Unless you are standing still (like sitting or playing Beat Saber), that cable really is annoying. You can't spin around for instance.
As for wireless communication. I also thought it would be easy, but the lack of options despite the demand in the Oculus Rift / HTC Vive days proved otherwise. There have been some attempts, some worked, none of them great, and they usually involved hot hardware and batteries.
Steam Frame is apparently the best at being a wireless, PC-driven headset.
As for standalone functionality, my guess is that a headset hardware powerful enough to deliver a good wireless PC VR experience is powerful enough to work as a standalone headset for less demanding applications.
What make you think it is vibe coded? There is no mention of genAI being used, and the methodology looks more consistent with hand-written code he actually understands.
The firmware on these things is terrible, also larger e-mopeds btw. Like a 2 second delay on the throttle after breaking (fun when cornering!). Happy this Egret GT E-Scooter didnt turn into..’Regret’
Net neutrality means that providers don't discriminate based on the kind of traffic, that you get internet access, not just access to particular services.
They can absolutely meter and limit your connection as long as one byte is one byte, no matter its origin. They can also discriminate based on the technology they provide (4G, 5G, fiber...). Net neutrality is not about preventing "pay to win", obviously, you can get a better connection if you pay more. It is about fair competition between online services.
The problem with psychoactive drugs, as I understand it, is not the lack of positive results. There are plenty of well recognized cases.
The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why. We can't tell "in your case you should take this dose, the risks are quantified and acceptable, and this is what we should do if things go wrong". And it is not for the lack of trying.
People tend to forget that LSD is a product of "big pharma" and they definitely tried to make a safe and effective treatment out of it, so that they could make money out of their patent.
The "war on drugs" certainly didn't help, but research never really stopped, but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards. And by the way, many controlled substances are used in mainstream medicine: heroin, fentanyl, amphetamines (incl. meth), cocaine, ketamine,...
> The "war on drugs" certainly didn't help, but research never really stopped.
This is false. The scheduling of psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD was catastrophic for medical research in the United States (as well as in many other countries) from the early 1970s until the mid-2000's. Even today, research on psychedelics is challenging.
> but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards
The elephant in the room is that psychedelics don't really fit into our existing framework around development of psychiatric drugs. For example, you can't really run a RCT, because it's completely obvious to the patient whether they've received the drug or a placebo. The concepts of set and settings, and the importance of "guides" in trials, prove challenging as they introduce highly subjective elements. I would frame this as more of a mismatch than a case of "modern standards being better" - the jury is still out on whether psychedelics will prove effective, and we're still trying to figure out how to "prove" that.
There are plenty of other cases (e.g. ultra rare diseases) where we don't do RCTs for various practical reasons. So it's not really a problem of the existing framework - there's a ton of room for "we can't do an rct because like, duh they know they're tripping." But as other comments pointed out were really hampered by the lack of understanding of how and why these do or don't work - why some people get positive outcomes and why some get negative (preferably we'd like to know before prescribing broadly!) a ton of this basic research/mechanistic understanding etc has not been possible because of the war on drugs. If research had been possible we would be in a much better place of understanding how they could be regulated and used today - even with the more limited technology available a couple decades ago more openness around this could have at least enabled e.g. more and larger observational studies that could elucidate things today but we're stuck with a very fragmented and incomplete picture
Sure; total blinding is an issue with many drugs (however active placebos which can make you feel dizzy/sedated/whatever can help); opiods/fentanyl/etc sometimes have to make do with imperfect blinding. The fact remains that the psychedelic state is so distinct from normal consciousness that the challenge is qualitatively different.
> The problem with psychoactive drugs, as I understand it, is not the lack of positive results. There are plenty of well recognized cases.
There is a long way to go toward solid research on this topic. The studies that exist have small sample sizes and usually very limited monitoring periods after the dose, which makes them extremely prone to placebo effects. There’s no real blinding in a study with powerful psychedelics, so long-term comparisons against active comparators (therapy, other antidepressants) are needed.
