Yes, its very much a part of my work setup. It transformed working so that for the first time I have a good working setup everywhere.
Its also my preferred place to consume cinema. I have a short throw projector and sound system. I prefer the AVP. The image is so crisp and the 3D is so good, that its better than a decent home movie theater.
Its my preferred place to watch F1.
Environments genuinely soothe me.
Breathe works on this platform, it annoys me on the watch.
I would watch every sport and documentary in spatial if the was a thing. The tastes have me excited for the future.
I'd love to hear more about how you use it for your work set-up. The other things you've mentioned all have me interested in getting one but I've never been able to imagine how I'd use it for work.
Very nice! I'm hoping something similar comes for wargames - the ones with hex maps and bazillions of cardboard counters. These games in modern incarnations tend to suffer from complexity and physical fiddliness, and AR/VR could help with both.
I find the easiest way of explaining LLMs to laypeople is
"Bulls*t Engine". If tuned well they're going to answer like a salesperson or internet troll: if they don't know they will BS before they don't answer. Its not hallucinating, or confabulation its BS.
That's not to say they're not useful. The ability to BS is well regarded among humans as long as you, as a consumer, have a decent BS detector. And like a good BS artist, if you stay within their area of expertise they can be really useful. Its when you ask them something that they should or almost know that they start to be full of s**.
To me, "confabulating" implies deliberately attempting to mislead. I like "bullshit" better -- bullshitting might be lying, but it can also mean simply trying your best in the attempt to please. To the degree that an LLM "wants" something, it's to give you an answer that makes you happy, even if it doesn't know the truth.
The fact that BS is also used for deliberate lying to mislead is a strike against that word. Using "bullshit" and "hallucinate" in conjunction somewhat paint a picture of the quality of the answer you get and the "motivation" used to get there.
I really enjoy the luxury of both. I have a MacBook Air that I use when I'm traveling or sick of being at the desk, but 80% of my computing is done at my desk with my Mac Studio. git, icloud, airplay and basically all corporate work happening in office360 means that I'm not really tethered to any one machine.
Why have the desktop? Power. M1 Ultra is a beast, throwing a little more money at a device that isn't going to die because the battery expired or I crack the screen made sense to me. I'm also mostly at my desk, mostly for ergonomic reasons: I hurt _less_ if I'm in a good chair where everything is tuned to my height.
Oh dear, don't tell me about the cracked screen - damaged two in 3 years :(
I like the energy efficiency of apple silicon chips, I think they've hit jackpot with that.
True, you get raw power from a high-end desktop/workstation, but cloud services have eaten-up missive chunks of of dev work. MacBook is a good medium (Jack of all trades)
Look at the UK. Tipping has gotten weird in the last decade but the service culture is just missing. The service industry is what you do in high school or college because it’s the first cost that the food service industry wants to optimize. Consumers don’t expect or demand good service, so we don’t get it.
No - we expect adequate service and no obsequiousness.
It makes us uncomfortable to be pampered or if the serving staff are overly friendly or chirpy - it feels insincere to a Brit and puts us into a defensive mode.
If serving staff are polite (or at least not surly) and we get served in a reasonable amount of time then that's all we ask for and we'll tip 10% if there was nothing wrong with the meal, or put some change in a tip jar if we only ordered drinks.
Traveling to the US as a Brit is an affront when you first experience "service culture". You become desensitised to it after a while (and can even have some fun with it) but initially it's a genuinely uncomfortable experience and it blows my mind how different "normal" can be across English-speaking cultures who share a hell of a lot of history and culture.
Post-Brexit service in London has genuinely become very bad, on average. It’s just incompetent half the time. I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into a mid-market restaurant and waited several minutes for someone to greet me. I can live with crappy service, but I don’t buy this narrative of ‘sincere Brits vs fake Americans’. Most Americans in the service industry seem genuinely to be trying to do a good job, even if there are layers of fake friendliness on top of that. Most British people in service jobs seem genuinely not to give a shit (which is fair enough - I wouldn’t either).
> it blows my mind how different "normal" can be across English-speaking cultures who share a hell of a lot of history and culture.
Is that really true, though? The US is such a mix of cultures at this point (and even the more dominant cultures have diverged so much), that I'm not sure it's accurate to say that Brits and Americans generally share all that much culture. History is there, yes, but it's been over 200 years, and history fades.
These aren't "summer jobs" for pocket money or children's first steps into the workforce, they're the jobs adults depend on to keep their rent/utilities paid and their families fed.
