Hey jbk just wanted to take this chance to say thanks! VLC has been year over year some of the most consitently good software I've ever used. Thank you for all the hard work I'm sure goes into making a killer product.
144 karma · joined May 15, 2018
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-t...
It's my favorite sci-fi universe of any book, movie, or game. Feels a bit like Star Trek if the Federation were more advanced.
How long do you think it will be until neuralink has the capabilities to fully simulate senses and experiences on the level of movies like the matrix?
Thank you for doing important and inspiring work.
Up to recently I had been using Reuters, AP, and an aggregator called spectrym.news. These are fairly good but don't completely solve problem.
Over the last month or two I've almost completely switched over to the current events page on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
It's amazing! If any editors for that page are reading this, you're doing a great job! Thank you so much!
That page, and Wikipedia generally are not optimizing for engagement. So the headlines are informative rather than inflammatory. I can get the same amount of information that I used to get from other sources in an extremely small amount of time. Which is what I'm going for.
I want to be informed without investing a lot of time or feeling like I'm being socially engineered for ad revenue.
I had been checking that page and the following up on Reuters, AP, and Spectrym to make sure there weren't any big stories that I had missed. While there was occasionally something notable not on the Current Events page it was rare enough that I usually don't even feel compelled to check the other sites anymore.
It's also nice that it's organized by day so if I take a couple days off reading the news I can easily go back and see it chronologically.
In any case - if you made it I would at least be interested enough to check it out and see what kind of content it blocked.
As an aside I use firefox mobile which has pretty weak extension support. If the extension worked with firefox mobile that would be extra cool.
>“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton
I've noticed I have this sort of meta Gell-Mann effect where every time I think of that annecdote the news seems much more dubious. Then a short while later I go back to not thinking about it and reading the news as I otherwise would.
For maybe the last 15 years or so I've been blocking or avoiding ads. uBlock origin is probably the most valuable product I use as well as AdBlock Plus before that. I know I know! I'm morally bankrupt! Thats how people make money on their content. That's what makes the internet go round. But I can't help myself. I just can't stand advertisements. Where I can I pay to avoid ads like Netflix or Youtube Premium I do. But beyond that I've used ad blockers and various tricks over the last decade and a half to nearly completely avoid advertisements in my life. It has been delightful. I feel like I'm happier for it and have saved who knows how much time and attention by doing so. I've always said that for any given service if I couldn't figure out how to block the ads I would just stop using it and read more books or something instead. Short of that there is almost no ceiling for how much I am willing to pay to use an ad-free version of a service.
That strategy has been pretty effective and continues to be today. But whereas the deal used to be "we have content you want, but the trade is that you have to look at our advertisements" it seems like that deal has shifted a bit in the last couple years. Now it's more like "we have the content you want, but it's in a walled garden of really addicting algorithms." So even though I don't see ads on Reddit, Youtube, or whatever - thats no longer enough. I'm still finding my time and attention being taken up by this really addicting content that is optimized for engagement and leaves me no more informed and usually less happy.
The thing is the good content is still out there! In fact there is probably more of it than there ever was even though it doesn't feel that way now. For now I've stopped using reddit and feel much happier for it. I try all these little tricks with Youtube to use it in a way where I don't get sucked into that engagement trap but it's pretty tricky.
All the well known tricks like uninstalling the app and using it in the browser or turning off notifications feel like trying to smoke 3 cigarettes a day or eat just one potato chip. They work moderately well but I often find myself slipping. It's also a constant willpower battle that is it's own drain on time and attention.
I've considered giving up the lot of it like I used to threaten I would do if I couldn't block ads anymore. Just read more books and so on. But I don't want to! What I want is to have my cake and eat it to. I want to go back to being a freeloader where I get the interesting content that I love without paying for it with my time, attention, and well-being, in a labyrinth of engagement.
I want an algorithm blocker that works like an adblocker. Maybe using machine learning to identify content that fits the bill. It seems somewhat unrealistic honestly. I'm not exactly sure what you're training the algorithm on in order to get that. Also maybe ML isn't the path there. Maybe there is another clever way to do it. I'm not sure. But I do think about it from time to time.
Short of that I've also considered trying to shift the sources to sites that have interesting and novel content without being so addictive and negative. Random wikipedia articles or random github repositories, that sort of thing.
Thinking about the biggest problem I have this was the most concrete one I could come up with. It's hard to quantify just how much value I would get out of a solution if it was as big of a benefit for me as adblockers have been up to now.
