It's hard to overstate how tired the entire argument is.
Doctorow feels like tweetstorms are an acceptable means of getting communication across (yikes), so maybe some things are just unbridgable.
HN sounds like cranks about this. In my podunk region 2 school I have access to all the journals I want, always have as a student. I rarely need that because it's easier to Google Scholar and then just grab the paper off of someone's site, which pretty mch everyone does these days.
Some of the commenters here could have written a phd in the last decade about this topic but I don't think it's the massive stopper of progress that people think it is.
Billions of dollars! Wish we didn't have to bust my ass to get a portion of that, but keep beating up on the academics.
> HN sounds like cranks about this. In my podunk region 2 school I have access to all the journals I want, always have as a student.
Perhaps you are in computer science. As long as we're trading anecdotes, I went to one of the top universities in my country. I regularly came across articles that were not accessible from large professional societies such as IEEE, ACS, and SPIE. Now I work in a hospital, and they don't have subscriptions to anything non-medical! I have to go through sci-hub for access to my own papers!
It sounds like to me to advance this debate, people could provide examples of journals that are regularly cited and their papers aren't easily accessible in some way.
All of these journals' articles are sometimes available, especially for very highly cited articles, but not consistently.
Medical research is often found on some NIH website though. The NIH has their shit together. I think they make everyone publish open access in addition to whatever journal they submit to.
I know that is a single article and I get your larger point. It's very much a field by field issue, in my field (I've been told it isn't a real science by HN, so no thanks sharing), I can't imagine me or the profs I know taking people seriously if they aren't making their stff available.
I work in the social sciences where we have lots of overlap with other social sciences, stats, and data science, machine learning.
Those are the domains I know and in those domains anyone born after 1970 knows that if they want to distribute their work they put it on their site or a number of free archives.
As I said, you're probably in a more quant-oriented subfield like economics. Ask your colleagues in field biology, or physical chemistry, or anything less quant/CS/stats/data/tech-flavored.
I came to this thread to read a thread about videogame stories. Imagine my surprise (wait, this is HN), when the first thing that I see is your comment about videogames that isn't really about videogames it's a way for you to sell your book, which you admit you are shameless about.
But I just wanted to reed about videogames. If you were more subtle, if you knew how tll me a story without telling me that you are telling a story, then it's not wasting my time and I can get what I came for as well as what you want me to learn.
I have a Vive from 2016. I purchased the Q2 with the intent of doing dev work with it and I expected it to be a big improvement. I mean I read reviews like yours and I saw what it was capable of.
Don't get me wrong, it's a big deal that it is now standalone (the Vive very much feels lke the matrix), but the visual fidelity hadn't incresed prceptibly in that time (as far as I can tell) and the headset itself is still too heavy.
The higher sales are interesting but it's at like 6 million units worldwide? The most popular consoles were over a hundred million. We're not even into a console that everyone knows about but only that weird dude has like the Xbox yet.
I can see a future where these googles are 3x the resolution, even cheaper, and as light as actual glasses, and that day we'll be at mass market, probably before it.
But if you made me work in VR for any length of time at all as of now, I'll quit because the quality is not there yet. I'd rather play the latest games on cheap but incredible monitors anyway.
Give it six weeks. You might still be entralled. I sold mine, I don't want to build anything for that guy.
I purchased a Q2 mostly because it was an incredible price for getting into VR, something I had long wanted to do mainly because I read a lot of sci fi as a kid.
Unlike the Vive I rented some years ago for a party, the screen made text more or less readable when it was large enough (I think the screen door effect interfered more on the Vive). Also not needing up base stations was a huge QOL improvement for using it a lot, and after I upgraded to Wifi 6 the desktop lag was pretty negligible. The weight doesnt bother me at all to be honest but having it resting against my face probably wouldnt be great day after day.
But after playing around with some desktop mirror apps, I decided it's not where I'd want to switch - yet. I code on a 32" 4k monitor at 100% scaling and I'm not interested in replacing that until I can get close to the same number of words infront of me at a time.
But.. 8k Pimax has been out for a while, 12k Pimax VR headset was announced, and the Varjo aero is expensive but has 2880x2720px per eye and was just released to consumer. The space is getting interesting very quickly at the moment.
