Yea, this is a really good point that isn't well known.
We've improved GNSS significantly, but the technology to avoid collisions hasn't been widely deployed, even though it's orders of magnitude less complicated than high accuracy GNSS on the whole
So... a random dilution of precision generator could... save lives? ha.
It's not uncommon in uncontrolled airspace to set a 1 or 2 Nm offset to the right in the FMS. Then it will follow the high accuracy path but not the same as opposite traffic that's 1000ft above or below.
Warning - I read some early research about this topic, something I was interested in at the time, around 15 years ago. Since then I've been actively trying to avoid multitasking as much as possible over the last decade or so.
It did, I believe, have one unforeseen side-effect: I now struggle to multitask in relatively simple situations where it's necessary. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older (42), but I seem to struggle with it much more than any of my peers.
Still, I wouldn't change anything. I believe I'm as or more productive per unit of time than anyone I've worked with.
Edit - one more side effect: I used to regularly work 12+ hour days. Now I'm _completely_ spent after 7-8 hours, as those hours are so intense.
I remember when Google presented their Ada(?) modular phone concept, I was really excited. But the commenters on HN were really convincingly telling me and the others that liked the concept that it couldn't happen. Basically unsolvable problem and the phone would be too thick. And right, Google immediately gave up. So it was impossible I thought. And now you see this, made by one guy I think. It was not impossible at all.
half the times people say something is impossible here on HN, what they're actually meaning is "it's not economically viable" or "doesn't make sense from a business perspective". It is not that that modular phone couldn't be built, it is that you couldn't make it in a way that made business sense for Google. There is lot of great tech there which is not used in products because of similar reasons.
Well, they were technically correct... it's technically impossible for google to do this, just like it's technically impossible for them to build an RSS reader... or manufacture a phone in this country instead of China... or (name cancelled google project of your choice)...
> The specific bats that host the ancestor of COVID-19 are quite a bit far away from those labs.
This is wildly misstating the science. That bat virus is a relative, not an "ancestor". And it's not known to be limited to those "specific, far away" bats, that's merely where it was documented. Believe it or not we don't routinely test every animal species for an exhaustive catalogue of virus variants. It's just shotgun science.
And as it happens there was a close relative to covid found on the same continent in a species group that exists in a broad continuum basically everywhere. A bat-to-bat transmission to Wuhan is a bleedingly obvious hypothesis.
And yet we have to talk about all this Andromeda Strain nonsense anyway, based largely on jingoist US politics.
"An insidious aspect of FB's Pixel is that it automatically attaches listeners to a bunch of stuff on the page such as buttons and sends back interactions and associated metadata[1]. "
Um. Holy crap. Is this common knowledge? I don't get shocked easily these days but... wow
I'm not really sure if it's common knowledge, but I'd say it's less common then it should be. I went ahead and made a top level comment[1] with some info about controlling data disclosure to FB's Pixel in case it's helpful to others.
In the analytics space, you traditionally had to:
– Initialize a tracking object on page load
– Explicitly call methods on that tracking object when you wanted to actually send a hit
This is how it works for Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics historically. Many of the newer analytics providers instantiate auto-listeners, which gave them an edge on the out-of-the-box analytics features. And Google Analytics 4 (the newest release), also does this.
So it's not unheard of for site analytics. And a quick glance at a particular provider's website can usually make it obvious if this is occurring, based on the advertised features.
Ad pixels tend to be different though. You create a conversion event within the ad platform, and you're given a snippet of code to fire when that specific event occurs, which both instantiates the tracking object and calls the tracking method with the conversion event's configuration details.
Facebook's pixel works far more like a modern analytics library than an ad pixel. It vacuums up the hit data from the site and the marketer is able to sort it out after the fact in Facebook's interface and use what they want from it. Marketers working within Facebook can see this is happening because they set up the conversions and audiences against the hit data, but that's "just the way things work" in Facebook so they think nothing of it. Marketers coming from other channels will notice how different it is, but won't realize what's actually happening nor the implications behind it. Devs would realize pretty quickly what's happening after a few minutes exposure to the FB Pixel interface and it'd trigger a red flag for them, but that's marketing's territory and all devs see are the snippets provided for implementation. So the only time most people become aware of it is if marketing has someone technical working directly within FB's interface or if the person tasked with implementation has a reason to dig into Facebook's dev documentation rather than just plop the snippet on the page like they were told.
Raw sounds were generated by manually fiddling with audio cables, field recording, and tone generators. I fed them all into Audacity and layered and blasted them out in different ways - pitch shifts, overdriving, intentional clipping and phasing, cutting off the tops and bottoms of waveforms, running them through tweaked reverbs and sound reproducers designed for slowing down music - intentionally misusing effects to create new sounds and distortions. Once I had a big project file going, I split it up into sections and started arranging things to create patterns, rhythms, and repeating themes, and work the noise into a kind of narrative that was forming in my brain.
We've improved GNSS significantly, but the technology to avoid collisions hasn't been widely deployed, even though it's orders of magnitude less complicated than high accuracy GNSS on the whole
So... a random dilution of precision generator could... save lives? ha.