LukeWalsh

The product (marketing) decision to focus on AR passthrough does seem really strange. If I was going to use a VR device for work, then, maybe if the resolution was high enough it could be nice to have much more space, but, I'd really only care that I'm not bumping into things. I'm not exactly sure why this AR route is being pushed before it's ready -- living in the world through cameras seems like a much harder problem to be solved after getting the base VR case to work.

IMO the more interesting business cases would be around simulated environments even as simple as viewing 360 videos for places where workers would be expected to know what's going on when they enter.

Thanks for the detailed analysis!

There seems to be a blackjack analogy here. Don’t let the boss catch on!

Fuck your burn!

WOW now I’m even more confused on how Latin is different from Greek.

I should not be listened to when it comes to the words.

Actually now I’m confused because I don’t understand Latin. Psyche definitely gets at the mind idea, but also soul or spirit. Ick sounds like what I do before I vomit but I guess “delic” is really what we’d be concerned about, but then this seems like it’s just talking about an experience of the first thing, an arrow pointing back to an amorphous blob of language. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse that I brought my own preconceptions to the word at this point, or how my preconceptions are different from the thing itself. I’m seeing other interpretations talking about dissolution. It’s certainly something big happening, that’s for sure! In a way, I’m also confused about mindfulness. Is my mind full or is the fullness of mind different from that? Does it mean something that there’s only one “L?”

Absolutely I think the next interesting discussions could either be about the word, or what to do.

Again, thanks to the author for properly choosing A New Brand, with existing baggage which perfectly typifies where discussions like this tend to go, see comments below.

I had a thought that this is even beyond the word psychedelia and extends more broadly to all modern health. But then, I think the word is just right, since psychedelia has as much to do with LSD as vitamins have to do with vitamin water. If you disagree with the analogy that’s no issue, it’s simply A Catchy Hook.

Psychedelic simply means expansion of the mind and is independent of any particular practice or substance.

Mindfulness seems to be another, or even, “the,” new culmination word for “safe” psychedelia in the west (as contrast with the “unsafe” roll-your-own a.la burning man). We can tell it’s the current culmination word because it’s polarized, the one word with a significant amount of scientific research, but then at the same time oddly clinical and paradoxically overall too LuLu lemon & vitamin water. It just doesn’t seem to have that same oomph as eating acid and stealing fire in the desert, but it’s receiving medical approvals that pave the way for economics to benefit people at scale. Mindfulness seems to encourage passivity, but then it’s practiced by navy seals. At the core, it’s all wrong by placing too much focus on the mind, just like we’ve always done in Latin-based languages.

Whatever the word is, developing a perspective that we individually believe is worth cultivating is the root of a connection between well-being and performance.

It doesn’t sound like a SASS app because it isn’t. It doesn’t seem like a good business idea because business is a dirty word, like mindfulness, people think there’s a way to do it.

Two quotes stood out to me:

“But what we really need are psychedelic models for business - business that defines new standards for integrity, equity and ethics; business reimagined with a technicolor glow.”

“What would I have done if I had known that this would happen?”

The second seems like exactly the right question. If you have an answer I’d love to chat, even just for fun.

Wow this is actually scratching an itch of mine now. I love the kindle feature of saving / sharing quotes and have been wanting something for offline. Awesome work Tanner!

I don’t think this is a humblebrag. It’s a success story, and we should celebrate those. There’s nothing wrong with being excited about something turning into more of a success than expected, and there are a lot of general values in the post that may be broadly encouraging to folks here.

It’s free, go download it if it’s useful to you :)

Interestingly, in his book outlining the technique he teaches, Andy doesn’t directly recommend people do any sort of guided meditation. Rather, he talks about it like a sort of skill people can learn.

There are probably diminishing returns once you are able to focus through the technique, however, even in monasteries with experienced meditators simple cues like bells are used because everyone gets distracted once in a while!

I thought this was strange too. I was just watching Gary open a few $500 football card boxes today (5 cards in each). Upon opening a box without any rare players he said: "That's what you get sometimes gambling!" So I think people know that's what's going on.

