I remember the excitement around VR back in the late 80s. These new polhemous motion tracking devices and LED microdisplays were going to change the world! Except the technology was expensive and ultimately it kinda sucked. It was barely used outside academia, interest died off gradually and eventually it was tacitly acknowledged to be going nowhere.
Then 30 years on Oculus was founded and everyone who'd never used one of the old VR systems was super excited. To be fair, the technology was a step better - much cheaper and more accessible, low motion input latencies, better resolutions. But ultimately it's still not really quite good enough and it seems that the hard reality is it's not going to make its way into mainstream consumer everyday use this time either.
> But ultimately it's still not really quite good enough
I'm not sure what use cases you've tried it, but I'm "playing" a bunch of flight simulators, and after getting used using a HP Reverb 2 for all my simming, it's basically impossible to move back to "flat" screens again. It gives you a completely different depth-perception that is as vital when you fly as when you race, so basically any simming is a lot easier and more fun with VR. But again, if you make the plunge into VR simming, it's short of impossible to go back to "normal" afterwards.
> hard reality is it's not going to make its way into mainstream consumer everyday use this time either.
Yeah, simultaneously I agree with this. VR-in-motion (so not sitting still) is still pretty bad, and the setups you need for good performance are pretty expensive, so it's unlikely to break into mainstream unless some breakthrough is being made. With that said, there are niches that are very well served by VR and personally I guess I hope it'll be enough when the mainstream hype dies off.
I disagree, I played a lot of Elite: Dangerous with a VR headset and while I completely agree about the scale, it was so much hassle to get in and out of the goggles and get everything set up and then to be totally cut off from the real world for any extended period that I stopped using it.
It's been in the closet for a few years. Beat Saber is fun too, but.. I guess if you're the kind of person who has a sim setup in a dedicated room in your house it's still appealing but for anyone remotely casual it's just not worth it
VR has moved from "only enthusiasts can even consider it" to "viable niche". That's a huge step up... viewed logarithmically you could even call it "halfway there". But it definitely needs a couple more revs before it gets to "mainstream accessible".
IIRC there was a brief VR spike around early 2000s. I remember trying out Duke Nukem in a helmet and a three-button controller.
And then a bit later, there were 3D glasses, ones that synchronized with the high-rate monitor to show each eye its respective right and left frame. The demo for it at the time was Rogue Squadron and I thought the effect was amazing.
AR is the true future, but we're a materials science breakthrough away. You need waveguides or some similar thing that generates holograms that's cheap, has a wide FOV, and works in bright light. HoloLens and Magic Leap came close, but people couldn't figure out how to make enough money off the devices, apparently.
I don't want to see sports teams playing on my coffee table. I don't want to see recipes dancing in front of me while I wear glasses in front of a stove, the humidity of boiling water vapor sticking to plastic lenses. I don't want people dicking around with headwear while they're supposed to be driving. I don't want to see contact and bio information hovering above my friends. And I certainly don't want to see ad overlays throughout daily life.
I want to escape life and enter fantasy worlds. I want to be transported. I want to see the Matrix unfold in front of me. That's about as far from AR or XR as I can imagine.
His estimate the LCoE of an electric vehicle with lithium batteries is off by a factor of ten. My back-of-the-napkin calculations make it to be $0.22–0.25 per kWh.
Let's compare two vehicles - an EV car vs an ICE car - in terms of their energy costs per mile, including energy storage. Using the above numbers the EV comes out to around $0.07 per mile including the lifetime costs of the battery, and the ICE comes out to around $0.125 per mile.
In short - his numbers are completely wrong and when calculated correctly prove the opposite of what he's trying to say.
> Let's compare two vehicles - an EV car vs an ICE car -
Ok, but TFA is about planes (and boats), not cars. That's a big caveat because neither planes nor boats can do regenerative braking, and planes need to be light. Boats can get big enough to float even if the power plant is heavy, though there is a maximum to what is reasonable.
Another way (from first principles): Assume you buy two cars per driver. The driver parks one car at their solar panels at a time, so one is available for use 100% of the time, and at least one can charge off the panels 100% of the time.
