tjah1087

> I also don’t believe addiction and other psychological exploits are used for the sole purpose of ad revenue

Instagram? Tiktok? Facebook?

Social media feeds off addiction to generate ad revenue.

And how much damage has social media done to political and social institutions and to collective mental health?

Ads on other web properties are not weaponised in the same way.

I have a colleague in a big tech firm whose email address is derived from his initials, resulting in the glorious: "svp@<company>.com"

Needless to say, he sometimes gets emails he shouldn't.

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”

― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

I think they are trying to imply that refueling a starship in orbit is worth it, whatever the cost - it gives a capability we didn't have before.

Yes, this.

Even looking like half a sphere is enough, as the system attempts to detect partially occluded balls too.

A few reasons why this outsourcing is more extensive than you might think:

Latency: (cheap labour is usually far away from the match). This makes teleoperation harder.

Bandwidth (TV ops run from a van in a car park - so getting a reliable video feed out is expensive).

Logistics: you still need to hire, train and utilise that person effectively.

Reliability: what if your remote operator's internet goes down?

They did this for Goal Line Technology (put a chip in the ball).

A few companies actually managed to get a production process that put a chip in the ball without affecting flight characteristics (there are a lot of regulations around this), and these balls were used in competition once (Club World Cup 2012).

Ironically, the most complicated bit is the sensors in the posts.

All GLT is Computer Vision based now.

This is a surprisingly easy mistake to make.

Background: I was one of the original engineers on the Goal Line Technology system now used by the vast majority of professional leagues.

Heads are surprisingly ball shaped from a a lot of camera angles, and the male balding pattern conspires to give a good impression of different football graphical designs.

When we were developing the system, we thought we had ball detection pretty nailed, and we never had false positives from any of the heads of engineers on the team. Then, our boss came to test the system ... As far as our algorithms were concerned, his head was exactly a football, just as in the article! Highly embarrassing, but everyone saw the funny side. It gave us better data and inspired a few more robustness checks that ended up being crucial later on! :)