Why Ad Blockers Work - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/03/06/why-ad-blockers-work/

<comment><USER2> I've said this before on HN - what we online call 'advertising', print media call 'remnant advertising'. The space that gets sold through third parties is the crap that your own sales team just couldn't manage to sell. Most print publishers would be horrified at how little attention is paid by web publishers to selling advertising. All print magazines have in-house ad sales teams because they can get higher prices and attract higher quality advertising. They understand their own niche and can establish ongoing relationships with advertisers. Advertising online is just done incredibly poorly relative to real advertising.

<comment><USER3> _Advertising online is just done incredibly poorly relative to real advertising._

Advertising online is threatening to offline advertising professionals and publishers, but these two statements are not co-extant. The reason Google is taking over the world is that when Big Brand Advertiser's outsourced advertising firm gets slick-talked into spending six figures on a single page advertisement in Vogue, nobody has a bleeping clue whether that particular advertisement actually advanced business goals or not. Spend six figures on AdWords driving folks to your landing page, though, and you can track the ROI fairly accurately.

<comment><AUTHOR> (I wrote the linked post)

This comment indicates you didn't RTFA. The entire point of it was to suggest that high traffic content sites would benefit from a way to move their own ads, but stay "above the line" and be accountable for results.

Basically, when Rupert Murdoch flips out about Google, he is on to something. He says that his product is being commoditized by its compliment. His reaction is to charge for consumers for content, and cut off air supply. My thought is that these sites should run their own ad sales, since that is where they actually generate cash. A core competency, one would hope.

Another comment here says that would generate a bunch of costs from non- standard deals. It needn't be so. There are already standard ad sizes. A middle man isn't required for standard terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Except if you follow this guy's suggestion, you now need your own sales team to sell ads for your site rather than relying on Google's/Doubleclick's/etc. And to pay for that sales team? You need to sell more and higher paying ads.. :-)

People outsource their ad sales to Google, Doubleclick and similar providers not because they can't rig up systems to audit and provide metrics, but because they can't actually sell the ad space themselves.. (it's the "outsource what you suck at" thing)

<comment><USER5> You can outsource what you suck at, but its a bad idea to outsource to someone who sucks at it as well.

I think what the post was getting at was that most people buy fashion magazines for the ads, because the ads are well crafted and made by the best photographers in the field. Some of them are pretty damn close to art. The ads are actually part of the magazine and not just a money-maker. You'd think this type of integration would be easier on the web, but no most sites would rather just throw a banner on the sidebar, another on top of the navigation and call it a day.

<comment><USER6> Pandora does a pretty good job of integrating ads into their site. Youtube had some nice ads (one for Wario game) that were disguised as regular videos, but ended up taking over the whole page. And CollegeHumor has done some similar things.

I think new media sites are getting better at this. And if the iPad (and the webapp-style magazines it was created for) ever takes off I think we'll see this sort of thing more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We (Ars) have run our own ad servers in the past. The unfortunate truth is that our own URLs will end up in the various live ad block lists within about 36 hours. People are going to block our ads (deliberately or just because their block list does) either way, despite what they might say about not liking DoubleClick or Flash or wanting text ads or any of the other technical "solutions" they clamor for.

To date, running that post was by far the best thing we've done to counteract ad blockers. We saw a measurable bump in our pageview to ad served ratio, and we sold a ton of subscriptions.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow. This is a model article. It takes two controversial opposing articles about an extremely relevant problem, points to a grey area that's worked in the past, and then, quite insightfully, points out a missing link (self-hosted advertising that is still inherently auditable to third parties) that we should fill in.

Even though I detest advertising, I think a lot of what I detest about them could be seriously mitigated by turning advertising into something a business plans and designs for. Let's get some applicants to Y Combinator next season that try to figure this out.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, it's not really a missing link. :) First, it's not that easy to run the entire ad server stack for every advertiser. Many want their own DoubleClick tags in regardless of what setup you have, since they're running campaigns on multiple sites and want to track them in the same place. We call these third party ad tags and they cause no end of technical problems, but it's not going to change anytime soon.

Secondly, running your own ad server really just guarantees that your specific ads will end up blocked by the vast majority of people running ad blockers. There is an entire Easylist ruleset specifically for site hosted ads: [https://hg.adblockplus.org/easylist/file/8811cd8afb56/easyli...](https://hg.adblockplus.org/easylist/file/8811cd8afb56/easylist_specific_block.txt)

The _only_ unblockable way of showing ads to people is by selling sponsored content. It's shady as hell, but many sites do it.

This is why we ran our little experiment to hide content for people using AdBlock Plus on Friday night. We wanted to see how many people noticed (a lot) and we wanted to know how quickly Easylist was updated (about 8 hours).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Editorial control of ads has nothing to do with the technical serving mechanism.

Self-hosting ads doesn't mean the site pays more attention to the choice of ads, any more than using a third party ad-system means that a site doesn't pay attention to the choice of ads.

If sites self-served ads, people would develop ad blockers that blocked them. Just because third-party ad server filtering is the standard way ad-blocking works now, we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking the third-party ad servers are the reason people block ads.

And of course once you break down the barrier between content and ads you have a much more serious risk of conflict of interest. Major TV stations, magazines and newspapers will often avoid news articles that are disparaging of their major advertisers, something that doesn't occur when there's a complete separation of ad sales and content provision.

</comment><comment><USER10> I used to actually like the ads when I went to the cinema. Not anymore. They have just become offensive - often there is over an hour of ads, even though I paid for a ticket. And the ads are stupid. So I consent with the post.

Also, I suspect ads work better if people actually like them.

<comment><USER11> > often there is over an hour of ads

Uhm, what?! When I go to the cinema there is maybe 5 minutes of ads, then 5-10 minutes of new movie trailers, then the movie starts. And you can come in after the ads & trailers if you want (but not many people do this).

I don't understand why people go to the cinema if they have to watch an HOUR of ads, especially because you can buy the DVD and watch ad-free. The cinemas should have an option to pay $x to skip ads.

<comment><USER12> Most DVD's include some forced advertising.

Anyway, I still go to the movies a lot. If you show up early to get a good seat you end up watching generic advertising while getting popcorn etc, then in the theater before showtime you get the same generic advertising. Then, at the stated movie start or a little after you get 7-10 minutes of higher quantity advertising, then 5 to 15 minutes of movie previews then the movie.

So, if you show up early enough and you really can watch a full hour of advertising before the movie starts. However, if you don't mind sacrificing a good seat or just go at an off time you can avoid most if not all of that.

<comment><USER13> The solution to this is reserved seating theaters. There are a couple in my area, so my friends and I will reserve seats online a few days before and show up right when the movie "starts."

<comment><USER14> I had no idea this was not standard, I have never seen a free-sitting cinema.

When you buy a ticket here the cashier asks you where you want to sit.

<comment><USER15> The opposite here, very few cinemas have reserved seating, certainly though this would present a reason to buy your ticket in advance online for a popular new movie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the solution to this problem is sponsorships. If there were a network that connected sponsors to websites it would be easy for a site to find a few good sponsors and just mention them in posts bypassing the ad-blockers and getting readers attention. It works in podcasting, why can't it work on blogs?

<comment><USER7> Because we want writers to have as little knowledge of ad campaigns as possible. We cover relatively negative news about the vast majority of companies that advertise on Ars. Breaking that firewall leads to bad things. Often very bad things.

It's hard enough when companies try and bully us by restricting access since they're not really happy with our coverage. At least then we're not implicitly encouraging authors to mind their tongues. :)

<comment><USER16> The sponsors could be unrelated to the topics covered. People who read tech news still drink soda and drive cars.</comment></comment></comment>


Dynamic Infrastructure: Implications for Network Pros  - <AUTHOR> http://www.infra20.com/post.cfm/dynamic-infrastructure-implications-for-network-pros#respond

<comment><USER2> A pay-for-play placed article in a minor pub, reflecting the viewpoint of Greg Ness, the VP/Marketing of a virtualization security product. A good example of what you wind up with if you shell out $10k/month for a PR firm.</comment>


Aaron Swartz' robots.txt file - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/robots.txt

<comment><USER2> OK this is getting ridiculous.

<comment><USER3> Agreed.</comment></comment>


First crowdfunded peer-reviewed paper - <AUTHOR> https://experiment.com/blog/65-first-crowdfunded-peer-reviewed-paper

<comment><USER2> Congrats to the Experiment team for this huge milestone! Looking forward to the first paper where the sole funding source is raised from Experiment and eventually Experiment R01s!

