No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res" where the story starts at a heightened moment of tension, then abruptly stops and rewinds to go back to fill in details of how they got to this exciting moment.
Sometimes it's done to great effect, like in Fight Club (film starts with him at the climax with a gun in his mouth, then rewinds and tells the story).
However, it is often used as a clumsy device by novice writers. They use it to get the audience to stick around for their mostly boring story.
I see this a lot on Youtube. The Youtuber will start with a compelling question and story, like "There he was... tied to the wall as he watched the firing squad load their weapons with gun powder.... But before we continue our story, what is gun powder? Well, it's composed of potassium nitrate, blah, blah, blah...."
You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited for the detour, then it's done well. If instead it feels like a long annoying interruption you want to skip, then it's done poorly.
For me, it's done poorly in this article. I read the first compelling section, then the writer slows everything down to a snail's pace to go into some very dry history of NASA without ever really giving a good payoff to the story he opened with.
"In medias res" vs "longform" is an important distinction, as you've highlighted. As the parent commented, a lot of this has to do with how we frame the article via the title. The title sets the expectation for the article. In this case, it provides a misleading ethos for discerning audiences.
But the title was not "This is what happened to Taylor Wang". It's about a general question. His particular case was just the opener. The rest of the article tells what's promised in the title, not what you maybe expected when hoping to read about the story of a single person.
I watched Dumb Money (2023) last night and it starts this same way. It was completely unnecessary, was done in a confusing way, and this plot device didn't add anything to enhance the excitement of the story. A completely linear plot would have been just fine, especially since everyone knows the story gets more interesting (even from the trailer alone). In fact, the interesting part of the story that most people don't know is the beginning... how it all started before it was exciting.
It was still an entertaining movie, so I wouldn't let this one poor choice deter anyone.
Purely subjectively, I find it way more egregious and annoying on Youtube (because YT won't monetize shorter articles) and less convenient to skim past if you don't like the structure of the video.
You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or
poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited
for the detour, then it's done well
I was a maybe little frustrated here, but we already know the ending of the story, right? The guy did return from space. The guy did not open the hatch and kill the crew. Pretty sure we'd all remember that.
So with that in mind I thought the detour into "what brought this dude to the point where he was refusing commands from Mission Control" was quite welcome.
>"I see this a lot on Youtube. The Youtuber will start with a compelling question and story, like "There he was... tied to the wall as he watched the firing squad load their weapons with gun powder.... But before we continue our story, what is gun powder? Well, it's composed of potassium nitrate, blah, blah, blah...."
It gets even worse. Looking for answer to particular question and hits the video that claims to have it. Let's say concise answer is 5 words. The video is 30 minutes long with those 5 words spaced evenly throughout.
History and flashback are not equivalent terms. Most history books do not open with a dramatic moment at a critical juncture of [historical event] and then flip back and forth between the lead-up and the dramatic moment to maintain narrative tension. This is sensationalism; it's literally designed to keep you on the edge of your seat.
And no, Homer does not use this technique in the Iliad, other than brief verbal allusions back to the original cause of the Trojan war. The Iliad starts in the middle of the conflict, but doesn't repeatedly skip the narrative backward in time; the plot is linear and the the dramatic tension comes from wondering if/when the champion warrior Achilles is going to stop sulking over a perceived insult and rejoin his army to fend off the Trojans.
> No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res"
This is like saying: This is not simply a mug, this is porcelain. Narrative and narrative technique are two different things, just like the function of an object is different thing than the material of the object.
It's also probably just a hook, not a full "in media res".
Yes, but helping these people save face smoothes the transition. My guess is that those folks were waaay out of their depth and they naturally made naive mistakes. It doesn't benefit anyone to stomp on them. I'm sure they learned hard lessons, and Sam's message is what we call "grace", which is classy.
