Answering the titular question, I personally don’t find it weird that someone might avoid certain types of aircraft, in the same way that some people strongly prefer certain aircraft. For example, the big windows and the more-comfortable pressurization of the Boeing 787 is appealing for some. But alternatively, some might prefer the modern Canadian design of the Airbus A220.

Objectively speaking, though, propeller planes is a very wide category, and I’m curious which specific aspect you want to avoid. Piston-powered propeller craft are basically non-existent in commercial passenger airline service, with the exception of small “puddle jumper”, 15-seat air taxi services. Such airplanes tend to be loud and also use leaded gasoline – hilariously still called “low lead” despite apparently having more lead additive than what motor gasoline had in the 1980s.

Then there are turbo prop aircraft, like the ATR-72, which are basically a propeller taking power off of a jet engine core. No lead here, and noise is slightly less bothersome due to continuous jet combustion, but the sound of the propeller remains. Though this is offset by the lower cruise speeds, so less “wind noise”.

If perhaps the concern is about propeller failures, bear in mind that commercial passenger aviation is exceptionally safe, across all aircraft types. The propulsion method is small-fries compared to the backend support and logistics of an airliner and ATC, plus having two pilots, and all manner of other things which blend into the background but are essential for safety. Pretty much only the elevator would be safer than air travel, even accounting for some rather unfortunate recent incidents here in USA airspace.

That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that propeller and jet fan failures have had fatalities in living memory, with a notable event being the blade ejection of a Southwest Boeing 737 that pierced the fuselage and partially ejected a passenger.

Overall, I personally have zero qualms about commercial passenger propeller aircraft, and up until the Boeing 737 MAX fiasco, most people did not care at all which type of airplane they were boarding. Since that event, booking websites added filters to allow excluding specific types of aircraft by model. But I’ve not seen one which excludes by propulsion type.

Presumably there’s the small benefit of not having to remove two links at a time, since there’s no longer a distinction between a link with outer vs inner plates.

I do wonder how this affects coupling (aka master) links.

I’ve always found it unintuitive that soldering and brazing are the same process – melting filler material into a joint without melting the base metals – but distinguished by whether the filler melts below 450 C (thus soldering) or above (thus brazing). Whereas welding will melt the base material, which necessarily must attain at least 600-660 C for aluminum or aluminum alloys.

I don’t doubt that soldering might provide sufficient stength for certain aluminum projects, but the hard part is getting the solder to stick. With aluminum being a very good heat sink, a 30 W soldering iron won’t cut it. Using a butane flame is probably necessary, though at that point, might as well braze the joint.

My understanding is that welding aluminum can only be done with TIG and requires 100% Argon shielding gas, so brazing for aluminum bike parts begins to look very appealing and with a lower barrier to entry. Though TIG is very versatile in its own right.

Very nice! For FOSS 3D modeling, I’ve been using FreeCAD, which is capable enough for my fairly straightforward designs. But I’m not a mechanical engineer, so take that with a grain of salt.

For design prototyping, I like to use my ABS 3D printer to check dimensions and fit-and-finish, before sending out to a CNC fab for final production. Though I’ve not (yet) had a design which called for laser metal cutting followed by welding; I only have capabilities for welding steel, although I can see a TIG welder in my future for aluminum.

Insofar as the skills hierarchy that software engineers develop well after learning to write in a programming language, I’m left wondering what scenarios or industries are the most “vibe coding” proof. That is to say, situations that absolutely require from day 1 a strong sense of design theory, creativity, and intimate knowledge of the available resources.

Musing out loud, history has given us examples of major feats of software engineering, from the Voyager spacecrafts, to retro console games squeezing every byte of ROM for value, to the successful virtualization of the x86 instruction set. In these scenarios, those charges with the task has to contend with outerworldly QA requirements and the reality that there would be no redo. Or with financial constraints where adding an extra PROM would cascade into requiring a wider memory bus, thus an upgraded CPU, and all sorts of other changes that would doom the console before its first sale. Or having to deal with the amazing-yet-arcane structure of Intel’s microchip development from the 80s and 90s.