There is a lot of reporting that would make the studies seem like slam-dunk, case closed results, but every study I’ve read so far has felt very weak compared to traditional antidepressant studies. That’s expected for early stage research, but it’s going to take a lot more to quantify the treatment effects.
> The problem is the the unpredictability, because there are plenty of catastrophic results too, and we don't really know why.
The studies go to great lengths to have controlled circumstances like therapists monitoring and guiding the situation for hours, including integration sessions afterward in a lot of the studies.
This helps control the situation for those studies, but it’s hard to translate that to real world practices. If the current proliferation of poorly-run ketamine clinics by cash grabbing providers is a clue, it would be really hard to ensure the level of trained therapist oversight that happens in these studies if this every becomes mainstream.
There’s also the big problem of occasional majorly negative outcomes, as you noted. There are a lot of reports around the internet of even seasoned psychonauts who eventually had a trip that left them depressed or dissociated for months. For the longest time these anecdotes were dismissed as having triggered an underlying mental health disorder as a way to avoid blaming the drug. The advice was always that people with mental health problems shouldn’t take the drugs. Well now that we’re talking about using these as antidepressants (maybe) then it would be exclusively people with severe mental health conditions taking them.
I don’t think it would take very many severely negative public cases to shut it down or at least severely restrict it.
We have pretty strong indications of when and why things go wrong. Openness vs rigid thinking are an axis that are very strong correlative factors. A lot more nuance but there is a lot we do know about risk factors so it isn’t a complete question mark.
Anecdotally / personally experienced; bad trips happen “when you get stuck”. The #1 thing to do in such a situation is to change the music. The #2 thing to do is, quite literally, go to the bathroom and take a shit.
It’s extremely analogous to anything that would make a normal day into a bad day.
That makes sense. I think I have approached becoming stuck. I reached a kind of extreme disassociated state once where I felt like I didn't exist and part of my brain started to panic. I meditate a lot. I reminded the part of me that was becoming anxious that we are okay because we are somehow still observing ourselves so we must still exist. That was apparently adequate to calm it lol. It is truly weird to negotiate with some part of your brain and see it work in real time. I think it was a particularly sticky day for my DMN and or some particular loop it was hanging on to? It is always hard to say.
The way I think of them is as a mulligan in a trading card game like Magic.
Sometimes you have a hand you can't keep, and it's better to draw a new hand with one fewer card. Don't want to do that too many times, or you will almost certainly have a losing hand.
> but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards.
We are struggling to pay for the research that would result in these being effective treatments (not subscription medicines) that would start out as generic drugs.
> ketamine
Great example, SPRAVATO, is a brand name patent protected version of this drug (enantiomer) that as a dose cost over 500 bucks.
You just gave your own counter argument. If they find a promising way to use psychedelics for instance, they are not going with straight LSD, they will find some analogue that they show is 0.1% better and patent it.
Just like that special ketamine. Or all these ADHD medicine that is just tweaked and patented amphetamine.
Meanwhile my at home treatment used Braun 250mg lozenges, which probably cost ~ $4 a pop (wholesale) and for many 2-3 are enough for a treatment session.
It's not like it's a novel drug -- the gatekeeping is ridiculous. Fuck the DEA.
i don't dispute that the "War on Drugs" was (is?) pretty much just a glorified jobs program for law enforcement but nevertheless some drugs are very bad. ironically enough alcohol, despite being the most readily available drug after caffeine, is probably the worst drug of all in terms of societal destruction.
> is probably the worst drug of all in terms of societal destruction.
We are yet to observe a society where the overwhelming majority of the population regularly uses fentanyl, crack cocaine or meth-amphetamine. I bet that if we try comparing apples to oranges alcohol would end up being relatively harmless.
If Crack was legal today would you light up a pipe ?
Maybe right after filing your taxes ?
