neural_thing's comments

On: Safe Superintelligence Inc.

[neural_thing]

Daniel Gross (with his partner Nat Friedman) invested $100M into Magic alone.

I don't think SSI will struggle to raise money.

On: Sam Altman, Lately

[neural_thing]

If you read the WSJ article, his second investment was $15,000 for 2% of Stripe

[neilv → neural_thing]

Nice. A tiny fraction of the opportunity cost of working as a founding engineer, people come to you to be vetted, and you can shotgun-approach it. Most of us are in the wrong business.

On: Meta Horizon OS

[neural_thing]

Very strange how many people are here to dunk on Zuck. He's opening up an OS. THAT'S AWESOME! We should celebrate that in principle, no matter how we feel about him or VR in general.

[Oras → neural_thing]

Oculus still requires a Facebook login; don't you see the conflict?

[zmmmmm → Oras]

you really should be factually correct when dunking on something

It hasn't been called Oculus for ages and it doesn't require a Facebook login. Meta accounts are stand alone and completely different, you can create as many as you want without giving your identity, just an email address, you don't need to link it to anything.

[purge → Oras]

it requires a meta sign-in, which isn't a facebook account.

[Oras → purge]

potato <=> potato (sounds on)

[aprilnya → Oras]

no, those are completely different… a facebook account is an account on a social network that requires you to use your real name or else you get banned. a facebook account links you to your real life identity and your real life social circles

a meta account is an account that you can optionally link to their social medias, but it isn’t required

meta accounts are basically just oculus accounts

[aeonik → aprilnya]

I don't need an account to use my monitor or my TV. Why do I need one for a VR Headset?

[aprilnya → aeonik]

Because these aren’t dumb headsets that just plug into your PC. These are standalone headsets that handle the whole thing — they aren’t just a display and controllers, they take the role of the PC too.

So, needing an account for these is more comparable to needing an account to use Steam

[aeonik → aprilnya]

I don't need Steam to run my games or to pipe data into my Valve Index either.

It's still unclear to me why an account is needed. I mean, I get the profit and control motive, I just don't understand the technical reasons.

[aprilnya → aeonik]

Yeah, I guess I do agree that you should be able to just run it without an account and load apps from elsewhere

I doubt there is any actual technical reason, just profit/control. I mean, it’s Meta, would you really put it past them?

[aeonik → aprilnya]

I don't know Zuckerberg, so I don't know his motivation, nor the executives of Meta. I haven't really read any of their work.

Profit and control fit the data points, but I suppose I could "put it past them" if a better model explained everything.

[baby → aeonik]

Because you need to buy apps to make use of your VR headset. Lets put it this way, do you need an account to use your Iphone?

[kotaKat → baby]

No, in fact, I don't.

My device is not signed into any Apple services right now or any Apple IDs. Anything my company needs to deploy gets pushed by MDM or via enterprise-signed applications.

[baby → kotaKat]

You just told me that you are part of the 0.0000001% of users and so your point is moot

[alt227 → neural_thing]

Dont be fooled by the marketing language.

All they are doing is allowing some companies to pay them billions of dollars to put meta onto their own headsets. Similar to how Valve allowed a few companies to put SteamOS onto their own hardware to create 'Steam Machines'.

I cant think of a single time in history when this tactic has worked. and made a product or brand more successful. Please correct me if I am wrong.

[croes → neural_thing]

to third-party hardware makers.

And it's still based on Android.

The reason will be the same as for Android by Google: Control the market.

On: Ask HN: Is anybody getting value from AI Agents? H...

[neural_thing]

Devin is the only one that I've been able to use. Set up some projects for me, added some features. Could improve, obviously, but net positive for me in terms of time

On: Gold-Medalist Coders Build an AI That Can Do Their...

[neural_thing]

Same story as https://www.cognition-labs.com/blog

On: Jim Keller criticizes Nvidia's CUDA, x86

[neural_thing]

He isn't though. He hasn't been at AMD or Intel for quite some time.

[westhanover → neural_thing]

He sells AI chips that don’t run CUDA.

[fisf → neural_thing]

Jim is at tenstorrent now.

On: Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile...

[neural_thing]

If you switch to Gemini as your default assistant, it can't even create calendar events

[upcoming-sesame → neural_thing]

This is what I am mostly looking forward to test today. Google Assistant does such an embarrassing job that I've already given up on it

On: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

[neural_thing]

Kagi has been good apart from weather.

"LA weather" gets you to Louisiana, "SF weather" gets you to Santa Fe. Californians in shambles.

[weikju → neural_thing]

As a paying customer, I suggest filing bug reports. [1]

[1] https://kagifeedback.org/

On: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purch...

[neural_thing]

ACDSee?

On: Using sequences of life-events to predict human li...

[neural_thing]

I wonder if fine tuning GPT-4 on the records would do significantly better