On my Meta Quest I am positively begging for decent content worth viewing in 3d. Here we have a bookful of 3d astronomy. Can I not get something like this in VR? Why is VR languishing? How is it that paper and eye-crossing are still the leading technologies for displaying this 3d content?
Yes, but if a chicken and a half laid an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long would it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all the seeds off a dill pickle?
Quote: “ Inspired by the concept of ‘a piece of cloth.’” Is this some kind of joke? If it were April 1st I’d assume the whole article is meant for comedic effect.
Absolutely. In the 2000s the Unreal Engine had a price tag of half a million dollars up-front plus royalties (I don't remember the percentage) on the back end. That these companies are giving their engines—even their source code—away essentially for free indicates either that (1) engine sales was never a very lucrative line of business or that (2) the promise of establishing your technology as a defacto game engine standard—the Panavision of games—is even more appealing than immediate revenue.
This is an unusually political post to have risen so high on Hacker News. Is that because of the significance of email to the story? The use of email in this case is not very technically interesting. Or is there some other attraction?
"We will significantly reduce preloaded applications." As a primary Mac and Linux user, it is absolutely incredible to me that any PC that isn't given to customers for free would have more than zero preloaded so-called applications by default. I accept that my television, or Google, or Facebook dumps advertising on me, because otherwise how would they monetize? But since when did it become okay to load multi-hundred- or thousand-dollar devices, for which customers have paid dearly, with advertising and bloatware that benefits only the manufacturer? Are you guys paying for this crap?
Yeah, I'm not buying it. I have two complains about this article in particular and this kind of "science" in general.
1. Their conclusion is unverifiable. Science is about hypothesis, experiment, and falsification in a reproducible context. When someone says, "I can look at these tree rings and tell you whether rats or marmots spread the plague," I say, "Cool! Show me the results." And when they say, "What do you mean results? I just mean that we infer from the rings to the marmots," then I say, "Okay, well I just infer from planetary alignments to mood swings." Speculation is part of science. Speculation is not science.
2. An extremely strong inference is, by definition, acceptable without further evidence. You don't have to show me an experimental result if you can show me a strong logical case, with very strong causal or inferential links from one piece of evidence to the next. Although you can't reproduce for me a precise result showing that the Grand Canyon was the result of many, many millennia of erosion, you can show me over observable spans of time the general erosion rates in soil of that type with rainfall of that type and I'll accept your inference that many millennia were involved in the Grand Canyon. But tree rings in Asia to disease vectors in Europe? Give me a break.
I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested? I'm guessing very small (even assuming that many hide it and so you're knowledge is substantially skewed). So maybe that's because of your high/squeaky-clean socio-economic class? No: imagine yourself in any class you care to. Unless that class is much, much larger than your "real" class, then it would have to have an astronomical arrest rate (80%?) to compensate.
This is, among other things, a terribly confusing situation. Who's to blame? The person who asks to have results expunged? The law that requires Google to comply? Google for complying? Or no one—is the right thing being done, the "pen" of the Internet being dulled back into a pencil?
"You can't be the world's best and fail at the same time." Oh yes you can. You can be the best at providing something people don't want. You can even be the best at providing something people should want but don't. The NY Times is in the same boat as so many smart, literate, thoughtful, and educated communicators before them: either (1) dumb down the content, (2) fight the vain battle of trying to snaz up clever content with whiz-bang visuals and "Tweets" and whatnot, or (3) go out of business. Not a happy choice, but sometimes, when you're surrounded by swine, your pearls have no place to go.
No. No no no. Sue them. Sue them dead. Where product and brand robbery thrives, developers wither. What's the point in working hard in developing a game (or anything) if all your hard decisions are just going to be copied in a matter of weeks? Why bother? There is certainly an evil side to copyright, trademark, and patent, but these weapons have a place on the side of justice too. Unprotected developers—at least those for whom the money or glory has significance—will give up eventually. When imagination doesn't pay off, the only ones left will be the unimaginative, the copy cats, the cloners. Sue them, for our sake if not yourselves.
