A bit dystopian turning people into a taxi-like system where you need an indicator to tell if they are vacant or not.
Regardless, I'm struggling to know the audience here. Is it an employee in the office? If that’s the case, it won’t solve any problem because most of the disturbances happen from your boss either calling about something or asking you to join another useless meeting. Your boss won’t care about your status simply because they won’t be collocated in the same office as you most of the time (not that they care about your online status anyway). For colleagues, after the first month or so, everyone will pretty much find the best way to approach others. If you still need a device for that, then there’s a problem in communication that you need a persistent device all the time. At home, you won’t need such a thing. So I don’t know who will find it useful; it looks gimmicky.
What’s next, a hat that will turn a green light telling people you are approachable or in the chatting mode, and red when you are not?!
After reading the page, it seems clear it is akin to a recording studio busy signal, well-trodden territory predating computers, and marketed for video conferencing. Neither without target audience, nor a sigil of the fall of interhuman cooperation and communication :)
You have not said what the market is. Recording studios have a solution. And probably don't use pomedero. And the reason for the indicator I assume is to stop people barging in and stop people saying silly stuff thinking their off air so it needs to be inside and outside the room.
Hmm, you sure? I checked OP, it says "marketed for video conferencing"
> Recording studios have a solution.
Okay.
> And probably don't use pomedero.
*pomodoro
> And the reason for the indicator I assume is to stop people barging in and stop people saying silly stuff thinking their off air so it needs to be inside and outside the room.
Okay.
> So who is this device for again?
Video conferencing, ex. the above scenario you laid out
> I'm curious, I'm not just rushing through an attempt to correct something that doesn't need correction. How do they envision it in use?
Here's a link to the site, it has marketing material re: this. https://busy.bar/
For context, we are replying to a comment putting that marketing into question. Therefore the "RTFA" card is not in your deck to play. (I say with a tongue in cheek tone: no flamewar intended!)
In particular GP said:
> For colleagues, after the first month or so, everyone will pretty much find the best way to approach others. If you still need a device for that, then there’s a problem in communication that you need a persistent device all the time.
I think I agree. Back in 2003 my boss said "when my headset is on I am busy". He had to remind everyone a few times. But that worked.
Reductio ad absurdum: If its for recording studios, fine. If not, get off my lawn, its just reinventing having a conversation.
It's telling that both obstinate refusals to not understand what its for end up on unrelated stories about bosses. Let's call it PHB derangement syndrome.
It never seemed likely it was that confusing, it's pretty hard to have been alive from 2020-2024 and claim that there's never any reason for anyone to know anyone else is on a video call. I guess I'm lucky I can take out my Monday scaries via pointing out the obvious, it'd suck to be on the other side and have to pretend I'm stupid.
You're thinking grandiosely. It's pretty simple situation thats different from that one.
No one's trying to lay claim to if this individual product "becomes Dropbox", and you're not saying you can build it in a weekend, which is the comment you're referring to.
I think you may be swapping in a bailey of "oh we're arguing about whether this will be "successful"" because the motte of "what is this for, it can't work!?" was obviously stupid, as you've ceded.
The original ftp dropbox comment was about usefulness rather than success IMO. They were saying why is this needed.
With the conraption here. It is not useless, sure, but that is not a high enough bar to use resources to manufacture it or for there to be a market for it. Other than someone mentioned geek consumerism.
Yes, it's so horrible, just like the on air signs in audio recording rooms from the 1920s are very dystopian, so bad. It's not like everyone is working from home now.
It should supplement and facilitate improved office dynamics and less interruptions rather than supplant interaction with proscribed, transactionalized objectification of people. Not everything more efficient should or has to be dystopian.
Your iPhone doesn't even really store your biometric information, it stores mathematical models that can be used to check whether the fingerprint (Touch ID) or face (Face ID) matches the person who enrolled on the device (you).
And that mathematical information is only stored in the Secure Enclave, which means even if the entire Operating System (iOS) is hacked, the attacker still would not have access to your biometric information.
That doesn't mean sharing them online with whoever buys the data is good... Every time I change my clothes at the gym I'm fully naked, I wouldn't want that to be showed on live TV, it's really not that hard of a nuance to grasp
True, but the analogy is far from fitting. Your nudity is shared with people in the gym, your biometrics is shared with anyone that has access to anything you ever touched. Your nude picture being shown on TV isn't the same as you-and-15-other-million nude pictures being shown on TV, and while sending your nude photo to your boss can be harmful, it's hard to think about what harm can be caused by sending your DNA to... anyone.
> In Australia, life insurance companies can legally use the results of genetic tests to discriminate. They can decline to provide life insurance coverage, increase the cost of premiums, or place exclusions on an individual’s cover.
Yes, in meat space. You can't relate that meat space data to anything meaningful unless your DNA is also in some database.
This is how they found the Golden State Killer. He left some DNA in the 70s. Worthless for a long time. But, a third cousin of his did a DNA test with a company, and the company provided the data to law enforcement, and they worked backwards to the killer.
Yes, but most people aren't following me around with a plastic bag to grab that biometric data. And if someone were, I'd get pretty paranoid about what they're trying to do with it.
Perhaps the reason why people aren't following you with a plastic bag is exactly because it is worthless? Sounds to me like if it wasn't, someone would have been following you. 23andme didn't follow anyone around — people sent it to them — and that doesn't make the data valuable all of a sudden.
It seems like a year ago 23andme was hacked and almost 7 million records were leaked. Wikipedia doesn't list one case of someone being affected by it. Was this kind of data ever used to harm someone? It sounds to me like we're just speculating.