Here's a direct link to the proof if anyone wants to take a look at the paper: [http://www.atmospolres.com/articles/Volume5/issue2/APR-14-04...](http://www.atmospolres.com/articles/Volume5/issue2/APR-14-040.pdf).</comment>


AirAsia X flight to Malaysia ends up in Melbourne after typo - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/business/aviation/airasia-x-flight-from-sydney-to-malaysia-ends-up-in-melbourne-after-navigational-error-20160907-gratv6.html <comment><AUTHOR> Wow! mistyping a number stops the GPS, auto pilot and auto throttle from working. I'm incredibly surprised that what would seem to be a relatively simple UX / validation issue could cause such a huge safety issue; flying in the wrong direction towards inbound aircraft and the plane mistaking its location by 11,000km. Very surprised; maybe someone with experience writing flight control / management software could explain?

</comment><comment><USER2> how rediculous that this is even an issue.. why would it not create an alert as to the discrepancy.</comment>


City of San Francisco Data Portal - <AUTHOR> https://data.sfgov.org/

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of powerful things you can do just in their interface. I heard a Ted talk recently that suggested there is a lot of hard to find datasets with lots of valuable information out there just waiting to be untapped. There are several non-profit and even business use cases.

<comment><USER3> How does this compare to OpenGov's offering?

<comment><USER4> This looks like another Socrata-based offering. Socrata allows cities to dump their datasets online for consumption. Certainly this makes the data more available than ever before, but it doesn't do much to help the ordinary citizen parse and understand their own city.

OpenGov on the other hand, consumes city financial information, organizes and visualizes it in such a way that anyone can easily explore and understand their city's finances. Socrata's great if you want to get an RSS feed of all the parking tickets issued in your city; OpenGov's great if you want to actually see how your city is spending your tax dollars.

Disclaimer: I'm a designer at OpenGov :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've used some of their data for tracking and visualizing locations of methamphetamine-related incidents in the city:

[http://keithflower.org/welcome/default/meth_timemap](http://keithflower.org/welcome/default/meth_timemap)

<comment><USER6> It is... annoying that the viewport width changes both the range of dates that you're looking at and the center of that date range.

Otherwise, it looks like a decent toy project.</comment></comment>


Who made your iPhone? (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/business/2012/02/06/grant-china-sour-apple.cnn

<comment><USER2> I don't mean to sound snarky, but this video is remarkably scarce on real content. There're exactly 2 complaints I gathered from the video. 1\. Low wages (this could be relative) 2\. Bad hours (sounds like most startups I know)

Heck, she even says she's "bored" and is free to leave. While bad, I don't think this deserves the adjective "worst".

PS - Just to be clear, I'm not saying Foxconn has excellent working conditions, just that this video gave me zero insight into them.

<comment><USER3> It'd be refreshing if people running such stories would go interview some teens who work at McDonalds or at Disneyland and ask the same questions. Electronics assembly is transitional employment for young people. It's a boring dead-end job but pays significantly more than most low-skill jobs, so people put up with being bored for a few years until they have something better to do. And there's nothing wrong with that, on either end.

(The worker herself did _not_ complain about low wages - CNN did that on her behalf, neglecting to add the context that Foxconn's wages are about 50% higher than the average wage in China)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could someone please add "[video]" to the title?</comment>


The Right Tool For The Job - <AUTHOR> http://www.growinup.org/2011/11/the-right-tool-for-the-job/

<comment><USER2> php a right tool for what? the author never mentioned this.

assuming it is web dev, really, php is a tad 1990s as a right tool for the job. sure it works. sure its easy. but hell, there are definitely better tools for the job, as you progress up the development skill ladder, there are options like RoR, django, flask, pyramid, anything! PHP is well, just unweldy.</comment>


5/50/500k Startup Rule - <AUTHOR> http://blog.prijector.com/post/88659076259/5-50-500k-start-up-rule 5/50/500k Start-Up Rule
My cousin emailed me recently the subject read "Need Advice" and the mail was about him wanting to do a start-up. He is part of a large tech company and been there for 4 years.
The challenge was he had two ideas, and he wanted my help on how to chose the best idea among the two.
We met and he took me through both the ideas - I asked him the usual  questions - TAM, Competition, Penetration, Competition.
After 4 beers and loosening up a bit I told him screw all that, and what was the idea he felt very strongly about? He said it is like asking his mother which kid she likes the most… So there we were, not sure the way forward…
After a couple of more beers, i thought i had a start-up rule for choosing ideas..
1. Develop an idea with 5k Investment - define metrics
2. If the metrics checks out, Invest 50k more to build the idea further.
3. If the metrics check out you are ready for a 500k investment from an investor..
What according to you is a good rule to evaluate ideas quickly? <comment><USER2> David Binetti did something similar ($1k/10k/100k/1000k) when starting what eventually became Votizen: [http://www.slideshare.net/startuplessonslearned/david- binett...](http://www.slideshare.net/startuplessonslearned/david-binetti-lean- startup-votizen-pivot-at-sllconf-2011)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice to know! Thanks for the link...</comment></comment>


EU Commission to staff: Switch to Signal messaging app - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-to-staff-switch-to-signal-messaging-app/ <comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, the IT department of the European Parliament has forbidden Signal Desktop and recommends WhatsApp.</comment>


Ricky Gervais quits 'pointless' Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/15/ricky-gervais-quits-pointless-twitter <comment><USER2> Twitter is a mullet. It's not just a fad, but a fad that will embarrass us later.

<comment><USER3> Once I got to the point that I had my follow list well tuned for my tastes, Twitter became a very valuable source of information for me. The trick has been to be ruthless with unfollowing people if they dirty my Twitter stream with stuff that distracts me or irritates me. (It's also helpful to be on the lookout for anyone to add who might add value to the stream.)

<comment><USER4> This is a great point that I hope people listen to. You REALLY have to tune your follow list. There's no one size fits all. Put time into thinking about what's useful to you. News? Commercial announcements? Personal friend updates?

And here's something it took me a long time to learn and adapt to:

Just because somebody is really cool/smart/one of your favorite thinkers, doesn't mean you should follow them.

When I first got to Twitter, I followed a lot of the writers/programmers/thinkers I admired. And while I still admire their work and think they're inspirational people, I had to unfollow many of them for the following reasons:

* They never tweeted about the things that otherwise made them interesting to me (they have every right to do this, just not a good fit for me on Twitter.)

* They used Twitter as their venting medium. (Well-known people tend to fly a lot, go to hotels a lot, and have many opportunities to be let down by "incompetence." Twitter has been their preferred medium to talk about such.) Again, I think this is fine. It's actually really healthy to vent. But it's not so great to _hear_ it all the time.

* They were stressed a LOT. And it made me stressed. It makes sense. Productive smart people that are interesting to me are probably busy and have meetings and deadlines etc. But I felt their pain too acutely.

Anyway... I think Twitter is great. And everything I mentioned above is fine in moderation. (And it's even fine in abundance, just not for me.)

Really put some time curating your Twitter follower list, and it can be great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of people should quit 'pointless' Twitter. Each time that happens, it becomes more useful to the rest of us.

<comment><USER2> I agree -- it's the "anti-network effect". Twitter will finally be most useful at its limit of zero.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I keep my eyes open for anything that looks like a toy - and this did ([http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will- start-o...](http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out- looking-like-a-toy/)). But in my case it wasn't sticky enough.

So just like Ricky I ended up abandoning it. Maybe it works for really well networked and extrovert people but is not a universal utility by any means.

</comment><comment><USER6> Karl should twitter

</comment><comment><USER7> Personally, I've never been interested in twittering to the world or reading hundreds of tweets a day. I just use it to keep up to date with a few friends.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't have any nails, therefore all hammers are pointless.

<comment><USER9> I need a hammer, and I can only hammer on each nail no more than 2 times.</comment></comment>


Audi Creates Green Diesel Using Just Carbon Dioxide and Water - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/audi-creates-green-e-diesel-fuel-future-using-just-carbon-dioxide-water-1498524

<comment><USER2> such a useless idea

use batteries and electric motors and be done with it</comment>


Rob Pike (2001): Presentation looking back on 1 billion seconds of Unix. [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf

<comment><USER2> Graphics, at least on Linux, seem to be headed in a much better direction than at the time of this presentation. Intel open source drivers, Gallium3D, DRI, etc. all are culminating in the much-simpler, less redundant, and (imo) more Unix-y architecture of Wayland.

