One under-discussed lever that senior / principal engineers can pull is the ability to write linters & analyzers that will stop junior engineers ( or LLMs ) from doing something stupid that's specific to your domain.

Let's say you don't want people to make async calls while owning a particular global resource, it only takes a few minutes to write an analyzer that will prevent anyone from doing so.

Avoid hours of back-and-forth over code review by encoding your preferences and taste into your build pipeline and stop it at source.

I started Ask Me Anything on reddit, does being a moderator in that capacity mean I limited free speech of Americans?

Frankly this was inevitable. There is a reckoning that has been put off, within the groups that champion free speech. Mods happen to be the people who see how the sausage is made, but have no real ability to be heard.

The Zeitgeist is still happy to say “censorship bad”, thus moderation bad. The work of ensuring “healthy” communities or debate is left to the magic of the “market place of ideas”.

Except the market place is well and truly broken, captured and unfair for regular users. We have a dark forest for content consumers.

This conversation needs to be had.

Edit: tried to make the tone less frustrated.

Attaching your real world identity to every interaction you have on the internet is no more objectively natural than doing otherwise, and more of a burden than we place on interactions in the real world. I don't exchange my drivers license and SSL with everyone I talk to.

We don't need to have the serious conversation, we've had it, and the false dichotomy you're presenting here is invalid. We don't have to choose one or the other. Anonymity has been well established in every free society as legally and morally defensible and a necessity for free speech and a free state for decades, to the point of including some degree of anonymity from one's own government.

Moderation beyond strictly legal content is acceptable. Anonymity is also acceptable. 4chan can be 4chan, and other places can not be 4chan. Free speech does not guarantee you a platform, much less all platforms. It doesn't require me to put a target on my back, either.

- The updated visa instructions

- we have had this conversation

- Moderation beyond strictly legal content is acceptable.

I will say this shows the conversation hasn’t been had.

Moderation is most often achieved by the use of censorial powers on private platforms.

That this was private censorship is no longer acceptable to the current regime, and people who were enforcing private rules are now in a category of applicants that I assume includes criminals and enemies of the state.

If it is an acceptable role, then it must be done well.

If it is an unacceptable criminal role, then it must be prohibited well.

Either way - people have to make that call and build a consensus on it.

It has been had. But you seem to require some objectively correct and universally agreed upon consensus that will never exist.

>Moderation is most often achieved by the use of censorial powers on private platforms.

"censorial powers on private platforms" are and have been acceptable since the dawn of mass communications. Even Ben Franklin when he ran a newspaper refused to run stories he considered too libelous (although he just as often ran such stories, exercising personal bias in his decisions.) The entire rationale behind the First Amendment is that it binds the government from interfering with free expression, because that right belongs to the people, implicit as it is in the concept of the marketplace of ideas, and freedom of association.

Again, the conversation has been had, and the matter has been settled at least for most people. That the current regime disagrees doesn't prove anything any more than disagreement with anything else. People disagree that the world is round, that doesn't mean the matter is still in dispute beyond a reasonable doubt.

>and people who were enforcing private rules are now in a category of applicants that I assume includes criminals and enemies of the state.

If they commit crimes, have them arrested for those crimes. If they violate TOS (even if they happen to be a sitting President), ban them. Otherwise even criminals and traitors have the same rights as everyone else. Again, this is well established and shouldn't be controversial.

> If it is an acceptable role, then it must be done well. > If it is an unacceptable criminal role, then it must be prohibited well.

what kind of force is "must" implying here, and how is "well" being defined?

We do have legal frameworks in place intended to do what you're proposing, but people are imperfect and may make mistakes or act in ways you might consider to be in error, without falling afoul of criminality. But that's acceptable. We don't abandon rights because they can't be defined or defended perfectly.

1) The conversation has been had

2) There are people who are making a concerted effort to overturn the status quo

3) They have decreed that content moderation workers are a category of workers which is not to be granted entry to the USA.

You can say the conversation has been had, as much as you want - which is your freedom and right. However some people have decided they don’t like the status quo and want to change it.

You are preaching to the choir here. I would love for you to convince THOSE people that they are party to this agreement.

That's a different and much more difficult problem, though.

Why do we keep electing fascists to power with an explicit mandate to undermine our freedoms, out of a categorical rejection of post Enlightenment values and democracy and a desire for ethnic cleansing and race war?

Why are we accelerating the normalization of theocracy and conspiracy theory while rejecting the validity of science, secularism and critical thought?

Why is the only truly inalienable right in the US the right to keep and bear arms, and why is it still so vigorously defended despite failing spectacularly at its one stated purpose?

