skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> there's little lasting value. Once the novelty wears off, most people stop caring.

i disagree. if we got half-life alyx level games as often as flatscreens people would still be playing. I do think we need lighter cooler headsets (at least compared to valve index) for longer play sessions.

the big trend now on PC is flat2vr. UEVR and luke ross have been carrying pcvr on their back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q02UCNXLJY8
Java's Closeable.close() has declared multiple invocations as safe for 20 years, when it first became an interface.
Don't anthropomorphize LLMs. They hate that.

And it's not even a question of LLMs getting answers "wrong". It's just generating associated text. It has no concept of right or wrong answers.
The Fastest Options Are the Most Fun
> the lesson to be drawn from that is "don't defer a function call if you need to check its error value"

Isn't the lesson here: If you must have a Close method that might fail in your API, ensure it can safely be called multiple times?

As long as that is true, you can approach it like you would any other API that has resources that might need to be cleaned up.

f, _ := os.Create(...)
defer f.Close()
// perform writes and whatever else
if err := f.Close(); err != nil {
// recover from failure
}

(os.File supports this, expectedly)

> the solution to this problem will be to use a WriteFile function

If it were the solution you'd already be using os.WriteFile. It has a time and place, but often it is not suitable. Notably because it requires the entire file contents to be first stored in memory, which can become problematic.

Certainly you could write a custom WriteFile function that is tuned to your specific requirements, but now you're back to needing to be familiar with the intricacies of a lower-level API in order to facilitate that.
Anecdata, with a few exceptions, the VR games I tried were impressive as an experience, but not really all that fun once the novelty passed. The limitations of the format clash with the kinds of games that are being made so I often felt like the games were limited, or toy-like. I think the argument made by the article does hit on something about why VR isn't really getting accepted. The games are wrong: but they might be wrong because of the limitations vs expectations of the developers and audience.

The comfort issue is real too. Even with the fairly svelte PSVR2, it's annoying to wear those things.
Great idea. I tried it with my personal site (https://matthew.science) and it didn't find any, which admittedly doesn't have any meta tags, but it is linked at the footer at https://matthew.science/atom.xml. It was the default feed URL for my SSG. I'd recommend adding this to the common suffix list.
> If they can do it to Apple, why not to regular citizens?

because Apple is literally made from tens of hundreds of "regular citizens"

or to keep it simple: Apple is a citizen made out of thousands of 'regular' citizens.
That site argues that carousels should basically never be used, but personally I hate the design constraints and resulting UX of refresh on hitting bottom of screen (the alternative to carousels).

Something to look at how airbnb uses carousels when showing a listings. There are many listings and you're not necessarily interested enough to click yet, and there's a cognitive cost to leaving and re-entering the search experience, so you can either have a modal or allow a carousel. The carousel is the halfway point between interested enough to investigate further but not interested enough to step into a new visual scene and step back out into the search experience.
I think the overlap between "hard core" flatscreen gamers and "hard core" VR gamers isn't a given.

I mean, look at VRChat. People spend thousands of dollars on gear (before even getting into the physical space needed for full immersion) to... wander around talking to each other and play low-quality clones of minigolf and Among Us games.
To be fair, the website has changed very little since OSS launch (when this blog post first came out) and almost all of the main points of the blog are still the same, and the selling points are the same, too. So, I think it's fine, but definitely the website is the next place to look, yes.

Probably the biggest major changes in Sapling I can personally think of are the introduction of the experimental "Dotgit" mode (.git exists next to .sl) and that the server-side stuff has recently become more usable. But none of it is stable yet, so for users not much has changed (yet).
Is bouncing radar from above on an active commercial airport an okay idea?
I feel like the other obvious area that VR games have barely touched on is simulation games. Think of Theme Hospital, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and the like as floating dioramas you can manipulate and zoom in and out of.
five accountants will produce six results from the same input based on the same laws, all of which the IRS will accept. Laws are not code. They are not unambiguous and noncontradictory.

And forget apple! This means that any company in existence now needs a lawyer who understands the Treaty of Lisbon! Just in case some EU country tells them to do X, they now need to know if said country can actually say so!

I think you underestimate the damage of "we cannot trust the actual government to tell us what we can and cannot do"
Thatcherism took hold and the Tories keep winning. This is your country on trickle down economics -- the roads suck and nothing changes.
>I will try to find more stories like this.

No offense, but it sounds like your problem is that you spend too much time "finding stories", and end up cynical and pessimistic about the the country.

But, back in reality, the US is very wealthy, has amazing educational institutions, unlimited opportunity and guess what? Not everyone who waves the flag is a fascist or racist. Some of those people long for the way things were...just like you seem to be doing.

It's not perfect, but the US is still a great place.
Did you try to repeat the experiment?
I am incorrect!