It is under these extreme pressures that true diamonds of engineering emerge, conquering what must have appeared to be unimaginably complex, insurmountable obstacles. I think it’s fair to say that the likes of NASA, Sony and Nintendo, and VMWare could not possibly have gotten any traction with their endeavors had they used so-called “vibe coding”.

And looking forward, I can’t see how “vibe coding” could ever yield such “ugly”-yet-functional hacks like the fast inverse square root. A product of its time, that algorithm had its niche on systems that didn’t have hardware support for inverse square roots, and it is as effective as it is surprising. Nowadays, it’s easy to fuzz a space for approximations of any given mathematical function, but if LLMs were somehow available in the 90s, I still can’t see how “vibe coding” could produce such a crude, ugly, inspirating, and breathtaking algorithm. In the right light, though, those traits might make it elegant.

Perhaps my greatest concern is that so-called “vibe coding” presents the greatest departure from the enduring ethos of computer science, a young field not too tainted by airs of station. This field, I like to think, does not close its doors based on socioeconomic class, on the place of one’s birth, or upon the connections of one’s family. Rather, the field is so wide that all who endeavor for this space find room to grow into it. There is a rich history of folks from all sorts of prior occupations joining into the ranks of computer science and finding success. The field itself elevates them based on what they contribute and how they solve puzzles.

What strikes against this ideal is how so-called “vibe coding” elevates mediocrity, a simulacra of engineering that produces a result without the personal contribution or logic solving to back it up. It is akin to producing artwork that is divorced from the artist’s experience. It embodies nothing.

To be clear, the problem isn’t that taking shortcuts is bad. Quite the opposite, shortcuts can allow for going farther with the same initial effort. But the central premise of “vibe coding” is to give off the appearance of major engineering but with virtually no effort. It is, at its core, deceitful and dilutes from bona fide engineering effort and talent.

Circling back to the earlier question, in my personal opinion, something like the Linux kernel might fit the bill. It’s something that is now so colossally large, is contributed to by an enormous user and developer base, and fills such a sizable role in the industry, that it’s hard to see how “vibe coding” can meaningful compete in that space.

But how do they connect to your network in order to access this web app? If the WiFi network credentials are needed to access the network that has the QR code for the network credentials, this sounds like a Catch 22.

Also, is a QR code useful if the web app is opened on the very phone needing the credentials? Perhaps other phones are different, but my smartphone is unable to scan a QR code that is on the display.

I’m not immediately understanding what the user scenario/story is. Would a family member open this web app on a desktop computer, in order to obtain the WiFi credentials to configure their phone or tablet?

Before my actual comment, I just want to humorously remark about the group which found and documented this vulnerability, Legit Security. With a name like that, I would inadvertently hang up the phone if I got a call from them haha:

"Hi! This is your SBOM vendor calling. We’re Legit.

Me: [hangs up, thinking it’s a scam]

Anyway…

In a lot of ways, this is the classic “ignore all prior instructions” type of exploit, but with more steps and is harder to scrub for. Which makes it so troubling that GitLab’s AI isn’t doing anything akin to data separation when taking instructions vs referencing other data sources. What LegitSecurity revealed really shouldn’t have been a surprise to GitLab’s developers.

IMO, this class of exploit really shouldn’t exist, in the same way that SQL injection attacks shouldn’t be happening in 2025 due to a lack of parameterized queries. Am I to believe that AI developers are not developing a cohesive list of best practices, to avoid silly exploits? [rhetorical question]

Setting aside whether such seats are actively hazardous to passengers for anything more than a short-haul flight – they almost certainly are – we can fairly easily rule out the possibility based solely on one of the more important airline test criteria: evacuation time.

For all commercial passenger airliners, the primary limiting factor for economy seating is how to get everyone out of the airplane in an emergency situation within the stipulated time, in ideal circumstances. In the USA, that time is 90 seconds, based on research that the inferno post-crash due to ruptured fuel tanks would only allow the plane to remain intact for about two minutes. From that article, the largest passenger jet in the world – the Airbus A380 – could evacuate 873 people through 16 doors on two dual-aisle decks. A typical short-haul, single-aisle Boeing 737 has only six doors and carries a maximum of 230 passengers with the still-being-certified 737 MAX 10 variant.

