16,548 karma · joined May 1, 2013
I have had a lot of fun with jeeves and wooster
I also really enjoyed raymond chandlers marlow series. Fast, easy to read, dense mystery.
Then there is rivers of london series, which is so wonderfuly visual of my london. Fun, not guessable and rich 3d characters.
1) are you rich?
2) are you useful to the present american government?
3) are you doing something that if stopped would break the AI buisness model
if you answered yes to more than one, you are not liable.
Autopilots are autonomous, without AI. lane following and collision avoidance in most cars, don't use "AI" they use classic computer vision and good old fashioned radar.
The difference here is that claude code fails to perform what it's intended to do without a model attached, a plane/car doesn't.
At no point did I mention video output. If you _read_ the aria website, you'll see that those do not have a display, because they cost too much money, eat a shit load of power, and require a huge amount of packaging space.
There is a reason why meta's AR glasses system is 6 years late. (Orion was meant to be released as a product in q4 2020, then an SDK, and its pathetic state its in now)
> You would also know that video is absolutely not required for anything in an AR
Ok lets walk through a sample scenario:
I am visually impaired & I walk into a kitchen, I walk towards the electric hob which someone else has only just turned off. This is not my kitchen is I am only vaguely familiar with the layout. My hand goes out to feel for the side of the counter, however its getting dangerously close to hob. Using just RF, how will you get the pose of the hand, identify the hob's location, and identify that the hob is hot?
Oh course you can get an AR experience with just a phone and rough location, but its not that good or compelling. its similar to having notifications read out.
Sure you can have speaker diarisation so you can go full "x said y to z", so you can ask your AR assistant "what did x think about b" but again, you are asking the device, rather that the device knowing enough to provide valuable insight at the right time. The point about AR is that you are being given the right information at the right time without having to ask for it. Again location really helps, as does room classification (ie no recording in the toilet)
One of the best AR demos I have experienced was from the sound team in the sister org. They made a navigation system that used spatial audio and my teams SLAM stack to help you navigate though a forest. Instead of using TTS to say "move x steps forward" it used the sound of a dog. The dog panting was placed on the path, and if you strayed from the path it would get more and more upset until it started whining. You just followed the dog noised and you could walk about with your eyes shut.
Again none of that has a display, but it used cameras to provide precise location.
> refinement past VR led to an almost entirely monochrome interface
The monochrome is interesting, because there are a bunch of reasons why its that way. Most of it is price, colour waveguides are really view dependent, prone to sparkles is another reason. The colour reproduction of the early versions were terrible. Think projector screen in full sun. Finally, they are bigger because they need more power to run and more optics to massage the colours into the right place. Making waveguides is really fucking hard, if you want them curved, even more hard. They also tend to need exotic materials like silicon carbide. Silicon Carbide is a bastard because its almost as hard as diamond and is fairly difficult to etch chemically.
Finally different wavelength LEDs have different efficiency, its much cheaper to have single wavelength microprojectors, because getting all the wavelength at the same output, is expensive.
> I'm guessing your AR glasses were a horrible unfinished
lol if I wanted a display, we'd just use an oculus/pico. It also has a much bigger battery and a massive processor with a boatload of ram. The glasses are real and if you're at the right university, you can use them for your projects.
> that u self funded by being a complete idiot aka substandard engineer.
Haha nice. No, my team was paid to do this, and it made the CTO very happy. The algorithms that we developed are state of the art and in a whole bunch of products.
It was a nightmare.
Now hand wave about LLMs means we should just go right into machine code and not bother with intermediate. That statement is also as mad as the statement about just changing the language on the fly.
The need for langauge changes arguably has disappeared, as there isn't really a need to save keystrokes. the key thing is common understanding. If you let the LLM change the fundamentals, you're ending up with a logic puzzle on top of your problem.
To get good context, you need video data. To get good video data, you need cameras, lots of them, on your head.
To get them on your head you need them to be small and light
To get them to run you need batteries. But the maximum battery size you can get, without wires is about 1-1.5 watt hour.