I also think it's interesting how he describes text files as both a strength and a weakness. I definitely agree here- grepping or awking a log file is very flexible, but ad-hoc, regex-style parsing-and-unparsing through pipes is very bad for real systems (i.e. not bash one-liners).

He also says "Drifting back towards typed, binary files (Ugly)." I would have to disagree here and say that something like a Lisp machine environment could have many (all?) of the advantages of Unix while solving some of the problems of text interfaces.

<comment><USER3> If Wayland delivers on the multiple monitor support that would help put Linux back in the running for me.

<comment><USER4> X11 has great multiple-monitor support, and has done for some time now. Unfortunately, many users are using video drivers from nVidia or ATi, and those vendors tend to have half-finished or sketchy implementations of less- mainstream features like multiple-monitor support. Like in so many things, if you've got Intel graphics, everything pretty much works out of the box.

<comment><USER3> After using Linux for a few years and learning that you had to do a bit of research and buy hardware carefully to make sure it all worked, I discovered that I could choose ever so slightly more carefully and everything would work with even less effort. I use a MacBook for my main workstation and since finding Divvy and SizeUp haven't missed Linux it all.

I just want a Unix machine that I don't have to fuss over or spend time setting up and maintaining.

<comment><USER4> Weirdly, that's the reason I switched from OS X to Debian. OS X's hardware support is fine, but I do a bunch of hobby and open-source programming, wrestling with getting stuff to compile under OS X is just not my idea of a fun afternoon. MacPorts is a joke compared to the size and reliability of Debian's package archive, and Debian doesn't make you compile everything yourself, or leave multiple, uncleaned build-trees lying around for every package you install.

<comment><USER3> That's a good reason to prefer Linux. If OS X didn't have pretty stable and easy system upgrades and migrations I would miss Linux package managers. Copying the list of installed packages to a new machine and then running aptitude update is just awesome.

I have pretty moderate package manager needs so homebrew is good enough, and when homebrew doesn't have it I just install from source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I still strongly believe that Linux strength is in so many variances. For me it is natural way of building things. Probably, slower and taking more resources, but evolved, not engineered.

<comment><USER6> I'd rather put my faith in carefully engineered, not randomly evolved solutions.

<comment><USER7> What operating systems would you regard as "carefully engineered"?

<comment><USER8> Also, perhaps OS X? If there's an OS out there where everything from top to bottom seems engineered in harmony, it has got to be OS X...

<comment><USER9> OSX has a MacOS user interface bolted on top of NeXTStep, and underneath it all there is a BSD/Mach hybrid kernel.

<comment><USER8> That may be, but a user's perception when using the OS (even as a developer) is one of relative harmony, nowadays - Apple have worked hard to unify these disparate parts and make them work well together - hell they even managed to minify it successfully to produce iOS...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I definitely feel what Rob feels, that there is work left to be done.

The question is, what more can be done? How can we bring more of the community together into a flexible system?</comment>


Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/machines-beat-humans-on-a-reading-test-but-do-they-understand-20191017 <comment><USER2> The problem with all of these tests is that they are predefined tasks with an objective measure. If you can spend a bunch of time optimizing your system against the measure, you'll eventually beat humans. Does that mean you've created superhuman intelligence? No!

A human can sit down in front of any of these sorts of tests and do reasonably well given no prior training whatsoever. None of these systems are capable of that.

Here is a challenge for an AI researcher: create a system that can beat an arbitrary, unknown console video game considered easy[1] for humans. You are not allowed to train your system by having it play video games, since this test is supposed to measure the ability to learn to play video games for the first time. Additionally, your system only has access to the I/O that a human has access to (gamepad inputs, sound and video outputs), no direct access to console memory by any means.

[1] I consider a video game easy if humans finish it more than 80% of the time on their first attempt, having never played a video game before in their life.

<comment><USER3> DeepMind's AlphaZero?

I think it's an incoherent premise to suggest that you could have a human with no contextual knowledge or experience that pertains to playing an arbitrary game. There's no blank-slate human that you could test like that. Even the act of finding food and eating, walking around and avoiding hazards, observing the movement and behavior of other people and animals..those experiences shape a person's ability to interpret an environment and model the agents within it. Those priors would be useful for any first-attempt at a game.

<comment><USER2> Oh, feel free to have your AI read all the books and watch all the films you want. Heck, you can even let your system read the game's manual, just as a kid would do if they got stuck in the game. The only restriction is that it can't play any video games as training.

The point of my challenge is to demonstrate understanding by being able to translate cultural and contextual information into a new medium. So rather than just making connections between different texts, you need to be able to take a text and leverage it to understand what's happening on the screen in a video game.

<comment><USER4> Maybe you've already learned this from the replies, but it's not really possible to have an intellectual dialog about the meaning or limitations of this research.

So while I get what you're saying and I'm sympathetic to your point of view, it's too late. The cloud bucks and 5x VC multiples that can be made on this stuff is too good. Even academics, whose whole advantage is that they can resist market forces, have very lucrative careers awaiting them if they publish the right stuff.

Then there's all the adjacent benefits. Like what good does it to be publicly skeptical of DeepMind? Google is everywhere in tech and science. Or even some random guy's paper, like where is he going to work? I can count the number of opportunities on my hand, and they all have a lot of influence in technology broadly. You don't even have to be doing AI for it to be rational to simply say, "Wow what an Amazing Discovery" and move along.

There's literally no forum that profits from skepticism. Nobody wins when "AI," whatever it is attached to, loses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like this article because it exposes the notion of computation vs. consciousness. We don't really understand consciousness but have a feeling for what it means. It could be that approximating consciousness so close, similar to the concept of limits in calculus would render it the same as what we have in terms of our inability to ever tell the difference if we cannot define it in the first place. The behavior of consciousness would be akin to approaching infinity.

<comment><USER6> If you don't know what consciousness means, is that because the word "consciousness" is vague, or is that because reality itself is vague? It is the word that is vague. By trying to build artificial consciousness, we are exploring, and creating machines that challenge our definition and understanding of the word "consciousness".

Usually we discover that the machine does not have consciousness and our definition for "consciousness" was wrong. Sometimes we discover that our definition of "consciousness" is so bad that we have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a completely new definition. Same thing happens with the word "intelligence".

<comment><USER7> It's not that consciousness is really vague, it's more that people use vastly different definitions for the same word. Medically consciousness has a relatively low bar, but philosophy loves to overload it with implied meanings.

<comment><USER8> Even medically, you're not evaluating anything about consciousness (i.e. subjective experience) directly. You're just measuring things that we think imply consciousness.

<comment><USER7> This is where it get's tricky, some people take consciousness to imply sentience which requires subjective experience others are happy to with just awareness.

A venus fly trap is aware of it's environment and has a useful response. In many peoples books that's consciousness others want to limit things to just say it's aware but lacks consciousness.

IMO, that's the kind of divide that's prevents meaningful discussions.

<comment><USER9> > IMO, that's the kind of divide that's prevents meaningful discussions.

It doesn't prevent discussions for the sake of it. It's simply that we don't know.

Any position you take in this matter is nothing more than unfounded speculation.

<comment><USER7> These are arbitrary definitions not knowable facts. People can agree that a standard red laser pointer is red, but exactly what frequency does light become or stop being red out to 7 decimal places? That's not something everyone agrees on and arguing about it is not going to change people's opinions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Machines perform tasks that require reasoning the same way airplanes fly without flapping their wings.

This philosophical question keeps on being asked . From my understanding right now I think it should be approached the same way Feynman approached quantum physics.

Just train your models.

</comment><comment><USER6> At some point we're going to start asking the same questions about humans. Do humans really understand what we read, or have we just picked up weird tricks that happen to work?

(When you read a novel, the experience of reading the novel is different for everyone. It's like being on a rollercoaster or amusement park ride. Everyone has roughly the same stimulus but a different mental landscape and a different reaction. Our response to the book is largely a response to our own experience of reading the book, and only partly a response to the content of the book itself. This distinction isn't just sophistry. Are we prepared for machines that react to books in ways that are completely alien to our own reactions?)

<comment><USER11> _" At some point we're going to start asking the same questions about humans. Do humans really understand what we read, or have we just picked up weird tricks that happen to work?"_

That question has been asked by philosophers and psychologists for a long time. There's a branch of philosophy called epistemology -- the study of how we know what we know -- where questions about whether we even know what we claim to know (or understand what we claim to understand) belong. In addition, nearly a hundred years ago behaviorist psychologists were positing that all we can see is other people's behavior, so making claims about their supposed mind states, understanding, etc, were unwarranted and effectively off-limits... and then psychology, cognitive science and linguistics had a backlash against behaviorists, rejecting their approach and assumptions, with mental states, thought, and understanding being admissible in the field for many decades now. So none of this is really new, and mountains of books and papers have been written discussing and debating such issues for at least a hundred years.

