skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to devalue their engineering departments, but I really don't remember any innovations in the software space from ASUS, Lenovo or alike hardware vendors. To me they're all essentially the same stuff, with different kind of junkware (or, in case of Lenovo, malware) bundled.

What I read is "we reached out to a bunch of vendors who dabbled in VR/AR/XR/whateveryounameit but failed to produce anything outstanding, so we made a deal of licensing them some software so maybe they'll fare better". Meta did the right thing in a sense that they made some sales, but I wouldn't hold my breath as a end-consumer.
pivoting some underlying metaverse tech? scant on detail unfortunately
I do like the fact that you just accepted the evolution of the term rather than having a rant about how it changed and eventually being accused in the replies of gatekeeping the term os
I went through a bit of a spat with cameras, and had luck with things from Amcrest, Reolink, and various similar ones on Amazon. All worked with VLC over RTSP, though I didn't go deep into PTZ setups.

What I did was go to them via the https://forums.zoneminder.com and looked for recent posts.

It's even more of a crapshoot because some of the cameras were absolute shite until I found some sketchy Chinese firmware of a particular version, which made them suddenly beautiful.

All of these are very securely cordoned off and unable to contact the Internet at large, of course.
> This long-term investment that began on the mobile-first foundations of the Android Open Source Project has produced a full mixed reality operating system used by millions of people.

Which gives some context to the calls for Google to bring the play store content library to Horizon.
Hunger is anchored to our circadian rhythm which nearly coincides with the clock. So we tend to be hungry around the same time each day.
Edit This Page now has filters
HockeyStack (YC S23) is hiring founding engineers in the Bay Area
A previous company I worked at was using mixed reality years ago (>4) to train manufacturing operators on manufacturing processes.

It ended up looking like a simulated workbench with low-detail models of CAD parts that needed to be assembled - it was pretty cool. Engineering companies are very ready for this technology.
I'd like to see the spec tackle latency with a "send then confirm" approach.

Ie. The RAM can reply to a read request with data, then a couple of clock cycles later it can confirm (via a flag) that the data it originally sent was correct.

This is helpful because it means the timing can be tightened to the typical access times, rather than the worst case access time (eg. the slowest preamp on the highest capacitance memory row/column).

Things like CPU's already have provisions for handling not-yet-confirmed information, and can roll back state if delivered info turns out to be wrong.

Yes, it adds complexity to the whole system, but it seems worth it for a -30% change to memory latency.
> This is like, say, taking advice from a FCC official on mental health.

This is more like if the FCC demanded a company provide a risk-assessment for a blatantly harmful feature, didn't receive it, and took remediating action against the offending business: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/17/byedance-rfi-tiktok-lite/
I have an Atreus and it has almost completely spoilt me for anything else. I tried the Model 100 but I just don't get on with it. For some reason it just makes my hands tired. Not impossible that I need different switches for it.

What I want right now is a wireless, split Atreus - precisely the same layout, just in two halves, and with no wires.

It strikes me as odd that such a thing doesn't seem to exist. I can find plenty that are "that, plus/minus a row", "that, plus a column", "close, but ortholinear" but nothing that precisely targets what seems to me to be quite an obvious gap in the market.

Maybe I'll end up building one myself...
IMO, the struggles with AI in robotics exposes where the current AI bottlenecks are more clearly.

Specifically, we don't have a training data corpus for any of our AI robots, enough to help them perform generalized task behaviors. So we have to go out and create them / use non training techniques, which crucially cannot leverage the existing learning / movements of humans accomplishing things.

ChatAI's training data of "generalized text on the internet" mirrors exactly what it can do right now — know a bit about everything. But there lacks computer-readable corpuses for the things that are truly useful — 1) efforts that lead to a task accomplishment and 2) better-than human efforts that lead to better-than-human output.

The key question is this: can AI reach beyond the human dataset that is currently powering it, crucially, at low(ish) cost? Or will AI always be fed training data? If we think the former, then we have to admit our algos aren't quite there yet and this iteration of AI is selling that dream.