There will always exist people who want to change that status quo. Unfortunately you can't force fascists to not be fascists, and the best answer I'm aware of is to not allow them to gain a foothold anywhere. But we've regressed culturally so far that fascism, racism, antisemitism and other formerly extremist right-wing ideals are now considered legitimate and credible points of view. We can't even agree on the existence of a consensus reality where facts even exist, much less that the Nazis are actually wrong.

I do think part of the solution is to preserve the right of anonymity on the internet and the right of private platforms to moderate content as they see fit, although that obviously has its own externalities and issues. I don't think that, say, repealing Section 230 and forcing all platforms to allow any legal content or requiring a license and legal ID to post online or any of the other "solutions" to the "problem" of free speech online would help more than they would harm.

Beyond that, I don't know. How do we get people to stop electing fascists and stop treating groypers and incels like intellectual sophonts and cultural leaders? How do we get people to take things seriously again?

People voted based on the information they had. The information system they had has been mapped out. If this were gaming, the “meta” is known. One group played the meta to the hilt. Others lament the failure of the spirit.

I get that people may be hesitant to leave the familiarity of known territory for what looks like malignant chaos. But there is a fight to be had, rules to be learnt and ways to counteract the tendencies you are concerned about.

I am sadly not at the point where I can both raise the issue, and point you to sources of information that are pertinent to the stage of your journey.

There’s actual work on misinformation propagation, efficacy of moderation, the mechanics of how the media environment is being used. Or there are places where you can contribute code and labor to learn/build as you go.

Communication with people half the way across the globe at the speed of light is objectively unnatural too, should we ban that? There's no "we" calling for the end of online anonymity excepts for spooks and people who believe people should be identified and punished for expressing opinions they disagree with.

> It’s objectively an unnatural form of communication

I agree. Short bits quick hits and spunk spits lead to epileptic fits from social halfwits and, that's what we produce and consume. More so, when we imagine we are anonymous. The random emotional inpulse spikes that flit across so many of our untrained anonymized minds leads to a noise floor that threatens to completely obliterate any signal.

There is value in anonymity. But I would love to participate in a smaller subset of the internet, where every participant is known, identified and associated with their real-world self. Such that no one feels so obscured and anonymously free to grafitti; where everyone is careful and concerned with their affect on the environment; where publication is a precise responsibility; where effort must be made or authority is lost.

((Kinda sorta like HN, but with blue checkmarks)/s)

Just because a part has the shape of an engineered part does not make it compatible, strong, safe, and fit for purpose. This part could have likely been fine if it used a different material such as Ultem.

According to the report:

> The aircraft owner who installed the modified fuel system stated that the 3D-printed induction elbow was purchased in the USA at an airshow, and he understood from the vendor that it was printed from CF-ABS (carbon fibre – acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) filament material, with a glass transition temperature3 of 105°C.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69297a4e345e3...

Isn't this simply a part that shouldn't have been allowed to be sold based on it being both faulty and also misleading?

And since vibe coding is so recently coined, I think a lot of people take it to specifically mean "LLM" and not some generalized "any third-party agent".

Then, a vibe coded engine part sounds like it would need a generative AI producing the CAD file that is then printed. And it might have some bizarre topology like a Klein bottle or some fever dream.

Yeah, exactly -- which is why it's a stupid phrase for what happened here.

Not every negligence is somehow equatable to an AI pitfall, it's just on parents' mind so it's the only metaphor that gets applied.

A poorly fit hammer in a world of nails.

I say this as an engineer/proprietor with years of additive manufacturing experience, it's insulting. A poorly chosen and wrongly used process conveys nothing about the underlying fundamentals of the process itself -- it conveys everything about the engineer and the business processes that birthed the problem.

Similarly if I came across a poorly vibe-coded project I wouldn't blame Anthropic/oAI directly -- I would blame the programmer who decided to release such garbage made with such powerful tools..

tl;dr : it's not vibe-coding itself that makes vibe-coding a poor fit to rocket science and brain surgery -- it's the braindead engineer that pushes the code to the THERAC-25 without reading.

The comparison does not seem as absurd to me as it does to you. vOv

I see multiple examples of it in this thread.

Analogies can be useful sometimes, but people also shouldn't feel like they need to see everything through the lens of their primary domain, because it usually results in losing nuances.

(unless that primary domain tends to attract a lot of people who tend to the hyper-literal /s)

With the rise of accessible 3D printers that can print engineering materials, there are a lot of people who try to create functional parts without any engineering background. Loading conditions, material properties, failure modes, and fatigue cycling are all important but invisible engineering steps that must be taken for a part to function safely.

As a consumer with a 3D printer, none of this is apparent when you look at a static, non-moving part. Even when you do start to learn more technical details like glass transition temperature, non-isotropic strength, and material creep, it's still not enough to cover everything you need to consider.

Much of this is also taught experimentally, not analytically - everyone will tell you "increasing walls increases strength more than increasing infill", but very few can actually point to the area moment of inertia equation that explains why.

