ozmbie

That sequence of shots of Saturn’s moons and the music....gets me every time.

To play Devil’s advocate: that’s 2 months a customer went without being able to use that feature. What could you or the company have learned if you shipped an earlier version and measured how people used it? Was your feeling of control and happiness worth the business information of not having that feature in the wild for 2 months?

Don’t forget about his road trip.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/technology/zuckerberg-har...

Apart from IMAX/70mm film sources...it is satisfying to watch a movie on a 4K HDR TV and know that you’re getting almost all (if not all) the visual information the director captured on the medium. Assuming the transfer was handled well (which most are).

Seeing the film grain detail on older movies is strangely satisfying to me. Even newer movies shot digitally are done so at 2K or 4K.

I watched 2001 in 4K UHD Bluray the other day, and the special effects hold up very nicely.

Reminds me of the hallway fight scene from Inception. The fact that they build an entire rotating set instead of relying on CG is what (I think) makes the scene so much more convincing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PhiSSnaUKk

"Hey, oven, make your interior 425F so I can bake a pizza”

Oven: “Sorry mike. I can only go to 400F unless you upgrade your ovenware plan to $2.99 a month. Or use an ovenware family brand pizza! For every 3 ovenware brand pizzas you cook, you get a chance to win a free pie! Oh by the way on your trip to Dusty Springs tomorrow stop by Chad’s Bakery for their famous pies.”

I’ve worked as a level designer on FPS games. Dynamic generation might suit certain types of games (or something like an event mode), but a huge amount of design work and iteration goes into the layout of multiplayer game levels to make them enjoyable.

It’s also important that players/teams can memorise the level layouts in order to form strategies.

Still a cool idea though!

It doesn't matter if Apple's goal here is to get "desktop class" A-series CPUs manufactured and shipped at scale...as a precursor to an A-series Macbook.

I’m starting to think that iPhone SoC performance gains are just a side effect of them investing heavily into their controlled hardware ecosystem. But the real payoff is in their wearable SoC. The watch is seeing huge performance gains. And the W1 chip in their headphones is similar. Low power, high performance wearable chips are something their competitors are far behind in. This is where Apple are headed.

It’s like building a high performance supercar to learn and grow in order to understand how to bring that technology to a lower powered and more effecient vehicle.

The combination of democracy and term limits means that iterative change should be the norm. But something isn’t working right.

Who knows what future physics holds (I’d love to know!) but our best theory of gravity (Einstein’s general relativity) is shown to be amazingly accurate in every experiment ever conducted for it.

Some form of only-detectable-via-gravity matter fits the math. Coming up with provable alternative math would be the greatest scientific breakthrough of the past century...or possibly of all time.

I’m sure people are working on it (along with quantum gravity). So either it’s wrong or it’s dark matter.

Dark matter’s interaction with “regular” matter via gravity is covered in the article. It also interacts with light via gravity.

Measuring the interactions between galaxies, and things like gravitational lensing are providing evidence of dark matter’s existence.

We can do horrifying things, too.

I think the larger concern people have with stories like this, is that it’s one part of all human culture becoming homogenized. And we feel something is lost when that happens.

As Terence McKenna put it:

“All culture is being destroyed, all culture is being sold down the river by the sorts of people who want to turn the entire planet into an international airport arrival concourse”

I recently replaced the battery in my 6S (it was free under a replacement program). Combined with iOS12, I have no reason to upgrade to a new phone for another year or two. Performance is great.

The camera is really the only feature that I would upgrade for at this moment. But I don’t use the camera much.

The most successful “transformations” or running of agile projects I’ve seen have been because key people understand the value in iteration. And they organise the entire operation around being able to iterate on the product.

I’ve seen organisations do all the rituals, hold all the meetings, do certification courses but they still don’t wrap their heads around the idea of creating shippable product iterations at least once a month. They just end up dividing the work they were already going to do into arbitrary 2 week “sprints” and wonder why they’re not being efffective.