But even with our current data-fed AI algos, we have not yet put a lot of effort into the root of the challenge - how to quickly build large sets of high quality training data. I think there can be optimization here (over a period of 10-20 years) on a similar scale of going from million dollar computer mainframes to hundred dollar laptops. If high quality training data for specialized efforts were indeed available at a low cost, then the AI revolution will effectively deliver the dream it promises - just wait for Moore's law.

The first step to solving that is an extremely polished LLM. You can see the proof of concept with SORA and other image-to-text efforts on how quality training data is created with the help of LLMs.

But of course, "LLM generated great training data" doesn't draw headlines, so it may just look like nothing is happening for a long, long time, until you see AI task bots pop up everywhere.
There exists a severe deterioration of trust with respect to Zuckerberg. I don't believe people are as eager to jump on his bandwagon today.
OpenAI has that name because, from its inception, it was working towards AI. But when they actually released a product, they did not call it “AI”. They called it “GPT”.
Let’s say Meta started really pushing stuff to encourage teens to not join the military. What then?
It’s not on average being developed as a product with the affordances one expects from a product: save and restore state, seamlessly maintain and modify a working set of artifacts, reset possibly corrupt cached state.

I think everyone who saw ChatGPT and thought something like “there’s a good website for instruct transformers? they’re going to have a zillion users” was acknowledging a milestone: if a tech demo is enough of a capability increase? It’s a product in spite of limitations.

But it’s been a long time, and we still don’t have save/restore, let alone “go curl this”.

We’re maximizing something other than consumer utility.
This was the same issue apple was facing with their batteries - basically - the third party alibiba folks weren't doing nearly as much QC as apple did.

Of course, apple got hammered for alerting users to potentially non-apple batteries in their phones. :)

I learned my lesson with I think a thinkpad "hi capacity" battery replacement I got super cheap. Basically burned my lap.
Which headsets support this?
The tech industry is guilty of fanning the flames of hype to get funding. A lot of people are rightly annoyed over some of the more outlandish claims that were made over the past 1-2 years.
Constant Variables in JavaScript, Or: When "Const" Isn't Constant
I suppose this is the antithesis of "legacy schools", whose practices of prioritizing children of former students serves to maintain and preserve privilege structures instead of disrupt them.
Yeah, I have a few "lottery tickets". I put a smallish amount of money into a wide variety of things that I don't actively manage. It includes crypto, tech stocks, hell, even magic the gathering cards from my childhood.

The plan is when the kids are college aged to see how it nets out and pay as much as I can from that.
Well said.

I would rather _not_ be immersed in the whole virtual world AND _not_ stare at a 7 inch screen for a large part of my day.

(written from a 16 inch laptop that I stare at for work)

I've been trying to exist more (in terms of "time-spent") without my phone in my pocket as it seems to be primarily a driver of distraction.
The Vernor Vinge novel Rainbows End famously presents a future in which people's interaction with the world is mediated by augmented reality via contact lenses. It's not presented as a necessarily bad thing, but who actually controls access to information is a very important consideration.
I think linux would be the obvious choice.

VR is being gatekept by Valve and Meta.

How likely is Valve to use Android?
or maybe what I cannot get over is the living within lingering legacy of having had your "own" culture be made up so you can be exploited

then realizing this, and finally (forever) being ostracized by peers for not going with the grain
The railroad is a good idea, but the concerns on throughput are real. If it’s a single-track railroad, your consist length (at least in one direction) will be limited by the length of sidings. Every rail car heading east will inevitably head west (to pick up containers).

It’s a big operation, putting together a new container-oriented freight railroad, and I hope it goes well!
Given React and PyTorch I'd say they've always been doing that. Also they've been releasing open source models for years and pretty much from the beginning.
I definitely support their choice, and we need more blue collar workers, but if this becomes a widespread trend there will be an oversupply of tradespeople and their wages will fall.

