belugacat

Most non technical people in my circles lose their messages every few years, when they change phones.

A lot of open source projects suffer from “pet project” syndrome. Some maintainers have very strong opinions about how/what things should be done regardless of actual user demand or feedback, and there’s no one with the power to rebuff them because the product owners deciding what to implement and the engineers doing implementation work are one and same. Commit right makes might.

In a (healthy) company, you have PMs and executives who will tell the overly opinionated engineers to STFU and actually implement things that move the needle and solve problems users are facing.

This is also why most open source projects have terrible UI/UX and any designer who attempts to help and improve things finds themselves ignored, with no means to actually carry out any decision, and walk away soon after.

Honestly, the real mystery is why so many people are confused about “why, despite universe seeming so vast, there are no signs of other alien civilizations” in 2023.

We have all the elements for answers if we focus on what we know, and forget the hand wavy sci-fi speculation.

1) Complex life is rare.

2) Reaching a space faring stage is even rarer. (we’re the most minimal definition of “space faring” you could come up with, and even then we got really lucky with so many things)

3) The universe is huge. It’s like, the hugest thing there is, man. And except for some little bits of interesting dust here and there, it’s mostly empty. As empty as it is huge.

So, does life - in any form - exist elsewhere in the universe? Almost certainly.

Are/were there life forms elsewhere in the universe that escaped their home planet gravity to go explore their moon or other planets in their solar system? Seems quite probable.

Is there any shot we are sufficiently close in space/time to encounter such another advanced life form? Almost certainly not.

Exactly this. Even to this day, Nintendo is very smart about almost never discounting their flagship games - and when they do, it’s by a small percent, sometimes with strings attached, not the crazy “90% off” tactics many other developers/publishers follow.

commercial design needs to hit a set of 2 contradictory goals:

1) be as boring as possible so people can make sense of it quickly and efficiently in a world where there are countless other things competing for your time and attention

2) standout as much as possible to gain your attention in the aforementioned busy world

IME this explains a lot the nature of trends that design experiences.

It might well be intentional. Scientists like those weird double entendre titles; it's especially noticeable in paper titles in academia, which often follows the format ("project name: punny phrase vaguely explaining the project").

It's frustrating because as a grad student I was explicitly taught to avoid using local slang, informal sayings and expressions, humor, etc. in my academic writing to make it as understandable and unambiguous as possible.

I think a simple piece of advice (stolen from Tuft) is to not use colors unless you really need to.

Funny, read your comment as my copy of Tufte's VDoQI is open to page 154:

"Color often generates graphical puzzles. Despite our experiences with the spectrum in science textbooks and rainbows, the mind's eye doe not readily give a visual ordering to colors, except possibly for red to reflect higher levels than other levels [...] Attempts to give colors an order result in those verbal decoders and the mumbling of little mental phrases [...] Because they do have a natural visual hierarchy, varying shades of gray show varying quantities better than color."

The classical optical camera does not capture anything. It is a light sealed box, with a pinhole for a lens. As an optical system, it interacts with electromagnetic waves that go through it, that's the only 'reality' you can really care about.

What captures an image is an imaging surface; traditionally a chemical emulsion on a piece of film, now a complex array of digital sensors.

This imaging surface is of human design, it therefore images what its designers designed it to image. But don't forget that it is a sampling of reality; by definition always partial, and biased (biased to the 400~700 nm range, for starters).

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”

I'm a photographer, and for years I've been pixel peeping at photos taken on phones with "portrait mode"; many years after the first introduction of the feature, regardless of the implementation, results still look crummy to my eye.

Looking at fine elements like hairs (nevermind curly hair) is a disaster, especially when you're used to fine classic german/japanese optics that accurately reproduce every subtle detail of a subject while having extremely aesthetically pleasing sharpness falloff/bokeh.

I've had to swallow the pill though: No one (end users; pros are another story) cares about those details. People just want something that vaguely looks good in the immediate moment, and then it's on to the next thing.

I suspect it'll remain the same for AI generated visuals; a sharp eye will always be able to tell, but it won't really matter for consumption by the masses (where the money is).

It's funny how these things work. There are many inventions that, looking back, could've happened centuries earlier purely from a resource/physical constraints point of view (of course, scientific knowledge doesn't work quite that way).

As a film photographer, if I ever find myself in possession of a time machine, the first thing I'll do is go back to ancient Minoa/Rome/Egypt/China/Tikal and show people how to make silver based emulsions to use with pinhole cameras.

In a similar vein, this article "Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?" is a nice read.

https://rootsofprogress.org/why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-...

I do visual work (graphic/UI design, photography, video editing) along with programming and there is no display with the resolution and color fidelity of the XDR at its price point. I got one shortly after release, and if it stopped working today I'd buy another one in the amount of time it takes me to click "Submit" on the Apple Store. It's just that good.