This is the study: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/29/1905329116

Yea the TCEC is one. I also think the chess.com computer chess championship (CCC) is interesting (Stockfish is winning here as well). The CCC uses more advanced hardware. Both are live now and interesting to watch, I mentioned the link for CCC but the TCEC is here: https://tcec.chessdom.com/

A server-based championship would also be interesting but pretty degenerate. I guess that's why computers playing more complex real-time games is becoming the bleeding edge.

TCEC Hardware -------------- CPU: CPUs: 2 x Intel Xeon E5 2699 v4 @ 2.8 GHz Cores: 44 physical Motherboard: Supermicro X10DRL-i RAM: 64 GB DDR4 ECC SSD: Crucial CT250M500 240 GB Chassis: Supermicro OS: Windows Server 2012 R2

GPU: GPUs: 1 x 2080 ti + 1 x 2080 CPU: Quad Core i5 2600k RAM: 16GB DDR3-2133 SSD: Samsung 840 Pro 256gb

CCC Hardware -------------- CPU: CPUs: 2 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 @ 2.70 GHz 33 MB L3 Cores: 48 physical (96 logical) RAM: 256GB DDR4-2666 ECC Registered RDIMM SSD: 2x Crucial MX300 (1TB) in RAID1 OS: Windows Server 2016

GPU: GPU: 4x Tesla V100 (64 GB GPU memory) CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2686 v4 @ 2.30 GHz Cores: 16 physical (32 virtual) RAM: 256 GB

I would love to use Alpha Zero. The article makes it sound like Komodo (which uses similar techniques to Alpha Zero) could also beat Stockfish (since Alpha Zero beat Stockfish). Stockfish still beat Komodo and all other engines according to the computer chess championship which uses equal-and-limited compute requirements.

The 5/2 blitz computer chess championship is currently live (with both Stockfish and Komodo competing): https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship

Nothing similar about private personalization was definitively mentioned for the recommendations inside the AppleTV app, however. From what I can tell Apple will be collecting viewing information, not only for content on iTunes but now, content viewed via cable subscriptions and streaming subscriptions like Hulu and Prime Video. The value proposition of this new app is "all of your content in one place, regardless of subscription." The only commitment from Apple was that they wouldn't share personal information with anyone (not that Apple won't have access to this information).

It's no wonder there wasn't a partnership that worked with Netflix here since Netflix uses information about viewing to guide licensing deals and inform what the studio should produce.

I assume it works like Pocket personalized recommendations in Firefox. 1/ The reading history is stored on-device, 2/ encrypted on-device, and then 3/ kept in sync with other authenticated devices that are able to decrypt the reading history (which is stored on the server but not readable by the server because it's encrypted).

One highlight is that there's a heavy emphasis on private recommendations inside the news app, including magazines (the app downloads a set of articles and manages recommendations on-device). There was a slide "Apple doesn't know what you read." Apple is doubling down on not giving data to advertisers.

I used OpenRent to find my last flat in London. It was great!

There's also an interesting aspect to a realtor that fills a guiding role. They're the person who helps turn seemingly intangible preferences into tangible search criteria (which can be executed by either party on mostly-public databases).

In fact, in the long-term, as jobs are automated, I'd expect people to spend more time, not less, on taste clarification. Then the pattern is to think about how all guiding roles in society will form to tools that automate the simple bits and let humans spend time doing what they do best. Imagine how much better it would be as a realtor to spend time in conversations inside virtual homes rather than sitting in traffic, navigating database searches, or fiddling calendars.

Is anyone aware of similar data on the YC company set?

The Firefox Multi-Account Containers is a more general extension that allows you to create containers and determine which sites open in each container. This extension can be customized to suit your needs for multiple sites and multiple logins but takes more time to set up than Google Container.

Then an interesting question is IF the Facebook container stemmed from principles 4 & 5 from the Mozilla Manifesto applied to the dominant social utility; is there a reason other than money that the same principles would not lead to a decision to build an add-on that gives people an option to contain Google? It's certainly not a technical limitation.

It seems natural to posit that money is the issue but is it so easy to believe that a foundation most of us trust would compromise its core values?

As mentioned elsewhere hacky add-ons cannot be the end solution, and will not be widely adopted unless incorporated as defaults.

That would certainly make it easier to trust this extension. I'm curious why Mozilla would ship a Facebook container but not a Google container.

