pertinhower

On my Meta Quest I am positively begging for decent content worth viewing in 3d. Here we have a bookful of 3d astronomy. Can I not get something like this in VR? Why is VR languishing? How is it that paper and eye-crossing are still the leading technologies for displaying this 3d content?

Yes, but if a chicken and a half laid an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long would it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all the seeds off a dill pickle?

Quote: “ Inspired by the concept of ‘a piece of cloth.’” Is this some kind of joke? If it were April 1st I’d assume the whole article is meant for comedic effect.

Absolutely. In the 2000s the Unreal Engine had a price tag of half a million dollars up-front plus royalties (I don't remember the percentage) on the back end. That these companies are giving their engines—even their source code—away essentially for free indicates either that (1) engine sales was never a very lucrative line of business or that (2) the promise of establishing your technology as a defacto game engine standard—the Panavision of games—is even more appealing than immediate revenue.

This is an unusually political post to have risen so high on Hacker News. Is that because of the significance of email to the story? The use of email in this case is not very technically interesting. Or is there some other attraction?

I don't mean the TV itself. I mean TV programming.

"We will significantly reduce preloaded applications." As a primary Mac and Linux user, it is absolutely incredible to me that any PC that isn't given to customers for free would have more than zero preloaded so-called applications by default. I accept that my television, or Google, or Facebook dumps advertising on me, because otherwise how would they monetize? But since when did it become okay to load multi-hundred- or thousand-dollar devices, for which customers have paid dearly, with advertising and bloatware that benefits only the manufacturer? Are you guys paying for this crap?

Yeah, I'm not buying it. I have two complains about this article in particular and this kind of "science" in general.

1. Their conclusion is unverifiable. Science is about hypothesis, experiment, and falsification in a reproducible context. When someone says, "I can look at these tree rings and tell you whether rats or marmots spread the plague," I say, "Cool! Show me the results." And when they say, "What do you mean results? I just mean that we infer from the rings to the marmots," then I say, "Okay, well I just infer from planetary alignments to mood swings." Speculation is part of science. Speculation is not science.

2. An extremely strong inference is, by definition, acceptable without further evidence. You don't have to show me an experimental result if you can show me a strong logical case, with very strong causal or inferential links from one piece of evidence to the next. Although you can't reproduce for me a precise result showing that the Grand Canyon was the result of many, many millennia of erosion, you can show me over observable spans of time the general erosion rates in soil of that type with rainfall of that type and I'll accept your inference that many millennia were involved in the Grand Canyon. But tree rings in Asia to disease vectors in Europe? Give me a break.

Help me. I want to care about this. But what does this model have that will make a substantial, observable improvement over my—say—iPad 3?

I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested? I'm guessing very small (even assuming that many hide it and so you're knowledge is substantially skewed). So maybe that's because of your high/squeaky-clean socio-economic class? No: imagine yourself in any class you care to. Unless that class is much, much larger than your "real" class, then it would have to have an astronomical arrest rate (80%?) to compensate.

I wanna see the data.

This is, among other things, a terribly confusing situation. Who's to blame? The person who asks to have results expunged? The law that requires Google to comply? Google for complying? Or no one—is the right thing being done, the "pen" of the Internet being dulled back into a pencil?