413 karma · joined April 16, 2013
"Following pushback, Zoom says it won't use customer data to train AI models": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37123572 (August 15th)
> The adelgid has spread very rapidly in southern parts of the range once becoming established, while its expansion northward is much slower. Virtually all the hemlocks in the southern Appalachian Mountains have seen infestations of the insect within the last five to seven years, with thousands of hectares of stands dying within the last two to three years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsuga_canadensis#Hemlock_wooll...
"Following his début monograph, TO:KY:OO, which captured Tokyo’s beauty at night, Wong widens his lens from the city that became his spiritual and photographic muse to Osaka and Kyoto, London and Seoul, Paris and Rome. But he goes still further, seeking the rich tapestries of nightlife in the foggy historical streets of his hometown Edinburgh, penetrating the backstreets of the megacity Chongqing, and seizing the verticality of Hong Kong from its rooftops."
The American Chestnut is "functionally extinct", because despite the fact that they are somewhat prominent throughout their native habitat as adolescents, they rarely (if ever) are able reach maturity and develop fruit (and therefore can't reproduce).
Here are a few pics of some adolescent chestnuts if anyone is curious:
- https://unsplash.com/photos/O9q1p_9bji0
- https://unsplash.com/photos/0s7_4fm8y-g
When I think of smart glasses, I imagine the best possible version of them as an exercise in thought. It starts off with them being in a form factor that's effectively indistinguishable from "normal" glasses. After that, I imagine them having the processing power to provide full AR capabilities, as well as a battery that's able to sustain that technology for at least a day if not longer.
I suppose that in turn might make you ask, "What is 'full AR'?" For the sake of this I'm going to imagine a world where there are no nefarious actors or ill-intentions. This is a fantasy world where I can just geek out over cool tech.
To me, it's the ability to recognize any and all people you interact with, at a moment's notice. Think all social media networks combined, but in realtime, as soon as you lock eyes with a person. The ability to "remember" a person you met ten years ago at that one networking event is now possible. Extrapolating this into other social spheres, you could get rid of all of the traditional dating apps that exist on your cell. If you walk into a bar or [$genericSocialSetting], you can immediately see who is single, and who isn't (assuming they have this information broadcast). Dating just got significantly easier, and maybe a bit more organic since you can tell right off the bat who is looking (and maybe even see if you have something in common).
Looking into other areas of use, imagine having Wikipedia at your finger tips, overlain in your field of vision. I'm not talking paragraphs of text here, but rather some sort of intuitive UI that cleverly displays the most significant bits of information about a given object, place, person, etc, within your field of vision. "That plant is poisonous."
Smart glasses represent taking all of the data and information that's available on the internet, and overlaying it in the real world. The "killer app" for smart glasses is several years out, and it will take many iterations before it's perfected. They're going to augment how we function, just how smart phones have augmented us. You'll be able to record, snapshot, and replay scenes from your past just like you can do with your phone, but far more effortlessly. I can imagine a world where your smart glasses are constantly recording, but only choosing to "save" given your input (since a lot of moments we wish we could have saved happen without us having our phones out.) Again this is pretending we live in world with zero nefarious actors (Black Mirror does a good job of covering some potential negatives of tech like this).
I think we're a long, long ways off from this tech. It's going to be a big culture shift in many ways, and is going to happen slowly at first. In my mind this is the sort of thing that Thalmic, Magic Leap and others are pursuing. I see companies like that as the early Ford Motor Company. These early Smart Glasses/AR companies are producing the Model T. Our smart phones are the "faster horses" in this analogy.
edit: I tried to keep it minimal but informative. I recently rebuilt it using Gatsby.
It seems to me that you're defending the uppermost social class in the US, and are attempting to place blame on the middle class of the US for not being able to compete on the global stage against the lower classes of third world nations. They aren't necessarily more productive, they're just willing to work for less. A lot less. I may be misunderstanding your entire point, though.
> So in order to maintain the globally-superior wages we have become accustomed to, we must maintain and even increase our productivity edge. How do we do that?
Couldn't we do this by having competitive taxes on the highest income workers, and then reinvesting that money into things like: reducing the cost of education, reducing the cost of healthcare, improving mass transit and infrastructure, and other things that in general detract from the middle class's ability to "increase our productivity edge". This seems like at least a step in the right direction, instead of allowing the upper echelons of society to vacuum up and hoard billions of dollars that aren't serving any higher goals other than making a select few wealthy beyond reason.
The Oculus Rift is $500, $598 with the Touch controllers and and extra sensor.[1]
Just leaving this here for reference and as a resource.
However, this didn't stop me from reading the article, which honestly felt a bit condescending (this line stuck out: "And don't kid yourself that it will ever look pretty. Without a designer's input, charts have a funny way of just not going well together."). As a young developer who is constantly looking for new (or new to me) and exciting tools, this is the sort of thing that turns me away from an otherwise handy or useful tool.