Interesting the author says “other manufacturers don’t bother”.
Unsurprisingly the real reason is “Apple was granted a patent on this over a decade ago and no one is risking an Apple patent infringement lawsuit over laptop speakers”.
EDIT: I say granted because that’s how most people understand patents and when they take effect. What really matters on the timeline here is the filing (priority) date and the grant (publish date).
It’s patents so it gets really complicated but essentially the later grant (after patent office/authority “review”) more or less makes the effective date the priority date - which to complicate matters even further can actually be the filing date of a referenced provisional patent that (in the US) can be as long as 12 months before the non-provisional (real) patent filing.
Human Revolution had one of the best gaming preludes. You had no augmentations, and then you get rocked. The opening credits while you're in surgery, chefs kiss. Obligatory "I never asked for this"
Though this site is under appreciated and less than up to date now they produced a fantastic interview with the director and opening sequence director. The additional images and videos make it really shine.
I've read books whose gist is the same point this author makes, and I agree it's such a freeing realization.
Out of the estimated 117 billion[1] humans who have walked the Earth, how many who have died can we actually name off the top of our heads? A few hundred at best? Maybe a few thousand if you're a history buff? And of that group, how many will still be remembered at the heat death of the universe? I'd bet money that the answer is "none of them".
So what's the point of trying to be remembered or leave a legacy? It's a game that we're destined to lose, so why play? Personally, I don't care how big my gravestone is, or whether I have my name on the side of a building, or whether I have an element in the periodic table named after me. Because it'll all come crumbling down in the end. This too shall pass.
And rather than being depressing, it's actually liberating. It means I'm done climbing the corporate ladder. It means I can work just hard enough to pay the bills at my day job, while leaving ample free time to engage with creative pursuits that satisfy me. It means I can have kids if it makes me happy, but I don't feel pressured to out of a sense of "continuing the family line" or some other bullshit.
No matter how hard I try, literally nothing you or I do will be remembered on a long enough timespan. Hell, I don't even know the names of my great-grandparents, and chances are that, if I ever have kids, my great-grandkids won't remember mine. It's like Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" quote[2]. I don't know what the meaning of life is, but I'm pretty sure it's not "try to wrest some sort of immortality by being remembered after you're gone".
Or we can have one network every doctor is in, and the state pays for everything. All doctors are independent contractors to the state. Everything is paid for. There's one price for everything. Everyone is covered. All this garbage just disappears.
Then there's one nice fee schedule like this, with all the prices on it, but it doesn't even matter, unless you're a physician doing your billing. [1]
[edit] As you can see from the PDF, a dermatology consult (A025) is $72CAD.
It feels like this is an example of a song structure that frequently leads to frisson, where you have a standard pop song (verse-chorus, repeated about 3x, maybe a solo), a long instrumental part that feels like an outtro and often has irregular rhythms or key changes...and then the song reconvenes with a vocal part that's either a small variation on the original pop song or something totally different. Other examples of this pattern:
One of my favourites is Symptom of the universe by Black Sabbath.
It's a classic Sabbath style tune with a hard hitting riff, solid drums, vocals and all that. The song seems to be winding down after the 4 minute mark with a standard fade out.
I suppose that's also how songs wear out with time and/or repeated listens. Fittingly, any frisson seems to be the first to go.
I'll contribute Stellenbosch University Choir's rendition of Say Something (by A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera). The arrangement capitalizes on the choir's dynamic range; by remaining relatively soft throughout, the sudden loud, tutti passages (1:38 & 3:51) have great effect.
I find that choral performances of pop songs work really well, though they're regrettably but understandably rare. Interestingly, the focus on dynamics isn't present in the original, duet, or Pentatonix version of Say Something, so no frisson moments there. Someone listed Bohemian Rhapsody--can also compare with Stellenbosch's version:
The relative sizes are super inaccurate. I know you know this, and I know in many ways it helps to have them be inaccurate so you can find anything in space, but the Earth and Moon look to be almost touching. In actuality, you can nearly fit every single planet in the solar system in a line between the Earth and Moon.
It's slightly more accurate when you click on the Earth, but the solar system view they look like they're nearly touching.
Also, small nit-pick, but I wouldn't use the term "dark side of the moon," and you also deepen this misconception by having it be literally dark and need to be lit up using a light bulb. The "far side of the moon" (better terminology) gets just as much light as the near side.
Personally I think that the movie Oblivion had one of the best UIs of all time. Every element placed there was animated with such a detail to transporting meaning, and wasn't there just for the show effect as most other Sci-Fi UIs. [1] I wish this UI was reality.
While I think Star Trek transported the idea of using touch screens everywhere, I don't think their UIs are practical, as all of them were static (except for the tablets, which only displayed texts).
If we found alien megastructures I think the most logical conclusion would be that we are subject to a kind of prime directive, effectively residing in a nature preserve, and that we are not intelligent enough to bother contacting (yet).