When I look at a high resolution scan of a large format negative on it, it feels like looking at it directly on a light table. It's insane. My only complaint is the local dimming, which shows its limit when you're doing fine white on black linework in a dark room. Hopefully we'll get a pro OLED display of that quality in the next decade which will solve that one issue.

The only other piece of hardware I've spent money on that comes close of giving me the same satisfaction is my Happy Hacking Keyboard, which I've used for over a decade now and I hope I will keep using until I cannot use computers altogether anymore (I have a few spares just in case).

This is why the reductionist argument of "your brain is reducible to a computer with inputs/outputs like any other, all we have to do is reimplement it" of AGI proponents always fell flat to me.

It's now becoming clear that we can't just take the brain in isolation, treating the spinal nerve like a PCI-E lane - the gut has to come with it. And if the gut comes with it, all the other organs (skin top of the list) probably do as well.

Now to model a human brain, you need to model an entire human, along with all the complexity of the microbiota, interactions of the organs with the environment... it all just falls apart.

The link points to an article titled “ Greening the Void: Climate Change and Political Legitimacy”, the submission is titled “ Ridley Scott: Our Anglo-Saxon Maximus”.

It’s a big deal because he’s extremely charismatic and well connected and that matters much, much more for a tech company’s success than some programmers like to think.

Thinking you can develop AGI - if such a thing actually can exist - in an academic vacuum, and not by having your AI rubber meet the road through a plethora of real world business use cases strikes me as extreme hubris.

… I guess that makes me a product person?

This article:

https://www.noemamag.com/ai-and-the-limits-of-language/

Right now this requires API tokens and being dependent on third party companies that will cut off your access if they decide they don’t like you.

The moment these models can run locally on the kind of cheap hardware that phone scam operations have will be the real Pandora’s box moment. (I give it 3-5 years or so)

Walls and floor/ceiling not being parallel (old house) tripped me up when I modeled my perfect kitchen in abstract 3D software land and then tried to make it happen in real life.

The premise reminds me of this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385

Link?

+1

The switch has really proven that this hybrid handheld formfactor is the future. On the software side, Proton has been the savior that liberated PC gamers from Microsoft’s iron grip.

The space is getting really exciting now that there are a few alternative products to the Steam Deck, too (Ayaneo, ROG Ally, etc). Phone controllers are nothing new, but iPhone switching to USB C means manufacturers can now sell a single SKU for iphone/android, and we’re starting to see AAA releases on those platforms.

If I were running Xbox or PlayStation, I’d be a little stressed out.

Quite a few bridges were burned to form the company, an acquisition would be a surprising development.

Imran wasn’t an exec, just an IC designer.

“Whenever his facts are broadly correct, they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously,” the anthropologist wrote in a scathing review […] When a computer scientist sees that Mark Zuckerberg is calling not him, but Harari, to consult on the effects of technology on humanity, he’s understandably mortified, just as an epidemiologist likely is, when he finds out that UNESCO has asked Harari about the effects of Covid on international scientific cooperation. For a long time now, Harrari hasn’t been a simple essayist: he has become the Oracle of Delphi.

There was a post here the other day titled “A blog post is a long and complex search query to find people”. [0]

Well, perhaps a book is a long and complex motivation letter to get public speaking engagements and a career promotion.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38137377

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.”

The day Valve falls, for whatever reason (greed, incompetence, some impossible to predict market shift/tech innovation... Gabe doesn't have decades and decades left as CEO after all) - the open world of PC gaming as we know it will probably fall, to be devoured by the Microsoft/Epic/Ubisoft/etc of the world.

Compared to most other tech/gaming companies, it's shocking how non predatory and customer friendly they are.

I've been able to maintain my digital library for almost 2 decades now, I've played those games on dozens of different hardware configuration without having to pay a single cent for it - compared to my other digital libraries, many of which (Wii, 3DS, PSP, etc) are completely lost to time.

It certainly adds insult to injury that the ACM Digital Library redesign from a couple years back has been a huge downgrade in usability across the board.

The new Hitman games are the best recent example in that category, IMO. Sadly the final goal still ends up being killing people.

There are few games that fall truly in that genre, which is a shame as (to me at least) it’s the video game genre that is most interesting from an “interactive medium” pov.

Arkane games (Dishonored, Deathloop) have some segments that get close, but at their core the games still have a few privileged paths (and are about killing people).

One fun indie game that uses a voxel engine effectively for open ended gameplay is Teardown (and it’s not about killing people!). The maps are quite small though. It’ll be exciting in a decade or so when we can run such engines at much higher dimensions.

Why is it always Japan and anime? It'd be nice to see articles like "32 Telenovelas for 32 States of Mexico" or "16 Home Renovation Shows for 16 Bundesländer of Germany" every once in a while.