skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People looking to buy Bitcoin unfortunately often end up at Binance.

They have long offered low trading fees, while heavily inflating on-chain withdrawal fees and duping users into accepting "wrapped bitcoin" instead (that is, a layer of misdirection and nonetheless custodial bitcoin, held by Binance or some other third party).

If what the SEC allege is proven, that they moved customer coins to a separate legal entity, I don't think it's a leap to assume the coins users think they're buying perhaps don't even exist - that the exchange have been selling paper coins banking on that users won't withdraw en masse.

This is what FTX were doing too - selling paper bitcoin; bitcoin that was not backed 1-to-1 (or anywhere close, they actually held a relatively small number), instead funneling customer money into the hundreds of other coins FTX had invested in.

This could reveal the apparent mass susceptibility for VC backed "cryptos" - that the masses are not so dumb after all, or at least not in the way you thought, that instead they've been fleeced.

Bitcoin may still suffer reputational damage in the short term, but surely the elimination of such schemes is, to use an overused phrase that seems very apt now, good for bitcoin?
You’re also forced to use the internet for many everyday tasks and that wasn’t the case 30 years ago.

Also credit cards are almost mandatory now with so many places going cashless.

I do think we need to stop and think as a society but is a corporation to blame? Or a pair of fancy eyewear?

Society evolves and changes, it’s been the way since early civilisation.
The work wasn't done by anyone on the Chrome team. Someone at Google Research Zurich (I don't recall who) wrote the patches and submitted them. Actually, I think that they've even kept the patches up to date with newer Chrome releases so in theory it would be easy to re-introduce JXL into Chrome if there is a will to do it...
Especially when you consider stuff like "Oh I want all the rows, but only know how to type in exact cell references. Ehh, 100 rows should do", and someone misses that their totals for a 10 year period are only including the first 8 and a bit years.
There is added value to you. The people who call it a tax probably don't see the value you do.
> A question I ask of all VR gaming enthusiasts: how much time do you spend on VR games versus other games?

My Oculus CV1 has been back in its box for several years now. I really enjoyed Eagle Flight, but that's about it. Turns out not that many games were designed for someone like me who wanted to play VR games with mouse and keyboard behind his desk, and those that were were mostly driving/flying sims. The experience of having a motorcycle helmet with a small and not very bright visor didn't help. If I buy another VR set, it will be the one where I'm finally allowed to use my peripheral vision.
I've been surprised at how many times I've realized that a bad result from GPT was because I specified the problem inadequately or incorrectly. Or that I took the solution, but applied it incorrectly.
I just want a portable gaming console with apple-level quality that can run Steam games. The VR thing is not very practical in my experience.
Thats what I am wondering - is this good for us?
> Not that IRC is hard

This totally understates the idiocy of IRC.

I was a full-blown operator/system administrator across both mainframes and Unix workstations for years. And I never truly felt like I grokked IRC.

Whenever I had to go into a channel, it was always a screwy dance of mishmash of how to get a directory, how to appease the channel bot, how to even bloody just log in, etc.

And God help you if you didn't have the preferred client for the channel. "Bye bye, N00b."

Sorry, I weep for the centralization of these kinds of services. I don't weep even in the slightest for how IRC actually got implemented.
high level whitepaper: https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/discussions/2

the protocol is a light protocol over IPFS/IPNS/Libp2p Gossipsub

IPFS files (JSON/base64): https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-js#schema
Gossipsub protocol messages (CBOR): https://github.com/plebbit/plebbit-js#pubsub-message-types

There's also a FAQ https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/blob/master/FAQ.md
> Have I

Yes, unless you're a different person from the person that possessed the rainworld account in March 2022. Or perhaps that was a Western psyop too!

I'd tread carefully if I'd had to go from being certain about that outcome to being certain the only reason Russia had lost more territory than it gained over the past six months was because "they're not in a rush" and that the flattened ruins of Bakhmut are somehow more valuable than the former Kherson oblast of the Russian Federation. Kudos for keeping the faith though. If only those representing Russia's front line troop factions shared your rosy picture of how things are going.

