You may be saving money but wood smoke is very much harmful to your lungs and heart according to the American Lung and American Heart Associations + the EPA. There's a good reason why we've adopted modern heating technologies. They may have other problems but particulate pollution is not one of them.
> For people with underlying heart disease, a 2017 study in the journal Environmental Research linked increased particulate air pollution from wood smoke and other sources to inflammation and clotting, which can predict heart attacks and other heart problems.
> A 2013 study in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology found exposure to wood smoke causes the arteries to become stiffer, which raises the risk of dangerous cardiac events. For pregnant women, a 2019 study in Environmental Research connected wood smoke exposure to a higher risk of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, which include preeclampsia and gestational high blood pressure.
I acknowledge that risk. But I think it is outweighed by the savings, exercise and reduced fire danger. And I shouldn't discount the value to me of living in light clothing in winter when I burn wood, but heavily dressed to save money when burning propane. To stop me you'd have to compel me.
This is not a small thing for me. By burning wood instead of gas I gain a full week of groceries per month all year!
I acknowledge the risk of AI too, including human extinction. Weighing that, I still use it heavily. To stop me you'd have to compel me.
Cow A: "That building smells like blood and steel. I don't think we come back out of there"
Cow B: "Maybe. But the corn is right there and I’m hungry. To stop me, you'd have to compel me"
Past safety is not a perfect predictor of future safety.
I'm burning dead wood in a very high wildfire area. It is going to burn. The county takes a small percentage away ... to burn in huge pits. It really isn't possible that much if any of this wood will just slowly decay. All I'm doing is diverting a couple of cords a year to heat my home. There is additional risk to me, but I'm probably deferring the risk to others by epsilon by clearing a scintilla.
Probably the risk involved in cutting down trees is more than for breathing in wood smoke. I'm no better at predicting which way a tree will fall than which horse will win.
At the highest level, this becomes a question of whether we live in a predetermined universe or not. Historians do debate the Great Man vs Great Forces narrative of human development, but even if many historical events were "close calls" or "almost didn't happens" it doesn't mean that the counterfactual would be better. Discrete things like the Juicero might not have happened, but ridiculous "smart internet-connected products" that raised lots of VC money during the ZIRP era feels inevitable to me.
Do we really think LLMs and the generative AI craze would have not occurred if Sam Altman chose to stay at Y Combinator or otherwise got hit by a bus? People clearly like to interact with a seemingly smart digital agent, demonstrated as early as ELIZA in 1966 and SmarterChild in 2001.
My POV is that human beings have innate biases and preferences that tend to manifest what we invent and adopt. I don't personally believe in a supernatural God but many people around the world do. Alcoholic beverages have been independently discovered in numerous cultures across the world over centuries.
I think the best we can do is usually try to act according to our own values and nudge it in a direction we believe is best (both things OP is doing so this is not a dunk on them, just my take on their thoughts here).
First off congrats on launching a novel idea and hitting HN front page.
Question / feedback — why is there no way to see what one of these looks like on the website? You have a header that says "see it in action" that literally doesn't allow you to see the video you're saying it produces.
I have an idea in my mind of what it looks like but I think you'd do well to have multiple examples illustrating different situations where this product could be useful.
I checked the video out and am still unsure - does it simply save a video with an audio visualization? I thought it would be embedding audio into images somehow, based on the title here.
Exactly that. So, I wanted to send voice messages that I pre-record, and then can send later. The easiest way for my workflow was to be able to access and then send them from my cameral roll, which is pretty much where I store everything that I want to send. So, this records audio, makes a simple wave visualisation, and because its a video file and not purely audio, it can be saved to the photos app ie camera roll vs to files.
I think you have a point, I should make this app's intent clearer.
Same here. I managed to see a video on the App Store. It creates a video with a waveform and the audio you recorded. I like it!
It would be great if I could also add some pictures and have it create transitions while the audio plays. If I only pick one photo, it could just display the image with the waveform on top.
I like sending a picture of myself, or a few of my dogs, cats and gf, because it adds that human touch that IMO is needed when talking to family and friends.
If you could make my mouth move with the audio, I'd definitely be willing to pay more for it.