Feels a lot like digital cameras from circa 2000. You had cameras like the Nikon D1, an expensive piece of kit which barely did what it needed to do. But it was getting better.
That's how I feel and VR and it's form factor has been around for decades... strap a sweaty headset to your face and isolate yourself.
Maybe it will be big for games but gluing a computer to my face for longggg periords of time no thanks.
AR glasses though they could be truly be the next big thing like the iPhone ...subtly enhance the world around us and our social interactions with each other through a form factor we are accustomed to.
Indeed and the vision Zuckerberg showed for AR glasses looked way too busy.
The UX needs to be subtle (not a lot going on) ... enhance and revolutionize daily life experiences like smart glasses that can zoom in like binoculars (would also help low sighted folks), glasses that turn night into day and vice versa and some other ideas ive thought might enhance real life like playing ping pong or a card game and the glasses keep/show the score with each point awarded... also when you meet someone new the glasses tells you their first name at the least. As well show you how a building or a spot in the woods where there once was a house looked decades or more ago.
Also for branding call them smart glasses not AR glasses ... average person can easily understand that branding.
If you watch Zuckerberg's AR Glasses demo posted today (fantasy demo) where he's fencing an Olympic fencing champ you will see above her head the score of the game.
Once I saw his first demo of Facebook Stories glasses where he was playing ping pong (in late August/early Sept) I immediately thought the glasses should be keeping/showing the score and posted that thought. They probably were working on that before, but maybe not and overall and right now its all just fantasy. Possibly for patents and to show investors that Apple's blocking Ad Trackers is hurting us but we have a way forward.
Also he is showing off a lot of AR Glasses tech not VR cause he believes VR (strapping headset to your face) isn't the next big thing rather AR/Smart Glasses are. But all he is showing is YEARS away.
It can be very immersive for games designed well for the VR platform. It can also be quite immersive when visiting locations, as long as the video is high quality. There's also some interesting 360 video experiences, like experiencing being a character in a movie. I also see the potential for exploration, like with the three space apps I have. And there are several apps which give you a good workout. The Supernatural one is great, if you're willing to pay $200 a year.
>I purchased the Q2 with the intent of doing dev work with it and I expected it to be a big improvement
Well there's your mistake. I also have the Q2 but it was never meant for work but for games. The device was built to be as cheap as possible with the apropriate compromises that are just not gonna cut the salami in terms of image clarity for small text and such needed for work. Games like beat sabre and super hot? A complete blast! Browsing HN or code on it? Pass.
A VR headset for work would need to have a high resolution display panel per each eye, instead of shared one for both. That would massively increase the price, weight and the GPU horse-power needed to drive 2 high-res displays while decreasing battery life.
The tech is just not there yet for this to be cost effective enough to sell in high volumes but we're getting close really fast.
I know Vince Gilligan did his research prior to Breaking Bad but st strikes me how on the nose it was. BB came out in 2008 and must have been in production a few years earlier but the increase in actual purity pretty much matches the show coming out.
I also recall the show depicting meth users having all those problems - Jesse is paranoid the missionaries are bikers, there's that guy digging a hole in his front yard, Spooe and his head, etc
Seems like the drug was fucking people up way prior to the last few years in fiction.
> I also recall the show depicting meth users having all those problems - Jesse is paranoid the missionaries are bikers, there's that guy digging a hole in his front yard, Spooe and his head, etc
> Seems like the drug was fucking people up way prior to the last few years in fiction.
Meth has always, always, always been known to cause those behaviors/effects since it first became widespread. Breaking bad shows those behaviors because they're classic tweaker behaviors. The scene where Jesse distracts the guy by digging is super spot on. Brilliant scene.
So yep, the paranoia, hallucinations etc have nothing to do with "new meth", they're just what happens when someone abuses sufficient amounts of meth. And the more potent the meth, the easier it is to get to that threshold. But note that you still need to be smoking or injecting quite a bit. The people exhibiting psychosis and the like are using hundreds of milligrams per session.
