TikTok was banned in India years ago. There was some noise initially but eventually everyone moved to Instagram Reels/YT Shorts. A few homegrown apps tried to capture the space but couldn't compete against Meta and Alphabet's entrenched network effect and superior platforms. TikTok wasn't as big in India back then as it is in the US right now but it was gaining traction and then lost it all. The same alternatives already exist in the US as well, people will move on in no time.
I understand that tech companies simply care about whether the user will click on the ad, video or like the next song or show. But can this also be used to change user's preferences or thought process?
For jpg: jhead -purejpg, exiftool looks like it only has "remove this specific kind" (like -gps:all= .)
(The more boring use case for this: putting images up on a web page - if you use jhead -autorot to correct the orientation, then the browser sees the metadata and rotates it again...)
I wonder in what currency the kid actually made that money. Solana tokens I believe. Can they be converted to actual money with which he can pay his college tuition in future?
There's an innate human desire for gold. Humans crave gold so much that empires have been built and destroyed over it. That's a utility baked into the commodity. Many cultures hoard gold. Most of that gold will never be sold. Much of it is purchased for ornamentation and most of the time it just sits in a locker. In many cultures it is in fact considered a shame if family gold has to be sold.
Think of it this way - if there was no one to buy the gold from you, would you still buy the gold? Answer is yes. Many people all over the world would buy gold even if they could never resell it. The same can't be said about magic internet tokens. They have no inherent utility apart from the hope that a bigger fool will buy it from you at a higher price in future.
Ever been to Vietnam? Literally anywhere you travel in the country, there are shops selling gold.
Women store it in their teeth as a sign of strength, wealth, marriage, class, and a way to protect it. Generally not 100% gold, as that would be expensive, but it is some % of gold, and satisfies the belief. [0]
The interesting thing for me is that as the price of gold is driven up by wealthy countries, it increases the value for poor people that save in gold. The same thing is happening in bitcoin/crypto today.
When the Access Hollywood tape came out back in 2016 I thought his campaign was over. How can someone who openly boasts about sexually assaulting women, ever be considered for any public office, let alone the most powerful office in the world? In most countries of the world a scandal of that scale would end a politician's career instantly. But not in the US. Not for him at least. I just can't understand how anyone can separate his character flaws from his policy and think he cares for anyone but himself.
>>incumbents all around the world have performed terribly post COVID
Except India. Yes, ruling party did lose majority on it's own but they still formed the third successive government despite terrible handling of the COVID.
A radio signal takes more than 22 hours to reach Voyager 1. And it would take the same to get a response back. Incredible. And imagine the patience needed to send commands and wait for the outcome on the part of the engineering team. You can't afford to send a wrong command and have the luxury of undo. Also, I wonder how many generations of engineers must have worked on the project by now.
You characterize every single piece of equipment on platform so you can do somewhat accurate simulations. The shuttle flew most of the critical phases of their missions on the ground before ever uploading the code into an actual shuttle computer. The simulation system was continuously updated with real world performance information so it's accuracy continually improves.
You also have a command processor on the spacecraft side. It will have some of these characterizations present as limits on command authority. Commands sent without override that exceed these limits will be ignored, possibly cancelling the entire sequence of dependent commands. You can demand that these limits be ignored but this obviously requires you to specify it redundantly in the message set.
Should anything happen your flight software is generally going to go into a recovery mode. Voyager will try this 4 times after a period of no commands triggers a watchdog. This will switch on different radios while keeping them oriented towards the Earth in a constant effort to reacquire the command signals.
Should this process fail a backup flight software mode will then activate which performs basic mission functions on a continuous loop so whatever continues to operate on the spacecraft will transmit it's data automatically back to the Earth at it's highest power setting.
Voyager was a continuation of some of the Viking hardware and flight systems.
> You characterize every single piece of equipment on platform so you can do somewhat accurate simulations. The shuttle flew most of the critical phases of their missions on the ground before ever uploading the code into an actual shuttle computer. The simulation system was continuously updated with real world performance information so it's accuracy continually improves.
