skedaddle · HackerTrans

skedaddle

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قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

What you described is how a camera sees the world, and how we see it in pictures. Part of what seems unconvincing to me about these concept ideas is that the demo UIs are superimposed over basically isometric, wide depth of field pictures and video.

So by plane of projection I mean the apparent distance of the virtual image of the UI. If your eyes are focused "through" the display on something a few yards away vs. relatively close, the light from the UI needs to come into your eye (or possibly glasses etc.) as though it is tracing rays in parallel from roughly the same distance away.

Quake style consoles and other HUDs work in video games because in reality the entire scene is coming from the plane of the display, some inches in front of you. If you tried to really focus on a game object 20 yards away, instead of on the screen in front of you, the HUD wouldn't be visible anymore.

In VR optics I believe the virtual screen is something like ~6 feet out in front of you. It is a compromise and still causes eye strain, but is workable perceptually. The issues for transparent AR seem much more complex.

Many of the far-out concepts and ideas that are mocked up for AR seem actually very achievable right now, or yesterday, if the display works like a phone or laptop or VR goggle's does, by re-projecting camera input from a plane a few (possibly virtual) inches or yards away from your eye. The value added though is pretty niche, because people have mobile phones anyway. But if the iPhone hadn't happened, a little display in front of the eye, a whole visor, or a pop-up wrist computer might have been possible to sell. It sounds kind of silly now, but that's what the expectation was in the 80s-90s. The idea of putting a computer on your head still seemed cool then.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

That makes sense. I wonder how these transparent displays handle the focus issues though. If you're not looking at your Monocle/Glasses, maybe 1in in front of your eye, but instead on something hundreds or thousands of times that distance behind it, how does the semitransparent information dense overlay appear at all, let alone in sharp focus?

The "Open source platform" part of the slideshow shows object detection at various distances. If it can box a car 20 feet away, a building 400 yards away, near objects on my breakfast plate, etc., then the plane of projection has to vary over a huge range as you look around (?). In general many of the demos I see seem to have remarkable things going on, in terms of what parts of the UI and world are in focus simultaneously.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Dumb question maybe, but why does it need to be transparent or else projected directly into your eye? What doesn't work (or wouldn't work for you) about a flip-down hard backed display?

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

"all programming philosophies are about programming"

I don't think it is a reductive take. The second instance of the term here instead involves the more traditional concept

program: "a regular plan of action in any undertaking" https://www.dictionary.net/program

Programming (in the sense of software construction) paradigms, philosophies, indeed "languages" etc., are about regularizing plans of action for complex computational undertakings.. usually.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

It's been a while since I worked in this space but ~10 years ago I would have said TCP termination. It is a pretty big ask though. :)

One issue in this area is that the underlying hard logic is limited, and differs from vendor to vendor and product to product. So a nice free IP core might exist for something, say for FFT, but the complete design cannot fit on your chip's LUTs, or it may not have enough buffer blocks or clock multipliers or buses or something to run a given core, or everything "fits" but it has to be run slower to meet timing constraints.

That's not to say it's always like that.

There is probably a need though for various implementations of some algorithms, with different topologies, or for niche environments etc. Just as in embedded development we need various implementations of FFT in floating point, fixed point, using static memory, etc.

And it's not algorithmic really, but peripheral drivers contribute a ton to the community. Being able to e.g. plug a certain e-ink display into a widget without having to write the driver yourself.

opencores.org might be of interest to you (github.com/klyone/opencores-ip).

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Probably, but FPGAs/reconfigurable logic can't be clocked at CPU speeds and usually have a limited number of floating point units and other "hard" resources. At the higher end, yes definitely, especially packet switching, sniffing and other tasks that don't involve parallel ALU/FPU calculations. At the lower end FPGA's can still shine on applications that have precise/low-jitter timing constraints. For example, sampling an analog signal for frequency analysis, actuating a thing within X nano/microseconds of some event, regulating clock drift with the pulse-per-second GPS signal, etc.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

In the row picture, the elements of a matrix are the coefficients of linear functions acting on its domain. In the column picture they are coordinates in its image.