Is it politics? Sure, but only in the best sense. By not dunking on the losers, he builds trust and opens the doors for others to work with him. If you work with Sam and make a mistake, he's not going to blast you. It's one reason that there was such a rallying of support around Sam, because he's a bridge-builder, not a bridge-burner. Over time, those bridges add up.
Silicon Valley has a long memory and people will be working with each other for decades. Forgiving youthful mistakes is a big part of why the culture works so well.
They may have been way out of their depth but they also may have been the only ones taking their roles somewhat seriously. They've now been shown what the true balance of power is like and that is a lesson they are probably not going to forget. Unfortunately they also threw away the one shot they had at managing this and for that their total contribution goes from net positive to net negative. I don't think that in a break-the-glass scenario it would have gone any different but they were there for the ride to see how their main role was a performative one rather than an actual one and it must have been a very rude awakening to come to realize this.
It would be poetic justice if the new board fires Sam Altman next week, given the amount of drama so far I am not sure if I would be surprised or not.
Reminder: B2 is great for backups, but is not good for production assets that you expect to be available 24/7. They have a weekly maintenance window on Thursday for an hour. It often doesn't involve an outage, but sometimes it does. You need to account for that in your production planning.
ZFS on Linux has improved a lot in the last few years. We (prematurely) moved to using it in production for our MySQL data about 5 years ago and initially it was a nightmare due to unexplained stalling which would hang MySQL for 15-30 minutes at random times. I'm sure it shortened my life a few years trying to figure out what was wrong when everything was on fire. Fortunately, they have resolved those issues in the subsequent releases and it's been much more pleasant after that.
I'm one of the many who hadn't heard of Traefic until MRSK mentioned it. The marketing seems very (overly?) targetted at cloud microservices and container-specific tech[1]. Is that just marketing, or is it really not a good fit for monoliths on bare-metal?
[1] https://github.com/traefik/traefik
"Traefik (pronounced traffic) is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components (Docker, Swarm mode, Kubernetes, Consul, Etcd, Rancher v2, Amazon ECS, ...) and configures itself automatically and dynamically. Pointing Traefik at your orchestrator should be the only configuration step you need."
For aviation noobs (like me) wondering how low the balloon would have to be in order for a helicopter to be an option for retrieval:
"The maximum altitude which can be reached during forward flight typically depends on the ability of the engine to breathe the thinner air rather than the rotor's ability to provide lift. Turbine-engine helicopters can reach around 25,000 feet (7,620 meters). But the maximum height at which a helicopter can hover is much lower - a high performance helicopter can hover at 10,400 feet (3,170 meters)."
Is the one on mars able to operate with really thin air because mars has less gravity?
A "balloon retrieval bot" using battery powered propulsion, launched by another platform such as a rocket (or another balloon!) might be a fun thing for someone at raytheon to pitch.
> The planet's atmospheric density is about 1⁄100 that of Earth's at sea level, or about the same as 87,000 ft (27,000 m), an altitude never reached by existing helicopters. This density reduces even more in Martian winters. To keep Ingenuity aloft, its specially shaped blades of enlarged size must rotate between 2400 and 2900 rpm, or about 10 times faster than what is needed on Earth.
Of course that helps, but the whole design was made for it. It's dual rotors were designed for the environment, and rotate at 2500 rpm+ vs 500rpm for a normal helicopter.
Wow. There seems to be 2 main responses to this. 1) Sadness and depression or 2) Excitement and possibility
I really expected this thread to be more of #2 since historically Hacker News has been full of ambitious founders and founder-like engineers.
The great leaps in automation, especially with the recent AI developments is any founder's dream. To be able to go faster with less friction than ever to create something valuable for the world. Now this is within reach of even more people.
It's an amazing time - for those who choose to see the possibilities.
We can't and will never have a world with 8 billion distinct businesses that all have zero employees each. So it's nice that you think you might have a shot at a tiny lottery, but personally, I like to see trends that can benefit all of humanity, not just those who choose to start businesses.