This was the unit I received: https://imgur.com/G7sBbwX

It linked here: https://www.facebook.com/help/2687943754764396?ref=comms

Yes

During a rotational program out of college I was the product manager at Facebook working on maps as the team led up to the first ML contributions to OpenStreetMap (https://2016.stateofthemap.us/how-can-ai-help-us-make-maps/). There's an interesting story about a large mistake I made that is interesting to share:

I started working on this project because I believe that map data should be open as did everyone else on the team. There was (and still is to some extent) a lot of skepticism about whether large corporations have the best interest of the map at heart - and what tools need to be put in place to make sure the quality stays high. It's pretty clear to me that there can be an alignment in goals because whether it's a company, person, or nonprofit everyone prefers accurate map data. The questions are about margins of error & OSM rightfully leans toward only extremely high confidence.

One good thing about Facebook joining in on updating the open map is resources are not much of an issue. Our team was able to just call up and purchase the rights to the satellite images we needed instantly. For quite some time we had working models that generated edits for roads that were missing from the map. Leading up to the yearly conference there was a question of whether we should present all of our findings to the community and see what they thought before making any edits.

No one on the team was willing to push the button on submitting any of our edits because we weren't sure if they were good enough and it would feel shitty to be the one who broke the relationship between Facebook & OSM. Beyond the software engineers even the people who were paid hourly to train the models became invested in believing it was important that Facebook reach a way to channel its massive resources into the project.

Eventually we all gathered up and I just pushed the button to contribute a random 1km / 1km square in Egypt (we'd already computed edits across the country accounting for over 100% increase but things could always get better). Then we waited. No one ever reached out so we started contributing a little more at a steady rate to see if anyone else working in the country noticed (including improving the original 1km / 1km box as the models improved).

We were testing the ML in some of the harshest conditions we could find (low contrast in the desert) so the research team started working on another model for India (winding dirt roads, lots of rivers, tree cover). All of our edits went through street-by-street human approval which was working but slow going since the number of people on the project could fit in a Facebook friend recommendation unit. After not receiving much contact in Egypt (the map community there is small) we received initial positive feedback from local mappers in India and decided to ramp up the speed of contributing which meant getting a war room in Menlo Park and rounding up a larger group of people to review the machine suggested roads.

I ended up gathering a few too many people and myself along with the core team was too hasty in communicating the quality bar for submission. We planned to shadow edits as the week went on to make sure the new members were up to speed but things unfolded much more quickly. Within a few hours we accidentally submitted a few bad roads. A local mapper noticed as he'd just driven the area on his motorcycle the day before. I immediately left a meeting where we were negotiating buying more satellite imagery and jumped on a bike back to the war room. No harm done, we had scripts ready to undo edits.

When I got into the war room things were more problematic. Quite a few of the new folks had made similar mistakes so we paused everything. There was now a small group of local mappers in an IRC channel worried about large scale vandalism (though they quickly realized that wasn't the case). They noticed the breadth of the edits and tracked down the accounts of most everyone in the room. The map community in India is one of the better communities but still a room of this many people making edits at a such a scale was unlike anything you'd normally expect since the ML made editing 10-100x faster than hand tracing imagery.

During the time when the local mappers believed this might be intentional vandalism they escalated to the global community. So that's how a large chunk of the OSM leadership found out Facebook was doing work on the map - some of our worst edits. Shit! It ended up not being so bad however. The entirety of the bad edits were reverted in a few minutes with oversight from the head of the OSM data working group. IMO the situation accidentally showed some of the OSM corporate contribution skeptics that even the worst case wasn't so bad & Facebook was definitely wanting the community in control of any crises.

It wasn't all thought through but it's quite interesting in retrospect how the engagement strategy panned out.

Internet outraged to lose boy hero. Meanwhile Ahmed laughs all the way to the bank.

I don't think this is a fair generalization. It might be correct to say 'many people think they want expensive things'.

I for one think you can keep your cedar floors and fancy wine. Maybe I'm just young but I really don't want that at all.

How can I view this on oculus keeping the text for each location?

Also if a spotify engineer is reading this email me I have some UI mocks for a few UX fixes in the mac desktop app