It seems I'm in a minority thinking this is not that great... wind can blow the hat (or the thing from the generalized idea) into traffic, or onto a baby, or any other place to upset people. Also, if the recipient can't/doesn't pick the thing up, then it's littering. From the technical perspective finding heads in a video is not that impressive nowadays... So, I don't get all the excitement...
Case in point - my friends wanted to imbibe a certain white powder with alcohol and I had to let them know that it is magnitudes more toxic to take them together. Did they have a less fun time? Probably. But I won't have their premature deaths on my conscience.
So, now we're comparing a hat dropping one or two stories to overdosing on a combination of drugs and alcohol?
It'd be nice if we could all just chill the hell out and let someone's fun, stupid, kinda pointless project just be someone's fun, stupid, kinda pointless project.
Edit: I don't mind the downvotes, but do feel free to tell me if I'm off base for thinking comparing this project to overdosing is a hell of a stretch.
I was responding with an anecdote to the comment that sometimes it's important to communicate concerns, even if it means being a killjoy. Didn't mean for it to sound like I was trying to equate the AI hat-dropper to potentially overdosing, just a recent occurrence that I was reminded of when I saw the parent comment.
Imagine walking (or in this case, standing around) on a sidewalk just going about your business. Then, imagine something drops on your head, literally out of the blue. In a city littered with scaffolding designed to prevent pedestrians being injured by stuff dropping from buildings. Further, imagine you are easily scared and/or have a weak heart. So, I think it's not a huge stretch to say that, with enough unlucky coincidences, this also might kill someone.
I think it'd almost certainly eventually kill someone with a pacemaker and a weak heart.
(Or maybe cause someone to take a sudden step away from the sidewalk)
(I wonder if the title is a bit clickbait and the hat dropper in fact tries out this new tech only on friends who are prepared already, not random strangers?)
> Here a busy New Yorker can book a 5 minute time slot, pay for a hat, stand in a spot under my window for 3 seconds, have a hat put on their head, and get on with their extremely important, extemely busy day
Ok. And after all, such nice hats are a bit expensive I guess (since they also function as helicopters).
I don't think he was making that comparison. I think this he was more referring to the mentality of "you must be fun at parties" whenever someone speaks up with some concerns about an idea.
Drinking alcohol is almost certainly more dangerous than dropping hats.
This is not even close.
Heck, pick any one negative impact of drinking alcohol at parties (impaired driving, or long term health effects, or impaired judgment, etc) and that individual impact would probably be orders of magnitude worse than the total negative impact of dropping hats.
Now obviously having a hat land on a windshield and actually block visibility would be worse, but catching something falling out of the edge of your vision especially something odd like a falling hat would easily qualify.
It’s also distracting pedestrians and so likely to result in other injuries.
So, you're an expert in hat related deaths? I fail to see how rattling off irrelevant statistics makes you "informed". Still not a single reference to hat related deaths, the topic of our debate!
Clearly you don’t want to see, but you lost the argument anyway.
Some basic advice, if you don’t want to come off as a fool try actually responding to an agreement as presented. You may still lose, but at least it doesn’t look like you’re hiding.
I’m not hiding from anything! You presented an argument (a hat falling from the sky will kill you) and then have been spouting irrelevant nonsense!
I suspect that, if the notion of a hat falling 20 feet out of a window terrifies you this much, you’ve probably not engaged much with real people or the world around you, such that I wouldn’t really have expected anything different. Glad I was not wrong!
Yet, again demonstrating you didn’t understand even the title of the article. As you clearly failed to read there in an ‘s’ at the end of “hats” at the top of the article. In this context that s means repeated hat drops.
Summing up for a simple mind. Research shows falling hats distract people. Article showing intersection means drivers would get distracted. Research showed distracting drivers risks killing someone else.
So with multiple events each risking killing someone taking place risk gasp increases.
PS: It’s also illegal, but that’s a secondary concern.
> Yet, again demonstrating you didn’t understand even the title of the article. As you clearly failed to read there in an ‘s’ at the end of “hats” at the top of the article. In this context that s means repeated hat drops.
Imagine being on the sidewalk and someone just hucks a hat at your head, how would that feel? More than a little alarming for many, I should think.
