dandelany

You know roughly what the future looks like, but it only takes a tiny (sub-millisecond) amount of error (due to user movement, clock drift, wireless lag etc etc) to throw the phasing off and ruin the effect. So you still need some combination of precise modeling/listener positional data and/or a sophisticated algorithm that uses an input signal to detect and correct the error and keep you “out of phase”

“Canceling out” requires knowing the exact phase of the sound hitting your ear, so that you can cancel it by playing a sound 180 degrees out of phase.

First problem: Your system needs to be perfectly synced up in time with the known sound being played. Human hearing goes to ~20KHz, so you need to be synced up with an error of <0.1 ms per second, probably much less. That’s gonna be tough.

Next problem: as you move around the room, your distance to the speaker changes, and you go out of phase. So you need positional data for your ears with sub-centimeter accuracy.

Can we get rid of the first two problems by using a microphone to detect the signal and auto-correct its phase as you move? Maybe but then you need an incredible algorithm to be able to pick out the correct part of the signal from all the background noise and echoes, plus it has to run in real-time at high sample rates. Very very difficult.

Then even if you solve these issues, you also have to cancel the echoes of the song bouncing off the walls etc. If you’re trying to take advantage of the fact that it’s a “known song” you then need an extremely good model of the room you’re in to predict how the sound will bounce.

In short, I suspect it’s “theoretically possible” but completely infeasible.

It’s not obvious at all at the quantum scale. Nothing we’ve seen indicates that eg. the timing of the decay of a single particle, or the ability of a single electron to escape an energy well is deterministic, though they are easily predictable in aggregate.

What does “deterministic but not predetermined” mean?

I agree, third might be (alcohol-based) hand sanitizer, which has more of a cooling effect than water when it evaporates, could easily be mistaken for tingles if you're already primed and hyperaware from wondering "did i just touch poison?!". And the acute chest pain seems likely to be a symptom of panicking about being poisoned.

This was true of the first rover (Pathfinder ‘97) but really hasn’t been true of rovers since then. Ingenuity was an exception re: COTS parts since it was experimental.

Pathfinder cost <$300M. “Better cheaper faster” became Discovery class missions, “capped” at $500M. Curiosity and Perseverance cost about $2.5B each. Not in the same category.

Maybe if you can get by with entirely COTS parts. Aluminum is much easier to cut, drill, tap and bend.

I’ve made some fun projects with Espruino - where you can literally use setTimeout/setInterval and it will even sleep the uC until it hits the the timeout :)

OP's last sentence explains exactly why it's frustrating - because cameras are held back by subpar software. Why do you think being able to explain the root cause of this would make it any less so?

It's not cooking 101, it's at least cooking 102 or 103. I know you didn't do it intentionally, but when newbies get into a new subject they are often turned off by comments like yours which boil down to "oh noo you can't do it that way, you simply must do insert term of art or else insert negative hyperbole" - it's precisely what's meant by "gatekeeping". If I told my girlfriend a million Italians were crying because she made lasagna wrong she'd probably slap me.

It also gets into the complaint about cultural specificity from the original comment. It might be Cooking 101 - for French cuisine. But to insist people learn to make the French mother sauces from scratch before eg. tacos or curry seems a bit too narrow-minded for "Cooking 101" generally speaking. I think "Salt Fat Acid Heat" has the right idea here.

edit PS: there is almost always a non-gatekeepy way to say the exact same thing. "In my experience, a homemade bechamel adds an incredible homemade taste to lasagna. I'd definitely recommend learning about the French 'mother sauces' sooner rather than later!"

From a security point of view, it sure makes for an interesting attack surface

This. I always get annoyed when entrepreneurs eg. on Shark Tank say things like “I quit my job, took out two mortgages on my home, maxed out my credit cards and spent my kids’ college fund on the business. And look at us now, we’re making millions of dollars a year! Don’t give up when failure looks inevitable!”

Probably most of the people who follow this advice to the letter end up financially ruined, they just don’t get a public platform to talk about it…

Oh great. A product that will let me spend my last moments on Earth debugging an IoT device because surely it’s a false posi——-AUGHHH

love when that happens :) Thanks!

This is an excellent comment that clearly comes from a lot of experience. Can you say any more about why having multiple locks is such a red flag? Is it because you start getting into deadlock/hungry philosophers territory? Are there rules of thumb for using multiple locks that make it more tractable or is it just always a bad idea?

The dust is ejected from the comet at relatively low speeds and the particles therefore remain in orbits that are very similar to the comet’s. Lots of objects in similar-but-different orbits quickly diverge such that they spread out along the entire orbital ellipse. So think about it more as a stream of objects in the shape of the comet’s ellipse. The whole area of the comet’s orbit is a “high traffic zone” for small particles, and where those streams cross the earth’s orbit you get meteor showers.

