineers had said, “This is crazy, I’m out.”
The build was kind of dumb, and I’m hardly an engineer. It’s common sense. Carbon fiber composites are interesting because they’re strong relative to their weight. Remove either of those features and they become pointless.
A submarine needs to be light to be neutrally buoyant in order to fly though the water properly. Otherwise you have a bathyscaphe, which has some other not nice failure modes (in addition to the "implodes if you f it up" one) and are much less maneuverable and arguably the whole system is less durable more costly for high tempo operations. "Just build a tube strong enough and big enough to not need all that" is a better answer, if you can pull it off.
An anecdotal personal story as it aligns with this exact statement although no one got killed but data breaches certainly occurred.
Many years ago now I was propositioned to be on the board of a financial technology company and they spared no expense in literally rolling out the red carpet for my arrival. I found it all very laughable being solely focused on business and the technical details as I was not being fooled by all the schmoozing. After hearing all the unrealistic business objectives and the promise of having the Philadelphia Flyers involved I then asked to meet the technology team that built the product to see a demo. They bring in one young guy who built it all, the executives are still present mind you, and they allow me to ask any and all questions about the platform that nearly no one in management comprehended. After seeing the demo which involved several blatant security issues I asked only one more question of the sole developer: "Would you put your financial information into this system?"
He provided his answer in front of the companies executive board and I can still see their reactions to this very day. I then stood up and thanked everyone for opportunity and left.
Wow! Man, an insider with these kinds of concerns isn't exactly exonerating or excusing themselves with such a testimony. Whistle-blowing to any relevant authority as hard as possible seems like the bare minimum? And if there's no governing agency to pass the responsibility over to, I think you gotta quietly approach the first customer (or victim) with these concerns if not a newspaper
I read that the pilot was also basically suicidal. His wife had died, and he was completely fine with the danger because he would die doing what he loved, and he didn't really want to live anymore.
> Wreck expert Paul-Henri "P.H." Nargeolet, who was also onboard, told me he wasn't worried about what would happen if the structure of the Titan itself were damaged when at the bottom of the ocean. "Under that pressure, you'd be dead before you knew there was a problem." He said it with a smile.
(as recounted by Arnie Weissmann, in Travel Weekly article published June 22, 2023)
There was only one other crew member in that vessel (well, actual crew and not paper "mission specialist"). He was an older gentleman, and it's quite common for older people to have lost their spouse. Was that so hard to figure out?
> No data with a timestamp after May 16th was found on the camera, so it is likely that none of the data recorded on the SD Card were of the accident voyage or dive.
Evidently the camera data was recorded to an external SSD card
in the mission computer when the accident occurred.
The investigation team actually managed to salvage the PC as well:
> To conduct the CT scans, the large mass was evaluated by a third-party
laboratory under NTSB supervision. This facility had a range of scanners with different
power and energy levels and could scan large masses using a rotating table, avoiding
the need to rotate the mass itself. Ultimately, the third-party laboratory attempted to
image the large mass at a power as high as 320 kilovolts (kV). The scans conducted at
320 kV were not powerful enough to penetrate the object, and as a result, no internal
structures or voids were visible, and no memory devices could be identified. The
NTSB evaluated using another laboratory with higher power and energy CT scan
devices, however, there was concern that increased CT scan energy could damage
data stored on any surviving NVM chips. Consequently, higher-energy scans were not
pursued.
I'm no expert, but remember reading about neutron imaging ([1]). I'm curious if that was deemed unfeasible, too expensive, or having little chance of success? From Wikipedia:
> X-rays are attenuated based on a material's density. Denser materials will stop more X-rays. With neutrons, a material's likelihood of attenuation of neutrons is not related to its density. Some light materials such as boron will absorb neutrons while hydrogen will generally scatter neutrons, and many commonly used metals allow most neutrons to pass through them.
What happened in the last decade was that solar panels ("Module" in this graph)
got very very cheap. They used to cost $3 per watt in 2010, but now only
cost $0.3 per watt.
This extreme price drop happened thanks to technical innovations (such as
commoditization of PERC cells), and the large-scale production in PRC.
Metal components ("Hardware - BOS" in this graph) did get cheaper in the same time frame ($0.6 per watt to $0.5 per watt),
but their cost cannot be reduced as much exactly because they are just a piece of metal i.e. there is no low-hanging fruit in Metallurgy.
This was used in some early-20th-century astronomical setting, I think to detect supernovae. I can't find any documentation now, but my memory is that it was called "blink testing" or something similar, where one switched rapidly between two images of a star field so that changes due to a supernova would stand out.
What does that accomplish? You can just read the web page as-is...
Are you going to share your two screenshots, and provide those instructions, with others? That seems impractical.
Video recording is a bit less impractical, but there you really need a short looping animation to avoid ballooning the file size. An actual readable screenshot has its advantages...
The whole black part of the case is for cooling if I understand correctly, so compared to your computer where the CPU can reach 90+ but the case stays at most warm, there the whole case reaches 70+ degrees.
Maybe a really mild winter; it's the same power as when I had my overhead light (2 60W lightbulbs) on in my room as a kid, and that didn't heat my room all on its own.
g - General format. For a given precision p >= 1, this rounds the number to p significant digits and then formats the result in either fixed-point format or in scientific notation, depending on its magnitude. A precision of 0 is treated as equivalent to a precision of 1.
The precise rules are as follows: suppose that the result formatted with presentation type 'e' and precision p-1 would have exponent exp. Then, if m <= exp < p, where m is -4 for floats and -6 for Decimals, the number is formatted with presentation type 'f' and precision p-1-exp. Otherwise, the number is formatted with presentation type 'e' and precision p-1. In both cases insignificant trailing zeros are removed from the significand, and the decimal point is also removed if there are no remaining digits following it, unless the '#' option is used.
