> Imagine a 12-16 year old happening upon HN and becoming a regular. Do you see this person coming away with a positive view of higher education and being encouraged to pursue it? Or are they more likely to develop a cynical, contrarian view?
This precise thing happened to me years ago, and yes I did develop a cynical/contrarian view about it. I still went to school, but in net think I benefitted from not taking it too seriously.
But I don't think HN made me an outcast; I was on here because I was already an outcast and it was a place where there were other people into similar things that I was. I feel the same way about your broader point; I think the cynicism/isolation comes first (even if the internet might reinforce it).
I wouldn't personally buy an NFT for those purposes, but tons of NFT owners buy them to be able to use them as profile pictures. Yes, you can put any arbitrary JPEG as your pfp including an NFT owned by someone else, but it'd feel the same as wearing replicas of branded clothing (and people mostly just don't).
That might not seem as meaningful as hanging them in your house, but I've watched it become that meaningful for a ton of people (as "irrational" as I think both NFTs and Hallmark cards are).
Blue Origin competed for a Human Landing System ("HLS") [0] contract. SpaceX won a contract and Blue Origin did not. Then Blue Origin complained at the GAO and the complaint was rejected. Management is acting like sore losers ever since. They have released graphics badmouthing SpaceX' Starship [1] and are suing NASA now [2]. The prevailing view is that this behaviour is not just sanctioned by CEO Bob Smith but by Jeff Bezos himself.
Search for Blue Origin, HLS and/or GAO for the rest of the story. The coverage by Ars Technica's Eric Berger is usually a good source, you might want to skim the list of his articles [3].
How many people have come off looking good by suing NASA?
Seems like the Venn Diagram of that includes families of astronauts killed on missions, people who had stuff land on their house, and <checks notes> no, that's about it.
SpaceX sued NASA (or at least complained) and won. NASA wanted to award a contract to Space plane Kistler and this was prevented and the contract competed. This however was the GAO and they already rejected Blue complaint.
I don’t disagree with you, but I think the only fallacy here is that it’s an extremely zero-sum way to look at things.
Are we perhaps better off for many — maybe even all — of our status quo legal contracts not working like software programs? Sure.
Is there a class of legal contracts — either already in existence, or made possible by crypto — that’d make much more sense if ran like software (with different requirements/constraints than the error tolerance you described)? I don’t see why not, and why this would be mutually exclusive with the first premise.
I agree that it isn't a zero sum game and that there are valid use cases. But I don't see any of these use cases operating over a multi-million dollar business. There has to be a way to override an exploit when a sum like that is at stake.
The fascinating thing about this spatial audio wave to me is that it was basically available almost a decade ago (because "binaural audio" has been available and fairly trivially usable for a while now).
I remember one of the first apps I downloaded on my iPod Touch in middle school (~2011) was a "binaural audio" app that catalogued spatial audio experiences (+ voice-acted stuff like getting a haircut, etc).
Binaural audio recordings are usually made with a Binaural microphone that records sound in a similar configuration to how human ears work. Or they're just synthesized directly as a stereo signal (that's usually how those "binaural beats" music is made). They're nothing more than a stereo file, and the audio has just been recorded in a certain way that mimics the human ear and head. This is why the virtual surround sound from binaural recordings sounds so convincing, but only when wearing headphones.
Spatial audio is a more generalized term. Let's say you're filming an action movie and have a scene where a robot comes from foreground-right, kicks a car, and the car flies over the camera and makes a loud crashing sound behind the camera. You can't just stick a binaural microphone on set and record that because it's almost all CGI. There is no actual sound of a robot kicking a car to be recorded. Instead your foley artists and sound design team will record and modify dozens (even hundreds) of sound sources and combine them together in software that supports a sort of virtual 3d environment, and save it in a format capable of representing this (like Dolby Atmos).
You can then take that Dolby Atmos data and in realtime compute how to map your virtual sound-sources onto things like a 64-speaker Dolby Atmos array in an movie theater, or a 12-speaker home theater Dolby Atmos setup, or apply an HRTF to convincingly map that audio to 2 headphones. A Binaural audio signal is restricted to stereo and intended to be placed directly in the ears.
The most important thing about spatial audio in AirPods is that they have head tracking, and so sound will appear to be coming from the same places if you move your head around. It doesn't work nearly as well without that.
I think the key thing has been enough processing for dynamic/real time spatial audio via HRTF. Despite being “just” audio, applying a HRTF can be pretty processing intensive, especially for a mobile device. Those binaural audio experiences were all pre-computed.
> This version of Jasmine by Jai Paul is created using the BRONZE AI engine. On each listen, Bronze performs a unique and infinite playback of the piece.
Bronze is a new technology that allows music creators to utilise AI and machine learning as creative tools for composition and arrangement. Bronze is also an audio file format which will revolutionise music playback, enabling artists to release non-static, generative and augmented music.
What a perfect song to pick for this experiment. It's extremely listenable. Jai Paul is a genius and my biggest problem with him is that he doesn't produce enough songs. His story is an interesting one, if you are interested. His laptop with his music was stolen and the music was leaked, and he disappeared from the scene for years afterward.
1. you choose a fixed duration of time within which to journal (i choose 15 minutes even though it is initially tough to spend all of)
2. if you stop typing for more than a few seconds within the duration, you lose your writing
These constraints basically force me to dump anything and everything on my mind for the sake of continuous typing (to not lose what i've written), and I've been successfully doing it at least 1-2 times a week for a few years now. All your entries are also saved locally in-browser only, with the option to export a savefile.
OTOH, i think you can actually measure the quality and accessibility of tooling based on how abundant the long tail of mediocrity/low-quality output there is.
in music’s case, one of the replies to this comment describes decline in musical complexity/sophistication, which i’d personally attribute to democratization of the tools (which are also much more powerful, allowing kids w computers to do what took whole teams and studios full of equipment before).
so i think only seeing high quality UIs in the wild is more of a mixed bag than is intuitive to us — a world absent of shitty soundcloud rap is a world with worse music tooling.
> Some people around me felt that my experience bootstrapping my last business should be enough to close seed funding, but the only thing that helps close funding is the fear of missing out on your deal. I witnessed this first hand after we launched to #2 on Product Hunt. We got some good inbound investor interest, but I couldn't create the pressure needed to close funding - there was no forcing function like the demo day.
TIL, makes a ton of sense but for some reason not the most obvious thing to a non-founder / VC.
This precise thing happened to me years ago, and yes I did develop a cynical/contrarian view about it. I still went to school, but in net think I benefitted from not taking it too seriously.
But I don't think HN made me an outcast; I was on here because I was already an outcast and it was a place where there were other people into similar things that I was. I feel the same way about your broader point; I think the cynicism/isolation comes first (even if the internet might reinforce it).