Osmium

That's marching cubes though, which is different from the parametric/Bézier approach in the article?

Could this extend to 3D?

My only experience so far is Google Cardboard with an iPhone ... would you expect an Oculus Go to be any better than this?

(I know iPhone screens aren't high-DPI enough for VR, but I doubt a screen in a $200 product would be much better, and the processor/GPU would surely be inferior? I'd really like to get into VR at a decent price point, but I just can't see how this works.)

Can someone explain to me how they can make a device worth buying for $200? That seems incredibly cheap since the cost of decent VR systems are ~$500+ and that's without a machine to provide processing/GPU.

Fantastic idea, upvote for visibility. Reminds me of the old ctrl+alt+delete but much more friendly for the user.

Didn't downvote you for the record. If a comment's worth responding to, it doesn't make much sense to me to downvote it (:

> "Too aggressive" relative to what?

Other humans (Homo not Sapiens). Sadly, we'll probably never know for sure, because it looks like we were responsible for wiping most of them out 10,000s years ago.

> Mother Teresa

Usually isn't a good example to bring up ... Mother Teresa has had her fair share of controversy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/25...

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_wor...

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/12/19/mother-teresa/

For the record, I’m also a white guy from a poorer family with no college connections.

And we don’t bear the sins of our forefathers. That doesn’t mean we don’t benefit from them. I worked hard, I got lucky, but I can’t pretend my priviledge doesn’t also exist. That a minority with my background wouldn’t have had to work even harder.

I’m not saying it’s fair. As I said, I don’t know where I stand on affirmative action. I think there’s a fundamental tension there. But what LBJ said in that speech feels true to me.

> I wanted MLK's idea of a colorblind world where no one is judged based on your skin

I still believe this is possible, I just think we're one or two generations behind. I'm encouraged that the coming generation seems to understand fairness and equality much more naturally and intuitively than my own generation.

Where I still feel like I need to be vigilant against racist thought creeping in (simply from conditioning, stereotypes... I don't consider myself racist, but it's so easy to become tribal without realizing it), for people just a few years younger than me it seems it's just that much easier for them. And the next generation after will hopefully be better still. I have hope.

When you think about it, humanity went very quickly from largely homogenous, semi-isolated communities, to a global community, with lots of movement. It’s going a while for the system to equilibriate. And while there may be many little racist Maxwell’s demons running around doing damage in the short term, I have faith that in the long term we will get there.

> So what is fair?

Isn't that the toughest question? I don't know what the answer is. I don't know where I stand on affirmative action: in any given instant, it seems unfair, but in a historical context it seems necessary that affirmative action should happen until the point where the damage done in the past has been undone, and we can have equal opportunities. LBJ's words resonate with me on this:

> That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society--to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.

> But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

> You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

> Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=27021

> pales in comparison

It's not a competition... To acknowledge one problem does not mean ignoring others. There is very real discrimination against people of Asian heritage in the US college system, with very similar parallels to discrimination against Jewish people in the past. To pretend this doesn't exist does all of the real individuals who've experienced it a disservice, as it would be a disservice to pretend that the extensive, institutional racism against black people is no longer an issue today when it clearly is. These are all problems worthy of attention.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/opinion/is-harvard-unfair... "A similar injustice is at work today, against Asian-Americans. To get into the top schools, they need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers."

Edit to add: I don't know what the solution to this is, or what should be done. I just know if I was one of those people rejected, I'd feel pretty bad. And as a privileged majority, I want to be judged on my merits, I don't want to benefit from racism or xenophobia, if someone is better than me then they deserve my spot. And I've got to speak loudly about it (even though I'd much rather stay out of political discussions online), because to do otherwise is to passively accept the advantages given to me by this institutionalized racism, which is almost as bad as explicitly endorsing it. We've got to acknowledge it, talk about it ...

Second edit: One very actionable thing is to make clear issues of access and discrimination are important issues when your college comes calling for donations. Ask them for their statistics, what their plans and intentions are. If enough people did it, this would matter. It would make a difference.

Yeah, I can see how a rewrite makes sense. It's not rewriting diskutil itself, it's adding a new UI, that presumably uses newer APIs that will be easier to maintain in the future.

The problem really is that the new Disk Utility is a minimal viable product, rather than an app that can actually do everything the diskutil command line utility can do.

And then you have terrible bugs like this, which is presumably a non-security engineer writing a bit of UI code that they shouldn't be. I doubt this bug actually came from the APFS encryption itself.

