artofpongfu

You should try GeoGuessr if you haven't already. But there as well there are things that ruin the fun: "meta" knowledge, like if you see this tear in the sky, or this or that Google car then it's this country. I purposefully avoid learning any meta because that's not what makes GeoGuessr fun. The fun part is integrating several vague clues and arriving at the right conclusion.

1) What

Many things are obvious in retrospect. In this case, it seems few truly understood that all information will be made digital, and that print, audio, video etc are all just different kinds of information.

Just imagine what should be obvious to us now about e.g. AI, but isn't.

Not all advice have to applicable to 100% of the population. If you're on HN reading this you are most likely in the 10%, and you probably have some room to save money, or prepare to start your own business. If needing a job bothers you that is, some people I know don't seem to mind all that much it seems.

Personally, the moment I started working was the moment I knew I needed to become free at some point. Jobs come and go, sometimes they're quite enjoyable, but you're always one bad boss, one health condition, one recession away from living a nightmare. The solution to me is not to interview "as a hobby", that also sounds like a nightmare. The solution is to get out by any means possible, or at least work towards the ability to get out when the need arrives.

Could AI have written this touching, funny article? There will still be a market for great writers, for now people crave connection to a real person at the other end. In this case, I'm reading it to understand something about being human. But it's true that the market for human writing as a whole will shrink further.

You'll quickly find that working in "Virtual Reality" constitutes remote work since you inhabit a different reality and is not allowed.

Left-handed, one one leg, one eye closed and a mobile phone instead of a racket. Reminds me of a clip of Truls Moregardh playing a reporter with a phone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EJaT1b8QmA

I could concede it as "lower intermediate", but the span is huge. I don't think it can beat an upper beginner consistently. It all depends on what ELO you consider intermediate.

Yeah, but I don't think anyone who's played TT regularly would call this "intermediate". It's like calling someone who managed to code fizzbuzz an intermediate programmer.

Very cool, but "Our approach lead to competitive play at human level and a robot agent that humans actually enjoy playing with": I would not call that remotely near "human level" yet. I think we'll get there at some point but I think people underestimate how difficult table tennis is and the level of top human play is insane. This was the World Cup match point recently for reference: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-AJg2u7U5MU

As a little side project I'm working on a table tennis AI for VR which works by imitating real players, which is a much simpler problem since you're allowed to "fake" a lot of things in a game. I think VR holds more promise in the short to medium term for practicing TT than robotics.

Sure thing, also good to share experiences on VR dev

Cool, I bet my son would love to throw stuff at me

I'm working on a human-like AI opponent for VR table tennis. It's something I really want myself, love playing table tennis in VR, but with online play you get the latency issues, people that have adopted a playing style which basically hacks the game physics or other aspects, or people who are just plain rude. Playing against the AI is much nicer, but it's not varied or realistic enough such that when you actually play against real people you are ill prepared.

At a very early prototyping phase, but having a ton of fun. https://x.com/artofpongfu

So he sets up a toy problem (drawing from a baby names distribution), then never explains how to solve this problem.

The intuition is, you set up a graph where the vertices are names, and the edges are based on name similarity. Two names are neighbors if e.g. their edit distance is within some limit. You start at a random name, then at the neighbors, flip a biased coin with the ratio of the P(x) of your current name and the neighbor, if heads you move to the neighbor.

I'm sure this is wrong in many and subtle ways, but when I read an article like this I expect some intuition like this to be imparted.