SimonPStevens

Super interesting product I'll definitely be taking a deeper look at this when I'm at work tomorrow.

I notice all your comparisons are with floating point and integer types. I was recently looking at SIMD as a possible way to speed up some of our calculations. But we create financial software and most data is typically stored as decimals not floating points to avoid problems with binary floating point precision during calculations.

Does quest handle decimals, just without the SIMD speed up?

Is this just a dead end? Are there any SIMD implementations that deal with decimal numbers? I considered Hacky workarounds like using integer based types internally and then treating them as as fixed point decimals for display but that doesn't give enough range for my purposes.

Yeah, sure. But I'm all in favour of that. I want to see systems compete on their comparative merits. That hopefully drives innovation. I just dislike the way Oculus are preferring to compete by locking up the market with exclusives. It only hurts gamers by reducing choice.

I thought Oculus touch did support finger tracking. Wikipedia describes it as a "system for detecting finger gestures which perhaps is different. I've only ever used a Vive, so I'm not sure.

One of the links off the page talks about how it adapts based on your systems capabilities. It supports both the finger tracking controllers as well as the older trigger controllers.

Yes. Sorry. Absolutely correct :-) For some reason I had in my head the new one was called a Vive Index, but it's not, it's a Valve Index.

"Play on any SteamVR system. If you have VR hardware that works with a computer, then it works with SteamVR."

Bravo Valve. This is why anyone interested in this should get a Vive and stay well clear of Oculus/Facebook's headsets. They are busy trying to capture the VR market by setting up exclusivity arrangements with studios to lock games to their platform to cut others out which just divides up the already small market.

Value have built a cross platform framework and SDK and are releasing their games for all headsets.

DJI already have a process for getting clearance to fly in restricted zones. It's called flysafe self unlock.

[Edit: changed "no-fly" to restricted]

The software limits height by allowing 400ft of elevation above the takeoff height. So it's tricky to take off at the base of a mountain and fly up the side because you'll be restricted at 400ft from the start point, despite it actually being totally legal provided you remain less than 400ft from the mountain at the point directly below the drone.

Except, if other people already have the same belief, won't it will already be priced into any oil futures prices.

So that only works if it's a belief you hold, but you also think that others believe the opposite.

I'd love to hear more about this.

Did he mean that there is a solved and known way to get uniform national cell phone coverage without blackspots? If so, do you know more about what his solution was.

Which one was that?

BlackMesa (a fan remake of Half-Life 1 on a modern engine) is outstanding.

AMP itself is not the problem. It is actual one possible solution to the problem of heavy slow pages.

The problem is that it is tied to Google.

We don't need to destroy it, we need to make it into an open standard that all browsers and search engines can implement for the same benefits.

I believe it's not as clear cut as that. I believe that in many jurisdictions there are various rules that allow trading within certain assets classes to not be treated as a taxable event for capital gains purposes unless you trade outside the class back to a regular currency. The taxable event can occur only when you realise the profit or loss.

Whether this is the case with crypto currencies is all dependent on how your particular jurisdiction has chosen to classify crypto. Or often just your best guess if your particular jurisdiction hasn't been clear on the classification as many haven't.

So to clarify... If you were holding bitcoin, but decided you wanted out because you think it's about to go down, you'd exchange for tether and hold that instead until you decided that bitcoin is ready to start going back up again.

And you accept all the associated risk rather than fully cashing out to real dollars because your jurisdiction doesn't treat crypto to crypto purchase as a taxable event?

Interesting. Thank you.

Serious question. What is the reason for holding Tethers?

They a supposedly pinned to the dollar, so there isn't much point in holding them hoping they will gain in value. If anything their peg is questionable so they are only likely to decrease in value.

As far as I can see their only purpose is a a way of transferring between other crypto currencies and exchanges, but you would only ever need the tethers very short term while you completed the movement or transaction.

Latest tech is far less important for games these days. I have a laptop that is 4 years old currently (admittedly it was pretty top end when I brought it) and it still runs latest games perfectly fine, and I'm still not really seeing any need to replace it. Last year's Farcry 5 ran at close to max settings.

Tech just doesn't make the gains it used to any more.

Back in the 90's a 4 year old machine would be lucky to even start a new released game, let alone run it at close to max settings.

This is ridiculous for so many reasons.

Comparing a minor bug with player speed calculations in an edge case scenario with the total collapse of a bridge. They are on totally different scales. One cost lives. The other is a minor inconvenience at worst. When bugs are found you triage them, and if the expected cost to fix is greater than the expected benefit gained, you don't fix it. The benefit gained from fixing an edge case movement bug like this is minimal, so it will often be left unfixed. This isn't incompetence, it's just prioritisation.

I agree with you sentiment in general about not chastising people for enjoying things you don't enjoy, but in this case it's different.

If you enjoy rock climbing or mountain hiking you go to one of thousands of other mountains. There are plenty of places that are more challenging if that is what you crave.

Literally the only reasons to climb Everest in the modern day is because you want the egocentric talking point of having climbed the highest mountain. That or you like queuing at high altitude.

Not the op, but for me the turboprops I've flown on [0] have a deeper, louder droning noise that really gives me a headache after a while. I think it's personal though, I've spoken about hating them with travelling companions and no one else shares my dislike. I've never actively tried to avoid them though, mainly because I rarely have a choice of time or route when I fly on the airlines I know use them.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_Dash_8

All the stories in this thread about people having to sign stuff without reading it. I guess this just makes them all unenforceable in reality if anyone actually challenged them.