Though Wikipedia makes it sound like there was a lot of pressure from investors to pivot into that side quest:

In 2012, the company received an additional $15 million investment from Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z),[1][3][11] prompted in part by partner Marc Andreessen's own past effort to build a group annotation feature into a web browser.[1] Ben Horowitz described Genius as "one of the most important things we've ever funded"
We just can't stop eating
Malaysia's plan to block overseas DNS dies after a day
Glad to hear money isn't your focus. Your comment "...then we realized it was also monetizable" was the reason for my interpretation. Its also a very common rational. I don't know what "nerd-sniped" means, so...

Good luck with the VCs. I hope you all stay friends through the challenging process.
It's fast because your demo prefetches the listings when the mouse cursor hovers or taps, which is possible with traditional e-commerce, I dislike that kind of UX that are wasting user data usage. Is there an option to disable prefetching?
What is it about this topic that makes you and others so hostile? It reads like heavy emotional reactions, but I am curious.

There are 4 replies to my comment and 3 of them are uncharacteristically hostile.
Why are gamers like this? People dinged the console for performance issues when the lushest 4k graphics options were selected, so Sony responded with a model that delivers lush graphics and smooth gameplay at high frame rates. I've never even seen a PS5 and I know this from overhearing gamers talk about it.

istm Sony's bigger problem is a lack of AAA games that make the console a must-have rather than a fun option, but since it's essentially a PC in a custom box idk how they square that circle. Juicing the hardware mid-cycle may not be the most exciting option but it's hardly unprecedented.
You can say "Bullshit". LLMs bullshit all the time. Talk without regard to the truth or falsity of statements. It also doesn't pressupose that the trueness is known, nir deny it, so it should satisfy both camps; unlike hallucination which implies that truth and fiction are separate.

I wonder if there is some sort of transition between recalling declarative facts (some of which have been shown to be decodable from activations) on one hand and completing the sentence with the most fitting word on the other hand. The dream that "hallucination" can be eliminated requires that the two states be separable, yet it is not evident to me that these "facts" are at all accessible without a sentence to complete.
Former employee here; the interesting (horrifying?) fact is that you can set some of these internal headers (I remember a notable bug with cf-cache-status) in workers (the serverless offering) and cause all kinds of bad things to happen :)
You know what helps paying the fines? Breaking the law.
While I agree that development has gotten more complex (often unnecessarily), compared to the 90s, the sheer number of potential consumers now available seems hard to justify complaining about.
Yeah, Spanner is also clear about this. It doesn't even have sequences, and their docs say to use random pkeys rather than time-dependent things like uuid7.
Ha.

Companies collude to eliminate competition all the time. Or use tactics that make competition impossible.

And don't use violence? Give me a break. Even small scale companies like Wizards of the Coast sent the fucking Pinkertons after someone for possessing a magic card. You think Amazon is out here existing violence free? You think Nestle's suppliers are making chocolate without any violence.

Take off the rose colored glasses.
The articles and discussions are combined. There are already a number of threads. It's a dupe.
And what we do see is terrible; bland art, more spam and political astroturfing than ever in human history, bad code, and ignorant lessons, all to the tune of a PR campaign to shift the Overton window towards praising incompetence and denigrating hard work.

The only real accomplishments of LLMs were how good the proposed use-cases sound on paper under competent implementation, and a theoretical solution to unstructured data parsing that's still too heavy to be worth a tiny bump in performance.

Do you want to live in a future where all human thought has been replaced by its surface level reproductions, made by big tech stuffing copyrighted works into a GPU farm with near-zero human labor? We both know it won't benefit you and me, our role is merely transitory in bootstrapping their self-improvement under the guise of a paid product, nor had the relationship between us and these tools been in any shape collaborative in the first place.

This fantasy targets the owner class, which can finally dream of labor decoupled from the laborer, the work simply costing no more than the price of electricity, all without the demands for livable compensation or following best practice. Even if the LLMs gained above-human performance in all domains of knowledge shortly followed by institution of a universal basic income, their invention will still have only been a force of stagnation, learned intellectual helpless, and overconsumption.
(antithesis employee here) We don't currently just offer the deterministic dev environment, but we do offer extended 30 day demos for prospects interested in trying out the tech and seeing how it works. If you're interested contact us directly! contact@antithesis.com
It's not just about the data size. There are reasons your sequence can increment without a row actually being inserted.
Looked at the sibling comments. Has everybody collectively forgotten that XML exists? This stuff was solved decades ago, XSDs can check types.

TOML nesting is indeed a joke. YAML & JSON "look clean", but try to match up nesting in a large document without help from text editor highlights, then see how easy it is in XML.

