2,973 karma · joined November 22, 2013
If you're interested in redirected walking, you might also be interested in the CyberMotion simulator [0]. I had the chance to see it in action when attending IEEE VR 2018. It's for motion sickness research, and it allows for mapping arbitrary motion into a limited robotic range of motion, in order to give a realistic sense of acceleration in different directions to the user.
I wonder if there have been any in-depth articles examining comparisons between real-time graphics and stagecraft. The design of props and backgrounds in the theatre has similar objectives -- not necessarily fooling the audience into thinking it's real, but using a collection of 'tricks' to extend the capabilities of the stage to achieve greater effects. When attending a performance of The Nutcracker a few months ago, I found myself fascinated by how the multiple layers of forced-perspective backdrops offered a greater sense of depth to the stage.
As a possible future fashion, I would love to see something like girdle book binding used for devices like smartphones. I still have momentary annoyance when pulling a phone out of my pocket, so reducing that friction would be interesting. I see there is already such a case made for reenactors / hipsters [2].
[0] https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JZ5lMsQEYgE/VvzXtponQ4I/AAAAAAAAB...
[1] https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/0/04...
[2] https://www.etsy.com/listing/155624836/custom-leather-smartp...
On the other hand, the presence of a domestic political party is a fundamentally different thing from the presence of a foreign entity working inside a sovereign entity like a state. Both the Republican and Democratic parties at least claim loyalty to the American people and its government and alignment with their interests.
It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the sheer chutzpah needed to say something like that. "The issue isn't that I did it, the issue is that you didn't make other people stop me." Textbook sociopathic behavior.
In a world where the PDFs are being backed up, the videos are also usually backed up and are just as available. I think in most cases, having an animation gets most of the value that you'd get from having complete interactivity.
https://qntm.org/abolish ("So You Want To Abolish Time Zones")
https://qntm.org/calendar ("You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform")
>First, there can be no compromise with the existing infrastructure. It was designed by superstitious people who didn’t have architecture degrees, or at the very least got their architecture degrees in the past and so were insufficiently Modern. The more completely it is bulldozed to make way for the Glorious Future, the better.
>Second, human needs can be abstracted and calculated. A human needs X amount of food. A human needs X amount of water. A human needs X amount of light, and prefers to travel at X speed, and wants to live within X miles of the workplace. These needs are easily calculable by experiment, and a good city is the one built to satisfy these needs and ignore any competing frivolities.
>Third, the solution is the solution. It is universal. The rational design for Moscow is the same as the rational design for Paris is the same as the rational design for Chandigarh, India. As a corollary, all of these cities ought to look exactly the same. It is maybe permissible to adjust for obstacles like mountains or lakes. But only if you are on too short a budget to follow the rationally correct solution of leveling the mountain and draining the lake to make your city truly optimal.
>Fourth, all of the relevant rules should be explicitly determined by technocrats, then followed to the letter by their subordinates. Following these rules is better than trying to use your intuition, in the same way that using the laws of physics to calculate the heat from burning something is better than just trying to guess, or following an evidence-based clinical algorithm is better than just prescribing whatever you feel like.
>Fifth, there is nothing whatsoever to be gained or learned from the people involved (eg the city’s future citizens). You are a rational modern scientist with an architecture degree who has already calculated out the precise value for all relevant urban parameters. They are yokels who probably cannot even spell the word architecture, let alone usefully contribute to it. They probably make all of their decisions based on superstition or tradition or something, and their input should be ignored For Their Own Good.
The result being, of course, the creation of hideous planned cities that no one wanted to live in.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like...
The Mushroom Ketchup recipe is one I repeatedly go back to -- it's just that good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29u_FejNuks
I also encourage anyone who still has their elderly relatives with them to ask them for recipes they had from their era. My family keeps a common cookbook, and it's nice to be able to pull out Grandma's shrimp-dip recipe for special occasions.
Are there other history podcasts you've enjoyed? I think something like The History of Rome might be more of your style.
Is there any conceivable political world in which UBI is set up as a replacement for the current costly welfare system, and stays that way for more than two weeks?
Imagine the headlines:
- This poor single mother spent her UBI on lottery tickets, now her four kids are starving!
- He got hit by a car. Now this man has to choose between hospital bills and food!
- You won't believe which filthy-rich billionaire is pocketing his UBI check instead of donating it to charity!
It's hard to envision an outcome in which the public isn't immediately clamoring for adjustments, deductions, and exceptions to try to tweak the UBI system to be more fair.
I'm sympathetic to the concept of UBI, especially the method of reducing waste as described in the article. But I can't help but feel that these "UBI will replace the welfare system" articles are inherently dishonest by promising an unstable house-of-cards outcome to a political bloc just to get their support for something that they wouldn't support otherwise.