Then, without making a custom wireless protocol, the maximum bandwith you can reliabily expect to user (with an iphone) is 1megabit.
That means you need to compress the world around you to 1megatbit a second.
Now, with a bit or work, like using eye tracking to segment what you are actually looking at(usually a 64x64 pixel image at 15-20 frames a second), and occasional wide angle view when the scene changed, you can build really good context, even reading a book.
But, you also need good location data, along with room classfication to get context. You can't really use GPS because they aren't accurate enough, and don't work all that well indoors. So you use visual odometry.
Once you have all that, you then now need to teach the machine to understand that 1mbit stream to work out if it knows the answer you need. oh and that has to work in a device that has ~10-15 watthours. or offload to a bit boy machine over a patching network.
Did I imply that all men are rapists? no.
I said that its up to us to police this. thats all. I don't think thats particularly anti-men.
its like saying, if you see your mate drink driving, you tell them not to do it. Its not controversial to do that, and its doing them a service. It'll stop them getting injured or injuring someone else.
do you want to see your mate's life ruined?
Depending on who is asking, there is a different tang to that question.
If you see, hear, or think that one of your "bros" is abusing someone, fucking talk to them and tell them to stop. If they dont, cock block them so they can't abuse your friends.
This stuff continues on because its overtly, or covertly approved. Men dont cry or talk about feelings because "thats what girls do". Thats how powerful social pressure is.
"oh but women love a powerful man" they might, but they don't like being abused. All that shit you hear from pickup artists doesn't work. 90% of it is showering cash and cornering people to the point where they can't say no comfortably.
is this related to the whole alpha/beta male tediousness, or something tangentially related?
Embezzling is universally bad, and can be proven with "objects" ie transaction and contracts and the like.
the pernicious problem with sexual assault is that first you need to prove the assault happened, which is hard, because its often in private with no witnesses.
Second you have to prove consent.
worse consent can be withdrawn, especially if things go too far or violent. so it might appear to witnesses that it look ok when they saw them.
Finally the elephant in the room. There is a taboo around non straight male sexuality which varies by region. Its very easy to paint the cliamant as someone with loose sexual morals, filled with guilt/loathing lashing out to smear an innocent party.
The problem for the victims is that agreeing to sex is vaguely taboo for non-straight men to do. Therefore they are at fault.
https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/what-we-do/crime-thre... for plebs, FCA for banks.
but bitcoin isn't anonymous, each coin and transaction is traceable, so its a terrible tool for money laundering.
No, but there is a cost.
it is?
Only if you also have the model thats better than anyone else's.
As soon as models are free, or there are no newer models (assuming thats going to happen, and thats not a given) then the only thing you can compete on is price.
This means that the only thing you have to differentiate is either price, speed or ease of use. (or regulatory capture...)
We are at pets.com level of spend currently. Unless model development becomes cheaper, then we are going to run out of novel debt but not really debt mechanisms.
> even the most hardened Unionist, actually calls it Londonderry in everyday speech unless they're making
thick NI accent the SIX COUNTIES! (at this point I would then quickly withdraw to a safe distance and hope I haven't set off a riot.)
For english people, as in actual english not from the UK, its a historic, unless its for emphasis.
There is/are some religious overtones, that are infused into this. Catholics used to (or still do) say "hay-tch" for h, where as non-Catholic would say "ay-tch". However that distinction is not so acute in england(unless you're in/near liverpool), but it might be in scotland and its certainly there in NI
well not specificlly but its bound to it. Having durable history stored in an SQL database (with secrets filtering and option syncing) you can search global history, or local. (as in if you have two terminals open, you can just search the commands you've typed in one terminal for that session, that session plus history or that session plus what you've just typed in any other session. )
Its awesome
As soon as you start specify technologies, rather than "sovereignty" you end up needing to created specific legal tests to stop people getting around it.
"Data must be stored domestically" is a short hand for being held in the same legal jurisdiction. This means for somewhere like the UK, you get all that battle tested data protections law for free. (new laws require case history to be reliable. Ie, prosecuting under a new law is hard, because if its on the edge of being legal, it can create a precedent that undermines the entire law)
In civil code places, its different, but I don't know enough to offer even a half arsed opinion.
