I made one called flyonthewall, you can upload a m4a file and it gives back transcription from openAI whisper model. Basic setup (no accounts right now) that I use to transcribe plus summarize my audio notes from my dictaphone.
Not "always on" but if you enable a recording with us, it's all searchable and even attempts to write a doc of what you were talking about to scan or answer questions about later: https://augmend.com. We do screen + audio, but audio alone does work.
In my mind, the lowest-hanging fruit is: "tech is now abundant, and great machine farms feed us all." Surprising thing is, most of us are already there - except the media (hand-in-hand with legacy corporations that need scared, docile employees) is incentivized to keep us thinking otherwise by focusing on homelessness and immigration.
They're afraid of the general populace reaching the consensus that "tech is now abundant, and great machine farms feed us all," because that would mean that most of us are free to explore and experiment without being subject to pointless human pyramids (i.e. corps), which represents unknown innovations and disruptions that might threaten said pyramids.
And a LOT of that mass-gaslighting relies on what the internet has become - a Judge Dredd-style Sprawl of a few monolithic power centers, with nothing but millions of noodle shops and nail salons (whose online equivalents would be e-commerce websites and commodity SaaS startups) in between.
Some time ago, the internet had a sensible structural ambition that a child could understand: a singular global network where nobody can stop the individual from adding a new node. That freedom is technically still there, but it's been neutered in every way imaginable. And most who would support that freedom lost heart, like the author here.
What now? I think it's simple - we try again. Go back to the original promise, and see how we can implement it better this time. An accessible, transparent, free network of simple documents and people. The tech is there, and the appetite is there, if you look at the success of products like LinkTree.
In fact, I'm working on building that right now, and I have high confidence in our go-to-market strategy. Email me (check my bio) if this interests you. I'd love to chat.
You're exactly right - tainted, because the contract killer's money becomes clean (laundered) at the expense of the rest of the money.
Now, as to whether everyone who had money in that pool will be found guilty by "Big Bad Government", which I think is what distresses you - the answer is no. There are additional criteria, as the article mentions.
A while ago i had a heated discussion on HN with someone who claimed that any graph where 0 is not the minimum value of all the axes is misleading.
We were talking about a graph that shows global temperature rise due to climate change. They claimed the graph was misleading because the Y axis (temperature) didn't start from 0 (fahrenheit? celsius? fucking kelvin?).
This person also quipped, "maybe if you can't see if with 0 at the bottom, it's not such a significant change?". That put a dent in my faith in humanity for a while. I'm just glad to see us operating at a higher level. I guess 2016-2020 was a different time.
Why some random starting point like when a religion started counting? Ofcourse you have to start from the beginning of the universe. THAT will put things in perspective!
The only sensible start for any time axis is clearly Modified Julian Day 0 which puts the x=0 of any truly god fearing years axis in November 1858, as it should!
Alternatively Fermi Mission Elapsed Time is also an acceptably cool zero point, which puts the zero in January 2001. The zero of the unix time is tolerable only in truly desperate circumstances.
I mean yes, if you want the ratios of different temperatures to be meaningful, then that's where you'd need to set the zero point. You could argue that a graph that makes 25C look "25% hotter" than 20C is misleading in this sense. (Not that this justifies global warming denialism.)
Significant changes are not necessarily visible on a scale from 0 K to 400 K. I mean, if you show up at the hospital with a temperature of 315 K instead of your base line around 310 K, that’s fucking significant even though you would not see anything on a scale that starts at 0 K.
> You could argue that a graph that makes 25C look "25% hotter" than 20C is misleading in this sense.
That’s meaningless in any sense. The origin of the Celsius scale is arbitrary, “25% hotter” has no meaning whatsoever.
It absolutely does have a physical meaning. It means that the system has 25% more energy at the microscopic level. (Or, you know, substitute in a more precise physical definition of temperature – it will be some kind of measure of energy, even if it's not exactly that.)
It's not necessarily wrong to suppress the zero in a graph of temperature changes, but by doing so you are making bars in the graph proportionally larger or smaller relative to other bars by an arbitrary amount. That could potentially be misleading, depending on what point you are making using the graph.
No, not really. Heat is a poorly defined concept to which we are saddled for historical reasons. For example:
> It means that the system has 25% more energy at the microscopic level.
It does not. This definition only works in a frame of reference at rest compared to the thing you are observing. Imagine a piece of matter that is travelling at a velocity v in your implicit frame of reference. Its temperature does not depend on v, even though it’s kinetic energy does. We are back to the choice of scale.
And then there are negative absolute temperatures, which do not make any sense at all if heat is kinetic energy.
The actual definition of thermodynamic temperature is the inverse of the derivative of the energy with respect to the entropy. This is highly non-intuitive and we cannot extrapolate our intuitive concept of heat too much.
