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dag11

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Programmer at Valve. Working on SteamVR, Steam Frame, Steam Deck, and games!

RIT/CSH alum. Former Google and Microsoft intern.

<http://drewgottlieb.net>

gottlieb.drew@gmail.com

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you could go to a rave and be you without fear someone would take pictures or people outside the rave would know who you are

These still exist! Look for events promoted as such, or look for smaller local events for the genres you're interested in - the latter might not ban phones, sure, but the vibe is still what you're seeking. Nobody's recording you.

I feel the same thing.

I think part of it also is that, games with the same scope of flash games are still being made, but they're being made for phones which is where the customers. Flash games were the perfect mobile game before mobile games existed.

But the magic was that flash games were created on the same machines they were made on, so curious players (often kids!) had a natural funnel in to dabbling with the creation side, so whole communities of creatives formed naturally.

I don't know how we can solve this disconnect between creation and consumption :( Sure there's many apps that let you build content from phones (swift playgrounds, other game-making apps, and now a whole gold rush of agentic prompting app-building apps...) but a phone is inherently non-immersive so I don't know how a creator can ever get into a flow state of building content on a phone itself.

But also we possibly just miss being teens on computers.

Cursor Camp 3 months ago

The soul of this game requires that your cursor can go "behind" things (like trees, or partially submerged in water), can have subtle nudges to keep you on paths and add friction when in water, and also to be able to take full control of your cursor for the lazy river etc!

This is one of those things you see and get angry you didn't wake up the idea first. It's so perfect and just as satisfying as you'd hope. Incredible stuff!

For me, charm and character.

I was an original Pebble Kickstarter wearer from 2012, then got the initial Time, then the first Android smartwatches (Moto 360!) then basically every Apple Watch from then to now. Even used Google Glass a few months in 2013.

I like my wearables. I use features on my Apple Watch constantly: NFC payments, voice reminders, fitness and sleep tracking, make my iPhone yell out so I can find where I put it, etc.

But not a single damn wearable I've had has captured a fraction of the charm the original Pebble and Pebble Time had. Their UIs are low-res by modern standards, and greyscale or largely solid colors, but wow.

Dug up some videos as reference. Here's one that highlights what the core system UI aesthetic is like. Notice the transitions as you use the UI. I remember it feeling really snappy too, and it feels great to use a UI that moves like that with physical tactile buttons, as opposed to scrolling a Digital Crown or using the touch screen on an Apple Watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdRENEQcymQ

And aside from the system UI, the community of apps that existed for it back then and no doubt will continue to grow now has a lot of charm too. The creators of all the apps are making them out of love, not to be a Top 10 on an Apple app store. And they don't exactly have a strong cohesive system UI to comply with unlike Apple. Human Interface Guidelines are wonderful for phones and tablets and for serious app ecosystems I depend on, but watches are Not That Serious as far as I'm concerned so the individuality and love within each app just fills me heart with joy every time I look down at my wrist.

I randomly skipped to five different paragraphs and each one ended with a "!x but y" logical statement, just formatted differently most of the time. Crazy how you can't unsee it.

A sibling [dead] comment to mine is a rebuttal to "just post the prompt", where it itself was expanded to several paragraphs that each say nearly nothing, including this gem:

"That’s not a critique of the writing. It’s a diagnosis"

I miss when people just typed their thoughts concisely and hit send without passing it to an inflater. I'd maybe have a chance of understanding the sibling comment's point.

I'm surprised nobody caught this, but both the screenshot for Windows 8.1 is not Windows 8.1, it's Windows Threshold, the development phase of Windows 10.

The specific screenshot they show is the very first start menu they cobbled together for Threshold, which would later be redesigned again before shipping as Windows 10. The screenshot is also showing off early adaptations of Windows 8 apps running in movable windows -- before that, they could only run full- or split-screen!

Because the brain is really weird, and tinnitus is often a completely internal neurological phenomenon.