With ChatGPT explicitly storing "memory" about the user and access to the history of all chats, that can also change. Not hard to imagine an AI-powered IDE like Cursor understanding that when you reran a prompt or gave it an error message it came to understand that its original result was wrong in some way and that it needs to "learn" to improve its outputs.
Maybe. I'd wager the next couple of generations of inference architecture will still have issues with context on that strategy. Trying to work with the state of the art models at their context boundaries quickly descends into gray goop like behavior for now and I don't see anything on the horizon that changes that rn.
I am also not a therapist but I am a former tech founder turned executive coach so I do talk to people who are facing what feels like overwhelming challenges, risk, and uncertainty.
Even in the language you used "severe learned helplessness" and "extremely stupid", you are revealing a state of mind (cynicism, self-flagellation) that is not oriented to improving your condition.
You know you have a strong bias against therapists—given your seeming lack of knowledge about them, where do you think that bias came from? Fundamentally, we are a social species and evolved to live with strong connections to small groups.
Our society is no longer set up like that. So professionals like therapists and coaches provide the essential value of a caring, supportive, and helpful relationship that we lack. Like getting an essential nutrient that your diet lacks.
Do you have health insurance? Many of them cover mental health—the site Headway can help you find one that takes insurance. Try a few and gather some first-party data before writing them off fully. The downside is a few hundred dollars. The upside is a much brighter and materially better future.
You have too much faith in the social system. Clue: I am in Eastern Europe. We have exactly zero protection. Not small. Zero.
TL;DR if my reserves dwindle, I get thrown on the street. No conditions. No if-s. No but-s. No social safety net. I become the next fresh bum on the street.
To more directly respond to your question: medical insurance in my case means I get to schedule a meeting 2 months from now, with an old-school psychologist who is going to look at me annoyed and badly hide the fact how impatient he is for me to leave. I heard stories from acquaintances.
Musk has (for now) pulled of heist that sounds like a summer blockbuster scheme: take direct control of the payment system that all US Gov't payments run through.
I guess the world's richest person still didn't have enough. I really the court orders get enforced soon or the limited trust the public has in the federal government is about to go into freefall.
Most of the people that voted for this (at least the ones I've interacted with) are happy that it's happening. They think Musk is just trimming the fat of the budget and getting rid of all the frivolous taxpayer spending.
But then, even ASSUMING THAT IS SO, why can't they see the problem in HOW it's happening. Can you imagine the outrage if, say, Biden handed the keys to the kingdom to George Soros?
Our big brains actually evolved because of lying - research by scientists like Robin Dunbar shows that figuring out who was lying and how to lie better may have driven the explosion of human intelligence. The same brain power that helped our ancestors outsmart each other is what lets us do amazing things today.
You're right that trust matters - that's why we created rules and systems to encourage honesty. But lying is as old as humanity itself.
I love the intent behind this letter. So often talented people are just below the "cut off" for whatever opportunity they are seeking, and they see themselves as unworthy. Some may give up, especially if they are young and have not had other forms of recognition.
I think this is why YC sends notes to rejected applicants who are in "the top 10%" by whatever standard they are grading folks on, and encourage them to apply again.
Not to mention that the “top 10%” shifts year-to-year as much or more than HYPS admissions.
Talent _development_ requires substantive feedback, or at least substantial visibility into the competition versus a binary outcome. For example, tell Founders if they have the substance or right fidelity but poor sense of timing. (And market timing often in the hands of the VCs anyways).
Without real feedback, it’s much closer to a real estate license than an academic math program.
I’ve always been interested in the idea that creativity is primarily about random association. That association can happen inside your mind, or it can be externalised like that story of how Donald Glover’s Childish Gambino name came out of a Wu-Tang Clan name generator. Yah!
You might enjoy the interview I did with a 20 year software engineer veteran who did stint(albeit short) as an Amazon warehouse worker to get through burnout
> For people with underlying heart disease, a 2017 study in the journal Environmental Research linked increased particulate air pollution from wood smoke and other sources to inflammation and clotting, which can predict heart attacks and other heart problems.
> A 2013 study in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology found exposure to wood smoke causes the arteries to become stiffer, which raises the risk of dangerous cardiac events. For pregnant women, a 2019 study in Environmental Research connected wood smoke exposure to a higher risk of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, which include preeclampsia and gestational high blood pressure.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/12/13/lovely-but-dangerou...