172 karma · joined October 19, 2010
I do agree with your comment about the forum and I've lobbied for that to be opened up myself on numerous occasions. I think it's largely for legacy reasons at this point since people assumed their posts would be private it's tricky to make them more public than they had expected, but there are highly active communities on G+ that are public.
I know literally hundreds of people who use Glass daily and have never heard this once. Now it's on the front page of hacker news as a "thing". I don't doubt Chris is telling the truth about his experience. I'm just generally bothered by tech bloggers (in this case CNET) wanting to feed people intellectual junk food that they are looking for without any real concern for the damage it does to the industry they are reporting on. Reporting on legitimate problems with technology is beneficial because it opens a dialogue that ultimately makes it better, making "mountains out of mole hills" just distracts everyone and creates a fog of confusion.
I think CNET is just looking for attention out of a non-issue, I've done interviews with them about Glass before (I won't bother linking, they don't deserve any more attention) and I felt then (and see in this article too) a desire to just dig up any morsel of controversy without a real appetite for balanced reporting. Specifically while being interviewed they dug for red meat that could confirm people's negative suspicions and in my case I had nothing negative to say and they still tried to spin it that way. I had to fight to get them to quote me accurately and they still refused to change blatant misquotes that served their narrative, I can't really emphasize how frustrating it is to have someone twist your words around to try to get a few more people to click on their post.
Tips for anyone doing tech press interviews: choose your outlet wisely (it wastes a lot of time fixing a poorly written article), refuse to do interviews that aren't recorded (either video, audio, or over email) as they will "hear" what they want, and insist on seeing a draft before they publish as a condition to the interview.
Socially Awkward: I've worn Glass every day since I got it (one of the first ones) and had 2 negative reactions and one of them ended up being a VC that after explaining it to him offered to fund me (I didn't accept). You have to be sympathetic to other people's feelings, if someone is feeling uncomfortable and you aren't using it then just put it on your head/neck and watch them chill out instantly. It's awkward when someone's constantly wondering if you are recording them but too scared to ask, just diffuse the situation and figure out what is making them feel uncomfortable. Once they understand how it works it will clear up any wild ideas they may have. Part of being an early adopter of anything is to explain it to people who are curious (same goes for fitbits, AR drones, etc).
Glass wearers self-segregating: If you act nervous and self aware while you are wearing it, you will make the whole room feel uncomfortable. If you are approachable and having fun with others you'll get a whole night club to stop dancing and want to talk to you (this is in DC, not exactly a bastion of techies like SF/NY). Due to how the Glass invites were distributed it's not "self-segregated" it's "self-selected", you invite your friends which means when you go out you are with your friends. Causation vs correlation man, the former is sensational and the latter isn't even mentioned.
At the end it starts to get more agreeable: glass is v1, it's incredibly ambitious of them to have released Glass like they did and it's allowing us to even have these discussions (thanks!), and the status quo (phones) aren't that great either right now. Sure it's not perfect but look where we came from: custom/clunky wearables of the 90's, nothing special for a decade, and now we have something that gets more positive attention than I'd otherwise get. Instead of looking at the first datapoint on a timeline and dumping on it, shouldn't a hip futurist publication (where the author says he gets made fun of...that's probably more telling about what it's like to work at Wired than anything) try to think out a few more steps and not sling link bait like this?
(from my G+ post https://plus.google.com/+BrandynWhite/posts/fRfhgBXej7e)
Of the 6 design considerations I listed, none of them are really addressed here. If you outgrow a single GPU then you have a huge performance penalty growing (that's a vertical growth). If you want to make your own operations (very common), then this would be impractical.
It's a nice idea but it'd be better to compare against things like Memsql and the like, where they have been designed from first principles for fast SQL processing. I'd recommend just dropping any Hadoop/HBase comparisons and compare within the same class, Hive is embarrassingly slow even in the class it's in (compare it to Google's Dremel/F1 or Apache Impala).
Would it even be possible to solve this problem in a serious way? If you could then would that mean strong AI is not possible? If not then why don't we figure out something better like asking users to actually pay for things and then we don't have to solve these philosophical quandaries. If it's too hard for people to pay for things then lets focus on that problem instead. If you don't want money and just want to rate limit then look into proof of work puzzles.
At this point that's really it. If you sit at a desk all day you're going to have a bad time with the notifications, "oh great I got a notice on my face a minute after my phone buzzed and my laptop notified me". They work much better when you are active, out and about when even picking up your phone is a chore. If you already know your way everywhere you go (you don't travel) then one of the best features, directions, is lost on you.
This applies to the current device/software/apps, part of what we are trying to do with OpenGlass is push it past being a "beeper on your face" because that only applies to the segment of people to whom getting notifications faster than you do with your phone matters. Once they allow devs to push to the Play store (coming soon) it'll be a much more compelling product for end users. I think it'll ultimately be an amazing product, it's just the current feature list targets what I see as limited audiences.
We're already working on the next demo, but the one after that (let's say 2 weeks) I'll try to show what we can do in terms of protecting the public's privacy (incidental bystanders). Thanks for mentioning this.
http://selfscreens.com/archives/4257/more-basic-augmented-re...
http://www.slashgear.com/google-glass-augmented-reality-demo...
Code is at http://github.com/bwhite/openglass
Project is at http://openglass.us
More to come, join our community if you want to collaborate.