Someone 25 years of age and older can deliver exceptional service, they just aren't paid enough to care to.
The GP poster was referring to the age of service workers in the UK, not the US. No idea if they're accurate for the UK, but I don't think US data can be used to refute what they're saying.
'over the wire' is less obvious than it used to be.
If you're in k8s pod, those calls are really kernel calls. Sure you're serializing and process switching where you could be just making a method call, but we had to do something.
I'm seeing less 'balls of mud' with microservices. Thats not zero balls of mud. But its not a given for almost every code base I wander into.
To clarify, I think stateless microservices are good. It's when you have too many DBs (and sometimes too many queues) that you run into problems.
A single instance of PostgreSQL is, in most situations, almost miraculously effective at coordinating concurrent and parallel state mutations. To me that's one of the most important characteristic of an RDBMS. Storing data is a simpler secondary problem. Managing concurrency is the hard problem that I need most help with from my DB and having a monolithic DB enables the coordination of everything else including stateless peripheral services without resulting in race conditions, conflicts or data corruption.
SQL is the most popular mostly functional language. This might be because managing persistent state and keeping data organized and low entropy, is where you get the most benefit from using a functional approach that doesn't add more state. This adds to the effectiveness of using a single transactional DB.
I must admit that even distributed DBs, like Cockroach and Yugabyte have recognized this and use the PostgreSQL syntax and protocol. This is good though, it means that if you really need to scale beyond PostgreSQL, you have PostgreSQL compatible options.
> I'm seeing less 'balls of mud' with microservices.
The parallel to "balls of mud" with microservices is tiny services that seem almost devoid of any business logic and all the actual business logic is encapsulated in the calls between different services, lambda functions, and so on.
That's quite nightmarish from a maintenance perspective too, because now it's almost impossible to look at the system from the outside and understand what it's doing. It also means that conventional tooling can't help you anymore: you don't get compiler errors if your lambda function calls an endpoint that doesn't exist anymore.
Big balls of mud are horrible (I'm currently working with a big ball of mud monolith, I know what I'm talking about), but you can create a different kind of mess with microservices too. Then there all the other problems, such as operational complexity, or "I now need to update log4j across 30 services".
In the end, a well-engineered system needs disciple and architectural skills, as well as a healthy engineering culture where tech debt can be paid off, regardless of whether it's a monolith, a microservice architecture or something in between.
Author of the blog post here. Thanks, it was a quite long project, but the device have a pretty simple and plain architecture that made it easy. Todays consoles are much harder to hack, due to multiple layers of encryption and protection.
Yes. But CO2 is a problem because it prevents the heat from the sun from escaping (and there is 1kW/m2 of that). Without excess “greenhouse” gasses excess energy is free to radiate into space.
Current battery tech can already deliver enough charge/discharge current to act as a momentary power boost for combustion engines. Many hybrid systems act this way, providing additional acceleration and/or torque filling (i.e. delivering power in between gear-shifts of the ICE). Maybe you could recoup a bit of additional power during hard braking with supercapacitors, but in practice I doubt it's going to make a meaningful difference.
For drones I don't understand why supercapacitors with equal energy density would be beneficial? I don't own a drone, but is charge time an issue?
Drones probably care more about the output rate than the input rate? If you need a fast recharge you can change out the battery, so that has to be less of an issue. With high output, the drone can go fast, change course in a hurry, carry a lot of weight, or fly into a headwind.
Dyson fans substitute one large, slow fan, for a small fast fan and then hydraulically gear that down.
Its an interesting idea. You would definitely create an uplift if air was blown through the fan and that could drive a turbine, and that turbine would be experiencing a much higher air speed, so you might be able to avoid the mechanical gearing. You'd have less moving parts, but probably lower efficiency.
You could also combine the fans with ducting and use a single generator. Ducting also has significant losses when compared with wiring, but if the generator is your biggest expense maybe its worth it?
For me its worse when my introversion is acting up. Its like having a song stuck in your head. It really only goes away if you engage with the rest of the world.
Its also my preferred place to consume cinema. I have a short throw projector and sound system. I prefer the AVP. The image is so crisp and the 3D is so good, that its better than a decent home movie theater.
Its my preferred place to watch F1.
Environments genuinely soothe me.
Breathe works on this platform, it annoys me on the watch.
I would watch every sport and documentary in spatial if the was a thing. The tastes have me excited for the future.