The Chinese Room thought experiment discussed in the article has been a staple of many Philosophy 101 courses, where the obvious followup question to ask (even for students just getting their first exposure to philosophy) is whether humans understand what they read to begin with. Pick up any related philosophy book and they'll discuss such questions ad nauseum.

Taking a much further step back in to history, more than 2000 years ago, the Skeptics were questioning whether we can know anything, and some were denying that anything can be known. Philosophers in the West have been debating such questions ever since. In Eastern philosophy and religion, such concerns are also very old, with a variety of people asserting the illusory nature of worldly knowledge, and positing that true reality is unknowable, or at least not accessible or limited by rational thought. Similar themes are echoed in Western mysticism.

Jumping forward yet again (forgive the rambling nature of this response), we have Descartes Duck[1], and the popular Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment view that "man is just a machine". Questions about whether we really understand or are really doing no more than a sophisticated version of what the Chinese Room or "dumb" neural networks do could be seen as modern restatements of that view.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digesting_Duck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digesting_Duck)

<comment><USER6> The Chinese room thought experiment is based on logically unsound reasoning and I don't understand why it has taken hold as widely as it has. The logical argument is that a composite object of a book, room, and person following directions cannot understand Chinese, but there is no justification for this claim—it is, as far as I can tell, a complete non-sequitur. Perhaps I just misunderstand it?

Because the logic underlying the Chinese room argument is unsound, it naturally leads to some bizarre conclusions. I think it's a bit of a tragedy that it's a staple of philosophy 101 courses, unless you use it as an example for teaching logic by dissecting it and showing how it is unsound.

Personally my view is that as much as we need our scientists and ML researchers to study epistemology, we need our epistemologists to study science and mathematics. Any coherent and comprehensive epistemological system in the future will have to somehow synthesize things like substance monism, post-Fisherian / post-Bayesian statistics, post-Popper science, and computational complexity theory. Just as too many ML researchers are reluctant to dip into philosophy and reinvent a poorer version of old philosohpical arguments, there are too many philosophers that would rather e.g. rehash some ideas of Hegel rather than step outside their own field long enough to synthesize new ideas.

<comment><USER12> Yes, you misunderstand it.

The Chinese Room is a refutation of the Turing Test and similar claims on AGI. It has nothing to do with the person in the room, but with the outside observer.

You, the observer, could be convinced by the evidence that a Chinese speaker is in the room despite that not being the case.

So you can't use outcomes to infer intelligence, and formal computaion of symbols is not thought. A neural network is still just an extremely fancy, well tuned lookup table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can go to my Google photos, type a query for a: car, bike, chair.

It will produce many images that do contain the object in question. It is amazing how well it works.

But then it will also produce photos that have nothing even similar to what I or anyone else would consider "a chair", "a bike" etc.

If the question is now: does Google AI understand what a chair is?

The answer is: obviously it does not. It does something completely different than "understanding" what a chair is. That method does work well, but it is not the "chair" we all know about.

<comment><USER14> I think your example demonstrates pattern recognition imperfection.

Understanding will start with questions like "cat sitting on the chair".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test. But Do They Understand?

I mean, I was so thoroughly trained to take standardized tests that I really _didn 't_ understand what I was reading. Through speed-skimming, selective underlining and recognizing the most probable answers, I was able to speed through reading tests without doing any normal reading.

Oh, you're talking about machines?

<comment><USER16> >Machines beat humans on a reading test. But do they understand?

I can't link directly to the result, but if you select "co-reference" from the dropdown, and enter the above text, this demo correctly links "they" to "Machines".

[https://corenlp.run/](https://corenlp.run/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."

</comment><comment><USER18> Q: "What can a human do that a machine cannot?"

A: "Answer that question."

Mark Miller pointed out, "A Computer's Perspective on Moore's Law: Humans are getting more expensive at an exponential rate."

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160316014939/http://www.caplet...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160316014939/http://www.caplet.com/adages.html)

If there's _nothing_ we can do that they can't..?

<comment><USER19> > What can a human do that a machine cannot?

The ability to think like a human. The ability to see and recognize the world around you. The ability to change your behavior. The ability to communicate. The ability to be free in a society driven by fear and self interest. The ability to look for love and trust in others. The ability to learn how to love yourself. The ability to be independent. The ability to be successful by your own choice.

A human can make you laugh, cry, scream, and cry again.

A human can design, analyze, execute, innovate, understand and apply new technology. A machine cannot do that.

\- GPT-2 774M (cherry-picked samples)

<comment><USER18> Technically correct, yes, but in a way that misses the point I was trying to make. (A way that I'm finding very difficult to articulate... Which in itself is interesting.)

If you want to know the difference between a machine and a human you need a human to compare to. (That's not quite it either, I think, but perhaps is a little less obscure?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Whenever I see claims of computers "understanding" I immediately think of the "Chinese Room" argument.

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese- room/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room)

</comment><comment><USER21> I find it interesting that so many people are having defensive reactions to this, trying to explain why they think this 'doesn't count', isn't important or significant in some way, etc. Perhaps this is rooted in some fear of obsolescence? I'm not sure.

Rather than thinking _" this machine can't do it as good as me"_, why not think of ways you could use the machine to enhance your own abilities? I think it would be really interesting to have a system at my disposal that can "read" a book and generate book reports/digests. This could allow me to spend less time reading speculatively and focus more of my (finite) reading time on books I am already reasonably confident contain what I'm after.

(Edit: maybe it's because the headline frames it as a competition, setting people to think of themselves competing with the machine, rather than collaborating with it.)

</comment><comment><USER22> Deep understanding will not come from these methods that are only trained on text. It will require multi-modal input such as images or video in addition to text.</comment>


How a Russian hacker made $45,000 selling a 0-day Flash exploit to Hacking Team - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/07/how-a-russian-hacker-made-45000-selling-a-zero-day-flash-exploit-to-hacking-team/

<comment><USER2> And Hacking Team turned those tens of thousands into millions.</comment>


Simula: A VR window manager for Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula <comment><AUTHOR> In case people are curious what it's like to work in VR, here's a demo of me using Simula: [https://youtu.be/FWLuwG91HnI](https://youtu.be/FWLuwG91HnI)

I would argue that working in VR is fundamentally superior to working in PCs/laptops. It's basically 10x the screens, focus, and work immersion. Simula's text quality is also very good (getting around the eye fatigue present in older VR Desktops).

<comment><USER2> Well looking at the video, I mean, I can have dozens workspaces with hundreds of windows (if I need to) and navigate them with moving just my fingers, whereas you are apparently breaking your neck to navigate more than 3 windows. I think what you're doing is cool and has to be done for the sake of exploration, but I would really, really focus on navigation. Also, how are you supposed to focus on text, when reading or reading or writing when it's wiggling all the time. It seems to me that VR really is for games, but for working with text I think humans are better off with stationary screens.

On a second thought: if you would make it easier to "fix" window, such that one can focus on it and work. As when you are "placing" a new window in your video, that could make it a workable solution.

<comment><USER3> Navigation is one of the things we definitely need to improve upon.

I think the wiggling is actually kind of natural -- you don't notice your head or eye movements when you do them automatically, but it might be exacerbated in VR.

The fixing is an interesting idea, we'll try it out. I'm a bit worried it might feel weird in VR.

<comment><USER4> YouTube has support for VR videos. If you could record & render such that people with headsets could watch a session, that might help with interest and adoption.

I think navigation needs eye tracking, which sadly no headset currently supports. Focus-follows-gaze would be a game changer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Uploading a YouTube VR video of a work session is a potentially fantastic idea. Thanks for the suggestion.

Right now, Simula uses "dumb" eye tracking, in the sense that windows receive keyboard and cursor focus when the user's forward eye gaze intersects a window. We also have it so that users can control the cursor focus with their forward gaze (presently binded to `Super + Apostrophe`); similarly, users can drag windows around by holding `Super + Alt` and looking around. The experience adds up to something quite productive once you learn all the keyboard shortcuts (your fingers don't need to leave the keyboard).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Been thinking about VR workspaces since sometime in the '80's. Broadly, they suck. It seems so cool but in practice VR adds pointless overhead to efficient UI. Windows with affine transformations _suck_ at their _one job_. Very few people use Second Life as an IDE.

