agar

One of the comments effectively frames the motivations for the US's current institutional disparities:

* The preference of well-off whites to pull the ladder up behind them;

* The preference of police unions to protect their members at all costs;

* The preference of the average non-black voter to not have to think about this crap.

I like that this is a pragmatic perspective that doesn't assume malicious intent behind most institutional racism (and tech debt, to continue the article's metaphor). People naturally act in their self-interest; it's not "I hate you" it's just "I'm not going to think about consequences when I optimize this solution for myself." While there are certainly many bad actors both in the creation and maintenance of our broken systems, IMO the vast majority of people are risk averse, passive participants in the status quo - i.e., falling into the third bucket. Even the more active participants in the first two buckets can justify their actions from inside their bubble; the horrible negative consequences are most visible only when placed in contrast to situations they often don't see.

Fortunately, people are recognizing the consequences of their actions - though not universally, and of course far too late to stop the death and marginalization of large numbers.

I hope it's a sign we're on the path to reduce or eliminate society's tech debt before the system crashes. Like all complex projects though, it needs sustained strong leadership.

I don't think it was a GoogleX project, but Chronicle was spun out from Google as an independent company. It grew well, and seemed ready to succeed on its own.

Google then re-acquired it.

Speculation, but perhaps Google was concerned about it getting acquired by a competitor as it used a lot of core Google search technology. Or, perhaps Google knew that the acquisition cost would spiral upwards if they waited much longer. Or, perhaps it just proved out the hypothesis that the product was viable, so better to bring it back in-house.

But I would call it successful by conventional metrics: it found product-market fit, had good customer traction, and was acquired at a decent (though not crazy) valuation.

It's been great fun to follow bradfitz's career.

I first learned of him from a post on Slashdot about a cool remote controlled door hack in a college dorm. His roommate posted and basically said, "this guy is brilliant, it's just the tip of the iceberg - he posts what he's working on at bradfitz.com, check it out." This was in...1998? 1999?

Seeing him start to post a daily journal, get frustrated, then write LiveJournal was fascinating. Posts on the problems he faced scaling it, open discussions on caching architecture (leading to a LiveJournal user suggesting he investigate slab allocation technique that led to memcached), identity (leading to OpenID), moderation, etc. were always illuminating. Moving to Go because he understood what problems needed solving just made sense. Rewriting Google's downloader because it sucked? Well, of course he would.

I don't know Brad other than occasional comments/responses from the early livejournal days (user number ~10K, after procrastinating actually joining for too long), but it's clear that he draws inspiration from overcoming roadblocks.

Taken in that context, leaving Google is completely understandable - having a trillion dollar organization there to remove roadblocks would subvert a key driver for his personal innovation and inspiration.

Good for him that he recognized this and is taking the leap into the unknown. Can't wait to see what he comes up with next, but I'm guessing the real treasures will be found in the process and not the final outcome.

You dismiss the question as ridiculous by pointing to the 4th Amendment. But you then seem to hand-wave away all the nuances that are intrinsic to your own argument, and thus make this question not ridiculous at all.

If you believe the 4th Amendment should be the answer to the question, then what about the flip side of the 4th Amendment: that it does allow reasonable searches with a warrant. This was the justification for "key escrow" systems in which master keys could only be unlocked with a court order. Do you support this approach? If not, why not?

Another question: If you believe the 4A's exclusive role, then do you also agree with the Supreme Court's interpretation that in ''national security cases'' electronic surveillance upon the authorization of the President or the Attorney General could be permissible without prior judicial approval? (See Katz v. United States)

If not, why do you believe so strongly in constitutional protections but not the equally-constitutionally defined role of the SCOTUS to interpret it? And if you do agree with SCOTUS interpretation, why should E2EE prevent a lawful intercept if directed by the President for national security matters?

For the record, I support E2EE, but these are serious issues that can't be hand-waved away. The question is anything but ridiculous.

Somewhat related, any plans for integration with VR headsets?

This could either be first-person flying, or the generation of stereo-correct video (using offset cameras) for later viewing.

Losing $4.5B in value really understates the impact LTCM's failure had on the public markets.

Multiple wall street firms (at US Government urging) needed to urgently inject massive capital into the markets to contain a near-systemic collapse.

PBS produced a phenomenal documentary, The Trillion Dollar Bet[1], which covers the development of Black-Scholes and the rise and fall of LTCM. Highly recommended.

[1] http://watchdocumentaries.com/trillion-dollar-bet/

Saying "the software industry dictates using VR controllers" misses the mark.

When Oculus Rift first released, the VR controllers weren't ready. Most demos were "3D vision" only (i.e., no input), and games used an Xbox One controller. As a Rift pre-orderer, I gave many demos to people in those early days.

Almost every single person looked around, said, "oh my god, this is incredible", and then raised their arms and tried to look at their hands.

Being unable to see your hands breaks immersion, while having the agency to literally reach out and interact with the virtual environment tricks your brain into believing it's real.

VR controllers aren't dictated by the software industry. They're demanded by nearly everyone that has used VR.

I've heard others with that same fear, and sadly it stopped them from taking advantage of a medicine that could significantly improve their quality of life.

Depression and anxiety, even when mild, can be pernicious in their self-preservation. Self-identifying with a symptom, and avoiding a potential cure because "it could turn you into an entirely different person" by removing that symptom, is often the disease talking.

SSRIs don't turn you into a different person. When working properly (i.e., right dose, right med), they simply give you more mental space to deal with and work through problems. Who you become after working through your issues is entirely up to you.

I think your posts are being downvoted because it's just simpler to downvote than try to correct someone with such fundamental errors of fact. Too many people who say things similar to you (e.g., pointing to incorrect climate models, questioning the degree of climate change, pointing to "unattainable changes to society" and so on) don't actually want to be corrected; they simply hold onto their beliefs regardless of contrary evidence. This is the difference between "denialism", which leads to futile argumentation, vs. "skepticism", which is a healthy part of science. Engagement with denialists is thus simply a waste of time, fatiguing, and frustrating.

I'll throw a few things out there: climate models. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJoMp-k_H3w for a comparison of predictions of major climate models vs. measured temperatures. Many, many articles and peer-reviewed research has covered this.

Overfishing being an "environmental problem that we can actually solve": this massively complex problem involves international policing of illegal fishing, national sovereignty, ecological protections vs. starving populations, increasing economic success leading to increasing consumption (see China's insatiable and growing appetite for fish), cultural issues, and on and on.

Worse, climate and agricultural impacts such as ocean acidification, temperature rise, algae blooms, and nitrogen run-off all contribute to dramatic declines in aquatic populations that lower yields and require ever-more aggressive fishing practices that further destroy the ecosystem.

Regarding the contribution of humans to climate change: there is no doubt that carbon dioxide warms the atmosphere. There is no doubt that CO2's overall contribution to warming exceeds that of other factors (including solar maxima and other denialist theories). There is also no doubt that humans emit more CO2 than any other source. See https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... for a good overview. Without a science-based rebuttal to these issues, saying human contribution is "not neaarrlly to the degree that alarmists and doom and gloomers would have people believe" is a belief based on nothing.

You use strawmen like "too many extremists that claim the apocolypse on very dubious grounds." What does this mean? We have 411 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere now, and it continues to grow - at an accelerating rate. This leads to stronger and more frequent extreme weather events like droughts (atmospheric warming) and hurricanes (ocean warming).

So what is this apocalypse the extremists discuss? Apocalypse like having a city burned to the ground (see California)? Like hurricanes devastating coastal communities (see Bahamas)? Like 500 year weather events occurring almost annually? How many of these must happen before they strain the economies of even the richest countries? And that's not even talking about massive flooding from sea-level rise.

Blaming "extreme alarmists" for being "harmful to science" is so disingenuous it makes me angry. You really believe they're more harmful to science than those who lie about, cherry-pick, obfuscate, and bury data (see Exxon) to create the illusion of controversy to protect their trillion dollar businesses or political power? The only reason climate change is polarizing is because their efforts to undermine the science have worked. The only reason you think the solutions are unattainable is because they have convinced you that is so for 40 years. And now, perhaps, they are unattainable. Congrats to them, I guess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcr-x-xPPFE

I don't know who downvoted you or why (not me), but I find your point to be a bit nonsensical.

Someone is pouring gasoline in our house and you're suggesting that we talk less about a catastrophic house fire and more about how they're ruining the carpet. How does that help?

Besides, what are these "environmental problems that we can actually all agree on"?

We should have clean water? No, the same people denying climate change have overturned basic protections.

Protection of endangered species? Also overturned.

Protection of national parks? Nope, acreage removed from the park system and existing reserves opened for drilling.

Increasing fuel economy standards? No.

Common sense reductions in coal usage, which is now more expensive than solar and wind (not even including carbon externalities)? No.

Both sides have extremists. But right now, an "economic growth at all costs" extremist regime is making policy. That is undeniable.

If a left-wing "criminalize eating meat, eliminate fossil fuel overnight, outlaw corporate farming and force people to live in yurts" extremist sat in the White House, do you think we should not talk about the risk of global economic collapse?

Gates says divestment will not lower carbon emissions. This is very different from saying it will not lower valuation.

Has the reduction in tobacco companies' stock prices materially affected smoking rates? I don't think so.

I believe OP meant, "consider [the paywall strategy of] their mainstream-educated-conservative counterpart, WSJ" - not "consider [switching to] ... WSJ" - as he/she continued with a comparison of the hard vs. soft paywall employed by each.

This refers to a joke made by Stephen Colbert (while portraying his satirical persona of right-wing host Stephen Colbert) that "reality has a well-known liberal bias"[1].

It is generally used to point out that many of the stories pointed to by conservative media as exhibiting liberal bias are often simply reporting on facts that are incompatible with conservative talking points.

Examples include: relative sizes of inauguration crowds, whether China or US importers pay for tariffs, the contents of the Mueller report, crime statistics on undocumented immigrants, crime statistics on Muslim communities, merits of single-payer healthcare in other first-world countries, various statistics on gun crime, impact of republican vs. democratic presidents on government deficits, benefits (or lack thereof) of trickle-down economics/cutting corporate taxes, and the causes and mitigations of the US Great Recession that began in 2007/2008.

[1] https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4530018/colbert-quote

This is a fascinating rabbit hole to go down.

When you consider some of the recent decisions about what constitutes "speech," it raises the important question of whether a private company influencing its customers' voting preferences would actually be protected.

How much different is it for a company to use its speech to influence a politician directly (donations, lobbying, PACs, etc.) vs. stating its political opinions on its own private "property" potentially to influence politics indirectly?

In physical space, is it legal to:

* Have a sign promoting a social position in the window of your private store? ("Say no to drugs!") * Have a sign promoting a political position? ("Say no to the Iraq war!") * Have a sign promoting a candidate? ("I like Ike!") * Tell customers who to vote for? ("Have a nice day, vote for JFK!") * Tell only customers that "look a certain way" who to vote for? ("As someone in a wheelchair, you should vote for FDR!")

Now convert all this to the online world with banner ads, user targeting, and personalization. Isn't it just free speech at scale?

This is a blog post by the software company that discovered the issue.

It's simply a marketing team leveraging the current threat environment to raise the profile of their product.

I both agree and disagree.

A metaverse doesn't need to include games per se, though portals to standalone games will be important - the metaverse simply acts as a lobby.

However, the critical component is the unified physics and interaction model. Games in the real world emerge because people can rely on consistent actions around which rules can be based.

Let people throw and catch, and people will play basketball with trash cans. Provide good collision models and people will play baseball or hide-and-seek. Basic occlusion and grabbing mechanics enable card games. Yes, provide great hit boxes and collision detection and people will become swordsmen.

Right now, creating great (predictable and realistic) physics in VR is CPU expensive and with lots of finicky edge cases. Leap Motion and others have done good work here[1], but anyone that has spent time in VR knows the challenges of simply stacking boxes without everything randomly flying away when the corner of one box is accidentally placed "inside" another box.

A successful metaverse requires physics to be predictable, consistent, and fun. Games will emerge. But expecting a single universe to somehow also extend to the requirements of games like Fortnite, Minecraft, or GTA5 - each of which have their own physics, graphics, and gameplay optimizations - is a difficult, if not impossible, goal.

[1] http://blog.leapmotion.com/designing-physical-interactions-f...

I look forward to a comment section filled with passionate developers rejecting the author's premise, and pitching their favorite framework(s) as proof...

Thereby validating the author's premise that "the majority of the problem is just a result of fragmentation in the modern ecosystem."

Yes, the software library is very good, continues to improve, and 2019 will see significant new releases approaching AAA quality (according the the vendors, of course).

Naturally, it depends on your interests. But my issue is lack of time to work through my library, not lack of compelling software.

In the interest of providing data, here is at least a single reply. Though I haven't voted, by my criteria your comment leans more to downvote than upvote. My reasons:

1. It adds little to nothing to the discussion. You raise two items with no commentary but "hmmmm", then offer a metaphor and an admitted conspiracy theory - neither of which you explain in depth nor draw interesting conclusions from.

2. There is inherent ridiculousness (almost to the point of trolling) in connecting a 20-year old report (1998) to a modern initiative, particularly considering the massive industry, technical, and organizational changes between those two events. Implying that one leads to another as part of a 30-year strategy to consume/extinguish Linux assumes a level of long-term planning and, frankly, managerial competency that is almost unheard of in today's public companies.

3. Assuming I can even understand your poorly constructed point, I still disagree with it (see #1 and #2) and, more importantly, think you fundamentally misunderstand the landscape in which Microsoft now competes. In a world increasingly accessed by mobile devices, MS has no mobile presence. In an OS landscape increasingly disintermediated by the browser, MS has little significant browser presence. They have oriented their entire organization around Azure (its biggest revenue growth area) and cross-platform applications deliverable in the browser and on 3rd party mobile OSes. They reorganized and, for the first time, no longer have a Windows division. Thinking they're in the middle of some Machiavellian scheme to take back an increasingly irrelevant OS dominance position by extinguishing Linux (and failing because Linux is too big?) completely misses the point that Linux's size wasn't the cause of Microsoft's inability to extinguish it, it was these other countervailing industry forces. And to imply that they've somehow failed also ignores the fact that MSFT's market capitalization has had a nearly identical growth to GOOG and AAPL over the past two years while they've made this transition.

As they say on Food Network, for those reasons we had to chop you.

As much as I love the concept, I can only imagine what a professional with expertise in cephalopods and their DNA would think while reading this article.

If you've ever read a popular press story in your area of expertise, you immediately see how many things writers oversimplify to the point of absurdity, or just get plain wrong.

I'm guessing the authors of that journal article, were they to read this news story, would simultaneously hyperventilate and strain their necks from the excessive sighing and head shaking.

Thanks, I took a look through that and most (all?) of the benchmarks seemed to be fairly traditional tasks, some not even highly threaded.

I guess I'm wondering if complex, multi-box, cloud-scale workloads have any advantage on Dragonfly - or if the optimizations for clustering are in such a narrow band of use cases that modern architectures have passed it by just through brute force.

There's an irony here, in that Matt Dillon was an ex-Amiga hacker (IIRC, some of Dragonfly's architectural choices were inspired by the Amiga). Anyway, the Amiga's linear memory, co-processor-driven architecture was ridiculously more elegant than the PC's segmented memory, CPU-bound approach. Didn't matter though, a huge investment in working around the PC's limitations led to its market dominance.

So, if massive technical accommodations for less efficient OS architectures end up marginalizing Dragonfly, it would be a bit of history repeating itself.

And I'm sure the irony wouldn't be lost on Mr. Dillon.

With DragonFly's architecture being designed with multiprocessing and clustering in mind, how does it fare (relative to Linux and other BSDs) in modern environments with many-core CPUs, horizontally-scalable architectures, reliance on VM-based workloads, and containerization?

I would think it would really shine, but haven't seen comparisons - or much market uptake.

Wouldn't significant advantages result in lower costs (e.g., fewer CPUs needed because of higher performance per core due to lower OS overhead) and therefore economics would drive greater use? If it hasn't, why not?

Of course some gun control advocates want a "we've come to collect your guns" law. I never said that no one holds extreme positions.

But that does not mean that everyone holds extreme positions, which is what you claimed.

Arguing that the extremes are the only options is a problem.

How productive would health debates be if the only two options presented were veganism and paleo? If the only sex ed options are abstinence or polyamory?

There must be room for compromise, or there is no debate, only argumentation.

> The only thing that could possibly give the gun-control people what they really want is total confiscation of all guns

Strawmen are so unhelpful in reasonable debate.

Not all gun control advocates are either anti-second amendment, nor in favor of eliminating all guns. To say otherwise, creating a false black/white dichotomy in the gun debate, does a massive disservice to both gun advocates and gun control proponents.

Ironically, by making the choice "all guns" or "no guns", gun advocates themselves are forcing the "no guns" option to the center of the debate. As a wave of frustrated anti-gun youth become voters and reasonable political moderates look at options to "protect the children", I really think it's in gun proponents' best interests to provide a better alternative than "do nothing" on one side and "civil war" on the other.

Arguing that medical devices don't fail is specious. The procedure for reporting errors that lead to deaths can be found here: https://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/ReportaProblem/def...

> "Each year, the FDA receives several hundred thousand medical device reports of suspected device-associated deaths, serious injuries and malfunctions."

It is also specious to argue that a consumer product is being used for live surgeries without FDA approval.

This does not excuse the mistake, nor does it change the fact that the error will make people question the reliability of the product - as they should.

However, mistakes do happen, even big ones. Rockets blow up. Airbags have defects that make them not work. McAfee pushed out an antivirus update that deleted a Windows system file, crashing hundreds of thousands of PCs.

The important questions are: how does the vendor respond, what procedures do they put into place to prevent it from happening again, and are those procedures enough to give future buyers confidence that the issues are addressed?

Saying "that shouldn't have happened," while perhaps true, is simply not constructive.

Thanks, no apologies needed. I didn't mean to come off snarky either. And I obviously am not averse to unnecessarily long messages.

As an aside, Valve's tracking solution is much less USB-intensive than Oculus's.

In Valve's Lighthouse system, sensors on the HMD and controllers use the angle of a laser sweep to calculate their absolute position in a room and provide the dead reckoning needed to correct IMU drift. As a result, the only data being sent over USB is the stream of sensor data and position (I believe sensor fusion still occurs in the SDK, not on device).

Oculus's Constellation system uses IR cameras, synchronized to an IR LED array on the HMD and controllers. The entire 1080p (or 720p, if used over USB2) video images (from 2 through 4 cameras, depending on configuration) are sent via USB to the PC. This is in addition to the IMU data coming from the controllers. The SDK performs image processing to recognize the position of the LEDs in the images, triangulate their position, perform sensor fusion, and produce an absolute position.

The net result is roughly equivalent tracking between the two systems, but the USB and CPU overhead for Rift is greater (it's estimated that 1%-2% of CPU is used for image processing per sensor, but the Oculus SDK appears to have some performance advantages that allow equivalent performance on apps despite this overhead).

There is great debate over which is the more "advanced" solution. Lighthouse is wickedly clever, allowing a performant solution over larger tracking volumes with fewer cables and sensors.

Constellation is pretty brute-force, but requires highly accurate image recognition algorithms that (some say) give Oculus a leg-up in next generation tracking with no external sensors (see the Santa Cruz prototype[1] which is a PC-free device that uses 4 cameras on the HMD and on-board image processing to determine absolute position using only real-world cues). It also opens the door to full-body tracking using similar outside-in sensors.

But overall, the Valve solution definitely lends itself to a Linux implementation better than Oculus's, simply due to the lower I/O requirements. It also helps that Valve has published the Lighthouse calculations (which is just basic math), while Oculus has kept its image recognition algorithms as trade secrets.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/wireless-oculus-vr-gr...

Whoops indeed. :-D

About a $5m whoops, considering Oculus just gave everyone a $15 store credit due to the problem.

Sometimes education is expensive.

I believe it is possible, though I doubt many people look at the raw data due to its limited usefulness. Without sensor fusion between the IMU (or inertial measurement unit, AKA electronic gyroscope) and various other inputs (including dead reckoning via external sensors), drift error rapidly accumulates.

So, the SDK takes all the information in directly, does its calculations, and exposes only the resulting positions and orientations for hands and head. This resulting info is what developers typically use.

Here's an excerpt from a blog post[1] regarding the IMU and sensor fusion:

> With the new Oculus VR™ sensor, we support sampling rates up to 1000hz, which minimizes the time between the player’s head movement and the game engine receiving the sensor data to roughly 2 milliseconds.

> <snip interesting info about sensor fusion>

> In addition to raw data, the Oculus SDK provides a SensorFusion class that takes care of the details, returning orientation data as either rotation matrices, quaternions, or Euler angles.

Note that this blog is from back in dev kit 2 days. It's possible that Oculus removed the ability to retrieve raw data; in my hobbyist efforts I only use Unity's integration and don't work directly against the SDK.

[1] https://www.oculus.com/blog/building-a-sensor-for-low-latenc...

To be clear, I'm not arguing that old, already-installed drivers should fail if not countersigned. This seems like an extreme, and customer-unfriendly failure case. However, I am saying that this appears to be the default implementation of Windows 10 build 1607+.

I won't argue it's right or wrong, actually. It's a choice, with different threat models driving different conclusions. Defining the failure modes with respect to security risks is a fraught business, and I hope Microsoft put a great deal of thought into it and has far more visibility into the risks than I. But it's what they appear to do, and we live in their world.

I argued elsewhere (in a late, top-level comment somewhere) that - if this is Windows's failure mode - MS should provide tools for devs to integrate into their build process that flags risky or mis-configured signature scenarios. This is too complicated, and used by too many non-security experts, with extreme failure modes, for it to be half-ass-able or easily done wrong.

This is in late beta, but anyone can opt in, try it, and opt out if it's not ready for them.

But I use it and it's amazing.

Edit: Here's the "sizzle reel": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvP_RI_S-bw

Here's just someone using Home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMjlM5vFSA0

And here's a blog post about it: https://www.oculus.com/blog/rift-core-20-updates-beta-coming...