Absolutely agree. Also, the kind of Karens described in the post usually enjoy their position and the meager power they hold over other humans. They need to get bitten sometimes.
> Also, the kind of Karens described in the post usually enjoy their position and the meager power they hold over other humans.
Do you have a citation for that or is that just an idea of a villain you've invented in your head? Karen doesn't hold any power whatsoever over anyone. Karen is a low level employee who has to answer the phones all day. She doesn't decide who gets benefits or not. She didn't create the Continuing Disability Review. She didn't create the security policy that said they should refuse to open PDF attachments from random people who email them. She doesn't need to "get bitten" any more than you do.
> For the recipient, a fax is a physical reality. It requires paper. It requires ink.
Not in my time it didn't. It was thermal paper that grew grey after a while (or a short exposition to direct sunlight); it came in rolls and each page was cut after it was "printed" and fell to the floor where it curled. 500 pages of this would have created a huge, unmanageable mess.
I use Lightroom 6 that I paid for, it still works and is still useful for my needs.
But as said needs are mostly general curve + highlights down + shadows up, it's possible they could simply be a jpeg preset in camera.
This line made me chuckle as well:
> Since I was a teenager I’ve used digital cameras
Digital cameras didn't exist when I was a teenager; and they cost about as much as a car when I was in my twenties. Overall I don't miss film cameras, although the scarcity was interesting. Taking a picture was an actual decision, unlike today.
This article is so true. "Collaboration" is how nothing ever gets done; we have this expression: "designed by committee"; we should also have "made by collaboration".
What's depressing is that it's like Fred Books' book never happened: most managers think the way to solve IT problems is just to trow more people / more money at it until it gets solved; and they're all surprised when it doesn't work, but try again the next time anyhow.
I think "design by committee" is a better target for criticism than collaboration in general.
If you get a bunch of people in a room and ask them for a design, one person is going to write the design while everyone else gets in the way. That's simply the nature of groups. The one person who writes it isn't even necessarily the best designer—they're just the one most willing to grab the whiteboard marker.
Conversely, if you ask one person to produce a preliminary design, they can leave, gather requirements, do research, produce a plan, and then convene everyone in a room to review it. Now all the abstract hypotheticals have been put to bed, the nebulous directionlessness has been replaced with a proposal, and the group can actually provide useful feedback and have a discussion that will inform the next draft of the design. And once the design is finished, everyone can easily work together to implement it as written. Collaboration is great, after someone has proposed a design.
That's part of what I like about the idea of Amazon's "culture of writing," though I've never worked in an environment like that in practice. Every idea needs to be preprocessed into an actionable memo before anyone tries to have a meeting about it.
Lets compare two projects that are collaborations:
Linux and Wayland.
Both are collaborative efforts, one has fairly effective and tyrannical leadership with the best interests of the community in mind. The other is lead by committee with competing interests and goals where they all have veto power.
Those same collaborators are reflected in the distro situation... Here is a group that also has some rather tyrannical leadership but they have dependencies (see the software they run) and some of those folks are sick of the distro's maintainers nonsense, and went to things like flat packs (see Bottles for an example).
> most managers think the way to solve IT problems is just to trow more people / more money
Right. But more often than not, the problem that's being solved is "we have gotten money to throw at things", so the answer of throwing in many more people to busywork kind of makes sense.
That's before we even think about all the consultants and similar roles where busywork really is work. Then all the organizational or agile roles.
The fact that some product gets shipped and we still have customers is good, because that's what pays for it all, but that is just the foundation we all rest on. Almost like background noise.
> A lot leaps from riflemen, who obviously didn’t want to die
Yeah but you'd think not dying involves killing those who want to kill you, or at least shooting at them! Isn't it super interesting to learn that 80% of riflemen don't ever shoot?
In a gunfight, you usually have to expose yourself at least a little bit in order to aim and fire. And let's say that you know an enemy soldier is around some corner, unaware, and you can pop out and shoot them. If there is another soldier aiming at your position, unbeknownst to you, you are dead.
In WW2 most shooting was covering fire, not targeted shots. That means people where not aiming shots, but just firing in the general direction of the enemy. If the 80% would have done it, the positive would be the other 20% would have been much more effective with the only downside of increased ammo consumption.
Yes, but that's also why the claim isn't true and has been criticized for years. It is so much more instinctive to simply pull the trigger even in a panic than sit there and do nothing.
a) other comment in the thread disproved the claim
b) even if it was remotely true, context matters. Refusing to shoot someone point blank because of reasons is one thing, refusing to go against Tiger 2 is another.
Trump is now threatening to destroy Iran's power plants if the straight isn't reopened. Is this "doing the right thing"? And doesn't this show he cares more about oil prices than regime change?
But the most important question is, what's next? If depriving tens of millions of people of energy doesn't work, what will he do next?
One hypothesis is he'll threaten Iran with a nuclear strike. In response, either China or Russia or both, will say that's a line that cannot be crossed.
And then, we will either all die, or be living in a world saved by authoritarian regimes from the irresponsibility of the US.
It will be interesting! But probably extremely unpleasant.
> Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old gardens, houses sheltered by decades of canopy: if you want to start fresh on an empty plot, you will not be able to get that.
This is a bad start. Louis XIV at Versailles and Marly famously made while forests appear or disappear overnight, to the utter dismay of Saint-Simon, the memorialist, who thought this was an unacceptable waste of money and energy.
And this was before the industrial revolution. Today I'm sure many more miracles happen every day.
Counterfactuals are hard to estimate but had the US and Britain not engineered a coup in 1953 to grab their oil they might have had friendly relations with US and its allies today.
Don't discount that the US foisted Saddam Hussein and his chemical weapons on Iran's population. They lost some 20 to 30 thousand civilians to chemical weapons attacks. Yet never once counterattacked with chemical weapons.
The assassinated Khamenei even had a fatwa declaring weapons of mass destruction to be un-Islamic.
No one is innocent in this world, but I can certainly understand why Iran feels the way it does and I find it justified, in the sense had I been born there I probably would feel the same way.
Recall Iran was the only middle-eastern country that supported the UN resolution forming the state of Israel.
US interference left them with a bad taste in their mouth. No wonder they do not like the US and their partners in geopolitical resource grabs.
What is your source for saying they are funding attacks? I know people on HN aren't stupid enough to fully believe everything Isreali and American media tells them so what's your source?
If he was serious about tracing the roots of terrorism he would have landed up with Saudi money and Pakistani training. Those two are the major powerhouses of terrorism.
Citizens of the US and its vassal states are quick to ignore that. Most are too lazy to exercise critical thinking.
Ras Laffan LNG complex in Qatar
Ras Tanura oil refinery in Saudi
drone attacks on Saudi oil fields
Ruwais refinery in Abu Dhabi
Shah gas field in Abu Dhabi
port of Fujairah
Bapco oil refinery in Bahrain
There is no point talking with these people. It's hard to explain how much the overton window shifted for Israeli-Khaleeji cooperation after the past few weeks, and after the strikes that have been hitting the Gulf.
The tone has shifted significantly that even KSA is now saturating WhatsApp, Snap, and other Gulf heavy media with anti-Iran and pro-Military Intervention ad campaigns [0][1][2], with a tone I've been noticing is similar what I saw in Israel right before 2014.
Anti-Iran sentiment was already prominent after the Houthis and the insurgency in the Eastern Province a decade ago, but the sentiment has now become extremely hardened.
The tone shift is similar to what happened to Saddam way back in the 90s and 2000s. MbS is trying to position himself the same way King Abdullah did during the Gulf War and Iraq War.
Pakistan effectively doesn't have nukes. Pakistan's nukes are kept in a de-mated state and it takes hours if not days to get them ready for launch. They're too close to terrorist groups in the Middle East (geographically and otherwise) to have nukes that are a button-press away.
This gives them enough deterrence against a total invasion (because of the "what if" factor) but not against random airstrikes.
Thats nothing, try nearly 400 nukes that "don't exist" and the man who exposed them was jailed and tortured for 18 years. Its not imaginary "in future" nukes, but nukes that exist and work right now. I am far more worried about that country. We must urgently force an audit and transfer or decommissioning of all these illegal nukes.
Which part?
The last time that the IAEA inspected Iran’s nuclear stockpile was in 2025.
As for “death to Israel” slogan there’s a Wikipedia page about it..
About: "I wonder if other species would look at our images or listen to our sounds and register with horror all the gaping holes everywhere.", yes.
In particular, dogs:
> While people have an image frame rate of around 15-20 images per second to make moving pictures appear seamless, canine vision means that dogs need a frame rate of about 70 images per second to perceive a moving image clearly.
> This means that for most of television’s existence – when they are powered by catheode ray tubes – dogs couldn’t recognize themselves reliably on a TV screen, meaning your pups mostly missed out on Wishbone, Eddie from Fraisier and Full House’s Comet.
> With new HDTVs, however, it’s possible that they can recognize other dogs onscreen.
It's about being able to perceive it as a "living" moving creature and not something different.
You can understand something below the perception threshold is supposed to be a creature because you both have a far more advanced brain and you've been exposed to such things your entire life so there's a learned component; but your dog may simply not be capable of making the leap in comprehending that something it doesn't see as living/moving is supposed to be representative of a creature at all.
I've personally seen something adjacent to this in action, as I had a dog over the period of time where I transitioned from lower framerate displays to higher framerate displays. The dog was never all that interested in the lower framerate displays, but the higher framerate displays would clearly capture his attention to the point he'd start barking at it when there were dogs on screen.
This is also pretty evident in simple popular culture. The myth that "dogs can't see 2D" where 2D was a standin for movies and often television was pervasive decades ago. So much so that (as an example) in the movie Turner and Hooch from 1989, Tom Hanks offhandedly makes a remark about how the dog isn't enjoying a movie because "dogs can't see 2D" and no further elaboration on it is needed or given; whereas today it's far more common to see content where dogs react to something being shown on a screen, and if you're under, say, 30 or so, you may not have ever even heard of "dogs can't see 2D".
I mean it's a dog so you can't exactly ask them; but this was a dog that would bark at every other dog. If he wasn't barking at Hooch because Hooch was only showing up at 24 FPS, then I'm inclined to think he didn't recognize Hooch as another dog.
With CRTs I would think that the problem may be that they do not see a full picture at all. Because the full screen is never lit all at once? Don’t know how persistence of vision works in this case…
With Cathode ray TVs only a single pixel at a time is on, it relies on our eyes having bad enough temporal resolution, if you have Superspeed eyes you will see just a coloured line/pixel moving on screen
That's not quite true. Only one pixel is being activated at a time but the phosphors continue to emit light for many pixels. In practice you get a handful of lines lit to varying degrees at at time. Maybe 1-2 lines quite brightly lit and then a trail of lines that are fading pretty significantly (but still emitting light). They yes, our persistence of vision fills in the rest to provide the appearance of a fully lit screen.
> While people have an image frame rate of around 15-20 images per second to make moving pictures appear seamless,
This is just...wrong? Human vision is much fast and more sensitive than we give it credit for. e.g. Humans can discern PWM frequencies up to many thousands of Hz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb_7uN7sfTw
The overwhelming majority of people were happy enough to spend, what, billions on screens and displays capable of displaying motion picture in those formats.
That there is evidence that most(?) people are able to sense high frequency PWM signals doesn’t make the claim that 15 to 20 frames per second is sufficient to make moving pictures appear seamless.
I’ve walked in to rooms where the LED lighting looks fine to me, and the person I was with has stopped, said “nope” and turned around and walked out, because to them the PWM driver LED lighting makes the room look illuminated by night club strobe lighting.
That's not really right. Most NTSC content is either 60 fields per second with independent fields (video camera sourced) or 24 frames per second with 3:2 pulldown (film sourced). It's pretty rare to have content that's actually 30 frames per second broken into even and odd fields. Early video game systems ran essentially 60p @ half the lines; they would put out all even or all odd fields, so there wasn't interlacing.
If you deinterlace 60i content with a lot of motion to 30p by just combining two adjacent fields, it typically looks awful, because each field is an independent sample. Works fine enough with low motion though.
PAL is similar, although 24 fps films were often shown at 25 fps to avoid jitter of showing most frames as two fields but two frames per second as three fields.
I think most people find 24 fps film motion acceptable (although classical film projection generally shows each frame two or three times, so it's 48/72 Hz with updates at 24 fps), but a lot of people can tell a difference between 'film look' and 'tv look' at 50/60 fields (or frames) per second.
That association seems to be an unfortunate equilibrium because higher frame rates seem to be "objectively" better, similar to higher resolution and color. (Someone without prior experience with TV/movies would presumably always prefer a version with higher frame rate.)
In general yes. Low framerates can be used deliberately to make something feel more dreamlike but that is something that should only used in very specific cases.
Pretty much all dramatic American TV shows were shot on film (at 24 fps) before the digital camera era. It's why so many old shows (ex. Star Trek TNG) are now available as HD remasters, they simply go back and rescan the film.
It's more complicated in other countries (the BBC liked to shoot on video a lot) but it was standard practice in the States.
It took far more than simply rescanning the film to get the TNG remasters as all the visual effects were only rendered and composed at broadcast resolutions (and framerates). They had to essentially recreate all of that, which is why we haven't gotten the same remasters for the less popular Deep Space Nine and Voyager series.