Identities are formalized based on observation of an Other who doesn't fit into the category, because those observations bring to light unstated assumed commonalities between peoples who didn't think of themselves as a single thing. This is one method of ethnogenesis where groups that didn't think of themselves as a thing gain that consciousness. The idea of "white people" is an example of ethnogenesis that I think had its origins mostly in the American colonial experience, where you had a mixture of European groups differentiating themselves from Africans and American Indian groups. In Europe, an Englishman and a Frenchman (themselves the result of their own ethnogenesis) may not see eye-to-eye, but in a new territory with other peoples with very different cultures, suddenly the English-French thing doesn't seem as big.
These things expand, shift, and contract over time. But at the moment, the consensus-driven model makes me see myself as "white" as one of my categories, invented or not (not that that's my sole identity or anything!). I see myself as white, others who I see as white see me as "white" (though probably if outside the US they see me as "American" more?), and others who aren't white probably think "white" when they see me, so in the end that's the category that we have at the moment, nothing wrong with that in and of itself as long as you treat others with respect.
I hear that "Imagined Communities" is a good read about the rise of different nation-feelings in recent centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities I haven't read it yet myself, though.
The history of the Jews (and the Jewish diaspora in particular) is fascinating. Between the typical opposing endpoints of assimilation/integration and separation there is this curious in-between state that seems both chaotic and stable over time -- the state of being "in a place" but not always being "of that place." The aforementioned podcast describes well the urge to assimilate or to remain distinct, positions held by both those in the Jewish community and those outside of it. The modern revival of the Hebrew language into a living tongue, both as a method of crystallizing identity and distinctiveness, is one example. Also interesting to consider how even small differences in "rules" between societies (like allowing usury or not, and to whom) leads to complex social consequences over time -- sort of a cellular automata analogy. Historical patterns of Jewish expulsion from various societies also make for interesting microcosms to understand tribe-based interactions: when the Jewish people were invited or allowed into a region, who was behind that change in policy and why? When pogroms or expulsions happened afterward, what were the causes and which segments of the population were the catalyst and why? It's an endlessly dynamic system that resists our efforts to create a simple static narrative -- and I suppose if anything it helps reveal that all of history is like that.
I'm curious, implementation-wise, what would need to be done to do this in a more unstructured way. Rather than having a regular polyhedron and a corresponding texture per polyhedron vertex, it would be interesting to use automatic measures of viewpoint entropy to select a smaller number of views that still adequately describe the object to some level of quality. [0] Rather than it being an octahedron, it would be some other irregular shape of points projected onto a unit sphere, from which a 3D convex hull is computed.
The one issue I can think of is that you'd need a way to quickly determine which triangle of that hull the camera is inside (to get the three surrounding views). Is there a way to do that all in shaders without costly raycasts on the CPU side?
[0] "Automatic View Selection Using Viewpoint Entropy and its Application to Image-Based Modelling", http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.96....
For some people in the new gig economy of attention/viewfarming, they've found themselves dependent on a particular 'company town' online service. I'm not so much of an anarcho-capitalist that I find this situation hunky-dory.
At the risk of drumming up unneeded controversy, it reminds me of when Marine Le Pen in France tweeted graphic images from ISIS actions as a rallying cry against them, only to be charged by the state with circulating violent content inciting terrorism ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/01/marine-le-pen-... ). Without proper application of context and judgment, a terrorist spreading propaganda and an anti-terrorist illustrating the terrorist's propaganda would be seen as the same sort of thing.
Of course, there's no simple solution -- we wouldn't want a world in which someone could get out of responsibility for spreading needlessly graphic content just by saying "oh I was just spreading it for educational purposes!".
Can automated processes ever hope to achieve the nuance we need in our societies?
Our society does do that on TV and radio. Consider the recent boycott attempts against Laura Ingraham: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott_in_support_of_David_Ho...
>Do we assume that if you're ad runs during <some sitcom> you agree with the jokes in it?
I don't think most people actually assume that the advertiser literally agrees with all the content they are running ads on. Rather, I think that people have found that it's an effective ideological weapon.
Going after the advertisers to attack content is a tactic that works. The attackers don't have to literally think that the advertisers are morally signing on with the content, they just have to think that enough people out there think that, and that the advertisers are risk-averse to bend the knee, that it's a useful tactic.
The issue is that, unless we have some sort of political movement toward a US-Government funded equivalent of YouTube, there will never be a public space online for the average person. More and more of daily social interaction is moving onto a platform on which everything is inherently private, where there is no public square anymore. I'm concerned about a future where technically you can scream on a physical public streetcorner but have it mean nothing at all in terms of impact on public discourse. "What good is speech if you are unable to make a phone call?" to twist the Matrix quote.
>If you want to publish your content with your own hardware on the Internet, you can. The tools aren't very good to do it, but you can. When the problem becomes network providers censoring your views, then come back to me.
The problem is that there's nothing fundamentally different about the arguments when it comes to the network providers. They're also private companies, why should they be forced at gunpoint to deliver content they disagree with? And yet we acknowledge that having the phone company shut you down for political speech on their phone lines would be an overstep even though the phone company is private.
At a certain point, the sheer dominance and size of some of these social media networks means we should be treating them differently. The fact that, as you say, "People treat Facebook, Google, etc. etc. etc. as if they themselves are The Internet" means that there is a distinction of kind that the citizenry are perceiving. I don't think the solution is just to say they're wrong, but rather to find a way to formalize this implicit categorization into something workable.
