Buckle Up for Bumpier Skies

(newyorker.com)

38 points | by littlexsparkee 4 hours ago

4 comments

  • _fw 2 hours ago
    The WebGL animation at the top is really cool. It’s probably smaller than a video too, and much sharper
  • ur-whale 3 hours ago
  • nineteen999 3 hours ago
    > Can today’s planes still keep us safe?

    Probably not if the turbines aren't spinning, no.

    • Onavo 1 hour ago
      Presumably the article is more referring to turbulence at a macro scale. If the air is so turbulent that the compressor blades stall because of it, well, we have bigger problems.
  • jsrozner 1 hour ago
    Idk but the analogies in the piece strike as AI generated. I don't think the new yorker is using AI to write pieces, so maybe the author has just been ingesting too much slop
    • A_D_E_P_T 46 minutes ago
      If it weren't the New Yorker, I'd swear up and down that Claude wrote this:

      > Turbulence is rarely that simple. It’s too scattered, too mercurial, too easily triggered by weather patterns that trigger other patterns in an endless cascade. “It’s not just one thing that’s going on,” Bob Sharman, an atmospheric scientist at NCAR, told me. “It’s not just atmospheric convection. It’s not just wind flowing over mountains. It’s everything going on all the time and interacting.”

      > “It’s not a piece of farm equipment,” Larson said. “It’s a life-support system. At thirty-five thousand feet, you can’t pull over.”

      The funny thing is that the passages that feel the most "AI-generated" come in quotes, when the author is quoting others. It could be that the author was communicating with those experts via email, and they used AI to generate their responses.

      Otherwise, I think that AI language patters are diffusing into common use. Being so aware of them is a curse...