> Even by the standards of 1914, Russia was a backward country. Most of its citizens were serfs, often tied to the land they worked, like serfs in the Middle Ages.
Russian serfdom was abolished in 1861, more than 50 years before the start of the First World War.
This is a world that I have no knowledge of so I expect my comment is commensurately naive, but it does remind me of the days when I was an avid race-goer. If I bet on a horse to win that's all I wanted it to do; if the horse and jockey expended all their effort and won, fantastic, if they lost, better luck next time. Slow and steady may win the race in some circumstances but it's not the tactic most punters are hoping for. The analogy would be more complete if the loosing horses were sent to the knacker's yard and their stable hands all dismissed with only the trainers living to try, try, try again.
Since my comments here some days ago I've now had time to follow your links in more detail and it's not only the info on Victorian Glass Fire Grenades that I've found interesting on YouTube's Our Own Devices but also the channel hosts a plethora of excellently produced videos that are both fascinating and diverse in topic.
I'd never come across Our Own Devices previously so I'm very pleased you posted the links as I reckon the channel ought to be more widely known to HN's audience. What's truly impressive about the channel is the sheer diversity of its subject matter and the depth in which each subject is covered.
From my limited search I find Our Own Devices is authored by a Canadian, a former mechanical engineer turned author by the name of Gilles Messier. What's stunning about Messier is that he has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the subject matter that he covers in his videos. Whilst that's not surprising of itself—as many YouTube-ers have a vast knowledge of their subject—what's amazing about Messier is the sheer diversity and range of his knowledge which spreads over many fields.
This became obvious to me when viewing Rotary Phones: the Call of History when Messier made
almost throwaway mention of a couple of obscure rather minor historical technical facts that would not be common knowledge to today's experts in telephony due to that they have been superseded and irrelevant for decades.
The only reason I know about them is because of my electronics background and that I'm considerably older than he is, thus I've accumulated historical knowledge that would be unfamiliar to younger viewers. Even then, the only reason that I'm aware of these facts is that I recall a decades-old conversation I had with a professional in telephony who mention them. (I won't bore you with the details except to say I wouldn't have expected Messier to be so very fluent and accurare in historical detail.)
Messier either has a photographic memory or he scrupulously researchs his topics, or both (he says he doesn't use a teleprompter when talking to camera so his memory must be excellent).
Every video I've watched on Our Own Devices I've found fascinating and informative, I always learn something new even with topics with which I am familiar. As a technology nerd I find this channel and Messier's presentation addictive.
This is the second time that I have notice a title change in HN where the original article has "The Man..." or "The Woman..." changed in the HN title to "A Man..." or "A Woman...". Why is this done?
I don't know anything about facial recognition software so I'm probably underestimating the difficulty of alerting the system and it's operators to the interesting possibility of giraffes and zebras wandering around the urban environment.
Facial recognition tech is basically two parts: detecting a face in an image (“face detection”, often this is done by calling out to OpenCV’s face detection in Python or C++), and then extracting information from that face image and searching a database with it (“facial recognition”, sometimes done with algorithmic measurement of facial features but increasingly done by neural networks).
This clothing looks like it might be designed to confuse the face detection step.