There's also another false promise being offered here that young people should be aware of:

> Kirby says blue-collar work is lucrative and allows him to "call the shots" in his life

But Kirby owns his own business and employs many people. It's not lucrative or boss-free for the majority of tradespeople.
It really doesn't. Mobile App starts in under a second and i can't remember the WebApp ever taking long enough to load, for me to notice.
look into the concept of "monopolism"
I don’t think most people can separate those things out, really. Our descriptions of how we want the future to play out are our descriptions of how we expect the future to play out, under the assumption that the whole system doesn’t come collapsing down (rendering investments moot).
Not everyone is trying to write the next hit game. You sound up your own ass.
I think everyone scratching at their throats and arguing "I'm not addicted - YOU'RE addicted to X" might be missing the forest for the trees.

It seems very plausible to me that there has been a Rubicon passed that has to be grappled with. There was an order of magnitude difference between opium and the development of heroin. Or tobacco and the cigarette.

TikTok did not invent the addictive parasocial content scroll. But it might represent a new concentration where we might really start grappling with the reality of what is happening to our brains when we use these services.
[dupe]

Some more discussion on their other official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40115554
My guess is that they saw how nicely Apple made basic app development (read 2.5D planes with list views and spatial UX) and they are gonna try their best to shape their “app framework” in a similar fashion.
I wonder if this will allow full use of Meta's hardware without an account.
> Starting last September the city outlawed the sale of these batteries, requiring that all batteries be certified as safe by a consumer safety group such as UL Listed.

(Thinking as a hacker/tinkerer,) Googling for the law, it seems like it applies to mobility devices or their batteries that are sold, leased, or rented in New York City. Meaning it would presumably not apply to DIY/home-built batteries used personally (which I think is a good thing on-balance).
Harbinger of Applocalypse?

(For customers; I have no doubt investors and the core team are happy.)
All valid points, and I completely agree that the narrative could have a bit more depth to it. I really wish there were more puzzles to solve. However, at the end of the day, we had to keep the scope under control, which was already quite large for a two-person team.
VR makes me sick. Don't know about mixed reality but I've read that also causes nausea.
And what about facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube... NATO are losing their control in propaganda and they are afraid because they cannot spread its disinformation through tiktok.. This is not a justification to adictive social media but their hypocrisy is unhideable
> How likely is Valve to use Android?

Not likely, unless they make a headset which doesn't do much of anything by itself and is just meant for streaming from a PC. To make a standalone headset which can draw on the Steam catalog they would almost certainly want to use a variant of their SteamOS Linux distro.
Energy transition metals winding up in the garbage bin
Hello alephnerd, Loved reading your insights. I am one of the editors of this story, and I was surprised when the reporters told me that most other tools (Google and Microsoft) did not allow African entrepreneurs to pay in local currencies. That does seem like something that can be easily fixed, if there's will. Here's hoping that all global companies make the playing field even for all global entrepreneurs.
Doesn’t seem very “open” actually. Open to ASUS and Lenovo != Open.
Are you thinking of the Quest or something? Google Glass didn't have content or a FOV.
Somehow you don't see these complaints when people just straight up have you download an .exe of their video game.
In my opinion, iCloud isn't a viable alternative to Dropbox (as far as its "a folder that syncs" functionality). They work differently under the hood and iCloud Drive is tied to all your iCloud data, so don't even think about using it for non-personal things.

You cannot sign into iCloud Drive on a Mac and not also have a bunch of sensitive personal data placed on it.

I now use SyncThing. It works when it works, but sync often breaks/stalls/goes into proxy mode and I have to go in and do some voodoo to get things syncing correctly again.