The reason why jurisdiction is important is because if you are storing data outside of your legal protection, when something goes wrong there is little you can do to discourage fuckery.
This is the problem with blinkered engineering thinking. Yes geographically distributed data storage is good. But as you also know, storing it in place with lots of other data, means that its a target. The more places its stored, the more physical security you need. This means that there is higher chance of people being bribed.
Its not a binary, its a multi-dimension graph, with no one answer. Every dimension has a tradeoff.
UAE's tradeoff was: not even trump would ignore all the wargaming that clearly shows kicking iran in the nuts would have inflation rising consequences
Which modernism?
1930s modernism was about new materials to allow luxury for the modern man (electricity! large windows! electric oven! washing machines! fridges! indoor toilets!)
1960/70s modernism was about creating new communities, adapting land to fit the modern car based world. No more pokey little shops with only a few items, requiring a trudge along a wobbly high street. NO! drive your car, go to a futuristic supermarket only once a week.
I don't think we see a modernism now, not as a movement. I will now divert to UK building, because in the US its different. Part of the reason why thats the case in the UK is that councils used to build houses, facilities and infrastructure with their own money. This meant they had their own architects. This lead to town plans that were coherent, if not always successful. See Birmingham, milton keynes, roehamton.
Housing wise, council houses were built, or should have been built to a standard. They were, especially in cities much bigger, brighter and luxurious compared to what preceded them. Were they pretty? no, modern is never pretty, because its not what you grew up with. When I was a kid everyone _hated_ victorian terrace houses, because thats what poor people have. They were more pokey compared to executive estate housing, and in some places didn't have a drive for your four door saloon.
Now, those estates are meh and terrace houses are very expensive, despite being cold, draughty, dingey little shitboxes with odd toilet arrangements. (unless you've slapped in a loft conversion and extended over the kitchen/outdoor toilet)
> Dieter Rams as some aesthetic pinnacle rather than soulless mass production.
The problem is, Rams was about bringing the complex new object into the house in a was that was reliable and simple. If we were all about Rams' vision, then we'd have got rid of radiators, had decent windows, insulated the place, had lots of cupboards and cleanly separated living spaces. Not an everything room and a bedroom with inbuilt mould farm (shower + shitter)
Yes the modern apartment is inspired by loft living and dieter rams, but that requires 100sqm/1000sqft and high ceilings. none of which most places have. So you get a kitchen diner because it allows developers to shave off one room from the floorplan and increase density by 1/3rd without extra mateiral costs.
But thats not modernism, thats poor fucking standards, and the lack of competition in the uk in the form new council houses. (a 3 bedroom council house will be at least 90sqm with seperate kitchen, living room)
for assistant glasses to be useful, you need to know who, what, when, where for each operation that the user cares about. In the experiements that I ran, that took about 35 watts continuous on the headset (using a jetson) and at least 2 big GPU machines in the backend. This was in 2024, so perhaps its not quite as heavy now. but its nowhere near 130mw
Basically you have about 130mw power budget. You need to do position, display, sound output, transcription, etc.
https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/software/musing-on-openais-d... << an explanation here
Moreover the interaction between firmware and the OS is a massive headache to overcome, especially if you are dealing with battery powered devices.
So they are almost certianly making an alexa type thing with cameras. So they can build a device capable of recording the entire context of a household.
Yes, yes they do, but read through artifact proxies are dodgy as fuck, which is why and facebook (and I assume a fuckload others) don't have them.
Also semi-airgapped labs are a lot less expensive than you think at that scale. Once you have to do multi-region VLANs with machine certs before you get access to juicy VLANs, the difference between "no internet for you" and "mostly airgapped" falls to almost zero.
Also I would want an artifact mirror because a) that give a good signal about how the model reacts, and what training material its latched onto, b) it hides what the models are doing from the outside.
but compare that to their competitors who got a license at the very start