tatrajim
Joined 10 years ago
Karma
405
Submissions
212
Member since
May 9
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
The AVP has greatly enhanced my productivity through access to a large virtual mac window inside a variety of environments, facilitating deep focus while reclining, sitting outdoors, or traveling. And the 3D image conversion of treasured photos is remarkable. On the whole, I've used it near daily for over a year and a half, and marvel at how many naysayers there are.
Comment · 1 year ago
Famously used by Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow. The notion of obtaining a distribution of random rocket attacks blew my young mind and prompted a life-long interest in the sturdy of statistics.
Comment · 1 year ago
They burned the church and tried to break into the White House forcing an evacuation of the president! The 1/6 riot, by contrast, was by turns both violent and civil, but no one was armed and attempting "to overthrow the election results". In fact the Trump plan of continuous debate over the merits of the election was thwarted by the riot. It was diametrically opposed to his interests and ended up favoring the Democrats. Many questions still linger over the identities of major participants, including the "pipe bomber" and the "scaffold commander", whom the FBI unaccountably never identified. Note that the 1/6 participants were relentlessly tracked by the state for years by some 6000 FBI agents and tried in DC courts, unlike the 2020 rioters aiming to storm the White House.
Comment · 1 year ago
Remember May 31, 2020?
"Secret Service agents rushed President Donald Trump to a White House bunker on Friday night as hundreds of protesters gathered outside the executive mansion, some of them throwing rocks and tugging at police barricades.
"Trump spent nearly an hour in the bunker, which was designed for use in emergencies like terrorist attacks, according to a Republican close to the White House who was not authorized to publicly discuss private matters and spoke on condition of anonymity. The account was confirmed by an administration official who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
"The abrupt decision by the agents underscored the rattled mood inside the White House, where the chants from protesters in Lafayette Park could be heard all weekend and Secret Service agents and law enforcement officers struggled to contain the crowds."
As near as I can find, some 6 people were arrested for this violent protest by the Secret Service, and some 16 by DC police. Is is vanishingly difficult to find if anyone was subsequently charged and convicted for this event, which was without parallel, at least in my lifetime. This followed the events of May 30, 2020, when the Church of St. John's Episcopal In Lafayette Square, across from the White House, was sent on fire. To date it seems that no one has been arrested or charged for this destruction.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-george-f...
Comment · 1 year ago
A fair point. Amidst the nationalistic preening over DeepSeek, the question of what the unintended consequences of an all-out AI arms race are lies fallow. Apart from everything else, it is tantamount to an information war, with competitions versions of the human past vying for supremacy.
Comment · 1 year ago
I've lived and roamed across much of China, studied in Taiwan and South Korea, and know Japan and Hong Kong well. Many Chinese are indeed great, but in the end the Chinese tendency to game every possible system, make clever use of naive 老外 to advance themselves, and just shamelessly appropriate IP ("hey, they did it too in the 18th century, and remember the Opium War!") has massively turned me off China generally. Not to mention the 50,000 RMB bounty now offered in China for reporting a "foreign spy".
The recent TV drama 赤热 (English title: Silicon Wave, available with subtitles on youtube) shows the whole China nationalist tech narrative in vivid relief, including "veiled racism" against Americans, e.g. the depiction of the Chinese protagonist's American mentor at UC Berkeley.
And just look at the history and career of Li Kaifu and the cavalier way he has treated all the benefits he received in the US turned into promoting the glorious 祖国. Foolish 老外 indeed.
Comment · 1 year ago
Is it "veiled racism" to point out how China continues to wield the great firewall that effectively blocks most internet users from outside news and entertainment while Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan et al. do not? The basic world view in China of 天下 -- the universal dominion of China. Hence the general unpopularity of China in Vietnam, South Korea, and japan.
Comment · 1 year ago
No, it's still rolling out globally, and has a growing group of owners, particularly using AVP for productivity applications after the recent system software update allowing ultrawide screen sharing of mac screens. See /r/visionpro on reddit for developer chatter and the latest developments.
Comment · 1 year ago
Perhaps around 400K sold? Production to date is said to be limited by Sony. The AVP is very much alive, especially with the recent system software update allowing ultrawide viewing of mac screens. See the reddit group /r/visionpro for lively discussion of the latest developments.
Comment · 2 years ago
Not sure about this. There have been multiple Congressional hearings that produced continuing nuggets of information, provoking yet more speculation.
And in the past 24 hours ABC had a rather shocking interview with the local police revealing that: "The local SWAT team assigned to help protect former President Donald Trump on July 13 had not had any contact with the Secret Service agents in charge of security before a would-be assassin opened fire, those officers told ABC News. . . . We were supposed to get a face-to-face briefing with the Secret Service members whenever they arrived, and that never happened," said Jason Woods, lead sharpshooter on the SWAT team in Beaver County, Pennsylvania."
This report seems sure to fuel further rounds of speculation concerning the abnormal security arrangements.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/failure-communication-local-...
Comment · 2 years ago
Gives power to the permanent committee staff members and lobbyists who have institutional memory and social networks. No legislator could possibly understand all the nuances of policy with such short limits. Four terms, say, as a Senator and eight as a House member would be more practical.
Comment · 2 years ago
And, on a related note for education, AI is quickly obviating the need to master and plumb the depths of foreign languages. Dating myself, doubtless, but as an undergraduate, it was an unalloyed joy to study ancient Greek and read Plato and Euripides in the original, however haltingly. And later Korean, Japanese, and Chinese beckoned providing a lifetime of rich understanding of life outside the confines of English.
For Americans, at least, perhaps ours is the last generation that will seek rewire our understanding of reality through linguistic hacking.
Comment · 2 years ago
The shift in the US from the 1980s to banning forced retirement age has only added to the trend toward accruing and maintaining status through navigating an established, and increasingly sclerotic, hierarchy. The quest for lifelong tenure has become increasingly and necessarily political as the length of future job security has extended into one's 80s.
Comment · 2 years ago
Thanks be for online investing. It's been my place of economic refuge to fund my lifelong impracticality.
Comment · 2 years ago
The ABC Conjecture and Mochizuki's IUT theory comes to mind.