Imagine two small pebbles ejected from a comet at the same time, one in the prograde direction (ie. in the comet’s direction, ahead of it) and one retrograde. For the first pebble, at the point 180 degrees opposite on its orbital ellipse, it’s orbit has been raised by (say) a few thousand km, while the second pebble’s orbit has been lowered by a few thousand km. If you zoom out you can barely tell the difference - on a solar system scale the ellipses look almost identical. But the difference in velocities means that they will quickly start to diverge in time. Both pebbles will do a full orbit and return roughly to the same point in space where they were ejected. But the retrograde particle (ie. the one “dumped out the back” of the comet instead of the one “fired ahead” of the it) will arrive there much earlier - it went faster and had less distance to cover. Repeat with millions or particles and you get a cloudy stream along the ellipse.

It's not really the same as a loan - you don't pay it back with cash, it's paid for upfront with a chunk of equity (usually). And if the company fails, the investors take a bath & you aren't personally liable for it. Not fun but it happens all the time.

Why is it celebrated? Because A) the company suddenly has more capital in their bank account to grow the business and B) they have someone with connections and power who has a vested interest in the business succeeding, both of which improve the long-term likelihood of success/profit (in theory at least).

PS: many people do celebrate and post about it when they get a home loan, it's an exciting thing! Debt is a tool, it's not inherently shameful.

What is obsolete is the doctrine of “armored warfare”, the idea that armor is the primary weapon on the battlefield that allows you to break through enemy defenses. In the days of trench warfare, tanks were a “disruptive technology” - an almost invulnerable mobile fortress that allowed armies to completely change the script on the battlefield by blitzing up the middle and breaking stalemates.

Now that ATGMs are everywhere, armor is no longer invulnerable enough for this to be the main strategy - you need “combined arms operations” - infantry and air support to protect the armor. The Russians are not acting like this is the case, which is why their tanks are getting destroyed left and right.

Armored vehicles will never be obsolete - if you’re sending in infantry or artillery or whatever, it’s still better to have armor for eg. small arms fire and shrapnel - you just can’t rely on its strength as the core of your strategy.

Seems kinda disingenuous to quote that part without the “however”…

“Yet despite the increase in image streaks, the new report notes that ZTF science operations have not been strongly affected. Study co-author Tom Prince, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech, says the paper shows a single streak affects less than one-tenth of a percent of the pixels in a ZTF image.

"There is a small chance that we would miss an asteroid or another event hidden behind a satellite streak, but compared to the impact of weather, such as a cloudy sky, these are rather small effects for ZTF."

If the effects are small compared to cloudy weather, is it really that serious of a problem?

Yikes. Didn’t know Hogwarts had an engineering school.

facepalm You’re not helping.

Electric vehicles are really the best option IMO - as long as it’s fully charged in the morning when it’s needed, most drivers won’t care if it charges at 9pm or 3am.

I’m less certain about the other things - not many people will eg. put off a load of laundry to a less-convenient time to save 21 cents. And if my partner is too hot because the heater has been running for 30 minutes I really do not want to have a discussion with her about “thermal storage” :)

Yeah Bitcoin is such an interesting exception! I think some ideas are viral enough on their own to go from zero to front-page on HN/reddit/etc. even when posted by an anonymous user - but it's rare to go beyond that, they usually run out of momentum.

Bitcoin had a few things going for it - the whitepaper is concise and well-explained, in perfect academic prose and typeset in LaTEX, which lends it an air of credibility. It came with an implementation, so hackers could experiment with it immediately, plus it sort of has implicit libertarian anti-government undertones, both of which encouraged follow-on blog posts.

Once the ball got rolling, another kind of heuristic took over - the money heuristic. People put money into the thing, which made other people go "oh look at how much money they put in, this is a real serious investment thing!" and put in their money, in a sick feedback loop that continues to this day...

I agree completely with criticisms of the journal - clearly their process is flawed in a multitude of ways. But regarding "shopping around for a respected authority to be taken seriously" - I think this is actually an important lesson.

The problem with the vision of an egalitarian meritocracy in science (or any other field, honestly) is that reviewing, understanding and critiquing someone else's work has a non-zero cost - actually quite a large cost if done correctly. Also, the people most qualified to do this analysis generally loathe doing it, as they'd rather be spending time on their own original work. Inevitably, people develop heuristics to estimate the credibility of every new email or article that comes across their desk, to decide which is even worth reading.

