I think the most interesting "escape the simulation" hypothetical is That Alien Message [1]
But +1 to Worth the Candle which was excellent.
Given your taste in literature, do you have any other recommendations? I'll put forward the Expanse series which has some interesting takes on solar system level politics mixed into the sci-fi, plus the best twist I've ever seen about halfway into the series
This article raises some awesome points. As a founder who is going through a seed round right now, I'm working hard to optimize our own fundraising process. Aaron refers to a plethora of resources for effective fundraising, but it's often hard to identify experts from rabble.
Has anyone already curated a list of quality resources? I would be greatly appreciative!
Cool, thanks Aaron. I feel like we've been carried on the backs of YC SUS videos for some time, but this startup library is far more organized than what I've seen before.
I echo your sentiment, by the way: thus far, fundraising on good terms is turning out to be far easier than we expected - is it possible that low interest rates from the fed are making it easier for investors to get money? If so, we may expect this trend to continue for a few years, as the fed has committed to keeping rates low for some time.
I expected your link to take me to a page that contained a simple list.
I also assumed that trypaper.io was the domain for a note-taking app called Paper, and that you were intending to link to one of your pages on that service. :)
...
Please forgive me for leveraging my confusion, for which I take full responsiblity, into a critique of your page design, but in the hopes that something here might be constructive...
I would have been less confused if the page headline was static instead of rotating/frequently incomplete due to animation/"difficult" to read. Something like "Financing your SaaS" would seem to cover all cases, maybe with a rotating subtitle without the backspacing animation so that the full content of each entry could be read in a glance?
Also the background of white with a pattern of pale blue dots made me think "note paper/note-taking app". The domain name makes sense for this also, but it was the background that forced the idea to front of mind.
Again, I'm sure this is a me thing and not a you thing -- but if others exhibit similar confusion, that's my best guess as to the cause.
...Now I will read the content on the site. Thanks for humoring me.
[edit] It's a bit dated, but the points and lessons are timeless. The 'norm' has changed (SAFEs are more common over convertible notes now, for example), but the rest is still accurate.
Awesome, going through it right now and learning a ton. Dated? Sure, but How To Win Friends And Influence People is still bang-on, and it was written almost a century ago. I really appreciate the recommendation!
Nah, your concerns are 100% reasonable - they just operate on a different context. On Earth, latency is king. On Mars, especially until the Primary Mission is complete, it's all about risk mitigation. Since we're light-minutes away from Earth, a few frames of latency is nothing. At the same time, you want to avoid breaking your $3B machine, which is hard to operate given the time-of-light delay and comms limitations. Just a different set of tradeoffs. IIRC they first tested on-device deep learning for hazard avoidance in Curiosity, but don't quote me on that.
-Worked at JPL for a few years and have dozens of friends, a few in the vision system.
As a radio-astronomer:
1. Well, few radio-telescopes have instantaneous bandwidth as wide as a factor of 12 -- they are usually optimal on a narrow region, and therefore hoping that another group with instruments optimized for lower/higher frequencies will do the job
2. Lower frequencies require larger antennas to achieve useful gain. It is more likely that they would go higher than 500 MHz vs lower. Also, dispersion (correctable with a position solve) and scattering (not correctable) eventually become problems with low enough frequencies and long enough distances
3. If we observe at the wrong frequencies, it will most likely not show up. RF filtering and antenna response will ensure that.
SAR generally relies on assumptions that your target is not changing. I question how well it would work in a complicated environment like a road scene. In my opinion, the single-shot nature of LIDAR is more robust. But its possible that SAR techniques have advanced since my work in it 3 years ago.
They are taking advantage of nonlinear properties in the microphone system, as described clearly in the article. There is no software filtering to protect against this using classical signal processing.
That said, it may be possible to detect the difference between human speech and the ultrasonic trick with a machine learning solution.
The thing is, this is creating harmonic vibrations in the membrane at human speech frequencies. I really don't think you need to go with ML. It seems to me that if you remove the LPF, let the ADC access all the frequencies, then (either in the ADC or in software) detect the harmonics and ignore those with an ultrasound source.
Wouldn't it go through a bandpass filter to remove the ultrasonics before it makes it to the ADC? I thought that was common with DACs to reduce aliasing issues.
This is precisely the difference from regular programming: Our code is typically going to be used by a very small number of people, and the inputs are typically very well constrained. It's typically faster to just call up the new prospective user and explain the code than to triple your development time making it rock solid.
For instance, I'm currently working on a project where I have to process 110 GB/s of radio data aggregated from 288 antennas. The data will need intensive cleaning after, so plenty of thought is put into logging the right statistics (since we have to average for 3 months to get the right data). This is where the real effort is being applied.
However, if there happens to be a missing edge case or malformed data packet, I can (and will) just cronjob a (if process hung, pkill and restart) the processor with the next bit of realtime data. Anyone who wants to reuse the algorithm will need our exact same antennas and specialized computing hardware, so why make it portable?
> they need to drive for hours and hours on end, instead of just 5-45minutes
If you assume that whatever vehicle considered is being driven near full-duty-cycle, the total amount of time is roughly conserved (perhaps autonomous vehicles will get 2x-3x utilization per day, for better or worse)
You could create a system, potentially using truck stops or in some way your own infrastructure, which is a docking point for autonomous vehicles. At these locations, human drivers pick up and drop off the otherwise autonomous vehicles, allowing humans to take the burden of the difficult portion of driving, while computers handle the boring part of driving. Of course, you would have to place similar stops every (80% of a tank of gas, measured in distance), as well for refueling. Naturally, this idea has a dozen holes at the moment and would need to be improved to be viable.
But +1 to Worth the Candle which was excellent.
Given your taste in literature, do you have any other recommendations? I'll put forward the Expanse series which has some interesting takes on solar system level politics mixed into the sci-fi, plus the best twist I've ever seen about halfway into the series
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...