Any matrix A or B can be interpreted from either point of view on its own. When you take their product AB, each of A's functions (row picture) is evaluated on each of B's points (column picture).

This gives an associative (but not commutative) algebra. If you go around the column picture with an operator like A.B=AB^T, you get

    (A.B).C = (AB^T).C
            = AB^TC^T
    

    A.(B.C) = A.(BC^T)
            = A(BC^T)^T
            = ACB^T

The two formulas are not equal, and second involves "traditional" matrix multiplication. You can compute products like this operationally though, as long as you work from left to right.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

There's no way to ship solar or hydro energy. And for shipping everything else -- how would you power a boat from India to the US? Or a plane? Hydrogen remains the only green (ish) game in town for these needs.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

> The "news" in America has devolved quite a bit. We've stopped funding public news sources at the level they need

The ownership structure of most news organizations is qualitatively different now than it was in the mid-century heyday of the "independent press". Joseph Pulitzer, for example, was succeeded by generations of owner/editors with a legacy to uphold until the 90s, when JP III died and the family's media interests transferred around and eventually becoming public. By that point, of course, papers had been raising capital from Wall Street for decades already.

So they are funded differently now. The publicly held conglomerates and private equity firms that largely own news organizations today are constitutionally of managing, perhaps even understanding, the "public trust" they own. At best they're concerned with trust in the news.

The concept of public trust is a little subtle. Every news organization, in the US, is a sort of public news organization (in theory).

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Just say what happened (Ray Lyle, Kansas City Star)

Marginalize pseudo-events, don't make a story where there isn't any, don't re-report same stories (Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image)

"always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty" (Joseph Pulitzer, Retirement letter)

Lessons from last century, when people trusted the news

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I've been listening to AM broadcasts a lot over the last few months. I can get good reception from 2-3 local stations on my crystal set. One gives me state and national news, interviews, the weather; useful stuff. From the other I've learned a lot about aliens, nutrition, debt and debt consolidation, Gray Man, World War III, psychedelic drugs, skinwalkers, Christian dating situations (ex: non-abstinent partners), the holiday/inflation deals on Smith & Wesson steel, various troubling situations involving Biden and his son...

What else. I don't know, I learn so much from my radio that it's hard to keep track! And it's so much more engaging than your typically maybe-just-as-sane Netflix documentary with its jarring interview style. The AM hosts actually let their guests talk, uninterrupted, and at length, so you can hear what their points are in the way that they meant to say it. The other night a caller phoned into this expert cryptozoological guy they were interviewing and related how a canid, "too big to be a dog but too small to be a wolf", planted itself on the road in front of his truck before morphing into a woman before him (at night!). And he and this doctor they had as a guest were able to work through the experience on the spot; it wasn't some high production story that cut back and forth through irrelevant fancy stuff for 20 minutes before finally explaining what the guy saw.

I'm only partly being tongue in cheek... This is how "information diet" + learn more about radio new years resolutions have been working out for me. All this crazy stuff has replaced the social media and news/opinion drama I would get wrapped up on before. It's free, actually enjoyable (because of the radio projects, not the broadcasts), mildly to thoroughly amusing (because of the broadcasts), and the insanity is gone as soon as I take the headset off. It should get better soon as well. I'm going to build an FM receiver next, and I hear they still play music on those channels!

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

I disagree thoroughly. This was an extremely important moral for my dad, he imparted these lessons to us from birth (I know that might sound strange but I can't elaborate): we were to expect no more or less from our country than any other American boys of our generation, and it is no more or less our own than it is theirs. I can't put it to you the same way that he did to us, but it is in no way an "absurd", "shallow", merely "politically correct" attitude. This means something to people. In politics because of the serious backdrop of family separation/deportation policy, the "shithole country" nationality, overall 18th-21st history of this continent (not to be discounted), etc. And personally because it's not like rare to have your own family story in America, even if your folks didn't set out to Oregon in a wagon.