Assume a 10kw solar system with no batteries, but with a level 2 charger. That costs $28K this year. Assume $50K per car. The system cost is $128K.
Assume the climate is such that you can charge the cars at 6kw (max output of the charger) for an average of 8 hours a day (pessimistic in summer, optimistic in winter).
This setup should last about 10 years. (Or sell the cars after 5 and get money back for new cars.)
That’s 365 * 10 * 8h * 6kw usable for the cars, or 175.2MWh, giving us $0.73 per kWh. Clearly the sky is falling. I’m going to get a steam engine for my buggy!
I forgot to figure the depreciation of the cars. We wasted one because this scheme is dumb, so the depreciation for an equivalent ICE car would be zero. For the other car, I think it’s reasonable to assume 90% depreciation. Say the ICE car depreciates $40K. We can sell the two EVs for a total of $10K. Now the total cost (sans car) for the system is $78K, or $0.445 per kwh — cheaper than California’s grid.
I forgot to figure interest on the $78K of capital. At 8% average return, that’s a bit over 2x, getting it closer to a dollar per kwh.
For a 4 mile/kwh car, that’s $0.25/mile. Of course, if you assume the existence of civilization, then the price drops a lot. For instance you could only buy one car, and you could size the solar smaller, or also plug the house into it.
Anyway, in my hypothetical mad maxian hellscape that’s experiencing healthy, steady economic growth and has access to cheap refined gasoline, he’s still off by a factor of 2.5x.
In my country (Australia), companies have been found guilty in court when making that claim. It considered false advertising to claim your product is "unlimited" when it is not, in fact, unlimited.
In the end it was a dumb comment by one of the Go devs which got jumped on by all the Go haters. Contrary to the popular meme, Go's not just for mid-tier programmers - it never was (and to be fair to Rob Pike, they've twisted what he said). But sure, it makes it easier for programmers at all levels to get started, and to get real work done. That includes advanced people as well as the inexperienced.
I think the ultimate goal of making a programming language is to cause the least friction for a programmer trying to get real work done, and in my experience Go's great from that point of view. Language bells and whistles may be exciting, but often don't pay their way in terms of real world productivity, IMHO.
I have never understood why go fans think “make it easier for beginners” is an important feature. I mean, sure, it’s nice to have, but not at the expense of anything else — your career lasts 40 years; why optimize for the first month experience?
Pretty much every reputable computer scientist has been saying for the last 70 years that the most important thing in the entire world is simplicity and ease of understanding.
I like that meme graph with the junior programmer liking the simplicity, then the mid level programmer liking the power, then the senior going back to liking the simplicity.
> I have never understood why go fans think “make it easier for beginners” is an important feature.
Well, in the real world a lot of people have to work on teams where many of their co-workers never grow beyond beginner level. So anything that can be done to reduce the burden of having to deal with them is welcome. Not everyone gets to sit in the Silicon Valley ivory tower beside the greats.
> your career lasts 40 years
40 years is a peculiar number. If it is your passion, you should easily be able to see 60-70 years (assuming you live to an average age), and if you are only in it for the paycheque the comparatively high salary offers you retirement long before 40 years comes around.
In the time you get everyone on the team to agree whether you should use Maven or Gradle, which testing framework to use, or figure out how to autoformat your code, your Go program will be done.
* everyone agrees to use `cargo test` (what even is a “testing framework”)?
* everyone agrees to use `cargo fmt`
What’s the advantage of go here?
By the way, the formatting situation is actually worse in Go because there are both gofmt and gofumpt used in the wild, at least gofmt has different behavior depending on different flags, and there are additional linters people use to e.g. ban long lines that for some reason the formatters don’t cover.
It may have been a dumb comment, but there's some truth to it. Go was to solve a Google problem of devs that needed to write system management programs, not systems themselves. The choices of Python or C/C++ left a large gap that Go filled.
I used Go for most of my own projects and as I got deeper into it began to realize its warts, but the worst was that you can't get performance by "share memory with communicating"--channels are slow. Reading the non-idiomatic stdlib implementation shows the difference of who it's made by vs who it's for (which isn't the authors).
> Go was to solve a Google problem of devs that needed to write system management programs, not systems themselves.