The big win, as far as I can tell, would be to engage the user's spacial memory. (There is a small but non-zero niche for 3D visualization of complex systems: weather, large molecule, etc.) You're going to want to combine "memory palace" with "zooming" UI in a kind of pseudo-3D (I think of it as 2.618...D but the exact fractal dimension isn't important I don't think.) Then infuse with Brenda Laurel's "Computers as Theatre"...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Laurel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Laurel) \- [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/239018.Computers_as_Thea...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/239018.Computers_as_Theatre)

<comment><USER6> They might suck right now, but this is a relatively nascent application of the technology.

Wait until resolution improves and we break out of the "desktop" paradigm. We could have a collection of unlimited windows and tabs that exist in a continuum around us, and we could use gestures to organize and surface the contextually relevant ones.

We won't need a bulky multi-monitor setup, and we could work remotely nearly anywhere. Imagine carrying your workspace with you.

> The big win, as far as I can tell, would be to engage the user's spacial > memory.

Absolutely! Physical workspaces and work benches are incredibly functional because we are spatial animals. Breaking out of the limitations of using a screen could unlock more of our senses for use in problem solving.

I'm extremely excited about this technology. It will be great for software engineers, creatives (2d and 3d artists), mechanical engineering, CAD, ... you name it.

I really hope this keeps getting pushed forward. While I'm using all of my spare cycles on a tangentially-related problem domain, I'd be more than happy to donate money and ideas. This technology will be a dream come true if it continues to mature.

<comment><USER7> > Wait until resolution improves and we break out of the "desktop" paradigm. > We could have a collection of unlimited windows and tabs that exist in a > continuum around us, and we could use gestures to organize and surface the > contextually relevant ones.

You can get 90% there by just using multiple desktops IMHO, at least that's my experience.

<comment><USER8> I think in the mid-term, the big win would be ability to have 4-10 large monitors but with a cheaper, mobile, and compact solution with the eyes focused further away.

Headsets have improved almost ~2x in resolution and have halved in price and some have become wireless with better optics. A long ways from 4-5 years ago, but still need another doubling of resolution (or maybe more) and an increase in wearing comfort (lighter, more compact) plus an improvement in wireless latency and maybe a reduction from $400 to $300, and you're looking at something that would be useful just as a replacement for multiple monitors.

Plus probably improvement with registering where your laptop and mouse are automatically. In principle that could be done with a software update to inside-out tracking software.

Additionally, some improvement is possible with similar to current resolution but with improved subpixel rendering and RGB pixel layout.

Seeing what has been done with the Oculus Quest since I last checked out VR like 3 years ago has left me pretty impressed. A lot of this stuff with multiple windows in this demo could be done natively and wirelessly with the Quest (which runs a kind of Linux). The inside-out tracking is impressively good. If combined with an insert you can put your tracked controllers on Bluetooth mouse and keyboard (so the Quest can register their positions in3D space to allow proper rendering in-headset), it could give you a high productivity workstation experience just about anywhere with WiFi (could be through phone). Hand-tracking (Which works already) could even allow gestures, although I'm not sure how important that is. Can the Quest do subpixel text rendering like ClearType but 3D?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks very nice! I've been thinking about something like this for quite a while. May I suggest two additional features that I would love to see in such a window manager:

1\. A way to neatly arrange all the windows on a virtual sphere that surrounds the user, possibly arranging them automatically in a similar manner as a tiling window manager.

2\. A way to rotate the before-mentioned sphere around you without forcing the user to rotate it's head. This would avoid much of the neck strain. It could be done by, for example, holding a button on the keyboard while moving the mouse or by a simple keyboard shortcut to rotate the sphere by X degrees in any direction.

This concept could also be extended to virtual desktops where each desktop is a sphere around the next, like an onion, with the ability to "zoom" in to the next desktop.

<comment><USER10> > 2\. A way to rotate the before-mentioned sphere around you without forcing > the user to rotate it's head. This would avoid much of the neck strain. It > could be done by, for example, holding a button on the keyboard while moving > the mouse or by a simple keyboard shortcut to rotate the sphere by X degrees > in any direction.

one more thing for the author to play around with (I don't have the hardware to try it myself) is experiment with speed/acceleration -- the mouse pointer movement has speed and acceleration parameters that affect how it moves, so that if you want you only have to move your mouse very little in real dimensions to move it thousands of pixels.

It might cause motion sickness, but maybe you can get away with pitching/yawing 5 degrees for every 1 degree of head movement, so to look "straight up" you only have to tilt your head up 18 degrees. Hopefully you'd still have the illusion of being oriented in a space.

<comment><USER4> > It might cause motion sickness, but maybe you can get away with > pitching/yawing 5 degrees for every 1 degree of head movement, so to look > "straight up" you only have to tilt your head up 18 degrees.

That would cause extreme motion sickness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While the demo is impressive, I'm a bit unhappy with the naming. Mind that Simula [0] is a historically enormously important programming language. (The language, which introduced object-oriented programming concepts, developed by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, 1962-1987; Dahl and Nygaard were awarded the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and the A. M. Turing Award for this.)

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula)

</comment><comment><USER12> There's something a little humorous about a new VR system whose primary feature is how well it can display VT100 emulators.

I don't know anyone who used MS Windows when their software was all still MS- DOS programs. Windows really took off when programmers started writing programs designed to take advantage of the native GUI paradigm.

Likewise, VR is never going to be accepted as a practical user interface until it moves beyond the concept of "windows". I fully believe it's possible to make a great VR user interface, but I can't believe it's going to look anything like some rectangles floating in space.

This could be a VR-fvwm. What we really need is a VR-GTK+.

<comment><USER13> Programmers work with text and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Terminal based editors are powerful, so properly displaying terminal is a great goal.

What would a non-rectangular UI for manipulating text look like?

<comment><USER12> > Programmers work with text and will continue to do so for the foreseeable > future.

Programmers work with 2D overlapping windows and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I'm giving a criterion for when that's going to change. They're connected. You can't beat a 2D display for displaying 2D data.

> What would a non-rectangular UI for manipulating text look like?

Looked at a DOM Inspector recently (HTML)? Or Computed Styles (CSS)? Or Network Activity (HTTP)? All of the most common text formats I use, I view through a non-text interface. These aren't inherently 2D data streams -- that's just what we do because they're being put on a 2D display. All of them would be even more useful in 3D.

That's not even counting the biggest classical use for an extra dimension: time, e.g., version control history, animation state, or database transactions or migrations.

<comment><USER13> I don't really do much frontend web programming, so those examples don't resonate much with me. I see your point, though, with your last examples.

It's still very difficult for me to imagine how I would translate interfaces I'm used to into another dimension. Even if I picture something floating in front of me, I only perceive a 2D projection of it. Perhaps with clever transparency or by rotating it around I could receive more information than I would in 2D.

I feel like a character in Flatland, I stuck in my own dimension.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like this would work nicely with vim³[0]

[0][https://github.com/oakes/vim_cubed](https://github.com/oakes/vim_cubed)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing improves productivity more than vim³.

<comment><USER15> Indeed. vim³ is great, but it's hard to compete with nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks cool and will try it out. That said, these things always feel like old paradigm stuffed in to new technology. Bit similar like when film was new people kept using it to record theater. It took years to come up with editing, not having to start scene by people entering the stage etc. Now that we have unlimited spatial space to manipulate the thing we come up with is to fill it with 2d screens.

<comment><USER17> There aren't a lot of jobs that can really use the 'space' provided by VR. I think the adoption here would have to drastically outpace multiple monitors and OS workspaces and keyboard shortcuts. I can easily get to 10-20 tabs in VS Code or a browser, but my attention is only really ever on one at a time. If I have to search through them, I'll have to do that on a monitor or in VR. I might be able to organize better in 3D: HTML files on the left, CSS files on the right, JS in the middle, backend reference above, tools and console below (like 5 monitors in a plus pattern).

I'd need probably a dozen or so channels of information that I had to cycle between quickly to convince me, given I've gotten used to multi-monitors, workspaces, and keyboard shortcuts. Maybe some futuristic high level analyst job that needs to look through lots of different kinds of information (geographical, text, videos, etc) at once.

<comment><USER18> I can imagine a web editor with some "3d space" flair. You have your HTML/JS/CSS editor in front of you, but imagine strands connecting CSS rules to the HTML elements in the preview window, which is floating slightly to your right. Or the page being previewed can even be the size of a 5-storey building which seems to be standing across the street.

