As someone who writes both "thought out"-blog-post-type content and throwaway HN comments, I'd be interested in knowing why you think it's important to spend more time on the former.
161 karma · joined April 21, 2025
The way I see it, though, that kind of thing still exists today: the "cheap modern memory card" probably contains many "exciting carefully engineered features". They got teams of people working full time to make these thing as fast, reliable, cheap, low-power as possible.
But the engineering feats are likely much more niche (and thus harder to understand). Not to mention, secret.
Towards the end he talks about how people trusted blogs and online content more because mainstream media was fake and biased.
The final paragraph:
> PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.
This is where we are now. It's even worse, I guess. Publishing online is essentially free, so they don't really have to try hard. And we are left with the work of separating the wheat out of this tsunami of chaff. The future of the Internet looks bleak TBH.
Whether or not this dynamic is good or fair for society, to me it's obvious that academia is necessary for industry to thrive (unless we do a complete restructuring of the whole system or something). Shutting it down seems incompatible with having cutting edge technology.
P.S.: Don't get the impression I'm a sucker for academia either. It's rotten as well.
How did they do that?
Why is the sale of a super expensive drug used exclusively to treat a super specific type of cancer even controlled in the first place? What is even the argument?
I couldn't think of any argument before. After reading, I can only think of "to restrict competition".
I think I might know what you're talking about. I've met some people who seem to have had their entire lives planned for them (by their parents, usually), and all they did was follow the plan. It does give the impression that they would not be able to function outside this bubble, because they never had to. Is this what you mean?
TBH, I didn't get the impression that the people described in the article fit this category (though IMO the article was so shallow it didn't seem to go any further than "these people attend prestigious universities and work in software or in finance or in management consulting or in... marketing (???) instead of law or medicine"). If anything because the people I described whose path was planned for them by their parents often did follow traditional paths such as law or medicine, because the paths had been planned by the parents, and those were the safe options in their time.
BTW I thought medicine was still a pretty solid career.
Overall, this kind of business shift is not rare. It's good to be reminded from time to time though, that businesses change over time. Same goes for other institutions (say, universities, countries...). Puts things in perspective.
I am honestly shocked about the gaming industry size thing though. No joke, are videogames more influential in pop culture than film and music now? I really have a hard time picturing that. But when I was growing up, being a nerd would get you bullied. How does it work now?
Finally, regarding the downfall of legacy media: it's very simple, the way I see it. Back then, you only had two sets of conversations: (1) the people you personally knew, and (2) the one in the legacy media. So the legacy media had a huge power over the official narrative. People always trusted (1) more, but it was very limited in scope. With the rise of the Internet, discussion forums such as this one, (1) started to include conversations with people all over the world, so people ditched (2) in favor of that. As that got to big, we started to get astroturfing etc... that's where we are now.
Cool article.
Recently I met some people that were constantly filming and taking pictures of everything. It was ridiculous IMO, for the same reasons OP mentions.
This is not new. For me, it began with the rise of the smartphone. So I made it a point not to waste my time photographing things.
10 years later, I regret having essentially no pictures of anything. In particular, no "good" or "frameable" pictures (blurry pictures from funny angles don't count...). Especially from important moments. Yes, I was there living the moment. But with a picture, I could relive it for a bit.
It's not hard to find the balance, though, I guess. You don't have to constantly be filming everything. Maybe just get the group together for one picture at the end of the event and that's it. Good enough.
That's what'll I try from now on at least. Report back in 10 years...
Sorry to disappoint you but all I have are some noob questions.
What would be the steps to run this on a laptop? I take it that after building it there would be a process similar to, say, setting up dual-boot in a Windows PC? (Whoa I'm asking a stranger on the Internet how to run dangerous software on my computer...)
If one wanted to undertake such a project, do you have any recommendations of textbooks or other reading material? I had some OS & related courses in university (I'm EE, so computer-adjacent), but they were all very abstract / high level / conceptually-focused. I'd love something more concrete. It doesn't have to be x64.
"We have frequency modulation, amplitude modulation, phase modulation... But EM waves also have polarization. Can we do polarization modulation as well to transmit more information?"
So, a cocktail party idea.
IMO, this attitude of taking the known facts (in the example, modulation types, EM wave proprerties) and reasoning from them to obtain new conclusions and ideas (polarization modulation) is actually very commendable.
Thhis is how the pioneers first arrived at the ideas, after all, plain and simple. So we need this behavior to move forward.
Often, the only problem with the idea are missing facts: IIRC one of the answers why it didn't work was
"Polarization information gets lost in transmission due to multiple reflections"
So it's not like the layman could have foreseen this. Their theory is at least "self-consistent". And then, the only difference between them and the pioneer is that the pioneer came before, tried it, and found out it didn't work already.
But now consider:
"Big telecom is so dumb. Why don't they just do polarization modulation? Instant 2x internet speed"
The difference that makes this one bad IMO is the thought that, even though we've been doing radio for 100 years, nobody has thought of this idea before, that you came up with after taking EM 101.
It means arrogance, but IMO it also means ignorance: I like to think that having learned one field to some detail has given me appreciation for the hidden details other fields probably have...
P.S.: could not find the EE.SX question link. These are not exact quotes, I edited a little for rhetorical effect.
But let's engage it. I'm no RF expert so just cocktail party spitballing here. I'm not 100% convinced about the multiple reflection thing. I mean, couldn't you just do channel estimation with pilot waves or something like they do for AM? Also makes it work for mobile communications since random user antenna orientation for polarization is analogous to random user distance from transmitter. Also what about fixed links like parabolic dishes and geostationary satellites? Maybe the problem is that it's hard for the transmitter? I mean you can't just have 1 fixed amplifier, that does nothing but amplify, driving 1 fixed antenna if you want to change polarization right? I mean you'd have to have an electronically controlled antenna array or maybe have two amplifiers that ate driven in different ways. Either way this is fundamentally different from the basic transmitter architecture I have in my head where all modulation is done in baseband and then you just upconvert, filter, amplify.
And they imitate the style pretty well. It's kinda funny. (I don't follow this topic closely (I clicked because I imagined something entirely different from the title), so it's the first time I see it)