I use 3 primary ones.
https://www.reuters.com/ I find it to a pretty accurate and neutral. Covers most news of the day. I think the AP is a good option for this too but personally prefer Reuters.
http://www.spectrym.news/ This one I discovered about a year ago and really like it. It's an aggregator for lots of different news sites. It groups stories by subject and labels how partisan the outlet is. With it I find I catch some of the political news I might sometimes miss with Reuters and also get a better idea of what kind of news stories people on both extremes of the political spectrum are consuming. I find I can understand their perspectives a lot better when I see the way that it's being reported by their news source of choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events This one I added really recently and it has been great! Really boring, clear, and neutral information. I find that it covers most of the news of the day and sums it up as briefly as possible. I've considered making this my only news source but haven't pulled the trigger on that yet.
It's a frustrating problem. I wish there were better ways to stay informed without reading stuff that feels like it's designed to make me as mad as possible so I forward the article and drive ad revenue.
Room temperature superconductors also come to mind but I think that venture is somewhat better funded than Fusion.
I wish her and Courtland would do a regular podcast together.
[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/086-lynne-tye-of-key-va...
You would still have advertising, but less incentive to collect data on individuals.
I would love to hear feedback / criticism on this idea.
SF is probably a great place to find VR Arcades. Googling it looks like there are a couple here is one[1].
Might be better to ask / google around and see which ones have the best reviews.
edit: this one looks good too[2]
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcforme/comments/dfpwr0/1000_...
SpaceEngine is Google Earth for the Observable Universe (Google Earth VR is pretty cool too). It places celestial objects that we know of where they belong and procedurally generates what is unknown based on how many stars / planets are estimated to exist. The sense of scale in VR lends itself really well to this experience. You can control where you move and how fast you move.
I was genuinely in awe as I pointed away from earth into deep space and started accelerating. I know space is vast but it's just so hard to conceptualize. You increase the throttle and you realize that even travelling at light speed doesn't feel all that fast. At that rate it still takes hours to leave our solar system. But the shocking part is when you increase it far beyond that. Cranking it up to 100x the speed of light, then to 1 light year /second, how about 100ly/s, faster still. I don't remember what my final cruising speed was when I realized that I wasn't seeing stars pass by - those were galaxies. Maybe 100M ly/s or something. And as you're going you can stop, pick a galaxy, in that galaxy pick a star, have a look around that system, pick a planet, land on it, advance time and watch day night cycles. There was an overwhelming sense of how big the universe is and just how small I am as I watched galaxies fly by at impossible speeds.
SpaceEngine is buggy. Everything in VR is buggy and half works. Menus are terrible. UIs are baffling. Settings are either hidden and esoteric or oversimplified with no real control. This is part of what makes it seem so promising to me though. There is so much low hanging fruit to be picked. Everything I've experienced in VR feels like a castle in the sand. And not just because DMCA's will eventually remove much of the current content. There is so much potential to grow and extend what is currently available. Platforms where users can make their own content currently exist but it feels like it's almost by accident. You can imagine future systems making it even easier / more open. I think WebVr is one trying to do this but I've never used it.
The low hanging fruit isn't just the software either. Everything I've mentioned above is with todays consumer hardware. The improvements in the pipeline for VR hardware are crazy. Things that are available as Dev kits, prototypes, and commercial hardware blow my mind.
In VRChat you can join via VR or a flatscreen. When people are not connected via VR you can sort of subconsciously tell at all times because there is no body language. It's as if communication has some sort of inherent fidelity where on the high end you have standing in a room with a real person talking to them and on the low end you have something like a text message. People who are connected via flat screen feel a little closer to the text message side of that slider scale. But there are also people who use special hardware to enable full body tracking, or finger tracking. Interacting with them feels a little higher on that fidelity scale.
Full body tracking is currently done by a piece of hardware clipped to your belt and or shoes. In the future I suspect it will be done with cameras or something a bit more seamless. But it's not just body tracking. There are haptic suits where you can feel when someone taps you on the shoulder, or throws a dodgeball at you. There are very early alpha haptic gloves about which I could write another comment of similar length (this video was incredible to me[0]). There is experimentation with tracking facial expressions and eye movement. Facial expressions will go a long way towards increasing communication fidelity but eye tracking turns out to offer even more potential than that.
The resolution of the current gen VR headsets just isn't that good. It's better than the old Rift CV1 but is still noticeably less clear that a computer monitor or television. However, with eye tracking you can do foveated rendering. This allows you to track where the eye is looking at any given moment and render very high resolution in that spot, and lower resolution on the rest of the image. I have not yet experienced this myself but people who describe testing this out report a remarkable difference. I remember one article in which a guy described getting into a BMW in VR and looking at the logo on the steering wheel he said it looked shockingly similar to seeing it in real life. Thats a special example and not first hand so I take it with a grain of salt. But with foveated rendering the resolution can be on the order of 10x higher. Really extreme improvements possible here.