I happen to be re-watching this right now, and it blew my mind to see those graphs and not see the show lagging a few years behind the reality. How is this possible? It borderline seems like the background research for the show must have actually talked to the mass manufacturers of the stuff...
The transition to super labs, and away from small time Sudafed based meth production, happened prior to the release of Breaking Bad. They based their show on what was occurring in the real world.
Kyrie Irving - flat-earther, anti-vaxxer. To some people both are ridiculous positions. Conspiracy thoerists tend to groupp together and tend to pick up additional beliefs
Some people wonder what's the point of believing the flat earth theory, but for people looking for marks to con, it's a great "tool". The FE theory expands to "Everyone is lying to you, your teachers, the scientific community, the government, everyone who tries to tell you the world is spherical!" and "teaches" you to not believe accepted science, because according to them, accepted the science is just a global (ha) conspiracy.
Of course it's not hard to see why Fe'ers end up being antivaxxers. Or believing about pedophile pizza chains and furniture stores..
Why do you use biased language? Yes,there were lots of people in the media that dealt with Epstein. Epstein's arrest was public in what 2008 or 2009, you could find information about it on wikipedia in 2015. Now there have been multiple documentaries about it. That's why Gates acting all dumb about it years later is dumb.
The conspiracy theorists that point at everything as child abuse weren't right just because they found one of the most public instances of it. It doesn't make their other dozens of claims true.
Epstein and his connections, and everyone involved, should have been the biggest story of the century, given how high up his influence reached. But it wasn't, and that should tell you all you need to know.
This thread is filled with people stating conspiracies as fact (without a hint of irony). We have no idea what his "influence" was, it's all speculation and conjecture. Yet that unknown is somehow proof it's all real ?
Could you explain why? I'm not arguing just wanting to hear your perspective.
I know a bit about the story, but from my limited knowledge it seems like a Pedophile had a lot of powerful connections. Which seems roughly on par with Michael Jackson. A BIG story, but not biggest story of the century.
Shitting on academia is certainly one of them, but lets look at the merit of each comment for themselves.
As someone with a lot of friends in academia, but luckily not dependent on it myself, I was quite shocked by the amount of politics, polishing, neck rubbing etc. going on. Scientists present as very clean and orderly to the outside, but the process of writing a paper and getting it published is usually super messy.
I don't want to say of course it is, but of course it is.
It's an environment full of smart and hungry and competitive people. There are politics, yes, but you can damn well choose to avoid them, especially if you offer value.
Nobody in any industry presents all of the warts and difficulties of getting to a solution. If you wanted to hear about six years of failed experiments, I've got lots of time, but I feel like you don't want to hear it and neither do the people reading and writing research papers.
You'll find that outside of the superstar schools, the smaller schools (certain depts) are staffed with brilliant people. They'll tell you about the nuances of academia if you're a normal person but they're not going to show up on HN where people say what they do is worthless, so people get warped views of what the majority of it is.
The kind which agree with the HN group think - "nuclear energy is good", "Electron is bad", "Chrome is good", oh wait, that was 2009 HN group think, today is "Chrome is bad".
Academia and any sort of formal education is a waste of money. Math is difficult because of the notation used. The random guy who shows up in any ML/AI thread and starts talking about how useless it is because it’s not AGI. How stupid every hiring process is, especially anything involving testing technical competency.
I have worked in academia. I can't think of a single prof like that in my department. They exist, but that's not why people choose to spend decades of their life in poor paying jobs.
This is likewise anecdata. Experiences vary, so I don't know if I'd throw "normal academia" out there without having a full view of the sector as a whole, which few if any do.
Doctorow feels like tweetstorms are an acceptable means of getting communication across (yikes), so maybe some things are just unbridgable.
HN sounds like cranks about this. In my podunk region 2 school I have access to all the journals I want, always have as a student. I rarely need that because it's easier to Google Scholar and then just grab the paper off of someone's site, which pretty mch everyone does these days.
Some of the commenters here could have written a phd in the last decade about this topic but I don't think it's the massive stopper of progress that people think it is.
Billions of dollars! Wish we didn't have to bust my ass to get a portion of that, but keep beating up on the academics.