Understandably, one of those heuristics is credentials/authority - the ratio of good articles published by non-experts in their field is extremely small and massively outweighed by crackpots. So what does a smart non-expert with a good idea do to hack this system? "Bootstrap" your authority, by first finding someone with more credentials than yourself, but not so much notoriety that they're too busy to read your email. If you can convince them, they'll bring it up the chain to the next-highest authority they can convince, and eventually it'll have some important names behind it and people will pay attention. Brown was able to accomplish this with only two collaborators, so I consider him a master bootstrapper for this :)

Everyone wants to be the patent clerk slaving away in isolation who pops out with a new revolutionary theory of the universe, but it's just not realistic these days. On the internet, a non-expert trying to rapidly gain credibility on their own is indistinguishable from social media hucksterism/"influencing". If you want to break into a new field, find some experts in that field and work with them!

How else would you explain why people play the lottery? It's well-known that the expected value of any given ticket is negative (except in rare cases), unless you place some entertainment/fantasy value on playing.

A world of perfectly inoffensive, universally appealing art sounds… pretty horrible to me. You’re describing Budweiser and hotel art. Boring.

When I go to a modern art museum, I consider it a success if 90% of what I see is forgettable and 10% of it, or even 2%, is really powerful/sticks with me somehow. I’d much prefer this to 100% bland pictures of flowers and trees of which 0% will be memorable.

I appreciate that you seem to actually be seeking the truth, but consider changing your approach in discussions if you want them to be fruitful and interesting instead of self-satisfying.

Anyone paying attention to experts knows that none of them, including the ones you cite (McGaugh et al), speak with the certainty that you do. All of them readily admit that there are problems with both leading theories. So when you “explain” to everyone why their stupid ideas are stupid, it comes off as cheerleading born out of either naïveté or intellectual dishonesty, and harms your credibility. “MOND is obviously incomplete and I despair of making it into a proper theory. LCDM has no realistic chance of explaining MOND’s many predictive successes. Right now, we’re hosed.” - Stacy McGaugh

It’s a bit funny that you then go on to talk down on “the HN Crowd” downthread - the most common complaint I usually hear about “the HN Crowd” is best summed up as “it’s full of people who think a computer science degree makes them an expert in everything.”

Your point is, if it had a bunch of error (but not too much!) in one particular direction, the lifetime would be even further extended. This is true, and is probably worth a mention in the article as it is an interesting fact of the mission. My point is, the 10-year lifetime was designed with the worst-possible underboost (opposite) error scenario in mind, so it's not at all untruthful to say that the accuracy of Ariane extended the mission.

Ariane performed remarkably well, and that fact should be recognized and praised in the media. It's not exactly wise to hope for "errors in your favor" - much better to be more-precise-than-expected, as it allows them to plan more daring maneuvers with less margin in the future :)

> there should be exact calculated amount of fuel left

Nothing is exact :) Ariane upper stage boosts JWST on a certain trajectory +/- some error in all directions, and then detaches. Along the way, they figure out the error and JWST corrects it with trajectory correction burns. This is somewhat independent of any fuel left for the "underboosting" you're talking about.

A mission designer looks at the performance specs/error distribution for Ariane and tries to include enough fuel so that, 99.X% of the time there will be enough for trajectory correction maneuvers AND a 10-year lifetime. When the (Ariane) burn is precise, errors are small, and less fuel is wasted on TCM, leaving more for the mission itself.

What this (10->20 year lifetime adjustment) really means is that NASA's left quite a lot of margin for TCM here... Which, for something this expensive, was a good thing :)

> Meanwhile, does the art restoration world place a premium on using dissimilar materials, that prevent further disintegration while fooling the eye, but are easily distinguished by future scanning techniques?

Yes - as I understand it, restoration involves careful use of solvents to remove old layers of varnish/added paint, followed by a new coat of varnish to protect the original underlying paint, followed by inpainting/overpainting (filling on cracks and/or painting over damage). This is done using materials that can be easily removed by future restorers without damaging the original. I imagine these layers would show up on a sufficiently high-res scan, too.

As a person who has talked about weather with neighbors... It's not necessarily about being uncomfortable. All small talk has a subtext, and in this case I think it's something like:

"Hi neighbor, it's nice to see a familiar face. I'm glad to see that you are alive and well, as am I. I am still a normal non-creepy person who lives near you & who cares that you are doing well. If you ever find yourself in a jam eg. locked out, I'll try to help you, and hope I can rely on you to do the same for me. But I don't necessarily want to be your friend, and I realize that you have other things going on at the moment, so I won't bother or distract you with a conversation that takes longer than an elevator trip or requires emotional vulnerability or introspection."

I think we don't say these things in these words because it takes too long, and it requires engaging with someone on a more personal/honest/vulnerable level than they may really be comfortable with given that I'm basically a total stranger.