This is not true of the Voyager probes:
> Newer NASA missions have hardware and software simulators on the ground, where engineers can test new procedures to make sure they do no harm when they uplink commands to the real spacecraft. Due to its age, Voyager doesn't have any ground simulators, and much of the mission's original design documentation remains in paper form and hasn't been digitized.
While it's true they don't have a standing ground segment simulator, you'd be very wrong to think they didn't fly the craft in simulation before launch.
As opposed to many other modern missions this craft is just flying for distance. It doesn't have to land anywhere or perform any complicated maneuvers. So a standing ground test platform wouldn't be particularly useful. The shuttle, our landers, and probes are obviously a different story.
I suspect most people who've ever been responsible for colo-ed unix-ish servers have learned to do something like:
> ufw reset | at now +5 minutes
When doing "dangerous" things like updating firewall rules.
I wonder if they have a way to send commands saying something like:
Switch to thruster set 1, wriggle the antenna aim away and back to earth, wait 46 hours, if you do not receive "all clear" from earth switch back to thruster set 3 and re aim the antenna at earth.
So obvious! But _no_ I haven't done this even though I have messed up remote servers where this would have helped. A bit embarrassed I didn't think of it myself, but thanks for the tip nonetheless!
I also did not think of it myself, but had it shown to me by a greybeard after complaining about having messed up in exactly that way, and had to pay extortionate prices for "hands on" by someone at our colo facility...
> A radio signal takes more than 22 hours to reach Voyager 1
Voyager has a 23 watt radio and a 14 foot parabolic dish antenna, pointed directly at Earth which is presently 15 billion miles away.
The corresponding earth ground station has a 100 foot dish and transmits at thousands of watts.
It's astonishing to me that Voyager knows where Earth is at all. I imagine it uses Sol as a reference? Or maybe the high powered control signal carrier?
Which correspondingly means that the received signal strength here on Earth is very low.
Internet says approximately -160.48 dBm, which is one thousandth of the minimum strength that the most sensitive commercial FM radio receivers can discriminate.
Hence the huge receiving dishes, and apparently one 100 foot dish alone does not collect enough energy to reconstruct the signal, so multiple are required at each Deep Space Network receiving station.
And due to the rotation of the Earth, we need three DSN stations to maintain constant communication with Voyager.
I wonder if they could build a very large dish in Earth orbit. Probably cost prohibitive though. Also there's the power and cooling aspect when transporting... Would there be any advantage to a space based station?
You could build a planet-sized interferometric array without having to obtain land in different countries. If the orbit's much bigger than the planet, you can have most of the antennae always be usable instead of half on the wrong side. You can pick up wavelengths blocked by the atmosphere. You can build multi-kilometer single dishes out of mylar or steel cable, without gravity and air currents bending them. You can use it to focus sunlight onto surface locations, but probably shouldn't.
I'm no space expert, but I'm not sure this would be say better. It would certainly be epically more expensive.
Two obvious issues spring to mind;
The orbit would need to be polar to avoid being blocked by the earth (assuming the craft is in the solar plane). Whatever orbit was chosen at least some planes some of the time would be obscured by the earth.
And orientation fuel becomes an issue. Outside of refueling it becomes a hard end-of-life factor.
Contrasted to land-based stations. Which are happily operating 50 years and can be maintained etc.
Frankly I'm not sure there would be any advantage to a space receiver- and it's several orders of magnitude more expensive.
>It's astonishing to me that Voyager knows where Earth is at all
It's not that astonishing when you realize astral navigation is what sailors hundreds of years ago did to navigate the seas. Just look at the stars with a sextant and with some basic trigonometry you'll know where you are exactly. The Apollo space crew had to do that by hand and eyes using a sextant too when the astral navigation computer failed.
It would be astonishing if Voyager shipped in 1977 with computer vision capabilities that were capable of that level of object detection and discrimination and accuracy. Plus the detailed star maps for correlation. And all designed and built several years before launch!
And in fact I think it's not possible. But orienting on Sol should be achievable. Even at 15 billion miles away, it's still surely the brightest thing in the sky.