How is it not clear that it's inappropriate to be violating others' personal space without their consent and without warning, to force clothing upon them no less?
Eh, it's cute and I seriously doubt he is using this when not at home since it is a single use device.
But also I am shocked that there is a New Yorker that would pick up a hat from the street and put it on their head. My first thought would be, "how much lice is in this thing?"
Exactly my thoughts. I dont want anything being dropped on me when I am riding my bike or walking with an infant in a stroller. But I am hoping the guy did this just to solve problems and not actually dropping hats on others.
"Here a busy New Yorker *can book a 5 minute time slot*, pay for a hat, stand in a spot under my window for 3 seconds, have a hat put on their head, and get on with their extremely important, extemely busy day all within a single New York minute."
Strange perspective, it's not like they make employees wear them around the office, it's more so a message that you're new and it's ok, relax and take your time to onboard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wrong, errors should not go unnoticed, let alone helping them to propagate. Cascading effects should be kept on a short leash. System takes one step in the wrong direction, kill it. The two most miserable things are, things not happening and there's no feedback on why, and, the other extreme, when things are overengineered and no one can predict where problems might cascade to.
It's hilarious, Chen has been doing this right - on the bleeping internets for all to see - for thirty years and we've greenhorns going "Nah, mate, you're doing it wrong."
Get another job first, only then quit this one (then it doesn't matter if u pay them, in the grand scheme of things). Best case you find one. Worst case you don't, then you still have this paying your bills, be happy about it.
Yes. Also, back then in the offline-ish times people shipped working software. Nowadays stuff is huge, slow, craps out all the time, and the risk of stuff breaking with a next update is comparable to the security risks of turning off updates completely.
Everyone used pirated software, Bill still got rich, software developers did make a living, and software prices did not cripple companies. Good old times.
So then don't torture students by making them write long essays and waste their valuable time. Make it the task expressing the argument on a back of a napkin. More thought, less time wasted on writing text-amount. Also less of the teacher's time wasted, do they really read 100x student 3 pages, weekly? Don't they have anything better to do?
Word counts in essays in my experience are maximums not minimums.
For an advanced student writing about sufficiently complex topic, the challenge is to develop an argument in less than 5000 words, rather than to reach 5000 words.
And there is a big difference between writing an outline (which is valuable and important!) and actually expressing those ideas fully. The latter forces you to clarify your ideas much more precisely - which is a really valuable experience in exploring and understanding the details of a topic.
This assumes that the student places the class and knowledge (and writing effort) high in their list of priorities. I'd imagine that the people who are enticed to use an AI solution for writing an essay would have otherwise found writing it way down on their list of desires and would therefore be using many of the tried-and-true tricks to pad out their work.
Well sure, if a student doesn't engage meaningfully with the essay and just writes a load of waffle to fill the word count, they won't learn as much and they'll get a bad mark.
In that case sure, the whole exercise is kind of a waste of time, but you could say that about basically any educational method surely? You can take a horse to water and all that...
It's not fair to assume that's what this teacher asks of their students. Word minimums may be useful for children as a crude deterrent against laziness, but any serious student or teacher would recognize a good essay when they see one, no matter the length (though fitting a good and interesting essay on the back of a napkin would be almost unthinkably prolific).
"I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal
A word count is also a signal to the student of what level of depth the teacher is hoping for.
For most interesting questions you could write anything between a few sentences and a full book, depending on how much you develop and defend your arguments, evaluate other possible answers, etc.
The word count is a signal on where on that spectrum you should be aiming.
If we see Pascal's quote as a pretext, it could be used to justify writing longer texts, even when brevity is possible and appropriate. However, by interpreting the quote as a genuine apology for the length of his letter, we can recognize the importance of clarity and conciseness in communication, and strive to make our own messages as clear and concise as possible. This highlights the importance of interpreting someone's words in the right context, and not using them to justify behaviors or attitudes that are not aligned with the speaker's true intentions. By being mindful of how we interpret others' words, we can avoid misunderstandings and communicate more effectively.
Yes, it is a gray wall, a building of formal structure of literature.
In the end, it is a tool - education system, academia, not chatGPT- , what we see is representation.
For current -common- attention span, it is way too long.
For current perception of speed of time, it is very expensive.
Can we complain ?
Tool that we shape.
We may just need to change the representation.
