GuiA

Fingers crossed I guess, but given that 1) the virus is still around AND 2) we do not have a vaccine AND 3) we do not have herd immunity, I can't say I feel very optimistic about the next month or so.

Ah, thank you. That's handy phrasing.

One could write a similarly convincing post about how the Terrans, Zergs, and Protoss embody the 3 core pillars of humanity, complete with esoteric looking diagrams. Read some Carl Jung, some Joseph Campbell, some TVTropes, and you too can make your own grand unifying theory of human psychology at home!

The real insight for me came when I learned to hear what people were really saying, when on a first date or job interview or meeting at a party, they were telling me they were INWP or enneagram 14 second wing or a Capricorn rising Gemini.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox

There are 0 examples of a man made construct reaching "general" intelligence (whatever fuzzy meaning you may attach to it); there is no reason to believe that because we can reach some arbitrary human milestone today ("be a world class Go player"), any other human milestone ("start and run a company, and be a mentor and inspiration to others") is plausible.

This is a very different case from e.g. "we built a prototype plane that can lift 15 ft off the ground for 10 seconds, we should be able to build one that can lift 10,000 feet for 10 hours", because in the former case we were beginning to have an understanding of aerodynamics that made that path plausible. We do not have such an understanding backing current ML work. That's well illustrated by the fact that only 6 years elapsed between the first manned flight and crossing the Atlantic by plane - practice caught up to theory really fast, as it tends to do in those cases. We are about 6 years in the current ML revolution - what is its equivalent to crossing the Atlantic?

The logic you're advocating for here is more along the lines of "I taught my dog how to sit - shouldn't be too hard to get him to sit in front of a computer and start writing Python code now that I've got the first half figured out".

(or - I taught my dog how to fetch - shouldn't be too hard to train him to be a full time food delivery employee, etc).

Well, the way out of this is really stupid - you just have to learn to enjoy the music instead of always looking forward to reaching the end of the track.

It’s human nature to focus on the more immediate, tangible outcomes - eg going through a pytorch tutorial - over spending time trying to really understand the problem they are trying to solve. Great teachers try to guide their students there, and great students are perpetually calling themselves out mentally to try and stay on the track of understanding rather than rote repetition. But it’s very hard.

[0]: http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/05/21/7250878...

The question of how to turn these loose inklings into actionable, falsifiable, reproducible science- rather than Aristotelian armchairing - is a hard one.

"At the end of the day, doing VC right is actually much more about portfolio construction and modeling than picking."

(with a link to https://medium.com/ulu-ventures/successful-vcs-need-at-least...)

In practice, we get by mostly fine (partly because, as you point out, we have footnotes).

What OP is ranting about is websites glorifying certain words as “untranslatable”, imbuing them with esoteric cultural meaning. As a polyglot and linguistics enthusiast it frustrates me too but we all have to come to terms with people being wrong on the internet some day.

It makes sense to reconsider the use of that word given that employers competing on wages and benefits does benefit the employees.

The issue is that “gestures” are not a binary thing that you do or not; they live on a continuum. What is waving vs raising your hand to swat a fly? Categorizing these “gestures” in a meaningful way and layering effective gameplay on top of it is the challenge, that pretty much no one solved despite the huge incentives.

Gestures on two-dimensional multitouch screens are not what we’re talking about here (and even then, you can’t expect people to remember much more beyond the 5/6 core ones).

Games can ask players to do almost anything as long as they’re having fun in return - but that means that the more outlandish things you ask them to do, the more fun they must have.

The grenade example is a good one, because throwing/flicking doesn't require much feedback, unlike say rotation or fine grained manipulation. Of course the interaction would feel nicer if you could feel the weight of what you're throwing - the physics of throwing objects always feels kind of off in VR games - but it still works well enough. Note that many games did this with the Wiimote, and there is nothing about that interaction that is singular to VR.

However, the moment you lose that affordance based in a real world object, and ask your user/player to make gestures in mid air based on recollection, things really do start to fall apart. There is a host of HCI literature/projects around this - e.g. check out papers/demos from the Kinect era. An RPG game like the one you describe could be made with Kinect, and I vaguely recall a few in development - but Kinect demonstrated well that the only kind of gestural interaction that works in long term sessions is dancing.

Btw, this is why if you go to e.g. the VR center in Tokyo, almost every booth has physical props for you to hold/grip/sit on while you're fishing/golfing/shooting a gun/riding a bike in VR.

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit!

Joke aside, such game mechanics, albeit with cursor gesturing rather than hand gesturing, have been tried many times before. See Arx Fatalis, Black & White, etc. Jonathan Blow has a pre-Braid prototype about that as well that he shows in some detail in a talk he gave.

The reality is that sure, it sounds cool when you describe it like that, but there are many design issues to contend with:

- how does the player remember all these obscure symbols ?

- how do you deal with the frustration when a symbol isn't recognized? When it's confused by the system with another symbol?

Etc. On top of that, there is the fact that drawing squiggles to cast spells is not a game mechanic that is inherently extremely fun. Why are people going to the bother of doing that vs pressing a button?

It's all a lot of work to make it make sense, and there is little reason to believe that gesturing with your hands instead of your mouse would solve some of the more fundamental problems.

And yeah, Facebook does roll off the tongue better than Thefacebook.com.

- we released a thing

- yes we spent time courting the guy who made a version of the thing that ours looks suspiciously like, turns out he’s really good

- well yes our thing has a lot of features taken from the other thing!

- we’re excited for the future!! Maybe that guy can even help us out since he loves open source so much hahaha

Tone deaf at best, implied fuck you at worst.

Archive the channels you care about - they might otherwise be impossible to find in a few decades, or a few years. Youtube-dl is one of my favorite pieces of software.

Digital artefacts could be, paradoxically, less durable going in the future - if you write and publish a physical book, it might get forgotten in a library somewhere and rediscovered 200 years after you die.

If you publish an ebook on your website and die and no one cares, the probability of anyone discovering it by happenstance 200 years later goes down to 0.