Modding my xbox to run XBMC and play DivX rips is what got me into Home Theatre in the first place.

I now use an AppleTV 4K to stream UHD movies from a NAS. But the concept is the same.

Have you tried meditation? Nothing fancy, just taking 15 minutes to focus on breathing exercises.

Whenever I find my mind racing at night, it's because I haven't taken any "down time" during the day. Laying in bed at night is often the first moment of my entire day (other than taking a shower) where I have no external stimulation of work or entertainment.

Best of luck with everything though!

People mine bitcoin because there are millions of dollars per day of bitcoin rewards available.

I would guess that collectively, millions of dollars are being spent each day on cancer research around the world.

These mining farms were built for a purpose. It’s not like all these spare ASICs were laying around waiting for somebody to find a use for them. The people running these farms would be on some other venture if cryptocurrency was never invented. And those ventures probably wouldn’t involve curing cancer either.

You’re correct, and that’s the bigger point. The entire industry business model is tilted in that direction.

It mentiones why this is useful:

> it will give scientists a much more accurate method of dating prehistorical events — the dates of fossils, for example.

> “The dream is have a framework independent of the fossils that you can plug the fossils into and see more interesting things — the coexistence of disparate forms, or of similar forms widely separated in location. Now we can place things more accurately in time rather than depending on the fossils to tell us what the time is.”

It's also fascinating to see how it was done:

>By comparing the amount of decay of uranium to that of lead trapped in zircon, the layers in the Arizona core can be dated quite accurately.

1) Figure out how to reliably and predictably get people into your app. Know where to advertise, how much it costs and how to optimise your ads and storefront. Don’t have a “build it and they will come” attitude. Solving this problem at scale will be roughly half your total effort.

2) Once users get into your app, figure out how to keep them around. Identify how often you want users to use your app (once a day? Weekly? Etc) and design the entire app experience around promoting that form of behaviour.

3) Really understand what is unique about your app (compared to all others) and emphasise it. Ensure new users understand it and experience it. Most users drop out minutes after first launching your app.

It’s a pretty well understood psychological system of variable rewards.

It’s the same reason people open up Facebook or Reddit or Hacker News every day: you don’t know what interesting content you’ll see and that keeps you coming back.

Except games aren’t social network filled with user generated content. Developers make the content (items, skins etc) and have figured out that presenting in a randomised way drives better engagement.

Haha. Well that's why the amounts of money people are putting in the network right now are very small. It's certainly not something anyone recommends using for large payments, at least yet.

I think many people envision it something like an account balance you top up as you need to.

Lightning network payments can be routed through other users/nodes. So you only need one "on chain" transaction to then be able to send those funds back and forth to any other user in the network.

eg: Alice opens a channel with Bob. Charlie opens a channel with Bob. Alice can send payments to Charlie by having them routed through Bob (in a trustless way using Hashed Timelock Contracts).

There are valid concerns around what the topology looks like and how efficient it is to find optimal routes through a large network. These are the problems the developers are working on though.

>1. It cannot meet demand, so folks are recreating existing point to point financial networks and then using the chain in the event of reconciliation. These define a new topology as surely as credit card companies redefined the topology of modern digital economies.

Are you talking about the Lightning Network?

While it has a different topology and its own limitations, I wouldn't call it a replication of existing systems. It's an extension of the blockchain transaction concept more than anything.

Users can still make trustless payments without relying on a third party. The routing nodes do not require trust due to the hash time locked contract system.

This looks really interesting. Thanks!

This is different to “LED TVs” at home. It’s closer to an OLED TV since each pixel in this cinema screen is individually lit.

If you can invent a reliable alternative to proof-of-work distributed consensus there is a multi-billion dollar opportunity there. It’s inefficient, but before bitcoin came along there was no way to even do it. An inefficient way is better than no way at all.

Some other cryptocurrencies are trying alternatives. But none have been as “battle hardened” as bitcoin.

Follow the core developers and you’ll see their focus is on creating an open distributed platform. It’s up to us to figure out what to use it for.