> It's not necessarily wrong to suppress the zero in a graph of temperature changes, but by doing so you are making bars in the graph proportionally larger or smaller relative to other bars by an arbitrary amount.
Right. This is the point that was made in the story and I entirely agree with that. A bar chart communicates a surface area. Changing the scale artificially changes the surface area and is misleading. The logical conclusion is that bar graph make no sense for temperatures, or to show the relative change of a variable.
Personally I would go further and say that bar graphs are inappropriate in the vast majority of cases, but that’s just my opinion.
> That could potentially be misleading, depending on what point you are making using the graph.
If we're talking about global warming (as ppqqrr was), then it's surely some kind of objective physical notion of 'getting hotter' that we're interested in. The problem with global warming is not that we all feel subjectively hotter!
And I did say:
>substitute in a more precise physical definition of temperature
To add, that's actually a Bett chart anyway, because you aren't showing the temperature over time, you want to show the change in temperature over time.
For me it looks on a first look like a 2/3 decline and this is misleading. Often this decling graphs give an optical picture that does not reflect real decline.
It is not helpful in general. Magnitude and relative changes are different things. Sometimes you need one, and sometimes you need the other.
Global average temperatures are a good example: where is the zero? Is it significant? The effects of an increase or decrease of 0.5°C are massive, so the appropriate way of presenting this is to show the temperature anomaly, not the absolute temperature. Also, this way the information is conveyed regardless of the temperature scale in use.
The religiosity graph is interesting. If you want to show a sudden change at some point, then showing the relative change is appropriate. If you want to show that people are not religious anymore using this graph, then you are dishonest. It is all about the narrative and the point you want to make.
On its face, “scales must go to zero” is not good advice, because you can always change the variable so you can make anything go to zero without changing the shape of the curve and our perception. However, when we see a graph, then we always need to understand why it goes to zero or not, what the author is trying to show, and whether they are being honest about it
"global average temperatures are a good example: where is the zero?"
I don't know.
"The average surface temperature on Earth is approximately 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius), according to NASA"
But I know if the average temperature increased 0.5 degree C and I show a graph with the scale 14 to 16 degrees over time and the headline "world average surface temperature exploding" then this is excellent clickbait and a nice graph, but it is misleading on the first look.
I remember the moment I decided to be a vimmer. I was in my first systems class in college, looking for advice. A senior asked me if I knew how to use vim, and with a few flicks of his wrists, split his screen into halves, quarters. I was sold.
I still wonder about what I encountered in that moment - a kind of honesty and stubbornness to build something true, universal, empowering. The restraint and confidence it takes, then, to present it as a blank canvas for all to build on.
Because vim exists, I know it is possible to build in that spirit; I will always strive to do so myself.
Thanks for trying it out! I'd love to hear more - we use auth0's login UX, thought it would be a smooth experience for most. Did you want to try without signing up? I understand the frustration... but we made it work this way so we can store designs under the customer's account, so they can view it later.
Honestly just an obvious way to get out of the login dialogue would've made the experience different. I am excited about this idea but when I went and got stuck in that login screen after clicking customize, before even trying to scan the QR code, I was discouraged and left. Appreciate your response!
Being able to try it without signing up would be cool but I'm not here to tell you how to run your business I just didn't like the pattern that got me stuck staring at a black screen with a white sign up box in the middle and wouldn't let me do anything else.
Really appreciate your feedback. I think customizing the auth0 login page is out of our reach at the moment... but we addressed the other parts of your feedback :) you should be able to use the customize page without having to log in.
(we did change the background color of the login page, you're right that the black background didn't fit in with the rest of our website)
We'd love to hear more from you - don't hesitate to reach out directly, my email is in my bio.
Thanks for your feedback! As I mentioned in the other comment, we've removed the login wall so you can freely try the tool.
And yes - the end result is simple :) but there's more to it than meets the eye. In any case, from what we can tell, there's no other online QR generators offering something like this at the moment... So we wanted to put this out there and see if people find a way to make it useful.
False dichotomy; descriptive names can and should be cute, if you're willing to spice them with a bit of analogy and/or irony. Problem is that most corporate programmers lack personality (and punk spirit, tbh), and use names as a way to make their code appear "compliant," (boring)
deflecting attention and scrutiny from their work.
> whether it is really just your body, or whether it is two bodies
Not really. That’s a pseudo-philosophical framing that anti-abortionists prefer, because it hides the real world consequence of their little thought experiment: forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies, and to raise unwanted children.
“One vs two body” is little more than semantics. Fact is, carrying pregnancies and raising the resulting child is the heaviest burden that a citizen can ever carry for the state. The state has no way to adequately compensate the citizen for such service, so instead they offer the freedom of choice. That’s the implicit social contract behind abortion policies; it’s got nothing to do with anyone’s metaphysical interpretation of a pregnant woman’s anatomy.
