I’m not so sure mocking is really that on point, a tool used to understand avalanche safety should be safe. The product copy highlights safety and the value of providing a recommendation instead of having to collate and synthesize different data yourself.
Avalanche risk and its management are unknown to me, but not to ski patrols, experienced backcountry trekkers, scientists, and national weather services of many countries, etc. I saw no evidence of trials to test to see how the technology performs against real conditions.
If you can’t trust this product’s recommendations within some margin of safety then it’s value proposition disappears.
Why not market it instead as an experiment and seek some way of collecting data to improve the process or develop a model fine tuned to the inputs?
Is it just me, or does it seem extremely dangerous to market: “Strata doesn't just show the data. It makes the call.”
The page states it’s powered by Claude with nothing I could see that relates to its performance, metrics, processes, testing, etc. for something expected to be used in a safety application.
"You're right to push back on that. Let me take a step back and reconsider the requirements for an application that people might entrust with their lives."
Fair point, and you caught a real contradiction. "It makes the call" was wrong — it also contradicted our own safety page. We've changed it: Strata surfaces the risks and links the source forecasts, you make the call. It's a briefing, not a verdict. Appreciate the push.
Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue. We are taking two concurrent actions where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services and at the same time rolling back to our last known good state.
We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to mitigate the portal access issues. Customers should be able to access the Azure management portal directly.
We do not have an ETA for when the rollback will be completed, but we will update this communication within 30 minutes or when we have an update.
This message was last updated at 17:17 UTC on 29 October 2025
"We have initiated the deployment of our 'last known good' configuration. This is expected to be fully deployed in about 30 minutes from which point customers will start to see initial signs of recovery. Once this is completed, the next stage is to start to recover nodes while we route traffic through these healthy nodes."
"This message was last updated at 18:11 UTC on 29 October 2025"
At this stage, we anticipate full mitigation within the next four hours as we continue to recover nodes. This means we expect recovery to happen by 23:20 UTC on 29 October 2025. We will provide another update on our progress within two hours, or sooner if warranted.
This message was last updated at 19:57 UTC on 29 October 2025
Would this also be true for electrostatic speakers as well? Though would probably would require greater gain/amplification or, potentially the application of some kind of bias voltage for the capacitive diaphragm of the speaker.
Just speculation based on the shared operating principal with condenser microphones
With bias power, I think an electrostatic loudspeaker turns into a condenser microphone (a thing that provides varying capacitance in response to changes in pressure).
I don't think that electrostatic loudspeakers all require bias power, so it's not quite as simple as using a dynamic loudspeaker backwards is.
It is a neat idea, though. A big, flat-panel microphone would be interesting to play with.
You can use a window or any large panel as a microphone without even touching it by observing its vibrations.
You can bounce a laser off it, or even go fully passive using a camera with some sensitivity tricks: I recall a paper that reconstructed a remote conversation by watching a houseplant through a window.
Avalanche risk and its management are unknown to me, but not to ski patrols, experienced backcountry trekkers, scientists, and national weather services of many countries, etc. I saw no evidence of trials to test to see how the technology performs against real conditions.
If you can’t trust this product’s recommendations within some margin of safety then it’s value proposition disappears.
Why not market it instead as an experiment and seek some way of collecting data to improve the process or develop a model fine tuned to the inputs?