Nothing against automation itself, but the idea that it means all of the value of a business can and should accrue to a single person I take issue with. It doesn't matter how evenly spread the probability that a randomly chosen person can become a successful founder is, or what my personal probability is. The total number of such people is necessarily capped at a very small number, and there is nothing to celebrate about at the idea of a future where only a very small number of people can ever enjoy the wealth created by automation.
HN suffers from a higher than average amounts of narcissism when it comes to being "Temporarily depressed millionaires" when thinking they will be the ones at the top of the pyramid. The few here that are near the top of the pyramid seem to forget that their high position tend to forget that position is supported by the base below them and if they don't perform maintenance on the base the entire thing collapses.
Humanity is built on societies and we must treat it so by ensuring we produce wealth and distribute, not extract wealth and horde it.
"no thanks I'm actually going to go produce something of value"
I mean, being a janitor and cleaning the restroom is something of value, though by your attitude I highly doubt you're going to be that useful.
There is a high possibly of me being correct if I was thinking your 'something of value' was "Producing a product and then funding ever increasing lobbying to increase profitable rent seeking behaviors"
On Wireguard's homepage[1] it says "[Wireguard] is even capable of roaming between IP addresses, just like Mosh. There is no need to manage connections, be concerned about state, manage daemons, or worry about what's under the hood."
Has anyone been using Wireguard as a successful Mosh replacement? Would love to hear your experience.
It kinda works, but mosh reconnects on failure regardless of how long time has passed. Since WG is a layer below, the TCP connection eventually gets reset. It is a huge difference. Also mosh works around lag by local echo, no such thing in WG.
If I'm expecting echo, it does not add anything useful to my experience. I'm not waiting for every typed character to appear on my screen before I type next one.
If I'm expecting data from the server (say I'm searching through shell history), it might even make my experience worse because of flickering between local and then remote state.
I'm regularly working with 100-200 ms latency servers where latency is noticeable. Improving my perceptual latency was never something I want.
Better approach is to use client/server software. Like vscode. Of course it's out of capabilities of terminal emulator and rather requires full rethinking of the entire shell architecture. But at least it would be meaningful improvement. Like I'm typing first character in shell history search, server transfers all 100 matched lines to the client and now my client can further filter this list without any server hops.
It doesn't really fully replace mosh since it doesn't do any of the perceptual lag reduction, but I do use SSH over Wireguard and it is fairly stable. It can indeed survive roaming.
I use ZNC over wireguard and it works fairly well! I can travel in the car with my phone connected to IRC, roam from my home WiFi to the cellular network and back without disconnecting from ZNC! It even works pretty well when cellular service is spotty.
This isn't quite what you asked but I think it's relevant!
Try looking at options ServerAliveInterval and TCPKeepAlive, they should prevent SSH from detecting when there's temporary transport issues and persist when wireguard roams between IPs.
'Replicated' has been doing SaaS setups locally (on-premise) for a few years and I've heard good things (though haven't used them myself): https://www.replicated.com/
This has been a life-long challenge - in a good way. Whenever I feel boredom approaching, I try to change the situation or come up with a more creative way of viewing the moment. Not always successful, but it's a good practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res
Sometimes it's done to great effect, like in Fight Club (film starts with him at the climax with a gun in his mouth, then rewinds and tells the story).
However, it is often used as a clumsy device by novice writers. They use it to get the audience to stick around for their mostly boring story.
I see this a lot on Youtube. The Youtuber will start with a compelling question and story, like "There he was... tied to the wall as he watched the firing squad load their weapons with gun powder.... But before we continue our story, what is gun powder? Well, it's composed of potassium nitrate, blah, blah, blah...."
You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited for the detour, then it's done well. If instead it feels like a long annoying interruption you want to skip, then it's done poorly.
For me, it's done poorly in this article. I read the first compelling section, then the writer slows everything down to a snail's pace to go into some very dry history of NASA without ever really giving a good payoff to the story he opened with.