(semi-professional piano player here) That's interesting. I've never heard that...not even sure what "lowest fifth" would mean. I would think that the root and the third contribute the most, right? The fifth is sometimes even omitted. I'm very curious how this might work. Do you have any examples?
(Semi pro jazz guitarist here). The heuristic I was taught: the accompanist owns the 3rd and the 7th, which allows the SOLOIST to choose #4, 5th or the #5 as the muse dictates in the moment. The 5th is an semi-avoid note, until I hear the soloist commit to a choice of 5th.
I guess it means in the sound scape as a whole, potentially including multiple instruments. But to keep it to a single piano, e.g. if you play B3 D4 G4, then it won't sound like a B chord (neither minor nor major) because there's no fifth. Instead, you'll hear D5 as an overtone of D4, and G4-D5 will be the lowest fifth that you hear, so it is readily interpreted as G/B. If the third were the most important, then this would have been a Bm, which is pretty clearly isn't unless you add an F# (or there is some other instrument in the mix that provides one).
Allowing that I'm simply not sophisticated enough to understand this, I think he's overthinking things. :-)
I mean, B3 D4 G4 in isolation probably does sound like G/B to western ears, and maybe the overtone explanation is acoustically relevant, but it seems like there are not too many other things that those notes could be, and the spelling clearly spells a Gmaj triad.
Fifteen years ago I did my own in Canada, and just wrote my own name and phone number on the back as at the "photographer". They gave me the hairy eyeball at the passport office though but let it slide since the pics did meet the requirements.
After that I got them done at the local framing shop.
I'm generally with the author on this, but their examples are inconsistent. I think from a language perspective, the linked text should be a verb phrase. We want the user to do something (click here), and verbs are "do words."
So, instead of
For additional order details, go to [your account].
use
For additional order details, [go to your account].
(The author does this inconsistently.)
And in this case:
To review or adjust your AutoPay settings, [click here].
You can review or adjust your [AutoPay settings] at any time.
they change the meaning of the sentence ever so slightly with the extraneous "at any time," showing that it is not always simple to remove the "click here."
Maybe in this case, it should be a button or a simple stand-alone link, like
This. I've seen so much of this on Hacker News that it's almost like a game now to discover the variant of the archetype post in today's feed.
People with a "nerdy" mindset want to find the structure behind everything. That's not a bad thing, but it's so annoying to people who actually do comedy...or music...or art.
Not everything in life can be reduced and programmed. But they'll keep on trying.
To give you (Haystack authors) another datapoint, I'm a +1 to this comment. I can't think of a time when a canvas UI solved a problem I had. Usually it made navigation more difficult.
But also agree that it's great that you're innovating in this space! Good luck!
Funny, because I'd say that jargon is a facilitator of communication between knowledgeable people. It can always be looked up by those with the interest but not the knowledge. I end up doing this all the time, and appreciating reading dumps of domain knowledge and perspective. Meanwhile, writing everything for a lowest common denominator audience creates real barriers to communication - both destroying communications bandwidth, and also encouraging experts to retreat to less visible forums.
It would take the author a few seconds to type "remotely operated vehicle" (or whatever it stands for), and therefore save hours of time for people who need to look it up. Not to mention...I almost skipped the article because I didn't know what ROV stood for. Lost audience.
Your argument is that lots of experts on remotely operated vehicles would scoff at the article because it didn't use their "inside" jargon? First off, how many people would that be, compared to the number of people who love a good mystery and a good gadget, but have no idea what an ROV is?
As to bandwidth, you only have to spell it out once. Simple practice: I built a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) and solved some cold missing person cases.
The author of this piece doesn't strike me as someone who relishes communicating in cryptic acronyms, so my guess is that it was just thoughtless. He hadn't yet seen my screed on the subject. :-)
I'm sure there are those who love communicating in cryptic code. They tend to congregate in like-minded cliques that don't much care about communicating outside their tightly-defined world. So be it. But if you want to be read and understood by a wide audience, spell it out.