Moving my all my Syncthing devices to Tailscale IPs has helped this quite a bit, but it still kinda sucks. Still preferable to paying Dropbox's ever creeping prices and feature bloat.
AI is about to make the online child sex abuse problem much worse
Wow, my guess was more like 4-6 people for a year. You guys are impressively multi-talented!
On the off chance someone from Brown surfs these comments, your RSS feed is borked <https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbl...>

This feed does not validate.
line 5598, column 30: XML parsing error: <unknown>:5598:30: undefined entity
<title>Verifying Extensions&rsquo; Compliance with Firefox's Private Brow ...

and this isn't helping matters:

In addition, interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendations.
line 5, column 57: Self reference doesn't match document location
<link href="http://blog.brownplt.org/feed/" rel="self"/>
amazing, reminds me of the opening scene of jedi knights of the old republic.
I think he is working on turning that trend around (see Llama).
Very strange how many people are here to dunk on Zuck. He's opening up an OS. THAT'S AWESOME! We should celebrate that in principle, no matter how we feel about him or VR in general.
Yes, and also not-always-bumping-into-capacity-limits (availability) progress.
ActivityPub is just a protocol, but yes, Ghost could build moderation tools to determine what comments it will display.
Oculus still requires a Facebook login; don't you see the conflict?
Pixel phones are great too, but Google would be a radically different company if they tried to saturate the demand for Android hardware on their own.

Making flagship/reference hardware on the Oculus legacy is a much better strategy for Meta and lets them focus on platform vision and data collection, which is exactly the company they spent the last 15+ years building.
Here's a great and kind of terrifying story on CLEAR:

https://onezero.medium.com/clear-conquered-u-s-airports-now-...
The Black Tax: why have African Americans been cheated for so long?
What's suspicious about the timing? "ByeDance failed to do this before going ahead and launching TikTok Lite in the two EU markets" It's after launching the (new) app and after EU started enforcing the Digital Markets Act.
I can't tell which article is better so I guess we'll stick with the one that was posted earlier.

Comments moved thither. Thanks!
Such as what? I think this is like a massive invention and presages massive changes in the world at least on the decades-timescale. Big claims are warranted.
(author here) I will probably write more about this, but it's not just modularity, or interfaces. Or at least those words are clouded by associations with specific mechanisms in whatever programming languages one has used

One additional distinction that's relevant is strong vs. weak modules in the sense here:

https://thunderseethe.dev/posts/whats-in-a-module/#strong-vs...

Some of my comments here - https://lobste.rs/s/eccv1g/what_s_module

and here - https://lobste.rs/s/u7y4lk/modules_matter_most_for_masses

Harper doesn't use the term "strong modularity", but he says that REAL modularity is M x N, and that's closer to what I'm getting at:

https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/modules-mat...

To be most useful, it is important that the relationship between M and A be many-to-many, and not many-to-one or one-to-one.

(Although I disagree with the assertions about static types -- I think he is making a very domain specific argument, nonetheless we agree on strong modularity)

It needs more analysis, but I'd claim there are at least two kinds of modularity and programming to interfaces, but the difference is not clear to most people

The interior vs. exterior distinction is a big one -- is the interface "owned by" one party, or does it stand alone?

Are you able to do "interior" refactorings that change the interface, or is it fixed, outside the project? This is a big difference in practice
> My argument is that there is no 1:1 mapping: for instance, "for (i=0, j=10; s[i]; t[j--] = s[i++])" has no direct correspondence with sigma notation.

And? I didn't claim that all the multi-expression, body-in-the-conditional possibilities are a 1:1 mapping with sigma notation, did I?

Why do you think this is more representative of for loops in C than simpler examples I gave?

> or you meant by "1:1 mapping" something quite different from what I mean.

Well, yes. I meant that the 1:1 mapping is from sigma notation to C, not the other way around, because sigma notation was not invented after the C language.

Maybe I shouldn't have said 1:1 mapping; it's much clearer to say "The `for` loop in C is just a way to write sigma notation in programming languages".
Yeah right, he's donating all those GPUs to rebuild his reputation. It has nothing to do with trying to be relevant as a non-market leader.
About time. NVIDIA needs some serious competition.
I agree that it’s misleading to act like this is a product in market, we don’t really even know if the yield will happen.

