4 comments

  • ramon156 10 minutes ago
    Hm making an AI assisted page and replacing the emdashes with double dashes seems like more work than to just rewrite the text yourself. Not sure why you would do that.
    • dylan604 0 minutes ago
      What? That’s a simple find and replace vs rewriting the whole thing. If someone had the savvy to write the thing, they probably wouldn't have been using the the assistant in the first place. Either way, comparing a find/replace to rewriting is farcical
  • adrian_b 1 hour ago
    Nit pick:

    The name "octocopter" does not make sense. "Helicopter" is a compound word made of "helico-" and "pter", which means "screw-wings". "Octo-" means eight, "-co-" means nothing.

    "Octopter" would be a correct compound word meaning "8-wings", but that would be ambiguous, so the object discussed in TFA is better named just "8-propeller drone".

    • Mtinie 49 minutes ago
      That ship has long sailed. You’re correct, but the author isn’t the one who “named the thing” in this case, they are just using the name commonly used to describe it.

      Multi-rotor drones have been called tricopters, quadcopters, hexacopters, octocopters based on their propeller counts conversationally for as long as I can remember.

      There are plenty of commercial vendors who use the exact term for their expensive industrial drones.

      Update: I see that in the four minutes it took for me to validate my initial inclination and post that plenty of others also had the same thought :) No need to me to belabor the point!

    • maciuz 1 hour ago
      The -copter suffix is very common in the drone community.eg quadcopter is widely accepted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadcopter
    • cryptopian 53 minutes ago
      This is quite a common linguistic phonomenon, where a word is rebracketed to form a new suffix, even if it doesn't make sense with the original etymology. See also -holic (alcoholic -> workaholic), -thon (marathon -> danceathon) or -gate (Watergate -> partygate). Termed a "libfix" from liberated affix
    • GordonS 4 minutes ago
      I guess it's a play on the popular word "quadcopter", rather than "helicopter".
    • HPsquared 47 minutes ago
      "Copter" is a known word, short for helicopter.

      https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/copter

      • mapt 7 minutes ago
        On a related note, pronunciation variance in "Helicopter" -> "Helacopter" -> "Helocopter" leads to a confusing abbreviation - "Helee" vs "Heelo"
    • Closi 58 minutes ago
      Blame language evolving over time rather than OP, octocopter is a widely-used term for '8 propellor drones'.

      A nit pick with your post - you use the word 'ambiguous' but really this is from the latin root 'ambiguus' so we don't need the supurflous 'o' in between the two u's.

      • afandian 53 minutes ago
        Well I was confused by it! I was expecting an article on amateur semiconductor fabrication. Granted, that was due to my misreading it as 'optocoupler'.
    • KPGv2 59 minutes ago
      Counterpoint: -copter is a perfectly cromulent suffix. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-copter

      gyrocopter, helicopter, quadcopter, hexacopter, octocopter, parcelcopter, and—most famously—

      roflcopter, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/roflcopter#/media/File:Roflco...

      They all have their own dictionary entries.

      Octocopter makes perfect sense. Everyone understands immediately what it means, and that's the only purpose of language: to convey ideas. It should be clear, which this is, and concise, which this is.

      Fidelity to ancient Greek is not, and should not, be a goal for English.

  • cyclopeanutopia 1 hour ago
    Will follow a fellow Polish inventor! :)
  • quibono 58 minutes ago
    If I were to get a dirt cheap Chinese drone, would that be more likely to use RL or MCP? What’s the “standard”?
    • spaqin 5 minutes ago
      PID is more than enough to keep level. FPV relies on manual flight, but you can get Ardupilot for autonomous missions. There's no need for RL, nothing to gain here; level flight and following waypoints is a solved issue already.

      And frankly as a pilot, I'd rather not see any completely autonomous drones with no oversight in the sky - that's one incident away in which blame cannot be put solely on the operator from getting the hobby completely banned.