I use it for sim racing just about every other day at home. It is, by far and away, the most compelling gaming experience I've ever had. Having race high-end karts before, it is closer to the "real" feeling than I could've ever imagined -- certainly not in terms of the danger and things like that, but with high-end peripherals the driving experience, sense of competition, and mental effort required mirror it perfectly. Truly a steal at many times the cost if that's your sort of thing.
I also got my pilot's license a few years ago after developing a love of flying from the Microsoft Flight Sim 95 era and beyond. In VR, while I've never had the "full controls," in higher-end aircraft software I could very accurately (literally to just about 100%) recreate my IRL flights with the exception of the feel of the yoke and whatnot. Again, awesome gaming experience.
Lastly, I've played quite a bit of poker in PokerstarsVR. The thing that surprises me the most about THOSE experiences is that this attempt to create a pretty simple and at first-glance unexciting experience in VR to me revealed just how incredible VR actually CAN be. Like, yes, I get the value-add that the videogame can have for something like flying an airliner or a formula car, but wouldn't you always rather play poker with your friends IRL? Well, to me, VR showed me that that answer is a resounding 'no.' IRL poker is slow (just from shuffling and dealing, to say nothing of folks fumbling with chips), if you play poker well you'll be sitting out a lot of hands, so that can get boring, etc. In VR, however, I could see many, many more hands/hr, I could pin a TV to the virtual room and watch whatever I wanted as I'm talking with folks all over the world, could engage in side-games with the person next to me if I wasn't in a hand, etc. Just... unbelievably compelling. It made me a believer that I could EASILY see how in the near future even if I had 8 friends at home who really wanted to play poker, that I'd rather have each of us reaching out for our personal VR devices to do that in rather than reaching for a deck of cards.
The question I'd love to be able to ask the author is how, in fact, this is different from search. Google successfully built a moat around that, but one can argue, too, that it should not have been long-lived. True, there was the secrete page-rank sauce, but sooner or later everyone had that. Other corporations could crawl anything and index whatever at any cost (i.e. Bing), yet search, which is in some sense also a commodity heavily reliant on models trained partly on user input, is what underpins Google's success. What about that problem allowed it to successfully defend it for so long, and why can't you weave a narrative that something like that might, too, exist for generative AI?
I have a wonderful group of friends from back home, ranging all over the age spectrum, who all golf together almost religiously every weekend. I made them an app that resembles the PGATour's live scoring, so folks can be on the course and input their scores on the holes and get a live leaderboard of how everyone is doing, factoring in everyone's handicap. There are some commercial apps that kind of do this, but the issue with us there are several members who for one reason or another don't. have phones to input their scores themselves, so my app lets one person in the group put their scores in for the other ones.
After I left the country, this has had the wonderful side benefit that I can still follow along with everyone's game, and has been instrumental in me staying in touch and connected to my friends, so that when I come to visit on vacation it's like I never left!
I don't even have kids yet and I already feel bad for them!
On a more serious note, what an incredible project. There's all the very obvious stuff -- the creativity, the learning experience, the sense of wonder and ways it can inspire both the adults and kids -- but above all what sticks out to me is the amount of time that it took to put this together could have so easily... gone to waste? Like, what a nice way to have a hobby, spend time with your kids, and have something to show for it at the end? I worry that with the increased ease with which you can just "doom scroll," things like this are tougher and tougher to achieve. I remember as a child I'd get bored so I'd be FORCED to get my toys out and make up stories. In a similar vein, as an adult, this is such a positive outlet for "free time," but I worry that the attention economy has made committing to projects like these even harder (at the margin).
I applaud the rocket scientist (and astronaut!). Truly inspiring stuff!
As a tech-inclined person working at a private school with a healthy amount of time to putter and work on my own projects, I feel like I need to get busy!
I interned at the US Senate for a year, and it was pretty eye opening. There are quite literally teams available to members to which they basically can go "write me a law that does X," and then they get to work. Staff at the Congressional Research Service has to be sweating bullets now! /s
I have one of the original ones, and I will admit: for a dev-focused person, you could see A LOT of potential. But, now it is quite an ordeal to get things up and running... if you want to experiment with that kind of interface, something tells me you are better off buying an nreal or something like that and having an actual functional and supported device + something you can potentially hack on.
I feel like over the past few decades I have seen tons of news like this or that at least feels like this where there is some announcement about tangible progress that is made towards our returning to the moon -- some new prototype capsule announcement, a new unveiling of a rocket plan, the new suits, the "biosphere" stuff, etc. -- only to then see a published time horizon for the moon return which seems to always be "five years out." Any reason to expect THIS time around is different?
The best educational experience I've had in life was this summer course I took at Columbia as a high-schooler about "graphics programming."
In the morning, we would study a little bit of the physics and math behind image rendering. I didn't have a lot of the content in school, and this is where I learned all the high-school math around matrices and vectors. The instructor truly did an unbelievable job motivating us with this "real" problem we had about understanding the natural world, and then going through exploring how we could marshal the math to make it work.
Then, in the afternoon, we'd turn our attention to the computers, where we would then implement in C the math that we had done in the morning. We all literally started from a "blank sheet of paper," and over the course of a month build our own very simple rendering engine, including all of the helper math functions that it relied on, to a point where it could consume files with vertex information and render a 3D image on the screen. It was... absolutely exhilerating.