The benefit of having more doors and more aisles must not be understated, but even then, another limiting factor is takeoff weight. Using the 737 MAX 10 as an example, the difference between its empty weight and maximum takeoff weight is some 40,000 pounds. But 230 people already accounts for around 20,000 pounds, so the aircraft already cannot be fully loaded with its full 44,000 pound fuel capacity. Packing more people into this aircraft would steal even more capacity and leave the aircraft unable to support transcontinental USA flights.

But supposing that was overcome, and flights with so-called standing seats were only about 2 hours long or so, the problem would then be with seat durability during a crash scenario. Jet airlines seats are designed to absorb energy, since excessive G-forces would kill a human well before any fire might get to them. A seat which relies on human legs for vertical support would be unable to adequately absorb downward forces from a hard touchdown, nor from forces from the jet hitting an obstacle ahead or being rammed from behind. These two directions are what humans are best able to cope with, and a standing seat steals these benefits away.

Thus, a seat that complies with energy absorption requirements would be at least as equally thick as existing seatbacks, and would probably be thicker or heavier, further reducing available payload.

The only conceivable cabin configuration would be one where economy class uses so-called standing seats, in order to free up room ahead for business or first-class seats, staying within the existing seat limits for existing aircraft. However, the time to board such an aircraft would be noticeably slower than with a conventional seat aircraft, so at some point, such an airliner would need to consider whether a stopped aircraft loading passengers is better value than an aircraft which can be quickly turned around for another flight segment. The savings of even 10 minutes per flight can make the difference between a low-cost carrier being profitable or carrying losses every year.

All of these factors point to a technical inability to squeeze more passengers into less space. And remember that there’s no free lunch: a “standing” passenger frees up space between rows, but requires more height at each seat. At least from my experience, one cannot stand up in a conventional seat, without hitting the ceiling. How would a typical 5 ft 9 in (175 cm) American be able to use a “standing” seat safely?

It would also eliminate under-seat bags to anything except maybe a clutch handbag, and then the quandary of where the extra people’s carry-on luggage would go. For wide body jets, it would actually be more reasonable to create an additional deck by repurposing the cargo hold, but such provisions are akin to building a new aircraft variant outright. Nevermind that passenger aircraft actually make a decent amount of revenue from cargo/freight carriage.

I personally discount the possibility of “standing” seats deployed on existing and proposed aircraft, so it would be at least 10-20 years before we even see such a thing for future revenue passenger aircraft.

Money and incentives are very powerful, but also remember that these organizations are made of humans. And humans are vain.

Amassing station and power can scarcely be divorced from the history of human civilization, and even fairly trivial things like the job title of “AI engineer” or whatever might be alluring to those aspiring for it.

To that end, it’s not inhuman to pursue “the next big thing”, however misguided that thing may be. All good lies are wrapped in a kernel of truth, and the fact is that machine learning and LLMs have been in development for decades and do have a few concrete contributions to scientific endeavors. But that’s the small kernel, and surrounding it is a soup of lies, exaggerations, and inexactitudes which somehow keep drawing more entities into the fold.

Governments, businesses, and universities seem eager to get on the bandwagon before it departs the station, but where is it heading? Probably nowhere good. But hey, it’s new and shiny, and when nothing else suggests a quick turnaround for systemic political, economic, or academic issues (usually caused by colonialism, fascism, debt, racism, or social change), then might as well hitch onto the bandwagon and pray for the best.

BTW, you might consider posting about your finished results at [email protected] . We enjoy all things bicycle-related there, especially when it’s solving a unique problem or solving it in unique ways.

(sorry for the long delay)

From your description, I’m wondering if the internal pull-up from the bike computer might actually be an active output, and that the open-drain buffer is causing the bike computer to give up sourcing that pull-up voltage. That is to say, if a larger-than-expected current is drawn from the bike computer, it might trigger a protection mechanism to avoid damage to its output circuitry.