3D printing has been an incredible boon for increasing accessibility for making parts in small businesses, but it has also allowed for big mistakes to be made by small players. My interpretation is the airshow vendor is probably one of these "small businesses".

Everything you need to consider is really not that much when it comes to most typical consumer 3d printing projects. Mostly because they are usually about stuff like "fixing a broken tashcan". The engineers who made that bullshit plastic part that broke after a year probably knew all about area moment of inertia, but that doesn't mean I need to to print a replacement part that lasts longer - or not, in which case I'll just iterate on my process.

I really don't get the dismissiveness, and frankly, I've never experienced that from engineers in my life. They just seem delighted when someone, kid or adult, tinkes with additive manufacturing.

I think both vibe coding and 3D printing are wonderful things. Lowering the barrier to entry and increasing technology accessibility allows those without formal training to create incredibly capable things that were previously difficult or not possible to do.

What I meant to specifically highlight is the 3D printing of functional parts that have some level of impact on safety, things that can lead to significant property damage, harm, or loss of life. Common examples include 3D printed car parts (so many) and load bearing components in all sorts of applications (bike mounts, TV mounts, brackets, I even saw a ceiling mounted pull-up bar once).

This isn't to say it can't or shouldn't be done. What I'm saying is that both on the digital side (files for personal use) and the production/sale side (selling finished parts), there is no guarantee of engineering due diligence. 3D printers enable low volume small businesses to exist, but it also means that, purposefully or not, their size means they can go quite a while without running into safety regulations and standards meant to keep people safe.

Looks good - falls apart in practice, and a junior can't tell the difference as they "look the same" to the inexperienced eye.

From practical experience, you cannot just replace a tyre on a car with any old bit of wood - you really need to use hard wearing mulga (or equivilant) as an emergency skid. (And replace that as soon as possible)

This whole thread is a stretch, IMO. But, I like this phrase.

As a fabricator (large wood CNC, laser cutting and engraving, 3D Printing, UV Printing, Welding). I put engineering into a whole different job scope. I can make whatever you tell me really well, not vibe-carving.

I don't necessarily write the specs or "engineer" anything. I'm just saying, don't blame the medium, 3D printing. The fact is a fabricator is not necessarily an engineer, regardless of the medium.

Using scrublands wood (slow growing tough long grain mulga) as a skid when a rubber tyre destroys itself is an old old hack passed on by my father (he's still kicking about despite being born in the early 1930s).

In the early 1980s I used to enjoy hanging out with Chris Brady and helped out making jigs to assemble snare drums: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdBHtUN5gAE

His jarrah, wandoo, and sheoak snares are still loved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKmDuu5Iba4

Point being, I don't blame processes (3D printing, etc) for part failure, that comes down to whether the shape and material are fit for purpose, whether material grain structure can be aligned for sufficient strength if required, whether expansion coefficients match to avoid stress under thermal changes, etc.

Engineering manufacturing can sometimes be suprisingly holistic in the sense that every small things matter including the order in which steps are performed (hysteresis) .. there's more t things than meet the eye.

Also, the part it was replacing was a fiberglass part in an epoxy resin, with a glass transition temperature of 84°C. So the 105°C glass transition temperature of the replacement part should have been better than the original.

However, the original had an aluminum tube supporting the inlet, which provided extra structural support beyond fiberglass epoxy resin. And upon testing, the actual glass transition temperature of the 3D printed part was 52.8°C for one sample and 54.0°C for another, so much lower than expected.

Now, because the regulations are much less strict for experimental homebuilt aircraft, there may not be the traceability to figure out where in the chain the issue came up. Was it a bad batch of filament? Did the person making the part use the wrong kind of filament? Who should have tested the glass transition temperature of a coupon of the same material as the replacement part? Did the 3d printed material glass transition temperature change over time, possibly due to something like fuel or exhaust fumes?

The recommendation from this report is to disallow 3d printed replacements for this part, but it should be possible to do with the right material and proper testing and analysis (as well as leaving in the aluminum tube for additional support), as this is an air intake and it should be possible to find a 3d printed material that can withstand the kind of temperatures an air intake is subjected to, given that the original part is a fiberglass with epoxy resin.

Not a new story in the progression of human endeavors; see the printing press, perspective painting, digital photography, residential construction.

1: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/soylent-creator-hack...

2: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1990577951671509438

"Faulty and also misleading" pretty much describes the code output by vibe coding. And don't get me wrong: I use LLMs daily to help me write functions / write test cases / find bugs / find edge cases / explain error messages etc. But I don't vibe code entire parts like that part that melted.

The vendor selling the 3D-printed part at an airshow probably didn't think: "I'll deceive pilots." They likely thought: "I can 3D-print this part to spec, it looks right, it fits, and pilots will be happy." The capability to create professional-looking outputs outpaced the discipline required to validate them.