It would, indeed, be relatively straightforward to become an expert on Ukraine casualties, but we both know that isn't you. And there are indeed nukes in the mix, but remember: sides that are winning a conventional war aren't idly threatening the other nuclear states with them on a weekly basis because that's a more convincing illusion of strength than anything happening on the front line. I mean, even the US in Vietnam (or USSR in Aghanistan, or the US in Afghanistan, I guess) didn't feel so inept on the battlefield they had to bring their ICBM count into discussions.
I am most intrigued by the use of the 6x Sony IMX418 which seems to be brilliant for daisy-chaining cameras over MIPI lines in such a small package even if the sensor is older. Anyone else have experience with these?
The article features no actual math to calculate the magnitude of the effect, even though such data are available. I would guess it would be a couple of percentage points shift at best.
At least one use case I could think of is work on the go. I work from home but I can work from anywhere in my country. But I really do not like working on a small laptop screen, and wish my two 27” displays were with me. If this thing provides at least reasonable substitute- I am game.
If the goal posts was just to make a billion dollars they could make games. But the goal post is to make 100 billion dollars. So here we are.
That's the sound card. It's a Lynx E44. It has two giant breakout cables.
I think one telling section of the presentation is the very speedy run-through of a few 3rd party apps for this platform. They all looked crappy, quick and superficial pseudo-3D versions of existing 2D apps. Which is a problem on all VR platforms: to deliver a truly engaging and convincing experience is extraordinarily hard and expensive.

Even Disney couldn't deliver (yet). They showed a lot of imaginary scenarios that are not implemented and concluded with: Disney+ will be available. Which is just a 2D streaming app like any app.

I'm not all negative. I think movie watching in this incredibly immersive way might be stunning. That would be a type of baseline "killer app" to fall back on. Assuming it works well, without it being tiring. There's the prospect of gaming, which is interesting as you pretty much use this device stationary.

Those two solo experiences hold promise if the tech is as good as is suggested.

I'm not sold on the productivity scenarios, because they aren't really re-imagined. If your work consists of zoom calls, messages and email, projecting those into the air doesn't really do much and slightly unsharp Excel still sucks.

There's the usual amusement of hypothetical scenarios that only happen in Apple's imagination where everybody is balls deep into every iOS device, is permanently connected and instantly available on a whim. You decide to "relive" memories by projecting photos on your TV (most people never do or just watch it on their phone) and then spontaneously drag in grandma to have a shared live experience.

That's not real world. Grandma is taking a nap, has none of these devices and wants you to come by and visit instead of fooling around with your toys.

Which is the point I'll end with. I'm very much technically impressed and will readily admit that from a philosophical angle, I hope it will fail. I genuinely believe that technology that isolates you even further and gives you even less reason to interact with actual reality is the last thing we need in an already touchless society where mental health problems are skyrocketing.

I do not want a world where dad has ski goggles to record the kids, the kids looking back at a digital version of his eyes. Dad should stop recording at all and just bloody engage.
To be fair, watching the presentation, I'm pretty sure I saw a handheld controller in use for gaming.
It's bizarre that you'd pay $3000 more over the Mac Studio for zero extra performance, upgradability only for storage, and a bunch of useless PCI slots that don't support GPUs.
Tiny market? Apple rakes in ~$40 billion annually from Apple Watch, AirPods, Beats Headphones, and AirTags, with the watch itself being a $15 billion dollar annual segment. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/

I mean, if you added up every gaming console (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Meta Quest 2), Apple's wearables & accessories division is still far larger.

Nobody wants VR? Did Apple mention VR even once in today's talk? For all your skepticism around AR being technically possible, did you even watch the video? They are directly addressing all the key points around AR that everyone in that space has been trying to tackle for years.
fmt — simple text formatter
that's exactly what it does.
What makes you think they haven't? There was already upheaval at Stack* as a result of people writing trash answers with GPT help.
Yes, I will "ultra casually" strap this thing on my face...