I vividly recall our discussion about aliasing, and just how awesome it felt being an "investigator" and thinking deeply about this phenomenon I had noticed while using paint, and now uncovering what to me where insanely clever strategies on how to mitigate it.
I've become an educator, and to this day I hold that as the gold standard for what an incredible educational experience can be. I've tried many times, but if I'm being honest I don't think I've come close to delivering to my kids what that course did for me those years ago. I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember the instructor's name, because I wish I could publicly give him a ton of credit for it.
I just took a peak at SimAirport... just insane. As someone whose coding has amount to little else but a few small webapps here and there, it completely and utterly boggles my mind that a single person would be able to accomplish something like that. I was aware of the RollerCoaster Tycoon person, but I figured that was an abherration. Completely amazing and awe-inspiring. How on Earth do you get going on something like this?!?!
I'd even push it a little bit and say not even groupthink necessarily, but really the major issue here was a fundamental lack of diversification. Groupthink may be a lack of diversification in terms of opinions/ideas, which certainly is dangerous, but in the SVB example, there was also quite a clear and real lack of diversification of depositors.
If you go back in US banking regulation history, there used to be very strict rules around branching (which is one of the reasons why there is such a large number of regional banks in the US). This had the side-effect of preventing banks from having a diversified set of depositors, so local shocks (crop issues, weather, etc.) were much more likely to decimate small, local banks, which is one of the reasons why bank failures used to be MUCH more common.
Not too sure about the move of putting this out in the open so transparently. Surely if I'm a customer of one of these startups with any sort of serious reliance on them, surely seeing their name on this list will make me ask even tougher questions of them? (who, I fully recognize, are unfortunately just caught in the middle of all of this)
For folks for whom this is scratching an itch, highly recommend you check out Reentry: An Orbital Simulator. It is a beautiful indie passion project trying to faithfully recreate all aspects of the 1960s space era, in which you'd go through the actual steps necessary to operate the aircraft, including the lunar lander. It's awesome in it that it tries to be faithful, like NSSP and things of the nature, while also not cutting corners in the "game-like" parts of the experience, like textures, audio design, missions, VR capability, etc. If you enjoyed this for more than a few minutes, you'll enjoy poking around in it!
True but this take is a bit naive. I used to live in Brazil, where Whatsapp is the defacto communication method, for example. You might stand on principle all you want, but if you don't have that as a primary communication channel for a service/end-user oriented business -- even if you have all the alternatives imaginable!!! -- you are going to have a RIDICOUSLY hard time. Just on my personal life with folks there, if I were to just not participate in Whatsapp it is not an understatement that the social fabric of my life would significantly change. For the worse.
Thank you for the reply, it does! I do quite a bit of work with young people around social media and behavior, so I'm just noodling ways where I think this may be useful in setting up scenarios for them! Thanks so much for all the work!!!
A non trivial part of social media is the social component, where folks build their own networks according to all sorts of graphs and in many instances using real world identities to do that. Do you have a sense as to the impact that the absence of that has on using something like this? Sure, we can fairly accurately replicate the mechanics of a social network, but the decision making in it surely is influenced by the difference in the social graph/tie to real identity/etc.
This one, too, turns out to be incorrect. The source of this is mostly due to the fact that, in fact, if you average out over a longer time horizon, your annualized returns do in fact average out. However, what people miss is that fact that this annualization is being compounded over that entire time as well, so small disturbances to it end up having quite a substantial impact on that end result. The only REAL form of diversification is asset class, not time.
On the topic of "still quite impressive what can be done", I can't more emphatically recommend (the now quite old!) lecture that Peter Norvig gave which is available on YouTube called the unreasonable effectiveness of data. He does a great job showing some toy and small examples about just how nuanced this point is, and that it is easy to underestimate the impact that simply more data can have. We tend to think of it as a quantitative impact and make all sorts of assumptions as to the second derivative of what the gains can be, but he does a great job showing that there might be all sorts of interesting inflection points and that simply more data can actually have significant qualitative differences.
Random thought that I'm not sure is even a good thought. Tried the number pizza man game, and one mechanic which I thought may be interesting is if the distribution of values in the pizza boxes changes as time goes on. Rather than maybe skipping ahead after a while if the student doesn't get it, slowly change the randomization to include more and more, and then perhaps only exclusively, the right answer. This would allow a kid to still "get it," while still engaging them in the game mechanic.
If you want to do a marvelous deep dive on this concept, I highly recommend the Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod. It's a masterful work on the game theory behind how different species/animals/people cooperate and why, and it is a deeply intellectual and rigorous book that uses no more than 6th grade algebra to get its point across. Promise you you'll like it.
I work in the space -- the kind of computer use has changed dramatically. Probably as an accident because of the expense/availability/space required/etc., it used to be the case that to use a computer you'd have to have some sort of pre-existing justification for it. This has, for all intents and purposes, almost completely flipped. In a great many school/districts kids either have access to an individual computer or readily available shared carts, and more often than not teachers and kids will spring to it almost reflexively. And, while there are many positives this can bring, so too it brings a lot of negatives. I think it's less the fact that they are using them but rather that their use isn't being dictated by some sort of pedagogical justification but rather because it's become the default.