Presumably the orientation sensor is precisely in line with the parabolic antenna?
You can determine your longitude without a clock, but achieving precision with this method is challenging. First, you need to observe the Moon's position relative to fixed stars, which gives you the UTC time. Then, observe the Sun's position relative to the horizon to determine the local time. By comparing the two, you can calculate your longitude.
How are you going to usefully use this information if you wouldn't have an obvious way to know precisely how long it's been between whenever you lost track of the moon and stars and whenever the sun is clearly visible over the horizon?
An aside but this is why I was blown away by Mario Odyssey on the Switch. While it did get patches to add a few new games modes and bonuses, there was nothing done to fix anything broken with the title because there wasn't anything. If you buy a physical copy from the last few years, there is no additional patch to download.
They had all the issues sorted out before release, very rare nowadays.
Oh it definitely has bugs and glitches - tonnes of them in fact. It's just that Nintendo chooses not to fix them(not that they should, 90% of them are basically people actively trying to break stuff, although some I can see how you could do it accidentally).
And issues have been fixed in patches too, like the first glitch on that list that would lock your camera so you couldn't turn it - that was fixed in a patch.
"If Mario performs a Cap Throw at Talkatoo and talks to him at the same time, the camera will lock into place.[...] As of the February 21, 2018 update, this glitch is fixed"
But there are situations that will literally crash the game to the OS too:
"In the Bowser's Moon Wedding objective, if Mario falls into the lava just as he is about to capture Bowser, the game immediately crashes."
I should have been more specific by being more vague. The game didn't need to be patched for the vast majority of its common use. I would be surprised if there are any games with a degree of freedom that you couldn't crash if you did just the right thing. But for 99.99% of players, they will never come across these things.
What I should have said is that if left un-patched, most people would never hit a problem.
But I really appreciate the heads up about all the glitches people are using, very cool.
To be fair OTA updates aren't "low risk" - the trick is that you make your OTA system rock-solid so a failure results in a device you can still OTA too.
> Also, I wonder how many generations of engineers must have worked on the project by now.
Would've expected the generation raised on punch cards to be ideally suited for this kind of stunt, having learnt the hard way about the turnaround time for a bug (Donald Knuth quote about proving programs correct comes to mind), so I'd expect mission control, operators, and coders to be well in their 70s at least? Whereas tiday we hardly can write a single line if code without our AI overloads introducibg typos and not-fo-subtlr bugs.
Everything is becoming about ads. Ads, ads everywhere. On phone, on computer, now even car. This despite everyone knowing that consumers HATE ads. It's like companies are using ads as a ransom. Pay us more money on a regular basis else we will make your life miserable with ads and more ads.
And then, once everyone is paying more, they pull the coup de grace, and show you ads again! Netflix and Prime and Spotify started with this a while ago; I guess the temptation is just too big to let corporate greed run free.
I guess we’ve come full circle, and the next iteration will see people pirating stuff again. It’s going to be interesting to see what we can do against ads on devices like cars though…
> They take valuable resources from legitimate functionality
Including our own. Ads are designed to pull our attention to them and away from what we want to be focused on. The goal is to forcibly embed something in our thoughts and/or feelings. Maybe it's a lie, or a false association, or an impression, or a fear. One way or another ads seek to manipulate us and like it or not we are all changed by them. We'll have a cure for cancer long before we get a cure for advertising.
Well, I don’t know. Buying a dumb TV is more expensive than getting a „smart“ one these days, and I understand why. Doubt it will be different with cars.
In the car industry? If they aren't yet, I'm sure they'll soon have an onboard chip decoding encrypted audio, doing a cryptographic handshake with the car to verify they came from the manufacturer and the car refusing to drive anywhere more than 1 km off the calculated shortest path to the nearest dealership until the "broken" part is replaced with a new Genuine one.
Eagerly waiting for the potty bowl to start playing ads depending on the chemical composition of the particular waste… it would go: “Your zinc ratio is low, have you tried blah blah? After my doctor prescribed blah blah I can focus on my life more and is more productive and …”
That's what happens when innovation is dead and you need to pay the bills: you have to make current products profitable and the easiest way is to pack them with ads
If the current products aren't profitable already, how does does the company exist?