For another interesting use case, how about a 3d debugger that lets you follow a program flow over multiple classes and stacks...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems to me like VR could get some great usage of vector assets. Having icons and especially text render perfectly regardless of how close you get seems ideal.

<comment><USER20> Yes! In fact, games use another method that could also be very beneficial in VR: signed distance-field rendering. As far as I know it's mainly used for text, but there is nothing specific stopping it from working with other kinds of images.

Essentially you get your vector data, and map it into a texture of distance from the boundary, with positive being outside the boundary, and negative inside. Then you apply a shader to that resulting texture to make it presentable for the user. This means crisp contours/outlines at all but the most extreme proximity, and easy implementation of other common vector effects (such as bevels, shadows, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow, it is written in Haskell.

<comment><USER22> I was also impressed to see Nix package manager given first-class treatment.

<comment><USER3> Packaging this was an absolute nightmare due to various distributions shipping incompatible library versions and so on.

Nix, despite issues with everything OpenGL related, was the only thing that actually worked. And Cachix made installation really fast.

PS: if it starts building for some reason during the install process, let us know. We've tested it on various machines but due to some peculiarities specific configurations might require a rebuild even with Cachix. We can add that to the repo so that future installs and updates are faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There was a similar product for Windows in 2016: [https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/28/office-in- vr/](https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/28/office-in-vr/)

Disclaimer: I worked at its company at that time

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks like a nightmare to me, but I also prefer a single monitor with workspaces where most of my coworkers seem to feel the more monitors the better.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think that in 1-2 generations of VR headsets, we will no longer need monitors. For now my HTC vive isn't comparable to my 4k screens.

<comment><USER26> I think VR desktops look really cool, but I'm not sure I'd want to _have_ to wear a VR headset every time I used my computer. Monitors will surely stick around in parallel.

<comment><USER27> Until the VR headset comes integrated into contact lenses (my personal dream since I started needing glasses for reading passing 40).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Possibly a stupid question, but is it possible to try this out on an Oculus Quest? E.g. with a link cable?

<comment><USER29> I have Rift not a Quest so I don't know if they're the same but you can pull your desktop and every window in your desktop up in VR on the default Rift OS, even in the middle of running another VR app. I had a browser open in the middle of playing Half Life: Alyx. Did the same on No Man's Sky VR

Someone asked if I could watch all the Star Wars movies at the same time. I got 6 trailers running at once in 6 separate virtual monitors with the default built in OS feature.

<comment><USER28> The Quest runs Android and is a stand-alone device, it's not just a display unit for your PC.

<comment><USER29> Yes, but there's the PC link option for the Quest, so if you have the link do you get the same experience as a Rift including being able to pull all your Windows desktop windows individually into VR?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This looks absolutely awesome, but I think there's a bit more to be done RE neck strain and general ergonomics for the vast majority of people.

If you are at a desk and/or without a swivel chair, you're pretty limited to a grid of ~9 screens directly in front of you, and even then it looks like you're turning your head a TON to see the outer layer.

Some ideas that might help:

1) To use an analogy, could you increase the "mouse speed" of moving your head? Right now it's 1:1 with the virtual space and makes geometric "sense", but it might be nice to be able to focus on screens on the left/right by moving your head less and having your focus move just as fast. For example, moving your head 50% of what you do now to zoom over to the same place would reduce neck strain when looking at those windows, but also open up a bit more window space if, for example, you could still move your neck 100% of what you're doing and be able to "look over" far enough to fit another set of screens even further out. I don't know if this disconnect in pan speed would be disorienting, but it's worth trying. :) c.f. [https://i.imgur.com/0KCo9hG.png](https://i.imgur.com/0KCo9hG.png)

2) Keyboard gestures to "re-center" your focus might also go a long way. Perhaps instead of craning your head to look at a window that isn't "straight ahead" for a long time (as long as you're working in that window), you could do a quick glance at that window and hit a keyboard shortcut that would recenter wherever you're looking to be your "straight ahead", so you could then straighten your neck back out and continue working in that window while in a more comfortable position. c.f. [https://i.imgur.com/u6SI284.png](https://i.imgur.com/u6SI284.png)

3) Likewise, we don't all have amazing headset resolutions and there's a lot of potentially wasted space whenever focusing on a particular window that's not "full-screened". Perhaps a keyboard shortcut to expand whatever screen you're looking at to the full size of your view would be helpful for eye strain. Even something that could temporarily "pin" a window to your view (full screen and moving with your gaze) might go a long way toward minimizing unused focus/pixels. c.f. [https://i.imgur.com/yA1twKf.png](https://i.imgur.com/yA1twKf.png)

My immediate thought watching this was to mount a keyboard on a swivel chair, but I think requiring end-users to get customized hardware to take full advantage of your environment might be the wrong way to go. :)

<comment><USER31> Having spent some time in VR in the past, remapping inputs like "the mouse speed of your head" can be super disorienting when you return to the "real world," perhaps dangerously so if spent the majority of your workday in VR.

Your brain adapts, and starts to believe at a primal level that "things fall this speed when I drop them," "I move this fast when I walk", "when I point over there, it's at this angle," etc.

If anybody remembers playing GTA for too long, and later walking outside with the feeling like you ought to be able to jump in the nearest car and drive it a way, you have an inkling of how your brain gets remapped.

Remarkably quickly, moving around in the real-world can feel "off" to the same degree that it felt "off" when you first entered the VR world when you start messing with these primal feedback loops. Get ready to bump into things, and don't operate any heavy machinery if you've been in a non-1:1 VR mapping.

<comment><USER32> After playing half-life: alyx for a few hours straight the other day, my mind kept wanting to hit the teleport button to move around my house instead of just walking. It was a very strong reaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Well now I have something to use my SteamVR after I finish Half-Life: Alyx

<comment><USER34> If you're stuck I can name a few dozen other cool things to do.

It's not like Alyx is the only reason to own a VR headset.

<comment><USER35> Please do share, I am new to this world as I just got a headset.

<comment><USER34> That's a bit like saying "Just got a monitor. What's good to look at on it?" ;-)

The world of VR is so diverse it's tricky to recommend things without knowing you.

Personally I'm not much of a gamer so I tend to be interested in narrative stuff, abstract visuasation and geometry stuff or just exploring interesting environments.

And the games I do like tend to have one or more of the above qualities.

You might be an RPG fan, a strategy gamer, an art aficionado , looking for productivity or educational tools or any number of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This has been the main thing that I have wanted out of VR, and want to try whenever it is that I get one. I'm glad to see that it exists, and that it is usable for my primary goal of coding.

</comment><comment><USER37> I really wish we will soon get UI elements which are not flat, with form and function.

Volumetric video, spatial website navigation design guidelines, and augmented reality are high on m wish-list.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you elaborate what you mean by volumetric video and spatial navigation?

<comment><USER37> Video with z-depth, maybe computed from stereoscopic video. The complexity added would then be similar to an alpha channel. This would break video out of the rectangles we see in all UI design.

Wikipedia articles follow a format which makes it easy to find information. Perhaps site maps for a VR web could be arranged according to a convention so that users can easily figure out where to look for specific information. Early VR we web tried to do this by arranging content like rooms in a building, and streets, but that is cumbersome to use in practice. I think the wiki format suggests a much better approach can be created.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Seems like this doesn't have any relation to xrdesktop[1], which doesn't have mouse support! Really glad to see they have it here, any VR workspace is completely unusable if I have to use motion controls to simulate a mouse. Will definitely be trying this out tonight.

[1] [https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xrdesktop/xrdesktop](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xrdesktop/xrdesktop)

<comment><AUTHOR> xrdesktop has a very talented team of hackers working on it (so I have no doubt they'll fix the mouse issue!).

Our approach with mouse cursors has been to assign every window its own mouse cursor. This is possible in Simula since the active window is the one that the user is currently gazing at, so that -- for example -- if you gaze at one window and move its cursor, it won't affect the other windows' cursors. We also allow users to control mouse cursors with their eye gaze (presently bounded to `Super + Apostrophe`), which is a good productivity boost.

In fact, you can do everything in Simula with just the keyboard (no mouse or VR controllers needed): move windows, move the mouse cursor, click the mouse cursor, etc. Once you learn the shortcuts, it's very quick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I play a decent amount of flight sims in VR, and my eyes simply wouldn't be able to handle any more of this than they already do for the sake of game immersion. Unless theres some new headsets out there that fix this problem, I'm not sure if this will work for me yet.

I do await the day my whole system is a AR/VR hybrid, but I suspect it'll be a while still.