Made my own company that provides services and consultations in drones, robotics, and even cybersecurity. Very slow business at this stage, if someone is in the same field or went through the same stage, any tips are welcome.
Wow, and you don’t do anything productive for a year and you think you wasted your life... absolutely cruel. Even if he were released today, he would need another 15 years of therapy.
I have always wondered if quantum entanglement is the scientific explanation of why when you start thinking of someone (or stop thinking) suddenly they just text you.
It can't possibly be true. Such an idea presupposes there are particles in your body that are entangled with particles in someone else's body. Even setting aside that there would need to be vast biological machinery to suck up and put those particles in a useful place and that the particles would need to be able to interface with your physiology such that they are capable of activating neurons, the phenomenon wouldn't exist for people who have never met face to face.
If there's a non-psychological explanation for the phenomenon you're describing, it's not quantum entanglement, it's an entirely new kind of science that we have yet to contemplate.
It's a big chunk of confirmation bias (you don't remember all the times when that doesn't happen) and all sorts of less obvious behavioral correlations, like, if you tend to talk to someone weekly, and it's been a week since the last time, it wouldn't be surprising to have them reaching out to you around the same time you're thinking of them.
I think this also holds up with how ad tracking aims to hoover up all sorts of data to find correlations. There are probably a lot of non-obvious correlations in there, which causes ads to sometimes eerily seem to read minds. These same correlations may cause people to exhibit very similar thoughts without needing to invoke quantum entanglement.
Answering in case this is not humor: no, it isn't.
From the top of my head, quantum entanglement is something:
1/ that happens at quantum level, so typically with measurable effects on a scale smaller than one atom (way smaller than one neuron);
2/ that requires specific operations on a specific group of particles (the probability that such entangled particles end up in two different brains of related people is infinitesimal);
3/ that requires many measures to confirm – and you can only do so once per group of particles (so it would not be sufficient to have two entangled particles one in each brain, you'd probably need tens of thousands).
I think once we fully understand consciousness (and physics in general) at a deeper level, then not all, but a very large amount of stuff that was previously labeled as "magical thinking", "ghosts", "telepathy", etc will turn out to have been not only real but perfectly explainable by science.
Of course I'll now be slammed for "woo woo" unscientific thinking as is always the case on HN, when someone who "knows all" encounters someone who doesn't.
I won't speak for all of HN but I simply don't like low effort comments. Jokes like this are cheap and exist everywhere online. I come to HN to learn and discuss. I don't down vote an informative post with a joke tacked on, but one like this just lowers the information density and is a time waster.
Nope. That is coincidence paired with statistical priors. If you have certain relationships to people it is not unlikely that they would think: "I should text" in periods that overlap with you thinking a similar thing.
My idiots understanding of quantum entaglement is that if you take two boxes A and B, and each gets either a plus or a minus stored in them and then those boxes get sent galaxies away from each other, the moment you open either of the boxes and see a plus in it, you know that the other box by necessity has minus in it - even if it's very far apart.
This simple observation is something physicists have hard time wrapping their head around for some reason. The reason I suspect being that it clashes with their religious beliefs about free will and whatnot.
Except that experiments have ruled out hidden variables. (Go read about Bell inequalities.)
> something physicists have hard time wrapping their head around for some reason
The problem is that it's fundamentally different from anything you can do in classical mechanics. And because of that, attempts to explain it in simple terms with casual language are doomed. And attempts to take shortcuts in reasoning by analogizing it to something from everyday life are doomed.
> Except that experiments have ruled out hidden variables. (Go read about Bell inequalities.)
Nobel Prize in physics 2022
“for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”
To some extent, that is in fact how entanglement works. In fact, if you perform a Bell-style experiment exactly like this (with the two measurements in the two galaxies along the same axis), you'll get this same un-interesting result. The problem is that it works like more than this too.
Say you have two billiard balls on a very very large table with almost no friction. One ball is stationery, the other is moving towards it and spinning along some axis. When they collide, they'll be sent along some random directions and each with some spin, and their spins are going to add up to the original spin of the moving ball (angular momentum is conserved in frictionless interactions in classical mechanics too). Now, when the ball arrive at a long distance away from each other, two experimenters which can't see the balls measure their spin. They each choose some direction and measure how much their ball spins along that direction. They repeat the experiment lots of times, keeping good track of each individual result.
When they later compare notes, they'll measure how much their respective results for each individual experiment were correlated. Since they were measuring along different axis, they didn't both see the exact same result: maybe for the ball that reached one was spinning at one revolution along the 45° axis every two seconds, and the other was spinning at half a revolution along the 1° axis every second. Ultimately, they'll find that the correlation between their experiments was about 75% (each time they measure along unrelated axis, they get no correlation, when they happen to measure along the exact same axis, they get perfect correlation, and when it's in between, it's some subset of that).
However, if we repeat the same thing with quantum particles, we actually find a higher correlation, about 85%. This can only happen if (a) measuring one particle changes the other - and we've quickly ruled out that this can happen at slower than light speeds, or (b) the particle pair don't share a definite state to begin with, but assume an appropriate state only when they are measured [or (c) the axis chosen by the experimenters in each measurement somehow depends on the spin of the particle pair].
It stops working nicely like that once you go to slightly more complicated than measuring two photons with spin up and spin down. Then you find correlations that make no sense at all if you assume that each photon has a definite state before you measure them (for example, it's as if some events have negative probabilities).