There have been a few cases like this. Presumably the original was created/maintained by just one person, they move on, and then when the next person comes along they decide it's easier to re-write than modify the old code. But they don't have sufficient time and the new version is inferior to the old.

Bear in mind the old version did need to be updated (new CoreStorage features, has to handle Fusion drives, now APFS).

I get the sense there's a lot of shuffling between teams in Apple, and teams are a lot smaller than you'd expect, and this is the inevitable result. The advantage (I'm guessing) is that they get to move quickly, and it reduces bureaucracy/politics, but ... yeah, this isn't great.

At least diskutil is still there, and is as powerful as ever.

Sorry, I was barely around for the 80s ;) I am old enough to have had a knock-off portable CD player though...

> makes it thinner or anything else?

I think it's volume inside the device more than thinness, but I agree I don't think it's a fundamental design constraint. I'm sure they could find the room.

I think it's just that (now/soon) Bluetooth headphones are finally good enough. I have the Airpods, and I have almost no issue with batteries (they recharge while they're in the case, it's only a problem if I listen continuously for a whole evening, but even then they fast recharge in minutes), and they have great range. I'd tried Bluetooth headphones in the past and it was the pairing process that really turned me off, that's a non-issue now too. I would go as far as to say that the Airpods are the best/most game-changing product Apple has put out in maybe a decade. They just need to get a little cheaper, and included as standard (at least for the new top-of-line devices).

For people in the audio industry it sucks, but there are adapters. I don't resent them taking it out any more than I do an ethernet port in my MacBook (ethernet is much better than WiFi, but WiFi is 'good enough' now, and I have an adapter at my desk for when I need it).

Give it 10 years and anyone walking around with cables running from their head is going to look plenty silly. If ever there was a look that defined the 2010s...

I think there’s an elegance to basically keeping the existing design and just chopping the cables off, even if it is showy. Certainly beats the alternative “black amorphous blob” design of some of the others.

> (I thought I might lose one but it was really a non issue if they fit properly in the first place)

Exactly. If they don't fit you'll have issues, or will need silicone covers or something, but if they do fit it's great.

I've tried lots of earphones in the gym, including some cheap Bluetooth ones with a cable that goes behind the neck, and have always had problems until the Airpods. I've never had them fall out, ever. Embarrassingly, I do sometimes forget I have them in though...

This looks fantastic. Love my Airpods, but the 'tap for Siri' feature so rarely works for me, let alone language translation. Language translation is clearly an area Google is really pioneering too.

Shame about the cable though. The one (surprising) benefit of no cable is that the cable doesn't tug on the earphones, making them less likely to come out.

> You guys should be taking my money, is what I'm saying.

Completely agreed. The reason I don't use Keybase more than I do is because I half expect them to be acquired/something else to happen. Would gladly give them my $10/mo. for a 1TB instead of Dropbox.

With that said, I completely understand why they aren't right now -- maybe they're not going after the consumer market, maybe they don't want to box themselves in with customer support obligations, etc. But I really would like to use them.

> and Netflix is no great shakes either

And this is mostly because Netflix wants to hide the true extent of their library.

Hulu just had a recent, awful re-design too. They cover in-active thumbnails with gradients, you can barely see anything.

Apple TV (which I like as among the best) also has a ridiculously unergonomic remote and very confusing UI (do I want to press "menu" or "home"? And now the TV app is 'home' by default, it's even weirder...somehow, even though I know I think how it works, I always seem to press the wrong one.) And no picture-in-picture either, though their processors are plenty fast enough to support it. But their standard built-in TVML-based interfaces are functional, if a little boring, and the UI is responsive. And hey, at least they aren't showing me ads in the UI or tracking what I watch. But still, lots of little problems.

So much room for improvement here, by everyone.

> Amazon’s weaknesses are in the first case high-end design

Just design generally, including their website ... anecdotally, so many people I know don't really know that Amazon Prime Video exists, or if it does exist how to find it. Likewise for Music.

Apple has this discoverability problem too (Apple Music doesn't have a web UI, it might as well not exist if you can't install iTunes, and then Apple wonders why its social features don't take off).