Jargon generally takes on its own meaning and context beyond a naive reading. "ROV" customarily refers to an underwater remotely operated vehicle, not merely any "remotely operated vehicle" (contrast with flying "drones" or contemporary cars with cell modems). I'm nowhere near an expert or even frequent user of the term, that's just from my casual recollection and a quick search seems to back it up.
The proper comparison isn't the author's time versus the readers looking it up, but rather readers encountering a term for the first time having to look it up versus every other reader having to read overly verbose writing that reiterates basic definitions rather than getting to the novel points. If you're as interested in ROVs as you imply, well now you know for all of the other times you will read the term. If you're really expecting to never encounter the term again, I wonder why you're reading a technical engineering-adjacent forum.
And yes, effective communication within "like-minded cliques" is exactly what is facilitated by jargon. Personally I'd rather read concise technical descriptions from such direct communications (doing the work to learn what I don't know from context or external sources), rather than having to skim through watered-down general-audience "edutainment" articles and read between the lines to figure out the specific touchstones being referenced by canned general phrases.
>The proper comparison isn't the author's time versus the readers looking it up, but rather readers encountering a term for the first time having to look it up versus every other reader having to read overly verbose writing that reiterates basic definitions rather than getting to the novel points. If you're as interested in ROVs as you imply, well now you know for all of the other times you will read the term. If you're really expecting to never encounter the term again, I wonder why you're reading a technical engineering-adjacent forum.
This isn't a water hobbyists forum, nor one for all manner of remotely operated vehicles, so it's a bit optimistic to assume many people here will know "ROV" as a remote controlled submarine. Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested, nor from skimming the first six (!) pages of a long article. Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much, but saved me and most others on this forum some time figuring out if I want to figure it out.
I don't get this pigeonholing of the concern as being only about "water hobbyists" or "underwater professionals". It's literally just a type of machine you will become aware of some time during the course of reading about engineering or subsea operations. As I said, I'm not even fully sure it just applies to underwater vehicles yet I have bumped into the term/concept more than several times already in my life. If you're new and this is your first time encountering it, appreciate the learning opportunity. I bet you'll see the term a lot more now due to Baader-Meinhof.
> Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested
This is a situation where HN’s “no editorialising titles” rule falls flat. Simply with the context change the title would be also best changed. I also understand why we have the rule of course.
> Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much
Sure. There is a lot which could have been improved on the whole article with better editing.
Musk is always good for the 'hot take' that on the surface seems smart...but turns out it isn't, because he thinks that talking with an engineer in a specific area makes him qualified to talk like them. And then it turns out that he does the very thing he complains about.
What the fluff is a "Brick Monitor Board"? I'm a car nut and I know a lot about EVs, and my best guess: it's a submodule of the battery management system that monitors a group of cells, which I think the only reason I know to guess that is because I've watched youtube videos of tesla packs being repaired or torn down. IBST? Turns out that's the vacuum pump for the brake servo, and "I" means "electronic."
For the former, he was probably ranting about this because he's always struck me as a little insecure about being better than NASA (not really that hard) and thus is annoyed by NASA's fetish for backronyms...which I think it inherited from the military due to sleeping in the same bed for three quarters of a century, but also their convenience.
During all phases of a mission, there are often times where comms need to be fast (for example, when the flight director or whoever does it, asks each subsystem person if they're go for launch - there's a lot of those subsystem people and the "are you OK with us proceeding" happens multiple times just during the lead-up to launch. It's a lot faster to have the following conversation:
"ECS?" "Go."
"TACNAZ?" "Go."
"DONUT?" "Go."
If you're the astronaut, you don't want to be shouting "Electronic Cookie Stabilizer failure!" over the radio during an emergency, and anyone on the channel with you probably knows every acronym relating to the mission by heart..
In middle age, I (a computer science grad and working programmer) went to graduate school for molecular biology. In the early days of studying biological systems, I was struck by how much they were like computer code, or at least logic constructs. I remember to this day the moment I realized that my orderly world of 0s and 1s was being saturated and methylated and energized in ways that were utterly unpredictable by (the current state of) simple logic constructs. And that's the day I learned why we still have "wet" labs, to actually test things empirically, rather than vainly try to predict them computationally. :-)