To that end, I would imagine that either: 1) an inline resistor to limit drain current, 2) a push-pull buffer, or 3) both, would help rectify the issue.

My suspicion is based purely on the fact that getting stuck low for an open-drain device could be an issue “upstream”. If it were stuck high, I wouldn’t normally suspect this path.

If you still have the original configuration, measurement of the drain current would be valuable info, as well as the current when the buffer is omitted (when the motor and bike computer are directly attached, a la factory configuration). That would indicate if perhaps the currents are too mismatched.

For your edit #2, can you post a schematic of the relevant part of the circuit? It’s a bit hard to imagine how things are arranged, especially where your pull up resistor at the output of the buffer is.

If I had to guess, perhaps the buffer circuit is going onto latch-up due to ESD spikes, which is then locking the open drain to conduct, which is why you’re seeing a LOW output.

When in doubt, I suppose you can tack on more decoupling capacitors nearby the buffer’s Vcc.

When the buffer gets into this glitch scenario, is the output stuck at high or low?

As a sidenote, I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who regards the ~650 km trek from SF to LA as “fun”, unless somehow they’re flying their own private aircraft there. Obviously, there are many options to travel between the two major population centers of California, including: commercial aircraft, private bus line, nationally-operated Amtrak, state-sponsored Amtrak California, private automobile, bicycle, and good ol walking.

Not to say all of these are equally popular, but compared to many places outside the USA, getting between these two hubs really ought to be cheap, yet it’s not. The best chance at fixing that is by rail, which of those aforementioned choices, moves the most people at once, has the widest catchment area along the line, is only moderately expensive, and dove-tails into existing urban transit in SF and LA.

No, I’m not talking about California High Speed Rail, although I’m looking forward to that one too. That said, HSR serves a different role: geting to LA in the shortest possible time, since airport delays mean HSR’s 350 kph can be faster than an airplane’s 1100 kph + 0 kph waiting in the TSA line.

Rather, I’m talking about conventional rail corridors that already exist and just need a few upgrades to support additional passenger service. Adding passing tracks to freight corridors mean trains can move along at some 79 MPH (127 kph), which is both competitive with automobile speeds but trains carry so many more people than even two or three buses. The cost per passenger is thus potentially very low, getting us closer to that $20 figure while also being “easy” to ride. The state is already making this happen, although it’ll take time for ridership to ramp up, which will allow the fares to drop.

Is a train considered “fun”? I personally think so, but others might value not being felt up by TSA or the ability to have a drink while admiring the coast through the window.

Max Bike Load 560 Lbs

Rotors 203mm Front / 180mm Rear

Reiterating my prior objections, I think rotors like this might not be adequate to slow or stop a fully loaded 560 lbs (254 kg) ebike.

Current legislation has not caught up to deal with heavy + fast Class 3 ebikes, and the only restriction that exists here in California is that all bicycles need to be “equipped with a brake that will enable the operator to make one braked wheel skid on dry, level, clean pavement”.

As is plainly evident, this is a rather antiquated way to define bicycle stopping power, but it also reflects the generally low-touch regulations that have existed here regarding acoustic bicycles. It is, IMO, bonkers to intentionally run a bicycle with only a single braked wheel, but that’s where the law sets the floor.

My concern then is that a fully loaded bike hauling a fully loaded trailer would fail even this antiquated requirement, if its rear brake proves unable to halt the wheel. Typical bicycles benefit from the load-transfer during deceleration to lift the rear wheel, easily causing a skid that proves compliance with the law. Heavily loaded bikes might fail this test, or might have to be tested by skidding the front wheel. But that’s just asking for a crash.

I’m not at all endorsing the antiquated standard, but I think trying that test under full load would be very telling. Put it like this: I do not want to be ahead of someone that’s hauling way too much weight and is underbraked. Gamesmanship with manufacturer weight ratings will eventually cause an overload-related crash, and the subsequent regulatory changes will likely be unkind to fast, heavy ebikes, putting more regulatory hurdles in the way of getting more people riding.