I've always been more of a software guy personally. The potential of the hardware is exciting to me most of all because of the crazy possibilities it enables in what could be build in VR tomorrow. It's not quite Moore's law, but there is a sense that the hardware will get better for a while.
I once heard someone call VR/AR "the last interface" because any interface that currently exists or could exist can be built in VR. I don't know if thats entirely true but it gets at what makes VR so compelling. The limit is really only our imagination. This is true of other digital worlds too, like video games or to some degree even websites. But thats just through a screen. Here you can conjour into existence places for people to go, people to be, or adventures to experience.
It's not all adventure games and toaster people either. There may be even more low hanging fruit in building tools to do work in VR. Thats even less explored. A VR IDE would be pretty cool, especially once the resolution gets a little better. Or imagine if you could walk into a virtual datacenter and see all your AWS servers manifested as physical boxes racked and waiting for you to trip over power cables like it's the 90s again.
VR is a new medium. It doesn't feel like reading a book, playing a video game, or watching a movie. It feels like something else. And like all new mediums what exists there now is mostly ports of old mediums. I don't think we've even scratched the surface of whats possible in this space. There are probably whole undiscovered classes of ideas that really only work in VR the same way there are ideas that make great books but don't really cut it as movies. It just has so much potential.
It feels like the early web to me. An untouched frontier. Almost completely unexplored and teeming with possibility. What could be more promising than that.
If you get to try (or play everyday) one of the more common VR games like beatsaber, the lab, job simulator etc. those are definitely still fun too and I think still are a window into what VR can be. Rec Room is another popular one you may find that even has some user generated content (though with more limits on things like size). Really almost anything in VR as long as it's on one of the PC based headsets will show you what I'm talking about.
Thanks for asking this question. Looking at the other comments this is one of my favorite HN threads in a while.
If you're reading this and you haven't tried VR yet - I can't recommend it highly enough. Particularly a higher end experience connected to a PC with tracking (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or Valve Index). The lower end ones like a gear VR are fun and novel but it just isn't the same experience.
I have introduced dozens of people to VR for the first and you just can't explain it to people. Videos are no help. Trying to describe is better than nothing I guess but it just doesn't get you there. If you take anything away from this comment it would be to just try to find somewhere that you can try VR yourself and you'll understand what I'm about to say better than I could ever explain it.
The equipment available to consumers today is pretty low end compared to what is possible with prototypes / commercial systems when it comes to resolution, framerate, and other factors. There are also quality of life features that work but haven't been brought to market yet for consumers. Things like wireless for the headsets. But even with this early days tech - when you put the headset on you feel like you are being transported to a different place.
If you've tried VR you probably know what I'm talking about. There is this distinct feeling of being present in the virtual world. Remembering places in VR feels more like remembering a physical location you've been to rather than something you saw in a computer game. And VR is going to be so much more than games.
Because of this feeling of presence - going places in VR actually feels like going to a different place. Likewise, when you meet someone in VR it feels different than meeting someone in a fourm like this or even in a voice chat in a video game. It feels closer to actually being in a room with them. I think a lot of this is related to being able to see some of their body language.
Everything in VR feels like a hacked together prototype and works like one too. I like to show VR to people but I can't really recommend it to most people because it just doesn't work well enough for them to be able to fix it when various things break or settings need to be changed. Some options that I offer to them are things like PSVR or I've heard the new Oculus Quest is pretty good as a casual experience but I haven't tried it yet. But both of those route you to walled gardens that are missing a lot of the really cool stuff.
If you know the right nooks and crannies to look there are some amazing things to see and do. I'll list a couple of my favorites but the best ones all have something in common. They are a platform that allow people to make their own content. In some cases they are made that way on purpose, others it feels more like an accident of design.
Remember when the internet was a little younger and you'd find a cool or bizarre website in an irc channel or something and think "who even made this?" Well that time is back except you can't view it through a screen anymore. You have to put on an HMD and venture directly into the internet. When you take a walk through the internet what do you find? Mostly weird stuff and brief glimpses of the future - both are worthwhile.
VRChat is probably the best example of the above. Like everything in VR the interfaces are terrible and everything half works. But even through that fog you start to get an idea of how deep this rabbit hole goes. In VRChat you choose an Avatar and then go to virtual worlds and meet people other people. They have default Avatars and Worlds to choose from but the best content is what people make themselves. It's a unity game and there is a shocking degree of freedom in what people can upload (content made with apps like blender or unity itself).