Here's an example of where the philosophy helps. You would probably agree that physics is a clear science and that its methods—philosophically reasoned about—produce (or discover) genuine truth. But would you agree that a "softer" science—say, psychology—still has enough methodological rigor to produce genuine truth? How about sociology? Economics? The more observationally ambiguous—the more abstract, profoundly complex, or "fuzzy" a science's subject is—the less confident we are that it's really a science, that it really produces truth. So how do you reason about what sciences or individual experiments are productive and which are flawed, uncertain or, frankly, bogus? Philosophy!
It seemed to me to say that the Future of Kinect is not particularly as an essential aspect a major gaming platform. "Museums, hotels, and corporate offices" seemed to figure large in its increasingly tiny future. The article seems like a bit of a swan song—maybe a consolation prize to honor all the people who worked on an ingenious but basically rejected product?
Why do news stories like this never link to the actual text of the bill? Isn't it a little worrying when the participants in a democracy consider their governance "over their head" or simply boring? It seems symptomatic of the broader problem the bill is meant to curb: that we've let our rulers get away from us and left them dabbling in their own hidden sandbox.
Interesting how the word "weird" has virtually become a codeword for ridiculous bottom-feeding online advertising. I initially overlooked this post simply because my brain docketed it under the "Ignore all internet content matching 'weird,' esp. 'weird way[s]'" category.
Scientists need to be extraordinarily careful about this kind of vague, "might be", "coulda been" kind of speculation. Finding the "spark of life" would be amazing, but speculating about how it might have formed without actual evidence shows a lack of skepticism that runs counter to the whole ethos of science and ultimately undermines it. When the public sees scientists hoping and wishing that they can find the "spark of life," and raising up hands of praise when some vague suggestion of how it might have happened is proffered, they're bound to gain suspicions that this part of science, anyway, is nearer to a religion that a cold, surgical pursuit of verifiable truth.
If you don't see the handwaving speculative wishfulness of the article, note this sentence: "A related issue is that the reactions observed so far only go in one direction; from complex sugars to simpler molecules like pyruvate." Ah, so when you heat up sugars they decompose into simpler molecules? Amazing! Must have created life! God is dead; long live Nature! Praise be!
I think you're right. There are two forces at work: innate ability and social acceptability. Innate ability tends to harm social acceptability. Therefore, to the extent that social acceptability determines a person's overall ability to succeed, high innate ability can actually pose a greater net detriment to success than a lower innate ability does. In a word, being "smart" or even "skillful" may in some cases make you less successful. The optimum, as you point out, is to have high innate ability but to disguise it in order to reduce the social downside. The trouble with this is that it's harder to disguise than it might seem: people tend to "sense" the intelligence of other people. You don't laugh at the right times. You tell jokes that no one gets. You think the big ra-ra push is crazy and you can't help saying so. The path that you find obviously correct is the one everyone else finds silly.
I'm convinced that the real solution, to the extent it's possible, is for highly intelligent people to find their way into positions that don't require social acceptance. Academics is obviously one destination (one log-jam, rather) for these types. But by all means avoid management, because that's where the attractiveness of your brilliance to employers and the unacceptability of your brilliance to your reports become a trap.
Is this supposed to make me feel better? I'm real happy for the earth surviving and all, but I want to survive too, and I want people to survive. A philosophy of, "The earth will survive though we'll be gone—and maybe that will be justice," is ridiculous, because if we're gone, who will be left to celebrate the justice? Justice lies in the conscious mind, and if the conscious mind is gone, justice goes too.
It'll be neat when Wolfram uses their (his?) almighty genius to utterly change the world of computing. It'll also be neat when they implement basic undo/redo functionality in Mathematica.
From what I understand of chaos theory, and from what I'm hearing of recent trends in scientific overreaching and poor peer reviewing, I am inclined to dismiss this paper as yet another overambitious claim to know what can't be known. Divination is the world's oldest and most alluring scam. What makes this different?
Man that is one game-changing article. It has convinced me to downsize my use of business cliches, going forward. It plucks the low hanging fruit. It has totally shifted my paradigm, acted as the tipping point for my disdain of faddish phrases.