XML has universal support everywhere, has first-class tooling for everything that's being re-invented in these other languages, but it's not "cool" any more.
Strong disagree, diagnosing chronic dysfunction is essential to optimizing health. There's a big difference between an optimal blood glucose range and one that triggers insurance companies to authorize treatment. If you only pay attention to the later it could cost years of healthy life.

It's like, not being obese enough for your insurance company to pay for medical intervention doesn't mean that your weight is optimal enough to enjoy a long retirement.
Probably should point to https://fireforthewall.github.io

The actual source is under src/

Edit: nevermind yeah a lot of it is WIP indeed
I wonder how increased wages will change the way people work. Pretty much every household on my street is pulling in close to $500k / year. They’re all in their 40s and 50s. They seem to be putting excess wages into SPY. A handful of them have already retired. The rest are planning to in the next 5-10 years. I’m wondering how this will all play out.
Discs are super cheap to press, and word is that Switch games are significantly more expensive to manufacture: https://www.eurogamer.net/why-nintendo-switch-games-are-endi...
Until they solve the vertigo issue it's a non-starter for me and several of my friends who would otherwise be the target market.
Not a rebrand but a pivot. It is a major overhaul with significant new features such as reporting.
It took me a moment to ponder the effectiveness of mapping utf8 characters into a bitmask. At first, it seemed unwise. Then I realized that 32 bits would get you `a-z` plus six special characters, and 64 bits would get you 'A-Z' (uppercase) plus six more. That's plenty of room for HTTP headers, and for a blazing fast matching algorithm since it just masks and compares a couple integers. Even figuring out which bit corresponds to which character is a simple lookup into a 256-word table.

One thing the author leaves out is this technique is technically a Bloom Filter. I find these kinds of things fascinating since they came about in an era where computing was far more resource bound than today (1970 in this case). But here we are, still finding real-world corners to use the same old optimizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter
They build internal representations of the input only, and to the extent needed, to get the statistics right. This really isn't a "world model" of factual data, but rather a "source model" of what would various sources (training texts) say.

The responses of the model don't represent what it understands per some internal model, because there is no "it", only models of the sources it was trained on, and it'll just as happily generate lies as truths, or smart vs dumb answers (it's all just words) if that is what its source modelling calls for.

What most people mean when they say the model is hallucinating/bullshitting isn't where it has learnt a lie, but rather where is is operating "out of distribution", and is therefore (unknowingly) generating a mashup from multiple only loosely related/matching source contexts.
What a beautiful state ravaged by the growing trend of anti-collectivism.
The time required to write a good article—by write I mean compose sentences and type them—is a fraction of the time it takes to research it. Because the AI can't do actual reporting or journalism (interviewing people, emailing sources, tracking down documents and ingesting them, checking facts, etc.) then you either push all that work on to the editor, or you consign your publication to only writing stories that require no original reporting. If you push it all on to the editor, the economics no longer pencil out, because the editor is doing the work of 10 authors plus one editor. If you stop doing original reporting, you have a bad product.

Today, with the field of journalism in freefall, we actually have the worst of both worlds: not enough editors, not enough time to report, not enough original reporting being done, and too many AI or computationally generated articles. But, I don't see how getting rid of the humans and doubling down on the AI actually solves that problem in the medium and long terms.
Quick rant about websites that go into all the trouble of having an RSS feed but not linking to it in the <head>... I don't want to go hunting for the cute orange button, I want to copy and paste "https://example.com" into my feed reader and let the computer handle the work.

If you maintain any website with a news feed, go right now and check that you have this in your <head>:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/rss.xml" title="News feed" />
^^^^^^^^ change! ^^^^^^^^^

(Also note whether and where you need to use application/rss+xml, application/atom+xml, or application/json.)
All hail the actual time lord
Hmm. Delegating a decision you do not enjoy making to a machine? Sounds like expected behavior.
Yeah, I was going to say just that. The statement above is like saying: "If you have an oven, it should be burning at full power all the time. All the time with your oven not burning is wasted time". No. I need an oven to burn at high power when I bake, and it's fine for it to sit idle the rest of the time.
for shorter form lore, known to have a sol'n, there's always the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendian_problem

Lagniappe: https://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/zendiaproblem-call...
I think you make it seem like EU doesn't care at all about what member states do in regards to taxation but there's many limitations to what can be done by any member state in order to harmonize and prevent corruption etc. This in practice makes the EU have a lot of say in regards to taxation. Moreover the EU has special rules to limit moving funds to jurisdictions that have taxes that are deemed too low (read tax havens) - this directly implies no member state has agency to lower their own taxes as much.

Here's some example limitations: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/tackling-...

I focused on direct taxation, but in indirect taxation I think there's even more examples.
... has the same trend as any other TikTok trend. And I wouldn't compare the storm of the Capitol with something dumb as Area 51.

