Garmin New G4X

[Norman CYYJ]

My favorite flying is being able to juggle the workload of hand flying single pilot IFR in actual without missing a radio call, then breaking out a sane-but-challenging height above minimums and making a landing off an instrument approach. Most rewarding times I've ever had in a plane.

I'll never be a professional and will probably never be able to afford a lot more airplane than a piston single, so this is as close as I get to the full experience.

Fancy avionics is kind of cheating a bit but it does increase the safety factor.

Ya I have to agree, anything to make challenging situation easier is always very satisfying especially when you get rewarded with a good positive outcome.

 

[CaptPausert]

There is a lot of airspace to fly in where you don't need to talk to ATC and if you aren't into VFR navigation, there is always the "direct to" button. Definitely not much to manage.

As far as your engineering statement goes, if you are asking AI for a solution to a problem instead of actually working through it then you aren't doing real engineering; the AI is. All you are doing is asking for the solution.

I said i used a computer for my calculations. That includes matlab, excel, solidworks, ansys etc. Whatever speeds up the raw number crunching and allows me more time to consider the more importent things. Computers are way better at number crunching than people are that is why we invented them. And yes i sometimes use AI systems. If i have a large set of information in text like a huge database of maintainer entered notes for hundreds of aircraft AI is very useful for pulling info from those large datasets. The reason you get weird info out of the publicly avaliable AI models is that they are using the entire internet as their dataset and there is alot of misleading and just wrong info on the internet. Garbage in garbage out. AI is not intelligent it is just a really advanced calculator that can crunch large datasets without someone specifically programming it for that specific task. And yes the user is responsible for making sure that what is gotten out of it is actually correct

 

[bkervaski]

The point is that it simplifies the codeing. If you do this via older methods the coding gets very complicated quickly and have difficulty handeling input that isnt very specific. The point about AI systems is that they can take fairly vague input like human beings asking questions without all the specifics and generate an answer. Without it you have to be fairly specific and consistant in what you ask and in exactly the right format. Think the voice command systems in cars the older ones require you to ask things in exactly the format that was written by the programers.

I'm not an AI conspiracy theorist, I work with this stuff all day every day and specifically with speech.

You're right that it can do a better job figuring out what you said but it doesn't simplify coding. I'd make an argument that by the time you get the guardrails in place it's quite a bit more complex.

The older methods aren't any more complicated than using AI and those tools still continue to get improved. You get more precise control ... without all the expensive inference overhead.

If you're a computer guy, checkout "vosk", it's a very acurate and incredibly light weight speech recognition system. Inference requires a lot of compute and to no real advantage here, a solid vosk implementation would get you there with amazing acuracy.

The actual problem with speech recognition, especially in our small airplanes and cars, in my humble experience (been experimenting since probably 1982, professionally since 2005) is that the same basic problem exists ... it works wonderfully in perfect conditions ... but once you're on bluetooth speakerphone in your car with kids screaming in the back seat you're lucky to get 20% accuracy. Imaging how great it's going to work with our small airplane noise.

Don't forget, these models don't want to tell you "I can't" or "I don't know", they will lie.

While incredibly useful in the right context, I don't think there needs to be a mad rush to get AI into everything.