This doesn't really apply in the Ford case, but the real question is why we let companies burn money to get market share, killing existing sustanable businesses in the process? Once no competition is left, they raise prices and decrease quality, ending up with a worse product than we had before.
> Once no competition is left, they raise prices and decrease quality, ending up with a worse product than we had before.
That's the goal of literally every company. They all want to charge you as much as they can possibly get away with, while giving you as little as possible in return because it lowers their costs. Our society has decided that greed is the greatest virtue and the most important consideration in every facet of life. That inevitably results in a race to the bottom.
It’s not that we’ve decided that greed is virtuous; you’ll find critique of the rich throughout our culture. The issue, rather, is that the people with money intrinsically have so much more influence than everyone else, and the incentive to push things in a direction that’s favorable for them, eg direct lobbying and media bias. From an outside perspective, isn’t it insane that news outlets are mostly owned either by billionaires or corporations, given that these all have a shared interest in maintaining a specific economic status quo? It’s a major bug (or feature haha) in the system, and as a consequence effective change is often impossible. It’s not that there’s overt censorship, rather that there’s a constant pressure that pushes threatening ideas to the fringes, leaving only a residue of somewhat harmless social activism as a pressure release valve. I’m not sure how we get out of this; it’s a direct consequence of how the structure works that it’s hard to change.
Innovation in the automotive industry is far from dead, this is just the greed from investors seeping through every pore of the company, trying to squeeze as much money as they can get away with.
Making maximum profits for their shareholders should not be the highest goal of corporations nowadays, if they're persons they've become sociopaths.
It's more like "we are going to kidnap your children to make them some brain washed slaves, extract money from you with mass spying, ask a ransom with no intention to change what we plane to do if you pay or not"
Wall Street demands infinite growth. The Fed raised interest rates above zero, so money isn't free* anymore. Treating your customers like human beings, rather than bags of money with legs that it is your bounden duty to drain dry, just isn't popular anymore.
I just hate how disgustingly time wasting and pointless they are. Modern marketing is so piss poor.
Especially on mobile, endless ads for regular apps I already have installed but mostly for shitty ripoff trash games.
I am always 0% interested in downloading it, so why the FUCK has it become de rigeur to force the ad to be shown for 30-60 seconds.
I've read into it a little and apparently even negative reaction to an ad still has a positive effect on brand recognition, but how does this apply to shitty mobile games.
Our governments are failing us by not regulating this utter bs, it's so incensing. But then again that's all smiling politicians ever do, take money under the table while the grinning general population votes for em again and again.
Consumers don’t hate ads. HN readers hate ads. Given the choice, most people prefer ads to paying more to not have ads. FAST (free ad-supported TV) is taking over (again). It’s comparable to how a contingent of HN readers think there is a problem with using Google, while nearly everyone else uses nothing but Google.
While I do agree that HN readers are not representative of the general population, and we almost certainly are more ad-averse on average, hating ads is still common overall. Don't be fooled by the fact that less-technically-skilled individuals may find it harder to block ads than we do, or are less likely to identify covert advertisements disguised as legitimate search results.
Case in point, when I was a kid my dad (of "Boomer" age, but from a country where the generational name does not apply) really, really, really insisted on muting advertisements on TV whenever they came on. He made an effort to instill in me the idea that advertisements were lies trying to sell rubbish, and even though I do not have such an emotionally charged reaction to the concept of ads as he does, I still radically block them by all means necessary.
I would love to see ads on the search platform which is supposed to be used only for searching something you usually end up buying. I have a clear intention there and I am looking for something. Otherwise, I don't want to see ads.
But that will likely never happen. For it to work you would need to track behavior based on other sources than that site. And it does not make people buy something that they actually don't need.
Hasn't this rule been there for many years? I have flown to UK twice and there ere always restrictions on 100ml per bottle. Even lost a deodorant bottle because of that (security made me throw it away).
