Story Behind Hackathon Photo
frantic.im
frantic.im
From the judges:
>Our lives, especially in our twenties, feels like a competition. From school, to university, to getting a job and progressing through our careers – it’s a never ending competition.
Is that really how people feel? The last time I felt remotely similar was in high school during the university entry exams, but even then, it didn't feel much like a competition, more like a group of kids bonding over going through a stressful time together. Then uni was just socializing, taking fun (and some not so fun) classes and enjoying life without any real responsibilities outside of class and mundane student jobs. I know that my friends felt the same. Where is this competition taking place that the author says applies to everyone?
How rich was the country you grew up in?
Remembering that most of the rest of our cognitive processes are running on top of a hyperactive pattern matcher with a tendency to overfit (and to overestimate the comprehensiveness of the training data it's ingested to date) allows one to derive an appropriate lack of surprise at a lot of human behaviours from first principles.
(or at least it seems to work out well for me, it is of course entirely possible that I'm overestimating how well it would work for any given other person for pretty much the reasons I just outlined above)
That’s exactly what makes it “real”. Overexposed windows are the norm in our most common photos, mobile phone ones. The tilted horizon only makes it more dynamic. Chromatic abberation, only ever photo geeks care about. If anything, it lends a credence to it, images without it can sometimes look almost like a render.
Amazingly that was the comment I wanted to write after seeing the picture, its almost like free will doesnt exist.
My version of a dystopia is more like, everyone wears plain grey uniforms and is given the least amount of light and movement needed to squeeze the most product per watt-calorie out of them as is scientifically possible, where the human psychological meatgrinder is approaching maximum operational efficiency.
The 2022 edition of Dev Challenge didn't happen there though, it happened in Poland instead, but the organization is still located in Kiev.
And yes, maybe some of the programmers are fighting in a war, directly or indirectly, with guns or with computers.
Built after the School 42 concept in France: https://42.fr/en/homepage/
That's why is looks like a fancy SAT test, not a 3 day camp-in.
I know the pic is about a hackathon… but I have seen regular workplaces that look exactly the same.
Especially if they regularly work from random cafes or coworking spaces.
- Any small portable computer e.g Phone with Samsung DEX/RaspberryPi/Steam Deck
- Custom split bluetooth keyboard e.g Corne, Ferris Sweep
- Magic Trackpad or mouse
- AR Glasses (Viture, NReal Air)
- Large capacity power bank (imuto would be my recommendation). Alternatively a good charger like the Zendure Passport series.
It's less elegant as you're going to have a minimum of two cables involved (ar glasses to computer, computer to power bank) but ends up being a similar amount of space/weight, just distributed differently. You may argue it's heavier because of the power bank but if I'm taking my computer anywhere I'm normally taking my power bank as well because you can't rely on there being a seat near a plug in a lot of places.
I was super sceptical about VR/AR until I tried them but they really are the perfect solution for people who are suffering from this. The only downside is that you have to trade some screen resolution as all the current offerings are 1080p but I think it will only be a couple of years until we get 1440p and then 3 years after that I think we'll get 4k.
I've got a pair of both the Xreal Air and the Viture and I think I'm going to sell the XReal Air and keep the Viture. Reasons why, in order of importance:
- XReal Air give me a weird, sharp pinching pain on the side of my head after a while. It's weird because it comes out of nowhere and it is quite a sharp pain that is difficult to ignore but if you wear a thin polyester running headband underneath it completely goes away. I don't really want to wear a headband, even a thin one, just to use my AR glasses, so this is a major win for the Viture which doesn't suffer from this problem.
- Viture has a proprietary magnetic cable whereas XReal uses a USB-C cable that slots into the end of the arm. Normally, I would be all about the reusable standard but in this case I'm all about the magnetic cable, for the same reason people like the MagSafe charger on the MacBook. It's very easy to forget you're tethered with these things, move, and end up yanking the cable. With the Viture this is less of a worry because it will disconnect, but with the XReal it's going to get taut and yank either your machine and/or the glasses. There's a lot of photos of people with cracked arms on the XReal reddit and I strongly suspect this is a major contributing reason though people try and claim otherwise.