I agree it is ridiculous (this latest UFO craze), but keep in mind that what happened on Jan 6th ALSO started out as something dumb. Wacky conspiracy theories can turn very dark.

Pizza-gate was laughable until somebody decided to "take action" and those same sentiments poured into the q-anon "movement" and influenced many of the participants of the capitol riot.

There has been, lately it seems, interest in UFO stuff on the right-wing fringes. Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck have both been dabbling with this stuff. Elizondo and Grusch are thrilled to appear on any show that will take them, and now Elizondo is doing a speaking tour with his book. It could easily pivot into some bizarre and harmful stuff. At the very least, we're already seeing more politicians willing appease their conspiracy-minded voter base with lip-service to trashy UAP conspiracies.
> I never said it wasn’t statistical at any level so I’m not sure what your point is.

You said it was true on the surface, and I'm pointing out that it's true at its core. Your amazement at how well it works is based on our inability as humans to find the same patterns in the data as these models do. Ascribing some higher level sense of intelligence or understanding to these systems because of this party trick is anthropomorphizing what they actually are. We would all be better served by keeping in mind how they work, instead of being surprised when they do output the wrong pattern.

> Over time the errors and issues will be smoothed away until it’s still there but it’s not noticeable enough to be a major problem.

Why do you think this is guaranteed? We can keep throwing data and compute at these systems, and while we might continue to get better results, the current systems will never intuitively understand that e.g. 9.11 is lower than 9.2[1], unless those specific examples are in their training data. As we reach the limits of the data we can feed them, and we have to generate synthetic data, there's no reason to believe that the current approaches will ever fix these problems at their core.

> It being statistical doesn’t make it useless. It not being some metaphysical concept of awareness doesn’t make it useless.

I never said it was. I agree that this can be useful, but again, as long as we're aware of their limits. It's good keeping this in mind as we're reaching the peak of inflated expectations of the hype cycle.

[1]: https://towardsdatascience.com/9-11-or-9-9-which-one-is-high...
Discussed several times already; here's a start: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41441486
I think it still makes for an interesting contrast when you look at what's got the most ongoing users (VRChat, Gorilla Tag, Bigscreen, Beat Saber, etc), and then compare to the endless parade of devs trying to make yet another direct VR port of FPS game design.
Pretty much the sole game worth buying a Sony console for (Bloodborne) is playable from end-to-end with PC emulation, even on Steam Deck: https://youtu.be/ItnC4GnHfa0

Especially for Sony, there simply aren't any worthwhile exclusive titles they're putting out. The good/big releases get published on PC now, and the obscure/fandom related stuff like Persona and Senran Kagura bled out of Sony platforms almost immediately. That leaves a small handful of games that can mostly be emulated on PC platforms. Unless your name is "Nintendo", you do not have the publishing power to make a console attractive to wealthy PC owners. Sony literally does not have titles with the same draw, anymore.
What is the point of the question being asked by the title, and why do things have to take off?

I think VR is super cool. Playing an hour of beatsaber, pistol whip, or superhot is tremendously entertaining. I also get why people aren't flocking to VR in droves. Compared to other forms of entertainment it's expensive, clunky, isolating, and potentially causes motion sickness.
I don't believe in the metaverse / AVP future where your average person is going to work 40 hours a week with a headset on or whatever.
My fear is that Meta is going to wake up to the fact that the returns for the billions of dollars per year they're burning trying to make Metaverse a thing are never going to materialize and then give up on the whole thing.
Why can't VR just be a niche subdomain of the games industry?

If they just accepted it for what it is, VR could be a small but profitable business within Meta's portfolio or a profitable/sustainable spinoff.
The law making body of the EU is directly elected.
just to be clear, I see it like this (for now):

if a GPT does it and turns out to be false, then it's an hallucination and it's bad (goto more training)

if a human does it, then truth becomes "self-expression" (art) so we call it creativity and it's good
Weak article. Rehash of VR history from other articles. Then author's guesses.

For a good overview of VR today, see Phia's "The Virtual Reality Show."[1] There really are "VR natives", and she is one of them. She's tried almost all the available hardware and environments, including full body and face tracking, and even the omnidirectional treadmills. She's very critical of flaws in hardware and software. Cost is a big issue. The headset isn't all you need. For real immersion, you need face, eye, and body trackers and controllers, all of which cost extra. The good ones aren't cheap. The cheap ones aren't good. She posts videos of her live self and her VR self side by side so you can check the tracking quality.

All this gear provides good social VR immersion if you're in good shape, have good balance, a mobile face, an extroverted personality, a sizable hardware budget, plenty of free time, and an interest in virtual worlds. That's a niche.

Watching Phia does show that except for cost, weight, and complexity, VR does currently work. The original article claims it doesn't, but that probably reflects too much attention to Facebook/Meta's rather weak system.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@TheVirtualRealityShow