Copyright may as well not exist yet in VR because it's too new for anyone to know to look. So people decide to be various superheros or characters from all kinds of fiction. I once visited a world where you could choose from hundreds of Marvel and DC characters. It's not that in VRChat you can be Spiderman. It's that you can choose from dozens of spidermen from various comics and movies (the real spiderverse perhaps).
As you might expect there is a lot of anime. There are also a lot of unconventional avatars. Sometimes People choose to be a car. Or a firetruck. Or a toaster. Or an ATM Machine. Sometimes people choose to be something incredibly large like a robot towering hundreds of feet in the air. Sometimes people choose to be a tiny avatar like a mouse or an RC car.
The strange thing is that there is a sense of scale in VR. So if you are a giant robot, everyone looks small and you really do feel like you are that large. Likewise if you pick a tiny avatar everything in the world looks giant. This feeling of presence remains. A very present toaster.
For many users of VRChat the Avatars are the most compelling parts. Don't get me wrong, they are really cool. It's amazing to see some of the things that people come up with. Especially the avatars that have some sort of animation without it being obnoxious / trolling (hey I did say we were walking into the internet here). People spend hours creating these versions of their virtual selves and build in abilities to do things in game. Most of these things just boil down to character animations or sounds. Any animation or sound you want leaves a lot of room for creativity (with few limits on size, or unfortunately volume).
But to me this isn't the real draw of VRChat. The worlds are. You can look at the most popular worlds in the game in menu but I prefer the search bar (searching is one of the things that half works.) Being able to be some character from fiction or someones imagination is one thing - but being able to travel somewhere is another thing all together.
So you may find yourself in a VR bar or arcade having a conversation when someone drops a portal to another world. Some of my favorites I've been to include a recreation of the secret base containing the Stargate from the show by the same name. Once you're there you can dial the gate and walk through to find yourself walking out of a pyramid on a desert planet called Abydos. Or you may find yourself climbing into a helicopter with friends in a world of abstract and surrealist art created to go along with an album somebody made. A sort of VR music video that you can fly through to a soundtrack. Or if a helicopter doesn't suit you how about another world where you can put on a jetpack and fly through what feels like various settings on an old media player visualizer (avoid this one if you get motion sickness!). Or how about one of those rides from a theme park where they put you in a hydraulic car that doesn't move and project a "ride" onto the screen in front of you? Because yes, somehow people have put a couple of these in VR too (I like the Back To The Future one).
There are literally thousands of these worlds you can visit. It really reminds me of the old internet where you would find these amazing little things tucked away and hidden.
The community is probably closer to today's internet as far as signal to noise ratio goes. But if you're willing to look there are definitely kind and interesting people to meet as well.
VRChat is fun and interesting but it's actually not where I spend most of my time in VR.
In VR there are maybe a dozen first person shooter games to choose from. In VR shooter games kind of feel like a mix between a game and paintball or something like that. My favorite is called Pavlov VR. It is a shameless knock off of counter-strike (I mean shameless. Down to the same exact same guns, mechanics, and win conditions.) But thats ok! Because it means you can play counter-strike in VR. Which is incredibly fun. There are also Call of Duty clones, Battlefield clones, and Battle Royale games. But what makes pavlov so special is that you can upload maps, similar to VRChat. Just like VRChat it's boundless creativity.
So in addition to having all the same mechanics as counter-strike it also has all the same maps. I've been playing Dust II for years (not as long as some, never did play 1.6). But now I get to actually run around there. Same goes for maps from a lot of other games I used to play. In addition to people uploading maps they also turn them into these custom game modes that you can instantly play just by joining or starting a server. Because of this, Pavlov winds up feeling like lots of different games. There are the classic default modes but there are also lots of other game modes to try (zombies, duel servers, conversions for weapons). Some of the coop modes are fun because they are a more social experience like VRChat but there is more to do. VRChat can wind up a little boring just standing around sometimes.
I feel sort of guilty doing that though, like I'm being a bad citizen by not being informed about what is happening in the world.
I've also tried just batching it down to one day with the current news sites I visit but I found it surprisingly difficult to understand the context of what was happening based on the news of that day.
Ideally I'd like to have my cake and eat it too. Only spend a little time per week or month reading the news but be as informed as someone who was consuming the slow trickle of the same news every day throughout the month.
Haha, yes. I guess that does sound strange. I've grown up consuming news via the internet. It always seemed like a faster / easier way to get news rather than buying a magazine or newspaper.
I would be open to using an older format like a newspaper, but I worry that they may have the same problems because I cannot find an online service like this provided by newspapers (NYT used to have a weekly summary but it has been discontinued for example).
I wonder if Sunday papers are still a summary of the weeks news or if they assume some prior knowledge.