<comment><USER40> The tech is still getting better, so it isn't like VR headsets are stagnant technology wise. I can see resolutions getting hire and maybe using AMOLEDs for less backlighting hitting your eyes all the time.

I've been spending an hour and a half in VR everyday as part of my quarantine workout, and it seems fine, though I'm not really reading anything in that environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Does this work with Samsung Gear VR[0]? I got one for free but never really used it much.

[0]: [https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/virtual-reality/gear- vr/ge...](https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/virtual-reality/gear-vr/gear-vr- with-controller-sm-r324nzaaxar/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Very clever idea actually, major props. Unfortunately I get really sick from VR so it's not gonna be for me but I can definitely see how someone can take advantage of that. In the WFH era for people who have tiny laptops, this could do. I personally hook mine to the tv as a second screen but still... Very clever!

<comment><USER3> Or in cramped environments where you don't always have space for a multi- monitor setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> How does it get the image of an application inside of SimulaVR? Is it something weird like grabbing a graphics buffer? Or is it launching the applications as a child process so it can access its viewport? Or is it asking the windows manager? I'm not sure how this part works and am curious.

<comment><USER3> We implement a Wayland compositor interface via `wlroots`. Windows can launch like usual in our environment (i.e. via DISPLAY or WAYLAND_DISPLAY).

X11 apps are supported via Xwayland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I remember seeing something like this during one of the early MagicLeap demos and was intrigued. If the headset was lightweight enough this would rock. In that video the screen remained in 'front' of the viewer and he could swipe left or right to switch screens.

</comment><comment><USER45> I can easily see this in a Day Trader application Forex/Bloomberg/Etc you can run a live feed 4x2 type dashboard matrix with a "click"-through drill down experience or similar. So many possibilities. Nice work with big upside potential.

</comment><comment><USER46> Fantastic! Now I just need a SinoLogic 16 with Sogo-7 data gloves and Thomson eyephones. :)

</comment><comment><USER47> What about an underwater setup where the VR headset is merged into a scuba mask?

Eventually we could move on to having tubes implanted for feeding and waste. You could stay in there indefinitely, forget you ever even existed outside the simulation...

</comment><comment><USER48> Very cool work, particularly important is the text quality improvements. Could you talk about the approach to improving text quality is? Are you implementing projected font hinting by any chance?

<comment><USER3> The core issue with surface (text) quality is essentially that classic texture filtering fails for surfaces here.

So we set a higher DPI than usual, and then use a supersampling algorithm with a suitable kernel as a lowpass filter. This allows us to avoid artifacts while maintaining sharpness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> About eye-strain, how is focusing in a VR headset? Is it always a fixed point given it's really just flat screens, or does one have to focus differently when things are "far away".

<comment><USER50> To add to your questions - What about old farts with reading glasses, like me? Do they _just work_ with VR, or are they even needed?

<comment><USER3> I wear glasses and VR is fine for me. I know some people who can't use it with glasses, but I think that's for clearance reasons.

There's prescription lenses for headsets, but they're fairly expensive and IMO only worth it if you use VR a lot.

<comment><USER50> thanks. Good to know. I'll be sure to bring my reading glasses when I go try on headsets. Something I would have likely neglected to do otherwise.

<comment><USER51> I'm pretty sure you never focus on anything up close in VR. It's all "far away", as someone who is near sighted I absolutely have to use glasses in VR. I suspect but am not certain some far sighted people might not need correction, as something may seem close up but really it's just "big and far away".

Try it!

<comment><USER52> > It's all "far away", as someone who is near sighted I absolutely have to use > glasses in VR

Yeah, me too. As far as my eye is concerned, most things are "far away". Interestingly though, I can read things in VR "farther" than I can in real life. I am not exactly sure what the convergence looks like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Very cool demo but I don't want to read/write (code or otherwise) at an angle. It's tiresome and straining.

Whatever I'm editing should be frontmost and dead center, IMO.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a key binding that automatically orients the active window towards the user's gaze. If you're interested, I could make a launch flag that leaves this feature on by default, so that any window you look at automatically orients itself toward your gaze. This actually used to be the default behavior in Simula a few iterations ago, and worked nicely in most contexts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Not being able to see the keyboard would push my touch typing skills to the limit! I hope it's doable, because this seems incredibly useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> When touch typing fails, Simula has a mouse & keyboard view: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5c3Hfp8Hcw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5c3Hfp8Hcw) Right now it's binded to `Super + w`.

<comment><USER54> Amazing! I had no idea this could be done in the current generation of VR devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> One word - neck strain. If carpal tunnel syndrome is not enough we now get even more fun trying to hurt out necks

</comment><comment><USER56> I imagine the neck strain after a full work day. Ergonomics is very important. I like the idea though

</comment><comment><USER57> mm I think we have a common interest

You could reach me at: [http://tbf-rnd.life/contact/](http://tbf- rnd.life/contact/)

Or if you have some ways of contacting you I'd be very happy to do so

<comment><USER58> A tip for finding out the email of a Github user: choose any of their commits, open it on Github and add ".patch" at the end of the URL, like this [1]. There's a good chance they use a real email to sign their commits.

[1] [https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/commit/19cf46894cae1962e9...](https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/commit/19cf46894cae1962e9036052acc9c1237f4e871b.patch)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Is this for Xorg or Wayland? I couldn't find the answer in the readme.

<comment><USER3> It's based on wlroots, but Wayland is less supported than the X compatibility layer via Xwayland. That's fixable though.

<comment><USER60> Developing a VR desktop on top of X-Windows seems like driving very fast down a dead-end dirt road with a cliff at the end.

<comment><USER3> We don't actually use X as the framework. The underlying code is Wayland, and then Xwayland as a compatibility layer. It's just that most apps we test against are X11.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> The name is familiar. :-)

</comment><comment><USER62> How change would it require to run on MacOS?

<comment><USER29> It would require Apple it care about VR and gaming and VR capable GPUs. Except for a MacPro, no Apple devices are powerful enough for VR. Even the top end MacBookPro at $19000 still has an underpowered GPU below the lowest VR specs.

<comment><USER63> The highest possible price for a MacBook Pro is US $6099. How do you get $19000? The iMac Pro can get to $14,299.

<comment><USER29> Sorry, bad memory. Still that's beside the point. The point is Apple so far is neither game nor VR friendly. I hope they change that stance. I'd prefer to be on Mac 100% of the time but I have a Windows machine as well because that's basically where all VR is happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Once step closer to having an Ono-Sendai

</comment><comment><USER65> now make the windows wobbly and make it a spinning cube.

</comment><comment><USER60> Soon after the invention of the movie camera, there was a "genera" of films that consisted of nothing but pointing a movie camera at a stage, and filming a play in one shot.

That's the classic example of using a new technology to emulate an old technology, without taking advantage of the unique advantages of the new technology, before the grammar and language of film had been invented.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_grammar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_grammar)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film)

>The first decade of motion picture saw film moving from a novelty to an established mass entertainment industry. The earliest films were in black and white, under a minute long, without recorded sound and consisted of a single shot from a steady camera.

>Conventions toward a general cinematic language developed over the years with editing, camera movements and other cinematic techniques contributing specific roles in the narrative of films. [...]

>In the 1890s, films were seen mostly via temporary storefront spaces and traveling exhibitors or as acts in vaudeville programs. A film could be under a minute long and would usually present a single scene, authentic or staged, of everyday life, a public event, a sporting event or slapstick. There was little to no cinematic technique, the film was usually black and white and it was without sound. [...]

>Within eleven years of motion pictures, the films moved from a novelty show to an established large-scale entertainment industry. Films moved from a single shot, completely made by one person with a few assistants, towards films several minutes long consisting of several shots, which were made by large companies in something like industrial conditions.

>By 1900, the first motion pictures that can be considered "films" – emerged, and film-makers began to introduce basic editing techniques and film narrative.

Simply projecting desktop user interfaces designed for flat 2D screens and mice into VR is still in the "novelty show" age, like filming staged plays written for a theater, without any editing, shots, or film grammar.

VR window managers are just a stop-gap backwards-compatibility bridge, while people work on inventing a grammar and language of interactive VR and AR user interfaces, and re-implement all the desktop and mobile applications from the ground up so they're not merely usable but actually enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing to use in VR.

The current definition of "window manager," especially as it applies to X-Windows desktops, tightly constrains how we think and what we expect of user interface and application design. We need something much more flexible and extensible. Unfortunately X-Windows decades ago rejected the crucially important ideas behind NeWS and AJAX, that the window manager should be open- ended and dynamically extensible with downloadable code, which is the key to making efficient, deeply integrated user interfaces.

