I always loved this question when I played the 'Why' game with my kids: They ask why, and I'd ELI5. Then they'd ask why, and the process continued until I could excitedly say "We don't know for sure!! We think it might be XYZ, but we're still exploring that frontier."
Readit NewsDarkphibre commented on Why is the sky blue? explainers.blog/posts/why... · Posted by u/udit99
Darkphibre commented on Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work? · Posted by u/plemer
I live in Seattle, Cap Hill. Before I moved here and when I first moved here (from London) people told me that Seattle was a terrible place to make friends and build a community. My experience has been exactly the opposite; this has been the best place I've ever lived for making friends and building community, especially as a sober person.
The order of importance, I have found community here in:
- Swing dancing, both classes and going to shows with live jazz bands to dance (I was never a dancer before moving here)
- Lifting (there are great locally owned gyms in this neighborhood)
- Getting to know people who own or work at local businesses
- People who have similar tech interests, that I meet from a mixture of the previous 3 places
Finally, and I think this is a really important thing to do, I try to organize events, either in my home or in any one of the local parks in the summer, where friends I've made in different parts of my life all get together and also get to know each other
Oh! I'm on the east side. I've been attending Brazillian Zouk classes, but I've been interested in swing. Where do you go?
And I completely agree about event organization! It really introduces you to a wider swath of people than your initial search may have turned up.
Way to go!
Darkphibre commented on VR optics and why IPD means too many things (2019) tomforsyth1000.github.io/... · Posted by u/luu
VR AR researcher here.
It is scary once you see what the actual VR research landscape looks like.....
There is a clear disconnect between users of vr and vr researchers.
I don't know even where to begin. Too much incompetence. Too much disinterest. Too much bullshit just to get grant money. And nobody has any clear idea of what VRs application should be.
So far even for me there are very few applications where vr gives an actual advantage for anything.
Take it situational awareness, overview, ux, visual quality etc. Most of the vr apps I have seen have no reason to be in vr.
I hear ya! One of my hobbies is to be a somewhat known stage & exotic dancer / dance instructor in VR using 5-11pt tracking (depending on my mood and production quality). The number of "features" that get in the way, and lack of representation for VR dancers and performers has been frustrating, especially as the world moves more and more towards 3-point robot avatars.
Actually had a chance to provide my perspective to a FAANG Research Group, but I was laid off (and they were disbanded).
Darkphibre commented on VR optics and why IPD means too many things (2019) tomforsyth1000.github.io/... · Posted by u/luu
This is a "you may not be able to unsee" thing once you read this, but... one of the major problems I have with 3D movies is precisely that 3D based on image separation extends out way less than people think it does, because the brain naturally picks up with heuristics and prior knowledge and a lot of other things. So if you're on a closeup of someone's face or something, sure, it can be in 3D. But if you've got a big action scene with, say, helicopters flying around and shooting at people on the ground, the camera is likely to be farther than 20 meters away. If you can see any "3D" at all, it's wrong. It should all be at the plane-at-infinity for you. Which means that if you can see "3D", rather than being an epic fight to save the world or whatever, you've got a fight taking place on a diorama in front of you, about the size of a large table or something.
Even something just as the scale like the Transformers being about a block away from you brawling with each other should all be on the plane-at-infinity to you.
It kinda takes the drama out of 3D action. Technically, the 2D version of the movie is probably more actually accurate at the important times in a lot of genres.
Thanks for the warning, genuinely appreciated!! I actually opted not to read this comment, I enjoy the immersion.
Ok, so if we take AI safety / AI existential risk as real and important, there are two possibilities:
1) The only way to be safe is to cede control to the most powerful models to a small group (highly regulated corporations or governments) that can be careful.
2) There is a way to make AI safe without doing this.
If 1 is true, then... sorry, I know it's not a very palatable solution, and may suck, but if that's all we've got I'll take it.
If 2 is true, great. But it seems less likely than 1, to me.
The important thing is not to unconsciously do some motivated reasoning, and think that AGI existential risk can't be a big deal, because if it is, that would mean that we have to cede control over to a small group of people to prevent disaster, which would suck, so there must be something else going on, like these people just want power.
I just don't see how the genie is put back in the bottle. Optimizations and new techniques are coming in at a breakneck pace, allowing for models that can run on consumer hardware.
Darkphibre commented on New horror revealed in sargassum blob caymannewsservice.com/202... · Posted by u/reaperducer
Seems to me like the pathogen is just adapting to have a new transport mechanism? Rather than it decomposing or making use of microplastics.
Rather than attaching to seaweed, it can also stick to microplastics and (hopefully) be ingested by marine wildlife. At least as I read the articles.
Darkphibre commented on What is the randomart image for? bytes.zone/posts/what-is-... · Posted by u/susam
It's not even a representation of the public key itself; it's the SHA256 fingerprint of the key. There's no practical way to transform that back into the key -- and, in any case, the server will send that key to any client that connects, so it's not like recovering it from a screenshot accomplishes anything.
I suppose the argument would be that the key search space is reduced. Statistically speaking, you know the weights of certain binary pairs if the image is not evenly distributed. But I'm guessing that it'd only drop the average search space by... two or three powers of two for most keys?
Darkphibre commented on What is the randomart image for? bytes.zone/posts/what-is-... · Posted by u/susam
Maybe they could use something like Chernoff faces (a method in which data is converted into images of a human face on the grounds that people are better at distinguishing faces than other images).
Heh... as someone with prosopagnosia, this wouldn't help too much. But I agree it'd help most people!!
The metric of "hauling 40 Tesla Model S vehicles up every sixty minutes." is a strange one. A '93 Honda Accord would be divisible to the minute (60/hr). Or even 52lbs/second... Though I suppose those don't sound as flashy.
Alternatively, I'd be curious how many tesla batteries in raw materials that equated to per hour.
I can't help but think, more and more often; how destructive and short sighted human technology has become. I find it fascinating to watch how ingenious we are, but equally or more terrifying. The ocean is our single life sustaining force.
I found the book Rama Revealed by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee to be an unbelievable and depressing outlook on the short sidedness of man's assault on limited resources.
And then I was driving through Phoenix Arizona, looking out at the concrete landscape and concrete riverways, and realized just how right he was.