I think we have different definitions of "casual" -- when we used that term to describe Farmville in the 00's, we meant that you could refresh your fb page, click a link, click on 2-5 objects in the Farmville pane and come back the next day to do the same thing.

If you're strapping on an immersive experience to do the equivalent of five mouse clicks in 90 seconds, you're doing it wrong. Wrong from the client's perspective because you've got to boot the VR headset, launch the app in order to do the equivalent of those 5-7 mouse clicks. A heavy investment of time and effort for something that could be done with your finger and your phone. And wrong from the content perspective because if your virtual environment is limited to the equivalent of 5-7 mouse clicks... it doesn't sound all that compelling.
Sorry, I'm not a native speaker. What do you mean by "It's just Ukraine now". Was it always just Ukraine or hast that changed recently?

Edit: But thanks for the information :)
Perhaps someone will invent a way to virtually move around within a virtual space. Seems far fetched, I know. But we can still dream.
That "we" is a bit of an assumption.

Was a relatively small group of tech-enthusiast and socially-awkward people, trying to hide behind cool digital lives? Sure, guilty as charged.

Was the world population at large asking for the same...? Eh.
> I'm aware that the field of view on the Quest 2 is fairly narrow, so expanding the virtual screen to close to the full width of the field of view winds up to actual 1080p yes. And it's a great comfortable size for a virtual screen. You're free to confirm the math yourself, but you're not losing detail.

Resolution and detail are not the same thing. We need to talk about Pixels Per Degree here. A 65" 1080p TV at reasonable viewing distance (3m) has ~70 PPD. The Quest 2 can barely do 20 PPD!

I can personally count the pixels of the Quest 2 (and the space between them!). I have to get extremely close to my 4k TV in order to be able to see the pixels.

> That's factual. Even most new TV shows aren't in 4K yet, nor is most of the movie catalog. Fortunately it's slowly growing.

Most of the new TV shows I watch come in 4K 10bit HDR with Dolby Vision. It's rare when one doesn't have the option.
The DDR5 bandwidth is ~51.2 GiB/s per "channel".

With consumer desktop CPUs having 2 "channels" (~102.4GiB/s).

And prosumer desktop/workstation CPUs (e.g. Threadripper) having 4 "channels" (~204.8GiB/s).

While apple is claiming 819.2GiB/s.

That is _max throughput is 4x/8x more_ (depending if you compare it to prosumer (fair comparison) or consumer (unfair comparison for a $7k system) hardware.

Now the _max_ part is important, Apple mainly reaches this by having more bandwidth, i.e. parallelism.

Mainly (oversimplified) the per "CPU memory channel" bandwidth for x86 is 64bit (for 51.2GiB/s) so the M1 Ultra is roughly comparable to having 16 "CPU memory channels" instead of 8 (prosumer) or 4 (consumer).

Some applications can take advantage of this nicely and will scale potentially even to 4x/8x speed, most probably will not some might even have neglible improvements. But applications which use a lot of RAM (as much as they can get) and most of the RAM they use is "warm" (e.g. doesn't just lie around with little access but isn't super "hot", i.e. highly contented either) will profit quite a lot.

On the other hand applications which use little RAM but the same small RAM region very heavily contented likely will hardly at all profit and will likely run faster on overclocked RAM on consumer systems.

Luckily for apple most the typical use case they sell their pro desktop model for belong more/mostly in the first category.

Additionally if you can run Linux on this system they might become _very_ interesting for some scientific applications for some users. I mean even e.g. Zen 4 EPYC CPU only have 12 "CPU memory channels" not 16 and it's much easier to put a desktop box "somewhere" then a server unit.

Side note: I say "CPU channel" in quotes because while it tends to be the marketing term things are more complicated in practice, e.g. in general DDR5 is splitting the 64bit channels into 32bit sub-channels, and just listing the channel width and throughput is still not painting the whole picture at all, e.g. the latency also matters for some applications (hence why OC can make sense) etc.