The sound machine linked here was really helpful for me when I had some distressing tinnitus due to concerts several years ago. If I listened to this somewhat loudly for several minutes, I'd then get about 2-3 minutes of what felt like pure silence. And for a little while after that as the tinnitus came back, my brain interpreted it as a gentle white noise instead of a continuous high-frequency tone. Then it went back to the tone a little while later. So if I was having trouble sleeping due to hyperfocusing on the tone I'd first pop in some airpods and listen to this for a few mins.

Nowadays my tinnitus is much less bothersome. Probably a combination of objectively getting a little better, and me getting more acclimated to it. Plus I've been using good musician's ear plugs for all my concerts and raves since then which stopped it from getting worse.

I think the clear implication of the phrase "healthy aging" is a lower-than-average rate of deterioration with respect to increasing years on earth.

It's like, you actually can describe one of two burgers as "healthier" even though they're both unhealthy. One is just less harmful. It's a valid use of language.

Oh man I forgot all about <frameset> and <frame> tags to create navigation. From the early days before we had dynamic sites or static site generators with templates, we had our browsers do our "templating" for us!

I had an original Kickstarter Pebble, a Pebble Time, and am probably ordering this new Pebble, but I have to say you have it the other way around. Apple Watch has 10x the functionality in this comparison, but they're both delightful devices and I'm excited to have a Pebble back in my rotation!

Happy 10k Day 1 year ago

In early 2020 I used a Comma 2 on my Honda Civic for a few weeks.

It had one failure, but the way it failed was so alarming I'm hesitant to ever try them again. It not only failed while engaged, but it froze which meant it still showed the bright green outline indicating "I'm still engaged!" with no alert sounds, visual indication of disengagement, or automatic restart.

I only noticed something was off when my car started to drift outside the lanes during a curve, which took me longer to notice than necessary because it still looked engaged and it looked like a somewhat typical case of understeering until I started exiting the lane. It also never booted back on again, so something went seriously wrong during an otherwise routine drive.

Stock driver assistance systems (e.g. Rivian Driver+, Tesla Autopilot) have redundant computers it can fall back on if the primary fails. If Comma offered a self-contained device that was demonstrably redundant at a hardware level I'd be willing to give it another shot!

More conventional mesh-based photogrammetry options include:

- https://maps.google.com (satellite view)

- https://earth.google.com (also in browser, possibly better camera controls for what you want)

- Bing Maps (3D flyover mode, more stale data in my experience)

- Apple Maps satellite view (only on macOS/iOS)

- Google Earth VR[1] (requires a Windows PC and a VR headset that can connect to it)

- Microsoft Flight Sim 2020/2024 (requires a beefy Windows PC, uses Bing Maps plus a lot of other enhancements and rendering goodness. Most lifelike "feels like I'm there" but not true to earth)

I'm not aware of splat-based city photogrammetry aside from one-offs like this but I'd love to learn if there's any such projects!

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/348250/Google_Earth_VR/

It's generating gaussian splats, so not quite 3D worlds. In short, they're pseudo 3D in that there is in fact a 3D point cloud, but the points are elliptical angular-dependent colored splats that get projected into 2D space[1]. They're better for reconstructing source-realistic renderings from a constrained view box, but break down outside of that.

They're a really cool way to capture spatial memories though! Friends and I occasionally use Polycam or Luma Labs apps. But there's not _too much_ you can do with them due to the above limitations.

From a brief look at the OP link, World Labs seems to be generating a 360º gaussian splat (for a limited view box) from a still photo, which is cool as hell! But we still have the same problem of "what do we do with gaussian splats".

[1] This description is hand-wavey as I'm a relative layman when it comes to how these work. I'm sure someone can reply with a more precise answer if this one is bad.

There's a full bodycam video here[1] of an officer in Phoenix pulling over a Waymo. The driver's window gets rolled down and he gets connected via voice to a Waymo agent and they're able to discuss what was going on. Waymo then kept the car parked there and sent someone out.

I'm really curious what the full interaction was like for this SF Waymo. The QR code on the window just links to a couple phone numbers[2] which seems insufficient to me in the case where a car is merely ticketed but not formally pulled over.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1dvso... [2] https://waymo.com/emergency-response/