What's the difference? The opposite, so to speak, of system is script, and I don't think system management falls into the scripting category. A system management system is a system too. But that isn't what they were talking about anyway. They were talking in the context of building servers (think like a HTTP server). That was clearly spelt out.
I understand that the Rust crowd has reimagined system to mean something akin to kernel, much like they have reimagined enums to be akin to sum types. Taking established words and coming up with entirely new meanings for them is what they like to do. But that reimagining has no applicability outside of their little community. This is not how the industry in general considers it.
It’s funny you mention that: my on and off years with go have locked a couple (possibly wrong today) ‘rules’ for go; one is that channels are crazy slow, and another is that defer does not always work like you imagine it will.
There was a sort of misunderstood dream in the early days of go that it would make fanning out and using your 24 cores easy as empowered by channels: this is still not easy in go, although it may be easier and less error prone than c.
In the intervening decade, python has made say a parallel for loop immensely easier.
> Nobody is compiling an entire Linux distro on something like a Raspberry Pi 3.
The RISC-V mainboard for the Framework is 4-core 1.5 GHz with 8 GB of RAM. That's leagues better than the hardware that people were compiling Linux on in the 90s and early 2000s.
Unfortunately software has gotten so much worse that hardware improvements simply can't keep up. That's also why Linux doesn't enable certain mitigations by default.
The U74-MC on that board’s JH7110 SoC is two 64-bit dual-issue cores at 1.5 GHz, so it’s fair to compare it with the four 64-bit dual-issue cores at 1.2 or 1.4 GHz on the RPi3’s Cortex-A53, or for that matter with something like a 1.0 to 1.4 GHz dual-socket Pentium III system from the early oughts (which would use the P6 32-bit dual-issue microarchitecture from the Pentium Pro).
They're targeting them, though. I used to use the Rasberry Pi Zero line for embedding into projects, even though it is much, much more difficult to get than the Pi Pico, because the Zero series can run Linux, opening up a lot more software.
I've switched to SBCs based on the Bouffalo Lab BL808 and more recently Sophgo SG2000 SoCs, which are in the same form factor and price range as the Pi Pico, but run full Linux. They're nowhere near as fast or capable as a desktop, laptop, or even phone/tablet processor, but they're much faster than the RP2040 and much easier to port to. I even compile target applications on them, although not the Linux kernel itself.
I love my little $5 duos! 64 MB RAM is actually enough to run emacs and gcc right on the board itself for programs you write yourself -- it's as much RAM as we had on PCs and Macs, as standard, as recently as 1998 or so, and that was on 200 or 300 MHz machines, slower than a 1 GHz Duo (even allowing for them being mild superscalar/OoO). Not to mention my SPARC ELC and SGO Indy, both of which have 64 MB RAM (and 33 and 166 MHz CPUs respectively. Those used to be serious machines!
With the standard Buildroot image you need to statically link things, but you don't have to build specially in many cases .. for example just copy qemu-arm-static, qemu-x86_64-static etc over from a standard RISC-V distro and they run fine on the Duo.
In the early development phase, you'd compile the OS on a big non-RISCV desktop PC and target those little SBC boards, then flash it onto them and boot and test. In the prototype phase, you get the real hardware, but will probably still compile from something else. By the time the real hardware is ready to be released to the public, the OS for it will probably already be finished and ship with it.
Cross-compilation is much more hassle than native, especially with GCC. It's feasible for individual apps, but I would not want to set that up for an entire Linux distro.
Sure, but a new architecture is big risk reward. I expect the first companies to start selling consumer risc-v products will have a big budget to set up a datacenter, to remotely flash racks of their devices and run automated tests as their big team develops the risc-v linux distro it will run. Perhaps a nintendo switch 3? Samsung smartphone? Quallcomm smart toaster? Who knows. But it will probably be some big company on https://riscv.org/members/ who has an axe to grind with ARMs licencing fees, and is willing to go to this hassle.
Your comment seemed to be claiming that cross-compiling an entire operating system was infeasible. My comment was that it's exactly what big companies do.
There wasn't any evidence that actually happened. It appears that it may have been fabricated by the same investigators that later robbed him of some millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. Then when it went to trial the murder-for-hire charges were completely dropped due to lack of evidence.