EDIT: Correction: The Threadripper PRO models have 8 "CPU memory channels" so it's just 2x on a fair comparison.
I expect no announcement at all. I think they will try to make this as quite as possible so that nobody is aware.
I don't get paid to run benchmarks, so I couldn't care less what the high scores are. My M2 laptop is 3x as fast as my previous laptop while being completely silent, making it very enjoyable to work with.
Are we days or hours away from finding out Binance is insolvent?

Anyway, it was obvious to everyone that Binance was a scam from the beginning. Anyone with a brain knows to use a quality exchange like <INSERT NEXT FAILED CRYPTO EXCHANGE HERE>.
I believe my parents are still chugging along with my ~2010 MBP after a couple of home-done battery swaps. Obviously not the fastest laptop in the world but never had any problems with the hardware.
No it wasn't. WASM implementations are simply slower than native support. No browser uses HW accelerated decode for AVIF images or JXL. I think Safari might use HW for JPEG, but that's it across all browsers.
The study [1][2].

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02779...

[2] https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.01.010
Thanks! A very interesting comment.

What strikes me as different from 1992-era games (and more like 1990s VR) is consistency of play. Even with the earlier generation of games, like NES titles or early Mac/PC games, you saw people putting in a lot of time over consistent periods. For many, video games replaced, say, board games. From what I see here and elsewhere, there are very few consistent VR users.

Maybe that's just down to the cost factors you describe. And maybe that's down to the competition being much better between modern consoles and the vast array of mobile games.

So I can believe you're right, it might be another way of gaming, coexisting in the same way that the PS5 and the Switch and phone games all coexist happily. But given the extra cost for both users and developers, it seems to me that it's also possible that there's a vicious circle ahead: High costs mean fewer games and fewer users. That leads to lower revenue, which means even fewer games, and therefore even fewer users.

At this point we must be somewhere near $50 billion invested in VR. If that level of subsidy isn't enough to get things going, I'm sure there are lots of CFOs asking exactly what it's going to take their VR units to become cash positive.
What is your setup? Is this for a virtual desktop or are you gaming?

The only reason I keep a Windows partition around is to boot into VR, and I would love to nuke it forever. But I just haven't been able to get happy with VR on Linux yet.
> it is possible that in the alternate history where apple had not done those things, tech might be better

This. I think Apple has actively made the cellphone space worse in a number of ways, from removing the headphone jack through eliminating user-replaceable batteries. When Apple does a thing, everyone else takes it as permission to do the same thing.
I'm paying for it from my savings, around $300k so far
It NeRF's an avatar. It's pretty freaking insane.

https://twitter.com/highsnobiety/status/1665794429364604928
> are you calling the Apple Watch, a $70 billion annual revenue sector of their business a failure?

First, where did you get $70 billion from? I see estimates of 40M Apple Watches sold per year. It starts at $249. I imagine the average selling price is pretty close to that. Let's assume $300. So that's a $12 billion business?

And no, I didn't call it a "failure". I called it a niche, which it is. To compare Apple sold 225M iPhones (at a significantly higher ASP) in 2022.
And in those early days many cable providers didn't even implement the Baseline Privacy Interface, so you could sniff the entire neighborhood's downstream traffic with a modified modem or possibly even a DVB-C capable TV card.

There was literally a register bit in the cable modem MAC to enable promiscuous mode, and you could just set it: https://pastebin.com/18702Ziq

Sadly the Broadcom modem hardware I used to experiment with then seemed to lack the ability to get at the raw MPEG-TS packets, so I didn't manage to repurpose it as a TV receiver. The idea was to tune to a TV channel and stream it over multicast RTP on the LAN.

As used modems were very cheap, I wanted to have a whole bank of them, to demodulate every carrier on the CATV system. All fed into a giant, noisy 24 port 100Mb Ethernet switch that had IGMP snooping support. That was back in the 2000s...

Modem photo: https://www.usbjtag.com/jtagnt/ambit120.jpg
Old reddit, while nice and textual is server side rendered. If you are dealing with P2P not fetching everything in one go (and thus suffering some async performance issues) is better than trying to render it all at once.