For example, the "Dragon Naturally Speaking" speech synthesis and recognition system has "dragonfly", a Python-based "speech manager" that is capable of hooking into existing unmodified desktop applications, and scripting custom speech based user interfaces.

[https://github.com/t4ngo/dragonfly](https://github.com/t4ngo/dragonfly)

Another more ambitious example is Morgan Dixon's work on Prefab, that screen- scrapes the pixels of desktop apps, and uses pattern recognition and composition to remix and modify them. This is like cinematographers finally discovering they can edit films, cut and splice shots together, overlay text and graphics and pictures-in-pictures and adjacent frames. But Prefab isn't built around a scripting language like dragonfly, NeWS or AJAX.

Here's some stuff I've written about the direction that user interfaces should take to move beyond the antique notion of "window managers", and enables much deeper integration and accessibility and alternative input and output methods.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182061)

>Glad to see people are still making better window managers! [...] I think extensibility and accessibility are extremely important for window managers. [...] I'd like to take that idea a lot further, so I wrote up some ideas about programming window management, accessibility, screen scraping, pattern recognition and automation in JavaScript. [...] Check out Morgan Dixon's and James Fogarty's amazing work on user interface customization with Prefab, about which they've published several excellent CHI papers: [...]

>Imagine if every interface was open source. Any of us could modify the software we use every day. Unfortunately, we don't have the source.

>Prefab realizes this vision using only the pixels of everyday interfaces. This video shows the use of Prefab to add new functionality to Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes, and Microsoft Windows Media Player. Prefab represents a new approach to deploying HCI research in everyday software, and is also the first step toward a future where anybody can modify any interface.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797818)

>Here are some other interesting things related to scriptable window management and accessibility to check out: aQuery -- Like jQuery for Accessibility

[https://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/AQuery](https://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/AQuery)

>It would also be great to flesh out the accessibility and speech recognition APIs, and make it possible to write all kinds of intelligent application automation and integration scripts, bots, with nice HTML user interfaces in JavaScript. Take a look at what Dragon Naturally Speaking has done with Python:

[https://github.com/t4ngo/dragonfly](https://github.com/t4ngo/dragonfly)

>Morgan Dixon's work with Prefab is brilliant.

>I would like to discuss how we could integrate Prefab with a Javascriptable, extensible API like aQuery, so you could write "selectors" that used prefab's pattern recognition techniques, bind those to JavaScript event handlers, and write high level widgets on top of that in JavaScript, and implement the graphical overlays and gui enhancements in HTML/Canvas/etc like I've done with Slate and the WebView overlay.

</comment><comment><USER66> htop at top,my neck.</comment>


Chemistry says Moon is proto-Earth's mantle, relocated - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/5124.html <comment><USER2> Here's the model for which this paper offers support:

[http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2016/pdf/2881.pdf](http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2016/pdf/2881.pdf) [PDF]

</comment><comment><USER3> "So another model, proposed in 2015, assumes the impact was extremely violent, so violent that the impactor and Earth's mantle vaporized and mixed together to form a dense melt/vapor mantle atmosphere that expanded to fill a space more than 500 times bigger than today's Earth. As this atmosphere cooled, the Moon condensed from it."

<comment><USER4> I would wonder how long a vapor state would last, before precipitating to liquid, and then freezing into it's final solid form.

I bet the time scales for those phase transitions wouldn't be incalculable, even if gross estimates.

So, if the moon were a vapor bubble suspended in a vacuum, how long would that last? And how long for the heat to radiate out of it?

Sounds like that process would be pretty uniform, and dependent mostly on composition. But the uniformity of the temperature bleed would contribute to the maintenance of a stable orbit.

<comment><USER5> From fig. 1 on the second page of pdf linked by _spenrose_ below, it looks like vapor cloud was more doughnut/torus-shaped than spherical (due to rotation) and lasted few tens of years.

<comment><USER6> That is shockingly fast.

<comment><USER7> Well, that's a comparatively small volume it covered in the grand scheme of things. Just think how quickly a bunch of hair and dust will clump together in the corner of an unswept room.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This made me realize that our effort to land on the moon is effectively landing on a relocated proto-Earth's mantle. On a grander scale, landing on any planet in the solar system would probably raise similar thought, but as Moon seems to be directly derived from earth, it will still mean something different for us to land on, say, Mars.

<comment><USER9> Also ironic that the fastest and easiest way to the center of the Earth (or at least its interior) is to launch into orbit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone else read this and think that those "moon landing was fake" conspiracy theorists are loving this finding? "Of course the moon rocks are indistinguishable -- they're not actually from the Moon!"

Edit: I'm not one of them. The thought just crossed my mind.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there a good theory why there's only one moon, rather than many moons? The diagrams show, "moonlets" \- what happened to them? And why didn't this new mass not just collide back into Earth again?

<comment><USER12> Yes. The dynamics of the situation would have caused the moons to merge (or crash into the Earth).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What would our gravity on earth be if the moon had not been ejected and instead retained as mass? (According to this theory.) Moreover, what equation could I derive that from?

<comment><USER14> The mass of the Earth is 5.972E24 kg; the moon 7.348E22 kg. Combined, they're 6.945E24 kg, or about 1.2% more massive than the Earh is today.

The change in surface gravity wouldn't be meaningful. Capillary action would still permit tall trees and chemical rockets would still reach escape velocity. Toss Mars or Venus into the Pacific, on the other hand, and a more interesting game develops.

<comment><USER15> Capillary action is not nearly strong enough to permit tall trees. This is a common misconception. The stronger mechanism is negative pressure, caused by transpiration at the top of the tree, pulling up miniscule strands of water under high tension.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So I vote they call this the "Alderan model"

</comment><comment><USER17> I recall reading speculation that the core of the impactor (Theia) is Mercury. But nothing is showing up when I search. Anyone else remember that?

<comment><USER18> > That debris went into orbit, then coalesced to form the Moon. And that > raises an intriguing counter-theory: maybe that Mars-size impactor, which > planetary scientists call Theia, is the object that became Mercury. If > that's correct, the answer to where Mercury's rocky outer layer went might > not be under our feet after all.

Source: [http://time.com/2958731/mercury-peculiar-solar- system/](http://time.com/2958731/mercury-peculiar-solar-system/)

<comment><USER17> Thanks.

> Earth, Venus, Mars and asteroids such as Vesta and, perhaps, Lutetia have > chondritic bulk compositions with massive silicate mantles surrounding iron > cores. Anomalies include Mercury with its abundant metallic iron (about 70% > by mass), the Moon with its small iron core, and metal-dominated asteroids. > Although a giant impact with proto-Earth can explain the Moon's small core, > a giant impact origin for Mercury is problematic. Such a scenario requires > that proto-Mercury was blasted apart with far greater specific energy than > required for lunar formation, yet retained substantial volatile elements and > did not reaccrete its ejected mantle. Here we present numerical hydrocode > simulations showing that proto-Mercury could have been stripped of its > mantle in one or more high-speed collisions with a larger target planet that > survived intact.

[http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n8/full/ngeo2189.html](http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n8/full/ngeo2189.html)

So now we have evidence that lunar formation involved far greater specific energy than thought. It seems plausible that Theia's core could have survived a near head-on collision with Earth, which vaporized both mantles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ok , you read this theories about how moon was initially formed and you think sounds plausible . But then if you think about the math behind full solar eclipse you have to question yourself what are the chances of having it .

<comment><USER20> Could you unpack this a little bit.

<comment><USER17> God, I think ;)

<comment><USER21> Oh...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deriving the Free Monad - <AUTHOR> http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/04/23/deriving-the-free-monad.html

<comment><AUTHOR> An earlier blog post explains the free monad and gives some applications: [http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/04/14/free-monads- are-s...](http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/04/14/free-monads-are- simple.html)</comment>


Edward Snowden: Whistleblower, Criminal, Nobel Peace Prize Winner? - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2014/1008/Edward-Snowden-whistleblower-criminal-Nobel-Peace-Prize-winner

<comment><USER2> "But Harpviken's latest first choice is the Japanese people who support Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution."

Is there something new that happened on the subject recently? I mean, very few Japanese alive today were alive when Article 9 was drafted, and no one alive today had any influence over the decision to include it. In fact, at the time in post-WWII Japan, I would be surprised if the Japanese had a choice at all in policy.

I guess they're giving out peace prizes for just being born now?

</comment><comment><USER3> They should award it to his Hologram / Anybot!</comment>