On one hand it would suggest that our neighbors are either benevolent or at least indifferent, but on the other hand we might find it depressing to realize that we might be more or less insects at cosmic scale. It would have interesting existential implications.
IMHO the Fermi paradox suggests that we are either early or late. This would be the "late" option.
I have long doubted the dark forest hypothesis. Earth's atmospheric absorption spectra have been advertising the presence of a biosphere for almost a billion years at least. If there were any paranoid "reaper" intelligences around why would they even bother to wait for the evolution of something intelligent enough to leave the nest? Just whack candidate biospheres at first detection. It would even be a way to avoid some of the moral concerns that might arise from whacking fully sentient intelligences. Don't even let life get that far. If this were the nature of the universe I doubt we'd be here right now.
Edit:
I think the most disturbing thing to find would be apparently dead alien megastructures. That suggests ugly things like periodic cosmic scale catastrophes like... I dunno... maybe the black hole at the center of the galaxy deciding every now and then to emit enough gamma rays to destroy anything more complex than microbes living deep underground. That would suck.
Edit #2:
Now that I think of it, this makes me remember yet another Fermi paradox idea I heard once. Maybe there is some periodic catastrophe like this and the reason we don't see aliens everywhere is that anywhere near a galaxy is actually a dangerous place. Once intelligences reach a certain level they figure this out and then pack up and head out into intergalactic space where they try to set up shop around rogue planets and stars and similar objects. Abandoned megastructures might be leftovers from the previous crop with the smart ones having left before the "event" got them. It would be an interesting thing to discover, because it would imply that there is a clock ticking.
Fun sci-fi plot: there is such a clock, and we discover that the event is random. We could have anywhere from zero to a billion years left. Our first interstellar probes find two things: megastructures that are abandoned, and dead worlds and megastructures full of alien space mummies. The intentionally abandoned ones seem to be more or less launch support facilities built to harness and beam exawatts of power for as long as possible in the direction of intergalactic space, following what seems to be a trajectory toward a distant tiny extragalactic star cluster...
Very much on the DIY end, but I made a similar e-ink art piece that shows off the currently playing song on Spotify. I used a 3 colour display to add some flair :)
It’s not the easiest to set up yourself - need to generate Spotify API keys and build the unnecessary separate binary for dithering, but here’s the project if anyone is interested!
I've been working on an app [0] for the past few years that attempts to synthesize note card style note taking (a la zettelkasten method) with spaced repetition flash cards. Spaced repetition is the single most effective tool for efficient memorization that I've discovered.
You know, funnily enough, as someone who considers themselves to have a good memory, I cannot for the life of me remember most meetings, or most conversations for that matter in any sort of verbatim.
What I do focus on is remembering key details, as well as key emotional responses and postures. I try to take away from any sort of interaction any 1) new details that I find to be important and 2) how they reacted to other bits of information.
This helps me create a sort of holistic picture of a person, which I then take with me to my next interaction with them. I find this ultimately more useful than remembering the actual things said, as for the most part the counterparty does not either. However, their fundamental emotional posture(s) and motivations rarely change that quickly and having that knowledge helps me shape conversation faster and better.
On the other hand, a good memorization skill must not necessarily mean you come to the right conclusions. Your sources, peers, genetics and a mind that is by nature chaotic, do it's part.
For example, having good memory may lead you to become more arrogant. If other people praise you for your skill, you become so confident in your conclusions that you stop questioning them and rather see confirmation in an echo chamber of sources.
This arrogance is the source of much evil, I think. You see it a lot in politicians and management.
The website of the Nintendo founder's family office. It..is just beautifully designed, and a homage to the original game consoles and the entire art form of PC gaming when it started.
We are building a tool that can help you tackle some of this pain through process visualization. Built to be easy to use and create alignment across teams on how different aspects of your business works. Check us out! https://shiftx.com
It’s been on HN a few time before but Townscaper by @OskaSta on twitter is also brilliant. He’s worth following as he documents the development of the projects he’s working on, currently a new island generator. Really interesting intersection of algorithms and art. Often shares other peoples work to thats super interesting, I have a feeling he may have retweeted something about this city generator but not sure if it’s the same one.
A year ago today I launched something similar, but for Great Lakes boats passing my house on the Detroit River (uses AIS rather than ADS-B, and passively tracks the boat crossing the fixed camera rather than pointing the camera):
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130329898
EDIT: I say granted because that’s how most people understand patents and when they take effect. What really matters on the timeline here is the filing (priority) date and the grant (publish date).
It’s patents so it gets really complicated but essentially the later grant (after patent office/authority “review”) more or less makes the effective date the priority date - which to complicate matters even further can actually be the filing date of a referenced provisional patent that (in the US) can be as long as 12 months before the non-provisional (real) patent filing.
Clear as mud, right?