Same with vibe coding: the LLM isn't lying. It's producing code that passes basic inspection. But both technologies have collapsed the cost of creating something that looks production-ready while preserving all the ways something can fail in actual use.

Before 3D printing and LLMs, there were natural friction points that forced validation:

• Manufacturing a metal aircraft part required industrial equipment, precision tooling, material selection expertise. The process itself embedded quality gates.

• Writing professional software required years of training, code review practices, deployment infrastructure. The difficulty forced rigor.

Now, both technologies let anyone produce outputs that visually and functionally resemble professionally engineered work without any of the underlying validation:

• A 3D printer can output a part that looks dimensionally correct, has proper tolerances, fits perfectly—but the material choice was never stress-tested against thermal cycling.

• An LLM can generate code that compiles, runs, produces correct output for test cases—but has no error handling, SQL injection vulnerabilities, or memory leaks that only appear at scale.

This is a relatively new failure mode where professional appearance becomes decoupled from professional rigor. And customers can't easily tell the difference until something breaks.

Installing life-critical parts of shoddy engineering into a vital system of your airplane is a good example of when things do matter.

That should be so obvious that I wonder if it was DIY by the pilot.

> The Cozy Mark IV is a 4-seat, single engine, homebuilt light aircraft [...] The aircraft is built from plans using basic raw materials. It is not a kit aircraft

You could scarcely get more DIY than this aircraft. Home-built, and not even from a kit - the builder gets to lay up every part in glass fibre themselves, by hand. And this guy had been flying it for 26 years.

It sounds like the guy was sold a part 3D printed in the wrong plastic, and it melted. He thought it was ABS, but it melted at the temperatures PLA melts at. If your engine air inlet is made of plastic that melts at 54°C (130°F) you're going to have a bad time.

It's easy to imagine how a chaotic 3D printing business might have run off a test part in a cheaper black plastic, then a confused worker could have stored the test part in with the other 'identical' parts in a different black plastic.

The 'serious' aerospace industry avoids this with lots of paperwork and procedure; when an airline maintains an airbus plane, they use only airbus-approved parts from airbus-approved sources with a paperwork trail confirming they were inspected for being-the-right-material using an approved procedure. I don't know if the home-built aircraft community would be eager to adopt those practices, though.

I don't know how the regulatory environment is in the UK for experimental craft (this is considered to be "experimental" category in the US and Canada), but yes, the idea behind an experimental is that everything is DIY.

I have an experimental, and I can do close to anything I want. What I can't do is complain when my plane crashes because I installed a part that isn't fit for duty. I, as the owner and operator, am the one that signs off on the airworthiness of the plane.

E.G. If I install a Cessna part on my plane, and that is the cause of a crash, that is my fault from the point of view of the FAA.

There may be legal considerations outside of airworthiness and flight rules, but as far as the FAA is concerned (or would be if this had happened in the US), the manufacturer of a part is off the hook once the thing is installed on an experimental.

Maybe, but FDM printed parts are still much weaker than molded parts. We tried printing some coolant pump housings once during development. They worked fine until the pressure went up and then layers separated and someone got to clean the lab. At least an air intake is gonna have negative pressure which might help hold the layers together.

Looks like they would like to make the early flight mistakes themselves instead of following air worthiness guidelines.

In the end it depends on the application. Vibe coded flight management systems, anyone?

No employees, everyone there will be their own business and pay me for the privilege to work.

This is basically how services like Uber Eats work in my country. The basics of it are foreign students want to earn extra income by working a few hours per week. This is allowed on a student visa, but it's limited hours, so real businesses like restaurants or bars don't usually want to hire students.

First of all you need a means of transport. There are small companies that will rent to you - on a weekly basis - an electric bike or a 20 year old Toyota Prius that is barely legal to drive (we have strict technical inspections here, so it's not that bad). They handle all the maintenance and insurance, you just pay your money and get a vehicle.

Next up you probably can't use your drivers license from home here to drive, as once you have a residence visa you need a local license. Many people just risk it, but if you want to do it legally you need to have a minimum number of lessons with an instructor and then pass the test. The test is only in the local language, so if you don't speak it (zero chance as a student that's been here 3 months), you need to hire a translator to accompany you on your test. They may or may not help to ensure your answers are correct. (You can only exchange a driver's license from other EU countries)

Finally you need a worker account on the delivery service, and the bag. You can register as self employed, file all the documents, go through the training course. That will take time, plus I think they are not always looking for new people due to high demand from workers. So you can skip all that and just rent an account from someone else, and hope they pay you at the end of the day.

So there is an entire industry dedicated to helping people earn a side income. I'm surprised the delivery services themselves don't start getting involved in this as it is a lot of money they are leaving on the table - although most of it has a questionable legal status.