But it’s a serious thing if it happens.
it requires a meta sign-in, which isn't a facebook account.
HBM is slower than DDR per pin, the speed gain is from a hugely parallel bus.

Parallel means latency if you have non "embarrassingly parallelizable" tasks?
I'm not sure how to interpret this comment, are you saying that 28 deaths due to preventable battery fires is an acceptable number?
A news site can embed their own content and summarize it.

This site does not check if a video can be embedded before attempting to summarize it.

This șite exists to take the work of others, regardless of if they want it to be used like this and barely makes any effort to show the source. There's no link to the channel, no credits from the video itself.
From Wikipedia: "Unlike many other jurisdictions, the New York City fire marshals are armed police officers with full powers of arrest..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_marshal#New_York_City_Fir...
An apprentice gets low pay in exchange for on-the-ground learning, and earning hours towards licensure. ...Paying ones dues, to eventually earn good income.
I know I'm fighting the overwhelming tide here, but what the hell is "mixed reality"? What is "the metaverse"? For that matter what is "artificial intelligence"? Stop trying to dazzle and just use words, if the technology is revolutionary then it will be. An automobile is not the magic carpet, a cell phone is not a soulmate, etc. Otherwise fuck it -- TV is virtual reality, getting high augmented reality, TI-84 calculators are artificial intelligence, libraries are the metaverse, ...
Why Generative AI Violates Copyright – For Skeptics
I've found that `localStorage.mouseSensivity = 4` (the default max is 1) seems to set it to about the right amount. However mouse movement is now very jumpy. It seems that individual mouse events are visible and mouse acceleration curves cause very unpleasant behaviour.

Maybe it is something to a high resolution screen, so one CSS pixel is actually quite large?
potato <=> potato (sounds on)
Whatever the purpose is behind it, I'm just glad that their work benefits me for once. I could not tell you the last time Tim Cook or Bill Gates sponsored something that genuinely improved my day-to-day life.
This mirrors my experience in retail. Anything less than the top score is counted as a negative, often counting the 1-9 score as a 0 with the 10 as a 1. The heat lands on a local manager when corporate comes to town. What ends up happening is that the customer-facing employees train the customers to put down 10s.

It's ultimately a metric that's been gamified by everyone involved. I think the cynics keep it around because it gives customers a voice.
I don't know about the FDNY in particular, but lots of agencies beyond FBI / police have jurisdiction to arrest people.
How defensible do you think this distinction actually is? Like if you were fighting a philosophical battle, is this the hill you would choose? Or perhaps retreat to more defensible ground
Seeing as the popular alternative here would be DuckDB-WASM, which (last time I checked) is on the order of 50MB, this is comparatively super lightweight.
Things are moving on their level as well https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-sen...
to third-party hardware makers.

And it's still based on Android.

The reason will be the same as for Android by Google: Control the market.
The Problem is that it isn't smoke and mirrors.

People see legitimately novel and exiting new things computers can do. The Problems is that those things are extrapolated into the future based on insanely optimistic predictions.

Up until now every single innovation has had times of rapid advances and adoption followed by a slowing down and stagnation. Believing that artificial neural networks aren't subject to that trend is, again, extremely optimistic.

The greatest folly, I believe, is people who look at arbitrary problems and imagine AI solving them. This will not happen. Yet I see that thinking again and again.
Artificial neural networks are good at certain things and bad at others.

OpenAI has succeeded massive on making people believe that it can continually improve on basically every problem at an accelerating rate. If that is true, it is obviously the most valuable company in the world. But if artificial neural networks behave like any other innovation there will be a point at which implementation is impractical and improvements will be limited.
I just unpack node to different folders and set PATH. Why would I need any tool for that?

Most languages work that way just fine. Java, node, python, go. The only bad player that I've found is Rust, its distribution is absolute mess.
Sure, but .. we aren't really talking advanced mathematics, here, right? We're looking at an ascii representation of high school maths.