- Following on from the above, more thought seems to have been put into the design and the ecosystem with Viture in comparison to XReal. Even the Viture carrying case and packaging* are more premium than the XRreal. The nose pads are far easier to swap out and there's four heights compared to the Xreal's three. The prescription glasses attachment just magnetically snaps to the glasses rather than fiddling about like the Xreal. There's an accessory cable available to provide power to your device and allow the glasses to connect at the same time (essential for the Steam Deck which has only 1 usb-c port). There's a neckband accessory thing which I could see catching on as the main way consumers use these things. In contrast, the Xreal just have an accessory called the Beam, which doesn't really offer anything other than wireless connection to your computer (still have a wire between the glasses and the beam), 6Dof and 4 hours of battery which doesn't really add anything for me. The Beam does solve the yanking issue mentioned above because you're meant to wear it on your person.
- Viture are slightly brighter and have a really cool electrochromic film feature that essentially darkens the glasses when you're in a bright environment in order to see things better.
- The XReal screen is slightly larger than the Viture, but the Viture seems slightly sharper than the Xreal, especially when you get the myopia dials right. These dials aren't the greatest, and I think if you're short sighted you're probably best off just buying the prescription lens that snap to the frame.
- Xreal have a halo of light around the perimeter of the screen. I can ignore it but it is annoying when I see it. The Viture have no such halo, but the very top and very bottom of the screen can sometimes blur, I'm assuming due to light leakage as I'm definitely using the right nosepads as the entire screen is in view.
To me, Viture are the superior product, but the problem they have at this point is that the Xreal have first mover advantage. Viture have only recently started shipping wheras Xreal have sold over 200,000 units. A lot of people with Steam Decks also have Xreal glasses so there's a lot of momentum for them in the gaming community. There's a possibility that it might be a VHS/Betamax scenario where the better format ends up losing, but hopefully Viture will be able to gain some ground.
There are also some other companies on the market like Rokid, which are meant to be technically better than either Viture or Xreal, but the aesthetics are appalling. With the Viture and the Xreal, they look like Ray-Ban Wayfarers so you can get away with wearing them in public whereas the Rokid look like something out of a bad 90s spy movie.
I also think it's only a matter of time until Samsung and Google get in on the action and release something. I think Apple are going to be super late to the party like they were with smart speakers, presumably because they're not going to want to cannibalise Vision Pro unless they have to. I think it will end up being a HomePod/HomePod mini situation, where they reluctantly release the cheaper one and that ends up being the one people actually buy. I reckon it's probably going to be 4 maybe even 5 years before we see anything from them but I might be wrong.
I think you might even see all the major TV manufacturers try and release something because I think it's going to seriously eat into their market, to the point where I think TVs might not even exist in 20 years time. I also think cinemas might be seriously fucked.
*The packaging has a kind of "Falcon wing door" mechanism to open it that I've never really seen on anything before, it is pretty cool as far as packaging goes.
It's almost midnight here so I've only skimmed your comment (it's much more in-depth than I'd hoped for - wonderful!) but will ofc come back to read it fully :)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/600385286/inmo-air2-the...
Some venues provide a monitor, but thats usally one per team.
If I possibly can and I remote work i setup at least a 27" 4k monitor and my 12' iPad as a second monitor with the laptop on the stand as the third.
Productivity demands it.
And of course separate keyboard and trackpad.
If somewhere for 3 or 4 days I'll ship things if needed.
Well worth the 10 minutes.
It's hard enough traveling with a 27 inch monitor, there's no way I'm lugging a 12 foot iPad through the airports!
Anecdotally, I have found a correlation between hackathon winners and proper posture. Also some of the best developers I’ve seen work with proper posture.
I know 80+ years old with better posture than most 20 something tech workers