I've also been confused why they stay so small. It seems like such a good idea, why not scale faster and larger. My guess is they are so bound to the hacker ethos and culture. Also the regulatory gray area the product sits in, scaling too large would put a target on them.
There's no evidence that this use was real. Mythbusters tried it and said the trick itself does work (which any of has may already know), but who knows if it was even practical in a pirate boat, vs the loss of stereo vision etc.
The whole idea of pirates wearing eyepatches seems simply the replication of one particularly colorful pirate archetype over centuries of literature and tales.
I feel like the advantages of stereo vision may be oversold in this scenario. At the distances that sailing vessels would engage there's limited need for binocular depth cues - they really only start to come into play at the point where you would begin a boarding action
But the idea of the patches-for-night-vision is precisely to have one eye covered during the boarding, so when you enter the insides of the enemy boat that eye is ready for seeing in the dark.
I don't have binocular vision. I lived aboard a sailboat for a few years. I'm quite active with rock climbing etc and I honestly don't think I would be able to do anything better if I had binocular vision...
Such damage is creeping and the brain can just hallucinate the blank patches in the vision away, until only like 10% of the retina is left and it just doesn't work anymore. These days, dumbass laserheads are the most likely to suffer from that problem.
It's amazing how much of our conscious experience is hallucination, and yet a lot of people are disparaging LLMs for doing just the same...
probably because when humans pay full attention and think clearly they can not hallucinate for 99% of things they can sense (disregarfing optical illusion), but there is no 'pay attention and dont hallucinate' switch for LLMs.
People are bullshitting just the same about topics they know nothing about. They often also won't shut about when others tell them and even when they themselves know that they know nothing. To some extent this is necessary for humans to function at all, and the scientific process starts out from uneducated guesses and rigorously refines them and casts away what doesn't hold up to empiric data.
Optical illusions are evidence of the pile of hacks that our senses and our consciousness use to make sense of the world. I think it is really difficult to fully disengage from the biases this induces, and we are sadly best at perceiving such flaws in others. This might be one of the reasons why humans have to socialize with other humans to maintain mental health.
> I do have good news for fans of coercive government regulation,” Gruber says. “Apple’s hand was effectively forced. But by China, not the EU.”
What conditions need to be present which would encourage companies to cooperate on standards like this instead of waiting on a government to make the call?
Does geolocation of the server not matter for your application? I am curious if there are any latency issues with this solution as opposed to a hosted option.
This talk just made me realize how little I understand about what the firmware is really doing. I had previously understood the BIOS to be a small piece of firmware that runs the bootloader at startup and maybe some other coordination between other hardware devices and the CPU. Then CPU takes over and the firmware takes a backseat. The speaker mentioned a whole can of firmware worms that I had no idea even existed.
I’m interested to see the progress of open source firmware now.
That's pretty much where I'm at - my understanding of most of this hasn't moved since CP/M.
CPU boots, PC sets to zero, starts reading instructions from ROM, optionally paging out the ROM if we really need to recover that memory window. I get that x86 is a bit messier because you have optional bioses that get run, and then you read and run the first page of the storage device, but .. man have they made life difficult since I last paid attention.
Humans absolutely are not built for large social networks. There is a theory called Dunbar's number that suggests that humans have a cognitive limit of ~150 social relationships.
IMO, the continuation to Dunbar's number (theory) is Yuval Noah Harari's theory, as outlined in Sapiens.
That is, early humans were intelligent animals, but limited in our sophistication by Dunbar's number, so to speak. That is our range of social behaviour (and therefore most behaviour) was biologically limited to small social groups.
The Palaeolithic revolution circa 50kya-100kya was (according to YNH) the invention of language and "fiction" sophistication which enabled cooperation and in larger groups. The concept of a "tribe" with ancestors, shared traditions and social cooperation in much larger groups. Much larger groups allow for much more sophistication.
In some sense, he defines human progress as the quality of cooperation in larger groups. Basically culture takes over from biology, in determining effective human social group size.
Social networks are just another advancement in this trend. All these advancements are somewhat pathological, because they're at odds with our innate (noncultural) limitations. Consider how bad we are at "politics" and how "politics" is a bad word. The contrast is decision making in small, tight knit groups.
