scrozier

As a boomer, I had fun trying to decode your last sentence!

> Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.

This is precisely and importantly true. I just wonder if most of the world cares. I'd like to think so, but experience tells me that most of the world is satisfied with mediocre stuff. And I don't say this as a criticism; it's just a fact that artists have to come to grips with.

I'm sure author's company does good work, but the marketplace doesn't respond well to, "we're really, _really_ good,", "trust me," "you won't be disappointed." It not only feels desperate, but is proof-free. Show me your last three great projects and have your customers tell me what they loved about working with you. Anybody can say, "seriously, we're really good."

Eschew abbreviations!

Absolutely. And thank you for that.

Thank you. While abbreviations are handy for those in the know, it's so helpful for general readers if one takes a moment to spell things out.

Serious question? Good literature that's not sci-fi? Hard to know where to start. For (mostly) "Western" literature, here's a good list:

https://thegreatestbooks.org/

I'm sure there are others for other cultures.

Do you limit your reading to sci-fi? There is a world of amazing literature out there with much better ideas, characters, and plots.

Are you saying this is what you'd like to happen? That you would like to remove the element of human creation?

I was waiting for the author to discuss actual strategies, like subtly herding new passengers toward a seat, sitting in your own row so you can get up when the right person comes along and graciously offer them your seat, saying "I think there's some spilled Sprite there" if the wrong person attempts to sit down (only if there are plenty of seats left, of course), etc.

Other ideas?

The finger trick did it for me. As mentioned elsewhere, I used to do this academically (looking at protein structures), but I couldn't easily get back in the groove here without the finger.

I spent weeks doing this, looking at stereoscopic (?) images of protein structures, while a grad student in molecular biophysics. I got so that I could see the overlapped images pretty much instantly. But I'm having a hard time getting it now, even on the easy one.

You may or may not be aware that Andy Warhol famously quipped that, "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," back in the late 1960s. As media has gotten to be ever more ubiquitous and the cost of entry lower, he was clearly onto something decades before the internet!

Oh yes, I grew saying "quarter past four." Probably don't anymore, but it was definitely in the vernacular in the US in years past.

Volume…sorry, should have made that distinction.

You're right about the "serving" thing. But in the US, at least, a cup in a culinary context means precisely eight ounces.

Allowing that I'm simply not sophisticated enough to understand this, I think he's overthinking things. :-)

I mean, B3 D4 G4 in isolation probably does sound like G/B to western ears, and maybe the overtone explanation is acoustically relevant, but it seems like there are not too many other things that those notes could be, and the spelling clearly spells a Gmaj triad.

This is one of my favorite categories of HN posts. But hey, if it engenders some interest in ______ (fill in arts category), then it's all good.

(semi-professional piano player here) That's interesting. I've never heard that...not even sure what "lowest fifth" would mean. I would think that the root and the third contribute the most, right? The fifth is sometimes even omitted. I'm very curious how this might work. Do you have any examples?

In the US, anyone can take the photo, including yourself.

I can see your point. I think I'm convinced. Thanks!

Not sure what that has to do with the point of medical care not ever being free.

You were completely justified in your botheredness.

Well, she paid nothing at the time. But she and you and your countrypersons paid for it, nonetheless.

It's interesting to me that you think about it as free.

I'm generally with the author on this, but their examples are inconsistent. I think from a language perspective, the linked text should be a verb phrase. We want the user to do something (click here), and verbs are "do words."

So, instead of

For additional order details, go to [your account].

use

For additional order details, [go to your account].

(The author does this inconsistently.)

And in this case:

To review or adjust your AutoPay settings, [click here].

You can review or adjust your [AutoPay settings] at any time.

they change the meaning of the sentence ever so slightly with the extraneous "at any time," showing that it is not always simple to remove the "click here."

Maybe in this case, it should be a button or a simple stand-alone link, like

[Review or adjust your AutoPay settings]

This. I've seen so much of this on Hacker News that it's almost like a game now to discover the variant of the archetype post in today's feed.

People with a "nerdy" mindset want to find the structure behind everything. That's not a bad thing, but it's so annoying to people who actually do comedy...or music...or art.

Not everything in life can be reduced and programmed. But they'll keep on trying.

To give you (Haystack authors) another datapoint, I'm a +1 to this comment. I can't think of a time when a canvas UI solved a problem I had. Usually it made navigation more difficult.

But also agree that it's great that you're innovating in this space! Good luck!

It would take the author a few seconds to type "remotely operated vehicle" (or whatever it stands for), and therefore save hours of time for people who need to look it up. Not to mention...I almost skipped the article because I didn't know what ROV stood for. Lost audience.

Your argument is that lots of experts on remotely operated vehicles would scoff at the article because it didn't use their "inside" jargon? First off, how many people would that be, compared to the number of people who love a good mystery and a good gadget, but have no idea what an ROV is?

As to bandwidth, you only have to spell it out once. Simple practice: I built a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) and solved some cold missing person cases.

The author of this piece doesn't strike me as someone who relishes communicating in cryptic acronyms, so my guess is that it was just thoughtless. He hadn't yet seen my screed on the subject. :-)

I'm sure there are those who love communicating in cryptic code. They tend to congregate in like-minded cliques that don't much care about communicating outside their tightly-defined world. So be it. But if you want to be read and understood by a wide audience, spell it out.

It is my futile mission in life to help people understand that initials, acronyms, and abbreviations are real barriers to communication.

In middle age, I (a computer science grad and working programmer) went to graduate school for molecular biology. In the early days of studying biological systems, I was struck by how much they were like computer code, or at least logic constructs. I remember to this day the moment I realized that my orderly world of 0s and 1s was being saturated and methylated and energized in ways that were utterly unpredictable by (the current state of) simple logic constructs. And that's the day I learned why we still have "wet" labs, to actually test things empirically, rather than vainly try to predict them computationally. :-)