That's part of the "why of new.reddit"... which makes sense for some aspects of its infrastructure. Yes, I prefer old.reddit because it renders everything at once and the layout is simpler. But if you're waiting on the network more than the CPU, new.reddit style is probably better.

The UI being slow is because loading stuff from cloudflare-ipfs.com is slow. Trying to get it all at once for a 30 card rendering would be even slower if you're waiting for ipfs.
Sandstorm was actually a startup with product and marketing and we did spend a lot of time trying to make it as simple as possible to install.

The only way to make Sandstorm easier to set up would be to partner with hosting providers to offer one-click installers. In the absence of that, Sandstorm's current install is about as easy as it could possibly be given the constraint of "should run on a generic Linux host".

(Aside: People have always given Linux flak for being hard to install. But have you ever tried to install Windows from scratch? It's sooooo much harder. But no one cares because it's preinstalled on every PC you buy.)

(Aside 2: How did Chrome become the most popular browser? Sure as hell not because it's so easy for people to install. Most people don't know what a browser is. It got there by Google paying a lot of people to bundle it. It's honestly amazing that Google pulled it off, against competitors who owned their respective operating systems.)

Anyway, back in the day, Sandstorm actually offered its own hosting service, which you didn't need to be technical to sign up for. So it was actually quite easy then. But it was a first-party service. In retrospect I think building the first-party service was a mistake. It distracted too much engineering time away from actually building out the platform and ecosystem. It meant we could offer a better price point than a VPS provider would, but I think the people actually interested in the product at that point weren't so price-conscious. If I did it again I'd focus on partnerships.
> The proposal is part of an international agreement concluded in October 2021 by nearly 140 countries. The Netherlands is the first country in the European Union where legislation has been presented to parliament.

I am still scratching my head over how this is actually going to work. Representatives from 140 companies signing on via an OECD is a far cry from actual legislation.

A corporate income tax would not generate meaningful revenue for most countries. And such that it does, it only generates revenue by cannibalizing other taxes (income, sales, capital gains, etc) at the cost of a deadweight loss of investments.

But there is a huge game theory problem here. Even if you get collective sign-on, this would be an EXTREMELY unstable agreement - it's like the Prisoners' Dilemma in that there is no Nash Equilibrium. There would always be an incentive for a handful of countries to back out of the deal. And the more countries sign on, the more incentive there is to back out.
https://venturebeat.com/mobile/heres-robert-scoble-showering...
This only happens in "proper" tables. When you add a formula to a table column, Excel will automatically convert it into a "calculated column," so overridden values will have a green mark denoting an "inconsistent formula."

It's still a pretty minor warning and it only requires two clicks to ignore.
Musk claims the only solution to bots in 2023 is paid accounts.

I kinda agree with him. There is no captcha that's going to keep out determined spammers. Even reddit is filled with bots.

You either try to eliminate bots through paid accounts, real ID verification... Or you filter based on quality of content (ie. bots are allowed to post, as long as what they say and do is indistinguishable from a human - like reddit does).

Whats the anti-spam plan?
What Is the Future of Fusion Energy?
Yeah. Apple enters categories that already have product-market fit. It outsources market research to first movers.

VR has only significant traction for a handful of games. iPad is indeed an exception while watches and fitness trackers were popular and a growing market before Apple entered.
It’s hard for people to acquire new skills if they go into using a new tool attempting to confirm their own preconceived biases about how bad the tool is for a given task.
I mean, a moderator has to turn up and explain how pagination works in every large thread.
I would imagine most software developers could buy one.

If it's better than a MacBook with a sidecar iPad I think I would consider it.

It depends strongly on how much of a drop-in replacement it is for multi-screen.

I think the weakest point of the headset is it's interface, so if it seamlessly integrates with my laptop I might consider it.

I suspect this V1 of AR will probably involve a lot of unpleasant-ness and it will feel truly beta.

I am not confident apple has a killer app for it either.
> Add 5G and I'm not sure there are any options.

Yep. And I literally couldn't care less about the camera.

All of that (plus my #1 issue of security concerns) are why my current smartphone will be my last smartphone.