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Comment by vichyvich | Hacker News Reader

I love this! It would be great to have follow-ups and series of books about how to make things worse, as a way to learn to make things better.

Maybe it could be like O’Reilly, except the covers could have shittily-drawn fantasy animals, e.g. a 7-year-old’s drawing of a unicorn with a head on each side of its body both talking on their AirPods giving away their money to scammers, making PowerPoint slides, eating too much, doing hard drugs, live-streaming on Facebook, and standing on the railroad tracks with a train in the distance.

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This strategy was actually used during World War II, to ensure pilots could come home safely. Weather forecasting not being what it is today, meteorologists determined what conditions would result in the _most_ lives being lost, then together with mission commanders "designed" missions to simply not meet those conditions.

Source: https://medium.com/butwhatfor/suppose-i-wanted-to-kill-a-lot...

The missile knows where it is because it knows where it is not…

https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ?si=QrIlpJ6BuJADd_zF

Obviously this is a total aside, but can anyone explain what’s going on with that? Is it just explaining terrain mapping in an intentionally obtuse way, or is it some kind of parody? It’s really frustrated me because lots of people like to trot it out like a meme in the same way it was here.

It's a joke (meme, copypasta) but it's also accurate.

As I understood: Missile uses gyros and accelerometers to figure out how far it flew already towards the target. This is not 100% accurate.

So it additionally uses terrain mapping to figure out how it looks down there. Compare ground (am I flying above a slope?) to its internal maps and it can figure out where it is and adjust path if off course.

So it figured out the position by knowing that the position is most likely not the position where it's supposed to be.

> Is it just explaining terrain mapping in an intentionally obtuse way

AFAIK, yes, that's what it actually was (or the basic sentiment actually came from). It was some part of training video in the US army/navy (don't know exactly), but the actual story or origin remains a bit unclear. At least my search within the web did not yield any (assumingly) valid source. I think at some point it just got to "it is what it is now" because it is a very, very complicated way to explain this stuff.

I took a creative writing class and we had a portion where we read and analyzed bad writing then took good writing and rewrote it poorly and those were the most helpful writing exercises I've ever done.

https://orlybooks.com/

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