From what I have see most series of that era were edited in NTSC after converting the original film material.
I think familiarity is a major factor, but the lower frame-rate and slower shutter speed also creates motion blur, which makes it easier to make the film look realistic since the details get blurred away. I remember when The Hobbit came out at 48 fps and people were complaining about how the increased clarity made it look obviously fake, like watching a filmed play instead of a movie.
> I remember when The Hobbit came out at 48 fps and people were complaining about how the increased clarity made it look obviously fake, like watching a filmed play instead of a movie.
Curiously I can already get in this mindset with 24fps videos and much, much prefer the clarity of motion 48fps offers. All the complaining annoyed me, honestly. It reminds me of people complaining about "not being able to see things in dark scenes" which completely hampers the filmmakers ability to exploit high dynamic range.
Tbf, in both cases the consumer hardware can play a role in making this look bad.
I went out of my way to see the Hobbit in 24 and 48 fps when it came out, and weirdly liked 48 better. It was strange to behold, but felt like the sort of thing that would be worth getting used to. What I didn't like was the color grading. They didn't have enough time to get all the new Red tech right, that's for sure.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. They standardized on 24 back when sound on film took over Hollywood, and we now have a century of film shot at that speed. It's what "the movies" look like. There have been a few attempts to introduce higher frame rates, like Peter Jackson's The Hobbit and James Cameron's Avatar, both at 48 fps, but audiences by and large don't seem to like the higher frame rates. It doesn’t help that we have nearly a century of NTSC TV at ~60 fps[1], and our cultural memory equates these frame rates with live tv or the "soaps," not the prestige of movies.
[1]Technically 29.97fps but the interlacing gives 59.94 fields per second.
I haven't seen a single person complain about avatar. I wonder if the issue with the hobbit wasn't the 48fps at all but rather something more akin to when we shifted to HD and makeup/costume artists had to be more careful.
Because movies (in film form) are projected an entire frame at a time instead of scanned a line (well, actually a dot moving in a line) at a time onto the screen. I read somewhere (but no longer have the link) that when projecting the entire frame at once as film projectors do lower frame rates are not as noticeable. I do not know if modern digital projectors continue to project "whole frames at once" on screen.
Movies are not projected using the scan and hold approach used by typical computer displays. They have a rotating shutter which blinks every frame at you multiple times. This both helps to hide the advance to the next frame but also greatly increases motion clarity despite the poor framerate.
But blinking a frame multiple times rather than once creates a double (or triple etc) image effect. To get optimal motion clarity which compensates Smooth Pursuit without double images, one would need to flash each frame once, as short as possible. But that's not feasible for 24 FPS because it would lead to intense flickering. It would be possible for higher frame rates though.
Maximum depends on what it is you are seeing. If it’s a white screen with a single frame of black, you can see that at incredibly high frame rates. But if you took a 400fps and a 450fps video, I don’t think you would be able to pick which is which.
The discussion on flicker fusion frequency (FFF) and human vs. canine perception is fascinating. When building systems that synchronize with human physiology, like the metabolic digital twins I'm currently developing, we often find that 'perceived' seamlessness is highly variable based on cognitive load and environmental light.
While 24-30fps might suffice for basic motion, the biological impact of refresh rates on eye strain (especially for neurodivergent users) is a real engineering challenge. This is why I've been pushing for WCAG 2.1 AAA standards in my latest project; it’s not just about 'seeing' the image, but about minimizing the neurological stress of the interaction itself.
Dogs can see some colors, but not as many as humans. They have dichromatic vision, and see shades of gray, brown, yellow and blue. Red and green are particularly bad colors for them.
We get blue tennis balls for our pups instead of green; but they aren’t the fetching kind so not sure if it helps.
My dog doesn't react to familiar voices over the phone at all. The compression and reproduction of audio, while fine for humans, definitely doesn't work for her animal ears.
Have you tried it with uncompressed audio? Have all the times when your dog could recognize your voice also been times when you were within smelling range?
It's pretty hard to avoid uncompressed audio. Even if it's PCM, there's almost always a lowpass filter, either explicitly in the input/output processing, by the sampling rate, or from the physical limits of the mic and speaker.
Everything is tuned for human audible range, so dogs will miss out on the higher frequency stuff. Humans did ok with POTS@8kHz with a 300-3400Hz band pass filter though. The internet says dog hearing goes up to ~ 60 kHz; most audio equipment tuned for humans won't go anywhere near that, but probably cleanly carying high frequency up to the limit of the equipment would be better than psychoacoustic compression tuned for humans.
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