For its devices, Amazon also seems to share Google's general obliviousness, e.g. they just announced an alarm clock with a camera. Who wants a camera pointed at their bed all night? Their Fire Phone pioneered this over-expensive faux-3D UI, which on paper sounds great, but anybody could have said they weren't going to get the development support they needed to really sell it, and most users aren't going to care. Design is more than just veneer, you've got to make stuff that people want... Amazon's current approach seems to be "well if we just sell it cheap enough, we'll get customers."

The window manager now runs on Metal 2, which should give a nice jump in responsiveness, but it is likely responsible for the graphics glitches people have been reporting, especially with older machines.

As a counter-anecdote, I have a rMBP 2012, and I haven't encountered any major bugs (no kernel panics, hangs, lag), though I have seen a few minor glitches (Safari tab bar didn't draw properly, only saw this once). On balance I'm happy with the upgrade however, my system feels more stable and faster as a whole, fixed a few issues from Sierra.

True, I was being slightly facetious. That's why the wording of the question is so very important, e.g. in the case of Scotland there was no "third option", which would have been further devolution of powers.

> Does it want to be an associate state, or a completely independent state (that would also need to enter the Europena Union by its own)? This is something it is still not clear for me,

Hmm, maybe if you want to know what the people of Cataluña want, maybe we should ask them? Perhaps by holding a referendum to get their views on the matter?

(Note that a similar situation in Scotland was addressed by doing exactly this. The referendum was done begrudgingly, and certainly was not popular in Westminster, but it did happen, as it should have -- even though I'm personally glad they voted to remain.)

It's a big world out there, and we're all just trying to get along.

I'm not in the least bit offended by swearing and swear liberally amongst friends, but curse words (taboo words) do exist, and some people are bothered by them. It's not an expensive courtesy to just not swear to strangers, so why not extend that courtesy?

I'm a big believer in the right to offend, but that doesn't mean we should do so needlessly.

If you think putting it a little out to sea would kill NIMBY objections .... still, we can but dream.

I'm not entirely sure how serious SpaceX are about their E2E idea anyway, I took it as more of a "hey, isn't this neat? totally physically possible and practical too." I imagine it would take a long time to scale up to that point though, probably decades(?) after the Moon/Mars.

> His presentation style usually seems to be pretty raw, in a good way.

Completely agreed that it's raw in a good way -- you can tell he really has technical detail down too, I noticed one of the times when a slide left too early he still knew the numbers that had been on it. Also he has an understated sense of humor ("mountain").

I also sometimes got the sense he genuinely was in awe at what he was seeing. Like it still took him by surprise. It was interesting to watch.

> It's not as crisp/polished as Jobs' presentations were

All this said, I wish there were a Jobs-like figure to sell SpaceX. I'm sure there are people who'd disagree with me on this, but I can only imagine how popular/well-known SpaceX would be if they had someone who could pitch to the general public. SpaceX keynotes could be tune-in television with the right person, but it'd have to be someone really tied to the company, I don't think you could hire someone to do this. It'd have to be authentic.

Ironically, I think SpaceX will have a lot more trouble with any E2E ambitions than they would with missions to Mars. So much red tape, no one's going to want a space-port in their backyard, different/difficult economics, safety concerns, terrorism concerns, etc. etc.

Honestly, Elon's presentations are some of the most impressive, inspiring I've ever seen. And the way he just stumbles out words and sentences that are completely revolutionary... casually dropping these absurd, incredible statements. I find it incredible.

If anyone else was saying this, was showing these graphics, you'd think it was just wish fulfillment; a fantasy. And I'm sure their timeline is a bit aggressive. But I fully believe the SpaceX team can do this.

This has made me feel inspired for the future almost more than anything else has in recent memory.

(For context, and to the doubters, I've been following SpaceX for a long time, through their many failures, and they've already revolutionized the space industry. They have a drive and a vision and they're just going for it. This isn't about profits for them, it's about pushing humanity forwards -- and if that sounds grand, it's because it is.)

I haven't read the book the parent mentioned, I'm not sure what the book contains. But I agree with the parent's "TL;DR: no, language doesn't determine how you see the world." There is a lot of literature on Sapir-Whorf, including many pop linguistics books. Note I'm not a linguist, I just know a few and they're very vocal about this :)

Just to really emphasize the point -- the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been essentially disproved. It comes up a lot because it's a very attractive idea, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

> that doesn't use front, behind, left, right, but the cardinal directions

I can't remember where I saw this (maybe Language Log, consider this "citation needed"), but apparently there are some Polynesian Islanders that use a language with different direction concepts (inwards/outwards maybe?).