Schools now giving Chromebooks to Kindergarteners is some crazy unintentional dystopian shit.
"They have little badges, like they have their password on them, and they just wave it in front of the Chrome Chromebook [so] they don’t have to memorize all that early on."
If you think those kids will ever type a password in their life, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. I'd say what they are being taught is very relevant to their future.
The thing is some of these tools have enduring 100s of years. Multiple generations. Others have changed in just a single generation to be nearly unrecognizable (ipod -> iphone)and their existence can be wiped away by trend/market making/capitalism.
Learning how to use a screwdriver helps even when the electric is out, the internet is offline, etc. etc. Learning cursive may not be as immediately helpful but we have all come to accept that developing more neural pathways is important and "smooth brain" is bad
"To understand why PWM bulbs have so much flicker, imagine them being controlled by a robot arm flicking the on/off switch thousands of times per second. When you want bright light, the robot varies the time so the switch is in the 'on' mode most of the time, and 'off' only briefly. Whereas when you want to dim the light, the robot arm puts the switch in 'off' most of the time and 'on' only briefly."
It's entirely fine if the rate is high enough, but lowering the frequency of the PWM and using smaller inductors (or even no inductor at all) is a prime way to make the bulbs cheaper.
This the reverse, actually, you can use much smaller inductors the higher the switching frequency. That's why the GaN chargers are so much smaller, for example.
Smaller relative to the requirement for the frequency: you can cheap out both using lower frequency components _and_ using a small inductor than you should be for that lower frequency (or again, not using one at all at that lower frequency because it's still higher than the eye can directly perceive and you think that's all that matters)
I've been skeptical about XR headsets for years, but this post makes some really interesting points that I haven't seen discussed much, like:
"While XR devices like VisionPro do re-create home and office setups and allow for vast screen real estate, they lack a true sense of location. Evolution shaped our brains to operate differently depending on whether we’re traveling or at home. Researchers call this the encoding specificity principle—our memories link closely with the environment where they were first formed."
IE, even if the VisionPro wasn't as heavy as a sushi plate, it would still have fundamental problems!
This may the only time you ever see her talk about Meta on video, the company has enforced its NDA to prohibit her to do any publicity around her book.
Like actual creative person Ted Chiang (who moonlights at Microsoft) put it, you might be able to get an LLM to churn out a genuinely original story, but only after creating an extremely long and detailed prompt for it to work with. But if you even need to write that long-ass prompt, might as well just write the story yourself!
The thing is, that "long-ass prompt" is step 1, and LLM then draws "the rest of the fucking owl" for you. That's quite a big difference to doing it all yourself.
Wonder if they asked Iowa State University researchers about their NSF-funded study that VR makes women and girls twice as likely to get sick, because Meta sure didn't.
I get zero motion sickness and I play exactly that, FPS with stick movement.
Very early on I realized that turning with the stick gives me nausea, but not moving back and forth. So I use the stick to move back and forth, and my own human body to rotate. Can play for hours with zero issues.
It's frustrating because the two common methods for reducing motion sickness shouldn't be hard to implement, even for lazy console FPS ports. Tunneling while the user turns, and teleportation controls. All VR games should have those accessibility options. A stable +90FPS framerate and the highest fidelity VR equipment also helps.
Granted, these are still not a silver bullet for motion sickness. A lot more research needs to be done in this field.
There's research that the difference happens at the hormonal level, i.e. it's probably not fixable on a certain level.
It's mind-boggling that the industry just generally isn't interested in looking into this. I asked five top ex-Meta folks about this for my book and they shrugged or didn't answer. You can't say VR is the Next Big Thing if it tends to make half the population literally want to spew chunks.
But what response were you expecting? Plenty of men face suffer from VR motion sickness too. It's not like privileged class is marking and closing the ticket as "not reproducing".
Is it half the population? Do a third of men and two thirds of women suffer motion sickness from VR?
If so, what kind of solutions do you imagine would be in order? The only things I can think of would be improvements to optics, resolution, frame rate, reduction of latency, better motion tracking, maybe reduce headset weight... which seem like the kinds of improvements that this company is working towards?
It's not just better hardware, though. As I mentioned, two very easy solutions to help alleviate motion sickness are purely software based. If you're just going purely hardware, we already know that 90FPS is a bare minimum to keep people from puking, along with controls that have you teleport to a spot instead of jerking forwards with your analog stick.
And having the most high fidelity headset you can get. But its improvements are marginal at best compared to what really needs to be done to figure out motion sickness if you want it to actually catch on.
I don't understand why this is news. The researchers freely admit they don't know the causes either (see speculation below), and frankly Meta's probably in a better position than them to collect additional data. They won't be unbiased, but they're certainly motivated to make their product be useful for as many people as possible.
> As for Danah Boyd’s speculation that the gender difference in VR nausea may have a hormonal component, he says there’s not enough data to answer that question, but there are some intriguing findings:
> “I do not know of any good studies on cybersickness and hormones,” as he puts it. “There has been some research on motion sickness and hormones, and sometimes we extrapolate (cautiously) from the motion sickness literature to cybersickness. For example, Golding, Kadzere, and Gresty (2005) reported that motion sickness is related to hormonal fluctuations during the menstrual cycle. However, they also note that the effect of hormonal fluctuations was much smaller than the gender effect itself, so it is not likely to be the primary explanation.”
> He believes any gender difference might be related to social differences, and less central to the overall challenge of overcoming VR nausea:
> “[S]ome of my research on the gender effect indicates that 1) the effect is relatively small, and 2) the effect is partially explained by differences in prior experience of visually-induced sickness (e.g., screen-based games, movies). It's certainly a topic worth investigating, but it's worth a reminder that there are vast individual differences in cybersickness susceptibility even within a given gender.”
The crazy thing is the co-founder of Second Life is the one who got Zuck to buy Oculus in the first fucking place! But they ignored what Cory told them about virtual worlds when building HW.
"They have little badges, like they have their password on them, and they just wave it in front of the Chrome Chromebook [so] they don’t have to memorize all that early on."
!!!