Direct link (PDF) to the class action complaint filed with the federal Southern District Court of New York.

This is certainly a different avenue than I expected for vindicating the rights of NYC cyclists, but is very welcome. Conventionally, when a law is enforced improperly, the matter is adjudicated and that settles the matter for the person in question. However, that does not necessarily set “legal precedence”, which is the obligation for other courts and judges to rule in the same way.

To establish that a law is indeed being wrongly applied, someone would have to either appeal their case to the appellate court – whose ruling would then set precedence for all the lower courts to follow – or they file suit for “declaratory judgement”, where a court is asked specifically to rule on the validity of some law, regulation, or contract. And that in-depth analysis would set precedence, because it specifically litigates the core legality of what’s in question.

Declaratory judgement is what I thought would happen, but here, they’ve taken a different approach. Because the plaintiff posits that the law is clearly on their side – with zero room for any other interpretation, bolstered by the fact that a judge dismissed the charge against the cyclist earlier – they argue NYPD is operating unconstitutionally, violating whole swaths of people’s rights.

After all, the issue isn’t that some law conflicts with other laws, but that NYPD is systemically misapplying the wrong law against people conducting themselves lawfully. That’s akin to constantly prosecuting pedestrians for a failure to use low-beams at night. So absurd it is, the plaintiffs claim, that it amounts to unconstitutional harassment.

Hence, they bring a class action claim to vindicate the constitutional right to not be falsely arrested (4th Amendment, NY Constitution, and common law), and the right to be free from malicious prosecution. Note that it’s common to use a “scattergun” approach for lawsuits, in the hope that any one of these will stick.

With all that said, this is a bigger lift than “declaratory judgement” would have been, but unlike that process, this class action allows prior victims of NYPD’s false arrests to recover some money from the city, if they join the class action. As with all class action suits, the defendant will challenge the class definition, likely arguing that not every class member suffered equal harm.

And that’s possibly true: being dragged to court for an improper traffic citation affects people differently, whether they have to arrange child care for the day or whether they had to hire a lawyer or not. But the response to that would be: the harm suffered by the class was the constitutional rights that were trampled on. And it is very well settled that wrongly abridged constitutional rights, if for even a brief moment, is a cognizable harm that can be redressed in court.

Typically, business-oriented vendors will list the hardware that they’ve thoroughly tested and will warranty for operation with their product. The lack of testing larger disk sizes does not necessarily mean anything larger than 1 TB is locked out or technically infeasible. It just means the vendor won’t offer to help if it doesn’t work.

That said, in the enterprise storage space where disks are densely packed into disk shelves with monstrous SAS or NVMeoF configurations, vendor specific drives are not unheard of. But to possess hardware that even remotely has that possibility kinda means that sort of thing would be readily apparent.

To be clear, the mobo has a built-in HBA which you’re using, or you’re adding a separate HBA over PCIe that you already have? If the latter, I can’t see how the mobo can dictate what the HBA supports. And if it’s in IT mode, then the OS is mostly in control of addressing the drive.

The short answer is: you’ll have to try it and find out. And when you do, let us know what you find!

I’m not a pilot but have always looked to the open skies with dreams and admiration. I think we need to unpack a few assumptions.

something that’s very forbidden in the aviation world because of lightning

Weather (WX) has always been an integral part of aviation, as early as the lighter-than-air (ie hot-air balloon) days. The strength of human kind is no match to what nature can throw at us, and so instead we adapt to what nature gives us. On one hand, nature provides niceties like prevailing wind and thermals, to allow us to build runways pointing into the wind and for gliders to gain altitude. On the other hand, nature can decide that an Icelandic volcano shoots hundreds of thousands of tons of particulate matter into the air, grounding all commercial flights in European airspace.

Resilience becomes the objective, to safely operate revenue aircraft in the face of fickle natural phenomena. And this is achieved in a multi-layer approach, with resilience baked in at every step. The aircraft itself, the crew, the airports, ATC, and the regulators, they all are trained and briefed on known hazards, which is part of why commercial aviation is one of the safest modes of travel, sans maybe the elevator.

