With AI, VR is even more promising. I have been working on a Gaussian splat renderer for the Quest 3, and by having Claude and ChatGPT read state-of-the-art papers, I have been able to build a training and rendering pipeline that is getting >50 fps for large indoor scenes on the Quest 3. I started with an (AI-driven) port of a desktop renderer, which got less than 1 fps, but I've integrated both training and rendering improvements from research and added a bunch of quality and performance improvements and now it's actually usable. Applying research papers to a novel product is something that used to take weeks or months of a person's time and can now be measured in minutes and hours (and tokens).
You might be interested in a new experimental 3D scene learning and rendering approach called Radiant foam [1], which is supposed to be better suited for GPUs that don't have hardware ray tracing acceleration.
Cool! I'll definitely check it out. The great thing about LLMs is I can probably have a trainer and renderer using this technology up and running for my platform in a day or two, OR I can just pick and choose parts that would work well for my implementation and merge them in.
Sorry if this is a basic question, but what's you workflow for feeding the papers into the LLM and getting the implementation done? The coding agents that I've used are not able to read PDFs, so I've been wondering how to do it.
this is actually a great question - I just extract the text with PyPDF, but did a brief search on the functionality I'd like to have (convert math equations to LaTeX, extract images, reformat in markdown, extract data from charts) and it looks like there are a couple of promising Python libs like Docling and Marker.. I should really improve this part of my workflow.
after looking into it for a little while, Docling and Marker work pretty well but are very slow. I haven't found anything else that extracts math suitably. It takes 10+ minutes per pdf, so I'm going to run it on a batch of these papers overnight and create my own little gaussian splatting RAG database. It's really too bad PDF is so terrible.
My understanding is that those models create gaussian splats from a text prompt, kinda like a 3d version of nano banana. I'm not doing that (yet), what I'm doing is creating splats from a set of photos - aka "splat training" and then rendering the splat as a static (working on dynamism) on the Quest headset. This is pretty well-worn territory with a lot of good implementations, but I have my own implementation of a trainer in C++/CUDA (originally based in SpeedySplat, which was written in Python, but now completely rewritten and not much of SpeedySplat is left) and renderer in C++/OpenXR for the Quest (originally based on a LLM-made port of 3DGS.cpp to OpenXR, but 100% rewritten now), and I can easily integrate techniques from research.
I bought a copy of Office this year to do my taxes with the excel1040.com template and Claude for Excel, and dropped my 1099s and stuff into the chat window and Claude just transferred the numbers to the correct cells and Excel did the calculations. It was super easy (also easy to check because my tax picture didn’t change much from last year). It got some things right that TurboTax always got wrong (like cost basis for ESPPs). The only part that was difficult was getting Claude to transfer the data to the IRS fillable PDFs - I probably spent longer iterating on that than it would have taken to copy-paste the data from Excel. Other than that, it worked great, highly recommend.
I write a lot of tech docs with AI so I can add some substance here. First of all, you do tell it what you’re writing about - you can give it reams of documentation on related systems, terminology, and source code. Stuff that would take you weeks to consume personally (but you probably know the gist of it from having read or skimmed it before). Let’s say you are writing a design doc for a new component. After all of this stuff describing the environment is in its context (you don’t have to type it all out, you can copy paste it, use an MCP to suck it in from a DB, read it from a file, etc), you describe at a high level what architecture choices and design constraints to make (for example, needs to be implemented with this database, this is our standard middleware, etc) and it will fill in blanks and spit out a design for you. Then you refine it - actually this component needs to work like that, unit testing strategy needs to be like this, and so on. Now give me the main modules, code stubs, suggest patterns to use, etc. continue to iterate - it will update the entire doc for you, make sure there are no dead or outdated references, etc. extremely powerful and useful.
My recollection is that this website says that a 50% score is bad when the expected value of random chance of picking the correct option among 3 is 1/3. A 50% average score means there is some signal there. If it was impossible to guess, the average score should be 33%
I think you need to look at the data before making assertions like this.
> People don't buy American cars
53% of cars sold in the US are assembled in the US versus 18% assembled in Mexico.
> things get more and more expensive. And not by a few percent, more like by 50% or more.
The total cost of manufacturing wages only account for 5-15% of the MSRP of a vehicle. So moving manufacturing from an expensive country to a cheap country only changes the price by maybe 10% due to the impact of wages.
They also wouldn't have tried using a holstered weapon as pretense for a public execution which the president doubled down on, until he didn't. They wouldn't be treading on state's rights so openly either. We might be seeing parties flipping, in very short order.
If the Dems pick up on some of the issues the Republicans are neglecting, while maintaining principles* about healthcare access and reproductive rights I expect they'd be the dominant political force in America for some time...if they just had somebody who could man the helm.
Honestly, having spent a lot of time in Korea (which famously grew so much rice that visitors from Japan and China from the 16th century were astounded by their bounty of food), I disagree with the premise..
Queueing discipline is non-existent; people will take what they want without waiting for others who arrived first. Business standards for fair dealing are just as bad if not worse than many western societies. Family/personal connections are favored and nepotism is rampant. Driving behavior is extremely selfish and causes a lot of accidents (running red lights, default behavior at uncontrolled intersections, etc). Their problems with concentration of money and power are just as bad if not worse than the west with chaebols essentially above the law and abusing their workers to the extent that people have no time for families - so What makes Asian societies more “cooperative?” Is it just their attitude that they think they are more cooperative?
There might be 2 types: passive cooperative and active cooperative. Eastern Asian are likely more obedient. They behave better collectively under good leadership.
But they are not good at self-organized activities. Without an authority they are more chaotic.
Statistic features of populations are less understood not only because of lack of scientific method but also it's a taboo. However, there are some consensus among the elites within the populations but can not speak aloud.
This is why, on so many issues, the idea that the American public "chose" the outcome is a fantasy. When every possible candidate for office supports the military industrial complex, how is one supposed to vote against it?
You can try; the plane is already made and exported, and for certain customers (eg. the US Navy) they're going to struggle to find anything that replaces it.
The best way to invest "against" the F-35 is to put money in companies like Embraer and Saab, which have put up a strong fight on the export market.
In case it wasn't clear, my answer to your original question is "no" with a nice bit of set-dressing to help you feel better.
FWIW, the Super Tucano and Gripen are more "morally acceptable" in that they are not power-gap level planes. The F-35 was basically designed from the ground-up to molest denied airspace and violate every rule of diplomatic exchange. The Super Tucano is useless outside COIN operations, and the Gripen is decidedly a defensive fighter and not a strike fighter.
The ad campaign was super campy, there were print ads in comic books, I remember making fun of it before the movie came out - this can’t be any good, they are going to misrepresent computer geeks, it’s going to be stupid. Of course as a teen I didn’t think it was authentic enough but over time I look at it with more respect. I showed it to my 10 year old not too long ago (forgot that there was a little nudity, oh well) and I was proud of claiming the culture it represented. The thirst for knowledge, the irreverence for authority, all of the different kinds of people making a community based on shared interest and respect, all night hackathons, the adults who just don’t get it - and yeah, the music and the fashion. That’s the stuff that matters, not a hacker using a Mac or goofy technical gibberish, and that’s the stuff they got right. It was a special moment in time, and I’m glad the movie is around to encapsulate it.
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