With no precision given, uses a precision of 6 significant digits for float. For Decimal, the coefficient of the result is formed from the coefficient digits of the value; scientific notation is used for values smaller than 1e-6 in absolute value and values where the place value of the least significant digit is larger than 1, and fixed-point notation is used otherwise.
Positive and negative infinity, positive and negative zero, and nans, are formatted as inf, -inf, 0, -0 and nan respectively, regardless of the precision.
Make sense? You now should be able to see why it's called f-string.
I don't know why people look at paragraphs of documentation that explain the exact results in strange edge cases (which have to exist because of the underlying complexity; in this example, Python can't change how IEEE-754 works, nor the original C printf specifier they're emulating) and conclude that this proves some strange and unexpected complexity was introduced.
When documentation isn't this thorough, people complain about that, too.
> I'd love to be corrected if I'm misreading this, but the reports of Kodak's death seem greatly exaggerated
The basic background here is that Kodak has been pivotting at least for last 40 years.
- 1980s: Kodak tried to become a Chemical magnate. This strategy was abandoned in 1990s.
- 1990s: Kodak tried to become a Digital Imaging company. While it saw a brief success, Kodak lost the competition.
- 2000s: Kodak tried to become an Inkjet Printer company, which was doomed and eventually pushed it into bankruptcy.
- 2010s: Kodak tried to become a Blockchain company, issuing KodakCoin. It was a flop.
- 2020s: Kodak tried to become a Pharmaceutical company amid Covid-19 pandemic.
As of today, Kodak is focusing on its chemical business (such as manifacturing KODALUX, a fabric coating material) and borrowed $477M (at 12% p.a.) in order to expand that business line.
That loan is due in 2026. Kodak is basically saying "I have no idea how to repay that money. In fact, I only have $155M in cash. Maybe it's time to talk with the creditors?".
> - 2010s: Kodak tried to become a Blockchain company, issuing KodakCoin. It was a flop.
Its hard not to laugh at that. At least the pivots before that point kind of made sense. I guess 2010 came along and the executives just decided to yolo.
> At least the pivots before that point kind of made sense.
But was this even a real pivot? They "rented" out their name to a company with an already failed crypto coin project, who thought they'll make it if they use a bigger brand. A pivot implies some effort to change the business model, not just literally throwing your name out there and hoping money follows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin seems to say it was very photography themed and planned to integrate with their stock photo offering. Seems like it was at least integrated with their brand, so it wasnt just a totally random project
And yet right now they’re back to chemical photography film being over 50% of their revenue due to the breakout success of the instax instant cameras. Being able to charge a dollar per photo remains an unbeatable business to be in.
As much as I like the end result, I HATE the bulk of the cameras themselves.
I ended up with a Polaroid Go. It's relatively tiny. The output is nowhere near as good (arguably awful), but for my use, it's fine. I have 35mm film and mirrorless digital cameras when I want "good" photos.
I didn't say it was $1/shot yet, though medium format Portra 400 is $16/roll (if buying in a 5-pack) which is at minimum $1/shot. E100G is a bit pricier depending on where you buy it as well. I'm mostly just salty because a decade ago I was paying $6-7 roll for Portra and now (in Canada) it's closer to $35-40.
Maybe they should pivot into human robots, self-driving and robo-taxis next.
I heard it pays out well regardless of whether your product being sub-par or non existing at all
The chemical thing kinda worked out. Eastman Chemical is the spinout from that and they're a $9B annual business.
The folks running Kodak kind of forgot that Kodak was really a chemicals company that supported photography, not a photography company. Hence why the pivot into that was ill-fated and doomed.
So the archaeologists think that, after the destruction of 79 A.D., some survivors returned to Pompeii and found their homes half-buried in ash. They tried recover their belongings by digging underground, and some apparently attempted to rebuild their lives in their old homes, because they had nowhere else to go.
While their efforts ultimately proved to be futile, they did leave some historical artifacts behind (e.g. bread oven entirely made of salvaged materials), and the archaeologists recently unearthed them.
I don't understand this at all. What this post suggests seems illogical to me:
- The most obvious way to adjust the behavior of a LLM is fine-tuning. You prepare a carefully-curated dataset, and perform training on it for a few epoch.
- This is far more reliable than appending some wishy-washy text to every request. It's far more economical too.
- Even when you want some "toggle" to adjust the model behavior, there is no reason to use a verbose human-readable text. All you need is a special token such as `<humorous>` or `<image-support>`.
So I don't think this post is genuine. People are just fooling themselves.
Note that these are only used for chat. As far as I understand there are no built-in system prompts when you use their APIs (or maybe they have different, smaller system prompts).
I guess the rationale is that the end users of chat are not trusted to get their prompts right, thus the system prompt.
I was surprised by that part too. I always assumed that Craig was a young techy person.
My takeaway from this article:
- Craiglist was launched by a 40-year old, ex-IBM enginner. It started out as an online list for his circle of friends.
- The main competitor then was "Classifieds" section in newspapers. Craigslist out-competed them by simply being a better medium (No word-count limit + photo support).
- Meanwhile, newspaper executives failed to respond in a meaning manner. By 2010, 70% of their classified ad business was gone.
Craig seems to be fully retired by now, focusing on his philanthropy work, which I think is awesome.
https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=17236880&Fi...
It appears that all the engineers -- system designer, material engineer and structural analyst -- thought that OceanGate CEO was going to kill himself:
And the director himself declined to dive on Titan when asked: