trzy

The Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit was the high water mark for commercial adaptations and it's been downhill since then.

Accelerationism has become a religion for many people working in tech. Social media is teaming with John the Baptists heralding the next messiah.

IIRC, prior to the pandemic, Apple implemented a freeze on leasing new office space in the bay area. Big companies are definitely incentivized to cut down on RE expenses.

Folk programming.

Really simple Stable Diffusion party game developed for the CVPR2023 generative AI art exhibition. Includes three mini-games, including a movie re-casting game and telephone/drawing game.

Feel free to laugh at my front-end code, I'm not much of a web dev :) I think with some proper game design, fine-tuning of the SD model (particularly for the movie game), and better use of ControlNet, could be a lot of fun.

At 7% of 28ms, if you boot it a thousand times per day you get a whopping 2 seconds.

Nothing. They just didn’t realize that JSON doesn’t need to be pretty-printed :)

I'm not sure that I'm sold on peripherals for AR. However, if a companion device like a phone happens to be present, having non-touch screen tactile inputs would be nice, even something as simple as being able to squeeze or grip the phone body (a la Google/HTC's Active Edge), or tap it through one's pocket, avoiding having to take it out, orient the screen, make sure some other content isn't inadvertently on the screen, etc.

Yeah these guys are total slime balls. Once they get what they want, their lack of concern for their sources is appalling. Breaking the news to drive eyeballs on their reporting is their 100% priority.

I don’t know about that. It’s usually just reporters reaching out asking you to dish in violation of your NDA for nothing in return. When I left Apple TDG, I was contacted by two reporters from well known publications on LinkedIn. I completely ignored both. Quite frankly it’s pretty upsetting that they’re so eager to put people in legal and financial jeopardy to write their stupid columns.

Use it out of habit on Windows but been annoyed for years at how slow the UI is. I frequently open an email and start typing a reply and have to wait 10 seconds because it locks up for some unknown reason. I’ve never been able to figure out what’s going on and this has plagued the app for a good decade at least.

Wait till you learn that "deprecated" and "depreciated" are different words, too.

Is MAE ViT-H available freely? My system could certainly handle it locally if it can be obtained and dropped in.

The linked issue says nothing of the sort. Are you sure?

Trivia: The i960 was used to power Sega's highly successful Model 2 arcade board, which truly ushered in the era of 3D gaming* (with Daytona USA), and was used in the F-22 Raptor until it was later replaced with other CPUs.

* Certainly not the first 3D arcade hardware but arguably this along with Namco's MIPS-based System 22 (Ridge Racer, released a little before Daytona), was the inflection point that made 2D effectively obsolete.

This reminds me of speaking with SV investors. They’re eloquent and say things that sound plausible in the moment but then I snap out of it and realize they’ve said nothing meaningful or correct at all.

On the bright side, now you’re basically caught up. This stuff is shockingly easy :)

Yup, basically.

Edit: see here: https://github.com/openai/chatgpt-retrieval-plugin/blob/main...

I did this a while back with ARKit: https://github.com/trzy/ChatARKit/blob/17fca768ce8abd39fb27d...

Sweep it under the rug hoping that this person is unlikely to be able to afford to litigate this.

Most HFT shops aren’t pulling crazy hours like that. That’s a wild exaggeration. I worked far longer hours at a FAANG than I ever did as a dev on a low-latency trading desk. Nobody at the latter ever got in my face and screamed at me, either. And guess at which of the two I got an unnerving call from HR asking if I could comment as a witness about some sort of harassment/bullying complaint two coworkers were entangled in during my second week on the job.

Silicon Valley sucks :)

I also worked in the space, with Morgan Stanley’s options market making desk. It was all very sane. I’ve heard some of the prop shops and hedge funds can be crazy but not all are like that.

Very cool! Writing emulators for simple CPUs is challenging enough because it's extremely easy to overlook a quirk or implement a flag calculation incorrectly that is used infrequently and have it silently lurking like a mine waiting for the rare piece of code to trip it. x86 is very complex. Instruction decoding alone looks like a nightmare. I guess the one saving grace here is that since most of us still run on x86, side-by-side validation is a lot easier.

Color me skeptical. What will they open up? Even side-loading of apps doesn’t necessarily remove the platform vendor’s advantage in being able to control the system experience. For example, consider the way the app model itself has been designed: apps are standalone experiences (this is a simplification because there are some integration hooks into other parts of the system UX). I can think of several use cases where I might like a background “camera app” that monitors the system camera feed for certain objects/scene features and suggests an action when detected.

It’s hard to argue that Apple should have to permit such functionality but then if the debate shifts towards what first party OS level features Apple is and is not allowed to provide, we get into undesirable regulatory overreach.

Ideally the OS would be open source and replaceable but that’s a pipe dream. The reality remains that platforms are intentionally crafted to heavily favor the vendor’s services and there’s little that regulation will do to change that.

Not a standalone headset and not really trying to be a platform :)

Yes, they will. The computer industry doesn’t want to repeat IBM’s loss of platform control. Mobile phones are walled gardens with very restrictive app models and one should expect VR and AR devices to be even more so.

As an example, camera access is available on smart phones (cameras on phones being an established killer feature even before iOS and Android) but are completely off limits on all standalone VR headsets (Meta, Pico, HTC) for “privacy reasons”.

Expect other big players to lean into this.

100% agree. VR immersion is fundamentally broken anyway due to the locomotion problem. You can walk freely in your play area but it's always too small compared to typical game world size. So you end up being able to look around, duck, and dodge, but if you want to take a step forward, you need to remember to twiddle a joystick instead. It's a lot of cognitive load and discomfort for very little benefit.

Flat games feel quite immersive already. And others can easily be nearby and watch.

That's an extremely limited view of passthrough. Passthrough will be most useful for spatial applications like telepresence, in-situ learning, modeling and creation, and visualization, where remaining present and aware of your surroundings is preferable to the undesirable immersion of VR. The bet here is that useful interactions with virtual objects and interfaces don't benefit from disorienting virtual environments.

For an example of this on Quest Pro, check out Wooorld. It's a fun hangout app and is arguably a much better experience in passthrough.

Sega’s own Sega Rally 2 used WinCE. This is often blamed for its performance issues.

I routinely travel to South Bay and 150/night is absolutely a reasonable estimate for a hotel.

This is true. When I interviewed at a large investment bank for a position as a developer on a low-latency market making desk after completing my PhD in EE at the University of Washington, the managing director, who had a Master's from Stanford, wondered "why UW" and asked "why didn't you go to Stanford?"

Virtually all the traders were from elite schools. Devs and quants had diverse backgrounds.

(I got the job.)