10,295 karma · joined May 29, 2014
* @DamnInteresting@mastodon.cloud
In short, even our largest, most sensitive radio telescopes are far too small to detect omnidirectional (e.g., FM radio) leakage from Sol's nearest celestial neighbor. Unless an exoplanet directs a coherent radio beam at Earth, we'd need an antenna larger than the planet to detect a signal amid the noise.
In high school, my calculus teacher discovered that I had written programs on my TI-82 to help me solve homework questions. Much to my surprise, he approved! He explained that his objective was to teach us to solve the problems using whatever tools we had at our disposal—writing a BASIC program to solve the problem was not cheating, rather it was making the best of my resources.
You forgot to add "straw man cognitive dissonance Dunning–Kruger" to your little fallacy salad.
I see this complaint frequently, and I find it confusing. The feature is clearly named after the 'autopilot' found on airliners, a system which is designed to do things like maintain heading, manage airspeed, and avoid collisions. Airliner autopilot should not be relied upon for every step of a flight without human oversight, but clearly an airliner with autopilot is safer than one without. And if a pilot engaged autopilot and stretched out for a nap, we wouldn't blame autopilot for any resulting catastrophe.
So, how is Tesla's autopilot meaningfully different from that? They don't call it 'self-driving', 'autonomous', or 'driverless', they've named it after a very similar existing technology.
Tesla deserves a lot of criticism, but this specific complaint strikes me as misplaced.
> I strongly suspect, I know about ads and ranking and boosting no less than you do
Does not compute.
In that case, perhaps you should resist expressing strong opinions about it one way or the other. I anticipate that you, like most humans, find it annoying when other people have strong opinions in domains where they lack even superficial knowledge.
> Some call it a “necessary evil,” but if that’s the case let’s do all we can to make it unnecessary.
For any organizations considering the same move, I cannot recommend it enough. It feels like cutting off contact with a toxic acquaintance--equal parts relief and optimism.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/DamnInt/posts/10158097374656961
Thanks for the insights!
One thing I slowly discovered about storytelling is that you should decide in advance what your hook, climax, and conclusion will be.
The hook is a promise that something worthwhile is ahead, it is intended to make the listener eager to hear what the climax will be. Next, share the relevant background info and explanations. You can meander and digress a little, but always be pushing toward that climax, the moment where something amazing occurs to fulfill the promise of the hook. When you get to the climax, hit them over the head with it, then sprint to that satisfying conclusion with as little fuss as possible; get the story buttoned up while they're still reeling from the climax.
Also, a good story needs to have clear stakes; there need to be obvious, dire consequences for one or more people if things go sideways. And maybe they do go sideways.
I could go on and on, but I shouldn't, I must awake early tomorrow. I hope this helps!
In 2005 I published one of the Internet's earliest articles on the "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon"[1], also known as Frequency Illusion. In the intervening 15 years, thousands of sites have linked to my article, so you would think it would rank really well.
Instead, my article is barely on the first page of Google's search results. Above mine are more recent copycat articles, few of them containing any meaningful details beyond what I included in mine. Some of them are so similar that they are clearly just lazy rewrites of my article (similar jokes, etc). They appear to be ranked higher than mine solely due to being more recent, and presumably some SEO shenanigans.
This is not the only example--far from it--but it's one of the clearest.
[1]: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...
Being browser-based is not really a problem for me, because I run it on my local dev server and everything is instant. But over the web it has to upload each wav file to the server, which can be slow depending on bandwidth. It does however indicate when uploads are in progress so you can avoid interrupting it.
One of the ways the tool is unsophisticated is that it's designed for a single user. So anyone with the login can see/hear others' recordings, overwrite them, etc.
Anyway, if you're still interested in seeing it, just email me at: alan at [my HN username] dot com. I can send you the URL, username, and password.
I finally got past this problem by rolling my own audio recording software. I paste in the script, and the software highlights one sentence at a time. I tap a key to start recording that sentence. If I make a mistake or I'm not happy with how it sounded, one key press discards the audio and restarts the recording. When satisfied, one key press moves it to the next sentence.
When I'm done, I can download all of the recordings into one merged WAV, and I never have to hear any bad takes (it also trims 0.1 seconds from both ends of each sentence's audio so the key press noise is removed).
It's a little clunky, being home-grown and all, but it works great. Recording stuff is pretty easy now. I keep thinking about making it available to the public, but it's not yet polished enough for that.
Simon joined TIFO without informing us, while still working as our narrator. And TIFO had long been poaching our articles, lazily rewriting our work and calling it their own. So you can imagine my dismay when I found out that our paid narrator was also being paid by a competing website to read our slightly reworked content.
This Lake Peigneur video is a particularly egregious example. Their script is extremely similar to our original article in structure and phrasing. That alone would be bad enough, but for the video's host to be a former member of Damn Interesting makes it feel really awful.
This isn't the first of our articles they have reworked into a video without our permission, and I doubt it will be the last. I'm not claiming they are breaking any laws, but what they are doing is gross and parasitic.
This kind of hybrid may be impractical because it still requires cooling equipment (and its added weight) for the Li-ion, I'm just spitballing here.
1) There is an iPad version of Photoshop, and it's fine.
2) They are adding new features (at least to Photoshop), including some interesting and useful machine learning features like "select subject" and "enhance."