This can cause a cascade of particles to rain down through our atmosphere, like throwing marbles across a table.
Fucking pardon me? I’m no rocket surgeon but that’s not how it works.
Its not a bad start to an analogy explaining it but old mate Chris Baraniuk needs to string it out a bit more to make any sense.
…disrupt tiny bits of data stored in the computer’s memory, switching that bit – often represented as a 0 or 1 – from one state to another.
Top notch science journalism there.
This isn’t a scientific journal or news paper. It’s a main stream article by the BBC, intended to be consumed, and understood, by people who have zero knowledge of how computers, bits or binary numbers work, so I really don’t see the issue here.
So what do bits represent then, if not ones and zeros?
Read that sentence again. They didn’t say bits represent 0s and 1s, they said bits are represented BY 0s and 1s, which is entirely correct.
Physically speaking, in a modern silicon based PC, bits are the presence or absence of electrons in an electron well. That presence or absence is often represented by binary numbers, because it makes the math easy, though it can also be represented in other ways, such as “HI” and “LO”. Or in a Boolean mathematics the bits would represent the values “True” and “False”.
The statement from the article is entirely correct.
A bit isn’t represented by a one or a zero, that’s nonsense. A bit can take the state of a one or a zero and is represented in various ways in digital circuitry.
A bit IS represented by one or zero. A bit can take the state of charged or not charged. That’s what a bit physically is. In low level code, those states are represented by binary numbers.
Or do you think there’s a actual physical numbers 0 and 1 floating around in your RAM ?
those states are represented by binary numbers.
The states represent binary numbers, not the other way around.
https://www.britannica.com/technology/bit-communications
A bit is a binary digit. That’s what “bit” is an abbreviation for. That is, it’s either a 1 or a 0. It’s a logical thing, not a physical thing. It’s a unit of information.
The embodiment of that bit is the physical state of a certain tiny, addressable chunk of silicon. And there could be any of several other embodiments: the position of toggle switches, chalk marks on a board, pits on a metallic surface in a DVD, voltage in a wire at a particular time. The particular embodiment is an engineering choice that is distinct from the information itself.
And, if the top levels of the BBC weren’t staffed with time-serving Conservative Party appointees who spend all their time interfering in politics, they could get their journalists to fact-check their articles by asking someone who knows what the fuck they’re talking about.
It’s not going to be become a major problem. We have radiation hardened computing hardware, and ways to deal with single event effects, we’ve in fact got a lot of practice doing these things, because guess what: Satellites also need working computing hardware, and they’re exposed to orders of magnitude more radiation than aircraft.
Manufacturers will just have to start taking it into consideration more in the future, and ensure that the flight computers have redundant ECC memory.
And eventually “we” might come to the thought that for many things analog computing is enough. Symbolic calculation, cryptography and such, of course, need digital. But when we are talking about airplanes and satellites, perhaps not.
One thing I somewhat like about the general idea of all those LLMs is that in theory they are closer to something that can work on non-deterministic technology.
I wonder if some sort of FPGA but for analog circuits is possible. To have the advantages of re-configuration that programmable things have, but also advantages of continuous signals.
Not to mention that cosmic ray bit flips are extremely rare. A sys admin might encounter one or two during their entire career, if any.
Yeah, but the problem is, the airplanes don’t. The company didn’t think it would be a problem and now it’s a fucking problem.
It happened once, to one aircraft, and it’s solvable with a software update.
You’re more likely to be struck by lightning the next time you leave your house than to run into this problem on a flight, and that was before the software update.
It happened once
Not even once according to the article. They don’t actually know what happened on that flight, but their simulations can’t test test for cosmic radiation and didn’t reveal any other errors, so they presume it must be the cause. Then made up a story about that being a day of heavy day of solar activity, which the article refutes.
