HeavenFox

If they are literally sending the entire transcript and asking for a summary, wouldn't almost all of the tokens be cache hit, and therefore fairly cheap?

Look, as much as we hate Meta... doesn't Hanlon's razor apply here - "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"? Could it be that the account triggered some automated system?

Of all the major tech companies around the world, Apple has the most incentive to actually deliver privacy, and has the best track record.

To be fair even OpenAI's and, to a lesser extent, Anthropic's models do that sometimes

Yes, the pointing shown in the app will always be correct, just the object will move out of the field of view. You need to manually track the object using an equatorial mount, or use a clock drive or similar.

The distance doesn't matter, since the stars are almost infinitely far away, so there's no parallax. You do need to correct for the angle though. We support daytime alignment using, say, a distant treetop, or at night align on the object you are observing.

We have a prototype polar alignment feature in the works! The benefit of plate solving is you can actually do a two-point polar alignment: just take two pictures with different RA, and we will know where the axis is. Taking more pictures would improve accuracy.

So the reason that line of text is there is we designed AstroHelm to be mounted directly on the telescope facing the sky. We don't want our users to go to Amazon and search for "telescope smartphone mount", get an eyepiece adapter, and found that it doesn't work :)

As for why we don't support adding optics between the phone and the sky, there are a few reasons. The accuracy from phone's camera lens is good enough, and we don't want to introduce complexity. The plate solving algorithm also benefits heavily from knowing the field of view, which you get from phone's built in camera but need user input for custom optics. Finally, supporting smaller field of view means shipping a much larger star database which most users won't use, so it's just a waste of storage and bandwidth. Not to mention blind solving a small FoV would be very slow and not work interactively.

For alignment, we support two alignment methods. You can align it like a finderscope, i.e. aim your telescope at a distant treetop and drag the crosshair over it. Once you begin observing, you can also sync to the object, which should give you better accuracy.

We launched Android recently and was using this opportunity to experiment with pricing and packaging a little bit!

Since the plate solving happens periodically, the sky drift will quickly be corrected!

It should. I have users reporting good experience with iPhone XS. It is heavily dependent on your local light pollution levels though.

They do! The "night mode" in camera apps all utilize gimbals

That is the "mentality shift can take generations" part.

Those ladies may be part of the elite now. But remember their parents or grandparents went through the Great Chinese Famine where an estimated 15-60 million people died.

This is likely because as the author admits, their interaction with everyday Chinese is mainly through the Internet and cultural products, which has a significant bias.

Chinese government actively shapes the online discourse, so the messaging is already filtered. To make it worse, it meant people found out that the easiest way to silence your opponent is to brand them as anti-China, so you see a lot of pro-China virtue signaling. Finally, people also realized patriotism is lucrative.