Google has an app called live transcribe on Android but there's no iPhone version

This is an unaffiliated version looks like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-transcribe/id1471473738

Is there any Silicon Valley personality left who has an unquestionable/undamaged credibility/legacy ?

Erlich Bachman who founded airfare collator Aviato and then sold it seems the real deal. Last I heard he was in Tibet though.

I don’t know if they operate out of Silicon Valley but the Collison brothers seem to be pretty well-respected.

Andrew Iguodala, maybe

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What you consider credible is not the same as what others would.

Could it have anything to do with the fact that the UK is a much older democracy ? ( the first English parliament was called in 1295 )

Parliament itself is that old, but it's possible to argue that the UK didn't qualify as a democracy until the Reform Acts of the 1800s (and possible to argue against it too, of course).

Is a country a democracy if people are blocked from voting because they are female?

Obviously democracy is a sliding scale, but what was in place in the 1800s had a lot of headroom.

This is a amazing dose of humility.

as far as comms goes - nothing can speed it up - but yes the idea of using relays makes comms more reliable/repairable

Right, it’s not about speed but the message reliably getting there.

perhaps that can be overcome by a train/succession of such probes relaying the signals over shorter distances ?

But how much shorter? Light years are a long distance to cover with relay stations if their peer to peer range is not unlimited. And when "DVD sized" should include both sender and receiver, p2p range most certainly won't be "astronomical" (which it would quite literally have to be). The relay approach implies symmetry and usually what we do with probes is the opposite, compensate a smaller device on one end with a bigger device on the other end.

Voyager 1 uses 22 watts and 1970s technology to communicate from 21 light hours away.

Radio encoding has come a long way since then. In particular ft8/js8call uses an encoding that can communicate at over 20 db below the noise floor, allowing communications across the earth with a few watts which involves many 1000s of miles of atmosphere, bouncing (poorly) off the upper atmosphere and the ground many times.

If we launched one an hour at 5% of C (better than today, but much worse than the goals of the project) they would only have to communicate across hops of 3 light minutes, er about half that since 5% of C is the final velocity not the average. Considering voyagers success at 21 light hours and the improvements in encoding that sounds quite feasible.

Software is hard but more specifically it's human behavior - coordination and communication between contributors and teams to be exact

good Ask HN - mostly binge watch TV show(s), some minor errands, some time with parents, lot of the usual reddit/HN

under rated comment

I'm with you

although the language of that Brookings article is obscure ( possibly deliberately )

it seems like he's nitpicking rather than acknowledging something's deeply wrong.

plus it's strange the way he quotes himself in 3rd person in the article he himself wrote