He was convicted of:
1. Conspiracy to traffic narcotics
2. Continuing Criminal Enterprise (CCE) (sometimes referred to as the “kingpin” charge)
3. Computer Hacking Conspiracy
4. Conspiracy to Traffic in Fraudulent Identity Documents
5. Money Laundering Conspiracy
I think they were dropped because in 1 out of the 6 cases, the investigation was tainted because the associated government agents committed their own crimes, and also maybe but I can't prove it everyone thought that prosecuting someone who has been sentenced to 2 life sentences + 40 years is a waste of time.
They dropped the contract killer charges - it appears that they were fabricated to try to turn public opinion against him and get him jailed. But as soon as they went to trial the charges were dropped for lack of evidence.
They were not fabricated although it may have been challenging to secure a conviction and in any event Ross was going to be sentenced to many decades in prison.
Do you have a reference which shows they weren't fabricated or is this just your opinion? Because I feel if we know for sure they weren't fabricated they'd have at least proceeded to trial with it. Particularly considering they claimed they posed as hit-men to entrap him, which would be solid evidence. But later they dropped that claim entirely.
The point is to stop them using highly polluting cars OR stop driving altogether OR something in the middle. So the person you're responding to is right. The "older people" were saying in a roundabout away that they'd rather stop driving than playing along by getting less polluting car. And the correct answer to that is indeed: "you've made your choice, that was the entire point".
> The point is to stop them using highly polluting cars OR stop driving altogether OR something in the middle.
You can get a compliant car for as little as 1000 pounds. Virtually all gasoline powered cars after 2010 are compliant. It's not about stopping people driving altogether.
I'm not british either, but I understand the culture here is to disparage and discriminate against poor people in a slightly more polite and indirect way.
I don’t live in London though and generally don’t drive much either. When I visit people In London I either take the train or drive and pay the charge.
It is more expensive but for the amount I have to drive in London it’s fine for now.
All the diesel cars bought in the mid aughts when the fuel was still considered environmentally friendly thanks to its lower CO2 emissions.
Then again it's not like there are no buyers for the vehicles - my relative recently bought a 2012 diesel VW Golf from, apparently, a Londoner or someone who drives there frequently and didn't get that huge of a discount on it.
Sell the diesel, buy gasoline and enjoy not paying as much as you lost on the sale, only every year.
ULEZ and similar scheme are not about vehicle size. They are about Euro-spec of the engine.
There is a very vocal opposition against those: big recent SUVs are compliant, but small old cars are not, which goes against how people perceive their respective emissions.
In general:
- any EV or hybrid is OK
- petrol cars are OK if they're not too old (depending on Euro rating of the engine, I also have a 22 yo compliant petrol car, though a car from the same year could be non-compliant if the engine has a lower Euro rating)
- diesel cars need to be recent (in general equipped with DPF and other emission-control equipment that's become mandatory to pass more recent Euro-specs)
Sure. Wouldn’t drive an enormous car. I live in the county, would struggle on the narrow lanes with one of those Chelsea tractors. Big cars are only needed in the city.
Yeah, the whole "I can't afford to drive due to the ULEZ" argument really used to annoy me ... I have a 2005 Toyota (my first car, which I can't emotionally get rid of it), and it's ULEZ compliant, and it's value is probably £500 ... no excuses in my books, especially as second hand car prices are plumetting (where I am anyway).
If you can't afford a £500 car, you probably shouldn't be driving anyway.
"If you're not driving by the age of thirty, you've failed in life" was a quote I believe was attributed to Thatcher. She did some great stuff, but I'm not sure I agree with that one.
You might want to re-read what I've wrote. You've entirely misconstrued it ... (and I'm in the 'pull down the Thatcher statues and dump them in the ocean' brigade).
Then 30 years on Oculus was founded and everyone who'd never used one of the old VR systems was super excited. To be fair, the technology was a step better - much cheaper and more accessible, low motion input latencies, better resolutions. But ultimately it's still not really quite good enough and it seems that the hard reality is it's not going to make its way into mainstream consumer everyday use this time either.
I can't wait for round 3 in 2040 or so.