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
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
I took this class last year. Although it was nice to see undergraduates instructing the class, the lack of teaching experience really showed: the students were pretty rough around the edges in terms of their examples and explanations. About 2/3rds of classes ended early (at least this is better than heavily wasted time). This somewhat fits in with the unofficial caltech policy of "figuring out the finer details on your own".
That said, I thought the practical nature of the class was a refreshing switch from the heavily theoretical foundation of my other CS coursework experiences.
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...