It seems like the options are to regulate, nationalize, or build government-funded public alternatives to mega-social-media systems. Other options are to add some better system of decentralization that nonetheless allows users to access the common public pool of an audience and not just ghetto-ize themselves into irrelevance and destitution.
One of the big issues with the demonetization on YouTube is that it's a binary flag -- either "acceptable content for advertisers" or "unacceptable for advertisers." As if advertisers were a single block with a single set of values!
When YouTube is not under an obligation to act as the virtual-public-square (because "they're a private company"), then they are especially vulnerable to defining that "acceptability" either by internal ideological conformity, or by external ideological pressure. Part of the concept of "free speech" (as a doctrine, not just as 1A legal structure) is that it allows for a society where the distinction of "I don't agree with this but someone out there might and so it's OK for it to exist" is a distinction that is possible. Without that, we're left with a world in which expression has to be mediated by the approval/whims of external forces for it to be present.
Whatever strange, fringe things this person was having as YouTube videos, I'd be willing to guess there's some fringe company out there who wouldn't care if they were advertised on those videos. Think of the kinds of advertisers 4chan, Infowars, or adult websites get. Their standards don't fit into a generic mold of "acceptability." But if someone was a video creator who wanted to court such advertisers, what kind of audience would they even be able to build without access to the de-facto public-square that YouTube is?
I don't know how to get there from here. But I think a more healthy ad-revenue model would somehow have YouTube saying "OK, these mainstream videos are able to be monetized by mainstream ads from companies A B and C, while these fringe/controversial videos can be monetized by whatever companies X Y and Z want to."
The no-win situation you describe is a prime example of "Moloch."
>It seems like, despite the protagonist's fears about IOI turning the OASIS into a soul-less amusement park, that's kind of what the OASIS already was in the story. There wasn't much talk about players generating new worlds and new experiences -- most of the time characters were enjoying the pre-packaged "Lord of the Rings", "Star Trek", or "Dungeons and Dragons" VR worlds, reliving existing ideas again and again. The gunter protagonists weren't off creating fantastic new landscapes or generating culture, they were poring through the ruins of the old trying to find some arcane clue -- and I didn't get the sense that they would be doing that if they didn't have the Hunt to focus on.
>These are interesting things to think about -- and definitely a worrisome part of dystopian visions of VR that turn the ultimate communication/creation tool into a trough full of pre-packaged feed for consumers -- but I don't think that RPO's author was attempting to focus on that. Rather, the sterile emptiness I felt from the OASIS seemed more a result of the author just not describing much that wasn't necessarily "just so" for the plot.
I get the point of what you are saying (that times in the past have had very extreme responses to people stating things that were accurate but unpopular), but Galileo was not hung or even executed. He was placed under house arrest (the trouble he got into was also more about stepping on the Church's domain of interpreting Scripture rather than astronomical facts, but that's a tangential popular misconception).
"Open access" is not the same as "not peer reviewed." There is no subscription required to get the articles in the journal, but it is peer-reviewed.
From the page for the Warne et al. paper from the OP link (http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-07714-001):
>Publication Type: Journal; Peer Reviewed Journal
From the publication announcing "Archives of Scientific Psychology" (http://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2013-03009-001.pdf):
>Archives of Scientific Psychology uses peer review to determine whether a submitted manuscript is suitable for publication. Authors are free to submit manuscripts that reveal their identity or that are prepared to keep reviewers unaware of who they are. We adopted this policy because we are unconvinced that evidence on peer review rules out the possibility that some reviewers’ evaluations of manuscripts are influenced by characteristics of authors (Shatz, 2004; Weller, 2001). Likewise, reviewers will be given the option of revealing themselves to the authors.
From the custom skeletal hand mouse cursor, to the crossbones used as borders for some images [0], to the mouseovers on some of the initials where the letter is photoshopped out to show the background [1], to the fact that the site still has a guestbook [2]... there's a great character to the site that makes it enjoyable to interact with. Much more engaging than the overpolished style of so much online nowadays.
I also thought it was interesting to note the practice of almost-copies of certain woodcut illustrations over the centuries [0]. In our era of trivial lossless copying of digital data, it's easy to forget how much had to be done by hand in the past.
[0] http://www.dodedans.com/Eholbein26.htm [1] http://www.dodedans.com/Eholbeina.htm [2] http://www.dodedans.com/Ebook01.php
I'm glad articles like this are helping to raise awareness of the dimensions of interaction we've suppressed in recent years. As important as boundaries are, we also have to acknowledge our natures as physical, tactile, animal creatures. We're not mere Enlightenment-era conceptions of beings of pure reason. We're embedded and embodied and have millions of years of programming to make us what we are. In the same way that modern societies have learned about the issues of unhealthy repression of things like sexuality, we also have to take care that we don't repress things like touch or aggression, which are in our nature and actually do have legitimate places in our being. We wouldn't be comfortable with alienation and isolation in our pets; we're not so different.