Unlike volcanic activity or windshears/microbursts, thunderstorms and lightning give plenty of warning through day-ahead WX forecasts, as well as onboard radar. These are not fool-proof – for example, radar can be shadowed by nearby precipitation, hiding enormous thunder clouds beyond. But despite how terrifying it may sound to fly through a storm, it isn’t impossible and certainly not unmanageable. But it does take preparation, and requires sufficient margins so that if anything starts to look awry, there’s an escape path.

Often times, the escape path is just to climb away.

Lightning struck the plane … which could’ve been catastrophic

There are many things which are potentially catastrophic for aircraft: loss of engines, loss of pressurization, a lithium ion battery fire in the cargo compartment, a medical emergency while overflying the mid-Atlantic.

But while a gut-reaction would be to outright avoid risk, human endeavors can make no progress like that. So instead, worst-case planning means developing procedures for when not if something bad happens.

Aircraft are designed to take lightning strikes, and although the Boeing 787 uses a lot of composite material, it too has provisions for lightning.

the report for this incident

Seeing as the incident here occurred on 17 March 2025, I wouldn’t expect the Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB; the air safety regulator, equivalent to USA NTSB) to have published a final report. There might be a preliminary report, but this is not that.

This appears to be a collection of ADS-B data, a mention of damage to a control surface, and a Twitter post about airline compensation due to diverting from Haneda (HND) to Narita (NRT).

Were it not for the control surface damage, this incident might have fallen below the threshold for reporting, since no source suggests there were injuries and I don’t see – having not watched the video – an emergency being declared by the pilots. Diversions are not wholly uncommon, for a number of operational or WX reasons.

I’m pretty sure if a US or European pilot did this, they’d get their license revoked

I think this is wrong, based solely on the robust safety culture in both the USA and in European airspace. Safety culture means that procesures are developed to manage risk, these procedures are regularly practiced, are updated with the latest available recommendations, and non-wilful deviations from procedure (aka mistakes) will be addressed by additional training, not by punishment.

As Mentour Pilot eloquently reminds viewers of his YouTube channel, if punishment were metted out for every mistake, then it’s a disincentive to report mistakes, which makes safety worse for everyone, because nothing gets fixed.

No doubt, there are pilots which have operated grossly outside the bounds of acceptability, like flying an empty jet into coffin corner, or allowing a child to fly the plane. Such accidents are reported precisely because they blew through every layer of the Swiss cheese model of accident causation, and tragically took lives.

So with all that out of the way, I think we can still try to answer the titular question.

A scheduled passenger airliner tries to get passengers from airport A to airport B. A lot of prep is done in the background to make this happen, organizing the ground crew, flight crew, and backend operations at the airliner HQ. Most of the time, the flight is uneventful and arrives as expected. A few times, there might a go-around, but pilots are trained to not shy away from doing a go-around, and have the reserve fuel to do so.

With any sort of damage on approach, be it from a bird strike or lightning strike, the pilots will have to: 1) secure the plane, usually by initiating a go-around to buy valuable time and get away from the ground, and 2) assess the condition of the airplane and make a plan. In this case, the airplane diverted to a nearby airport, which was probably the backup destination airport.

As mentioned before, WX is fickle, and a storm can easily creep over the airport when the plane is within radio contact. And even if the storm was already over the arrival path, if the indications are still suitable for landing – eg low crosswind, no tailwind, no predicted windshears, no prior pilot reports of landing troubles – then the pilots will have discretion to continue their approach.

For a healthy safety culture, the airliner’s own procedures have to place the pilots as the ultimate decision-makers once a flight is underway, and so while it’s unfortunate that damage occurred unexpectedly, nothing from the minimal available information suggests this amounts to a systemic or procedural error, nor wilful malfeasance.

The fact that the airliner returned to service days later means this might simply be slightly more than mundane happenings. Though it would be prudent to keep an eye out for a future report from the safety regulator which would may have recommendations for updating training or to the manufacturer to address a systemic fault. But sometimes final reports have nothing to recommend (rare, but it happens).