Perhaps this is why anything actually serious I've ever signed requires witnesses.

Depends on the drone. I have a commercial DJI drone that has sensors and a nice easy mode that will stop you crashing into stuff (at least forwards and backwards, there are no side sensors). But it also has a "sport" mode that disables the sensors to allow faster flight.

I also have a home built racing drone that has no anti crash sensors, very little natural stabilty and can fly about twice as fast. It's insanely fun to fly, but believe me it requires very quick reactions and I crash it regular even when sober.

It's hugely dependant on the app and type of data it's processing.

Our primary apps deal with trading data at 15/30 minute intervals over multiple years. It's not uncommon to have millions of rows involved in a process.

Yes, nearly all of our performance problems boil down to the database. The majority of the time spent on the server is on data access.

Basic CRUD on small data wouldn't be the same.

I say this all the time when this kind of thing comes up.

Please use Firefox!

Even if it's worse. Even if its slower[1]. Even if it doesn't have that one feature or bug fix that you personally consider really important. Just use Firefox anyway. Find a workaround. Suffer whatever it is you dislike about Firefox because in the end if we don't act as individuals against the chrome monopoly then google are going to own the web and we'll suffer a far worse period of monoculture than the IE6 ever was.

If you can't go all the way, going part of the way is still valuable. I personally have chrome installed still because there are a couple if internal sites at my work that have problems on Firefox, so I use Chrome for those but Firefox for everything else.

Firefox for Android is also solid browser, and as a bonus you don't see any AMP stuff.

If you're a website/app maintainer, check for compatibility in Firefox.

It's worth supporting Firefox to keep the web the way it should be. I know they make mistakes sometimes, but we need a viable alternative or it will be too late.

([1] I don't think it is, it's made soild improvements in recent years, but lots of people seem to have their own specific issue they hold dear against it)

> the majority of people do understand the YouTube + Google/Alphabet relationship

I think this is very tech centric view. I asked my wife (tech savy enough but doesn't work in the industry) and she didn't have any idea who owned Youtube, and had never heard of Alphabet.

I know it's only one data point, but I think it's easy to be blinkered when actually the truth is probably that most people outside of tech have no idea about tech company relationships.

(BTW, not me doing the downvoting)

I don't think that only allowing the purchase of tether to retail really meets their original plan.

The whole point was meant to be that anyone could take their coins and go to tether and get exactly 1 USD for each one. It was designed to solve the problems people were having cashing out from exchanges. The idea was that you sold your bitcoin on poleniex or wherever for USDT the then took that to the tether website and got your USD. Safe in the knowledge that your USDT would be exchanged exactly 1-1, with no bid/offer spread or moving price. The reason this was needed was because most exchanges were really struggling to get their banks to allow the USD processing.

In reality, you could never really do that. And now exchanges have been able to get the USD payments working, so the USDT<->USD exchange market has picked up the slack and now serves the purpose that the tether website never realised. Although it's now not quite 1-1, there is a market and a spread and prices move.

As others have mentioned, the likely reason they never have is that they would hit exactly the same challenge all the exchanges did with their bank and the KYC rules.

No, they didn't. Their original proposition was that you could buy and sell tether from them at exactly 1 USD.

What happened was that website for doing that was only ever available for very short periods and instead tether was traded on exchanges. Poloniex/bitfinex etc are exchanges, not the promised single source of tether. Exchange trading with a market set price and a bid/offer spread is not the same as a direct purchase website from the creator. It means the price moves. The original promise was for a fixed price set buy the sole supplier.

Everyone talking about how tether should have profited from either investing the cash, or buying and selling tethers at slightly different rates is missing the point.

The original value propitiation of tether was... "A one to one, 100% reserved USD backed cryptocurrency that you can buy/sell any time directly from them"

They originally promised a website where you could buy/sell tethers directly for 1 USD. This is different from all the other stable type coins that achieve their pegs using various chain and exchange strategies. Tethers proposition was to maintain it's peg to USD by literally holding the cash and being the primary point of purchase/sale. Not investing it. Not operating fractional reserve. And not buying/selling with a spread. Every profit making strategy goes against their original proposition.

The reason this was the proposition was to supposedly make it easier for crypto traders. At the time everyone was having problems cashing out their cryoto. Tether was basically promising that they could fix the USD exchange problem by holding all the cash and not being an exchange.

Now they never actually delivered any of that. The website never reliably appeared and now tethers are traded on an exchange like any other crypto coin. And I suspect they did actually make a stack of profit by printing tether and selling them on exchanges. But that makes it a scam because they weren't following their own rules that they laid down at the start.

Yeah, I am shortening the story. The interview lasted longer than that one sentance and we discussed the technology. I was aware of a lot of the principles behind it (and I had read up before the interview), I had just never used it. Like you say, for senior people that's probably the case with a lot of tech.

I consider myself to be an anti-bullshitter. I once said in a job interview that I knew nothing about the technology they were hiring for, but I was pretty sure I could take a decent stab at it.

I was telling the truth.

I got the job.

If you actually lived there it would probably just seem like a lot of uninteresting empty space. It only looks interesting because what you're looking at is far beyond huge, all squashed together into one picture.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

This is a good point. Not really being much of a sports fan myself it's not a problem that had occurred to me.

I guess it depends on the type of programmes you watch.