... and don't get me wrong that is pretty rad. I have driven to and from St. Louis and the West coast a few times on different routes, and it is insane that anyone ever packed their family and shit from there to there in anything less than a huge truck/family minivan with cruise control air conditioning and radio all set to maximum.

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

We found newspaper articles that ran at the time my grandparents eloped from Misourri. They have headlines like "Kansas City woman marries Chinese", "she confirms he does speak English", "is pregnant with his son", ... etc. My father of course, when he came around, wasn't seen as an American boy in 1930s Kansas. His experiences there left him feeling like a "twilight child" for the rest of his life, caught in between foreign and native lands and not belonging in either.

Why is that alright? Were the anti-miscegenation laws wrong, but the newspapers not?

If you're from here or reside here and are committed to the future of the country, you are American. The country in its history has mostly not offered that assurance, and the law and culture behind it was badly racist.

I definitely feel American (on the same level as my white cousins I guess if that's how you want to pin it) and my dad did too. He rebuked my oldest brother once very strongly for suggesting he was first generation.

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

Do you have an opinion on the Laschamp event? The Wikipedia article for the says the evidence for these ideas is weak in that case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laschamp_event

> This loss of the geomagnetic shield is claimed to have contributed to the extinction of Australian megafauna, the extinction of the Neanderthals and the appearance of cave art. However, the lack of corroborating evidence of a causal link between the Laschamp event and population bottlenecks of many megafauna species, and the relatively moderate radio-isotopic changes during the event, have cast significant doubt on the real impact of the Laschamp event on global environmental changes.

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

It's highly variable. I didn't go to a Catholic school but where I grew up there were religious camps parents could send their kids to, where they could be hit. Some of those kids had problems with drugs or aggression, but others were just queer in one sense or another. If the Catholics can hit then so can the Pentecostal and Baptist and Mormon teachers as well, and you might not have appreciated their discipline as much.

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

My dad grew up in Shanghai and often made a point of emphasizing how lucky we were to be children in America. We were spanked and occasionally slapped in the face, sometimes for small acts of disobedience or unhappiness. Though I suppose it could have just felt that way from our perspective.

I can tell you though that getting hit didn't teach me anything useful at all. Certainly not about reason. It taught me that when reason fails you just rely on your temper. We weren't "corrected" by the punishment in a long term sense, both of my brothers and I just emulated it (to varying degrees).

If you have boys, be careful about modeling physical aggression for them as a norm. You might, say, hit the oldest one as punishment and then weeks later the younger one somehow has a broken arm. Or something happens at school.

We weren't exposed to the world that my dad was growing up in WWII China -- an occupying army, nearby factories blowing up, etc. That doesn't make it a luxury belief that you shouldn't hit your kids. There are consequences to it that go beyond the lessons you want to teach them.

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

Octave is wonderful. It's one of those free software projects whose success and necessity inspire the entire movement.

In one of my first jobs I saved a bunch of money for the company just by porting stuff out of Matlab. It wasn't just that the licenses were pricey, it's that they were a pain in the butt, plus the program was slow and very difficult to orchestrate. At least at the time.

It wasn't always easy or possible to replace a client's Matlab analyses with an Octave script, but we at least confined it to just one license on one server, stashed inside a utility closet. While meanwhile all other data analysis work flows had been automated and moved into EC2, where they ran for free on Octave.

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

I'm pretty sure you've been trolled.

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

No, mainly they identify the contributing factors and work to correct them. For a specific example check Air Canada 759, which nearly landed on a crowded taxiway at SFO in 2017. No one involved was fired afaik.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGQlQFn0euI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

The great filter is table stakes, getting over it doesn't guarantee anything. It's also impossible to accurately and confidently predict the future millions of years in advance.