The most dangerous part of any illegal substance is the illegal economy existing to support it. Drug dealers generally can’t sue each other so they resolve disputes via other means.
Law Enforcement has the right to suspend all your so called rights because someone you may or may not know might have an unauthorized substance.
Set the legal drug age to whatever the enlistment age is. I’d argue 21 for both.
> If Crack was legal today would you light up a pipe ?
I wouldn’t but I don’t drink either, while many ppl drink themselves to incapacitation.
The difference between crack and a bottle o’ Jack though is that consequence of a crack-filled weekend isn’t just a hangover.
Maybe a society with all drugs legal would eventually figure out tolerable dosages for heavy recreational crack use (I really did write this ha), but do you want to live through the couple of decades of that discovery phase?
It is just one approach, often referred to as method acting.
But good actors trained more classically can be just as convincing by pretending.
One is not better than the other, these are just different approaches, both capable of delivering excellent or terrible results, depending on your skills and practice. Being excited doesn't mean you look excited to an audience and vice versa.
I don't think it is the first time they do this, at least on one occasion, they have shown an ad for Tomb Raider on the lock screen.
And I am evidently an minority here, but I don't really mind. I don't really have a problem with ads, I have a problem with annoying ads. Popups, banners, billboards, notifications, video segments, etc... they grab your attention and take up valuable space, I hate these, and I think everyone else does.
But here it is just a wallpaper that happens to be branded, it is not particularly distracting, in fact, I find it pretty good overall. I like this simple, low contrast style for a wallpaper on the background.
And that Tomb Raider lockscreen image from before was more than good, to me, it was one of the best!
Of course, you may have different tastes, but and I can easily imagine someone being unaware that it is an ad (or not caring) and making it his new default.
I understand why people wouldn't want this, but I didn't expect that much outrage. I mean, it is Windows 11, and you are letting Microsoft pick wallpapers for you, what did you expect? Getting to see the wallpaper behind all these much more intrusive ads, notifications and AI crap seems like a rather impressive feat. So much that I would have expected people who got there to have given up on complaining, or better, given up on Windows. And the author runs an "insider preview", talk about masochism!
I paid for windows. I am the customer. I am not not the product.
I actually like Windows, or did for most of my nearly 30 year career. In the past I have defended it against the "winblows" crowd.
Now there are no new features that users want, the start menu is a progressive web app, explorer takes 2x3 times the resources it did in 10 and does less, and they have lost all respect for me as a consumer.
I'm one ad away from migrating everything I own to a system that respects me. It will be an investment, but I suspect it will be worth it.
If I showed up at your place and painted some tactful ads on the walls, would you have an issue with it?
Or, if you bought a mattress and discovered that it hums some well-targeted, inoffensive jingle at 11pm every night, would that be fine?
Ads intruding deeper and deeper into your "personal" space are an issue even if they're executed well. Now, for free products, maybe that's fine. But you paid for that OS, and now it comes with ads on multiple surfaces.
> If I showed up at your place and painted some tactful ads on the walls, would you have an issue with it?
Yes, because I didn't call you to paint anything on my walls. But if I hired you to paint me something on my wall every month, and gave you total freedom, then no, I wouldn't mind an occasional tactful ad. In fact, I know some people who buy (or steal) ad posters they find beautiful and put them on their wall.
> Or, if you bought a mattress and discovered that it hums some well-targeted, inoffensive jingle at 11pm every night, would that be fine?
No, I don't want my mattress to hum, mattresses are not supposed to hum. But if I bought a picture frame and that picture frame came preloaded with a tasteful ad, then I would be fine, because picture frames are supposed to have pictures in it. I can always change it later.
That's what I wanted to point out. That ad is a picture that goes where pictures should go, and blends in. It is not like an ad banner that goes where content should be, a billboard that block my view of the landscape, or that humming that definitely shouldn't come out of a mattress.
> But you paid for that OS
That component, Bing Wallpaper is free, I think. And I believe you can have it on other OSes. Bundling ad-supported software and services in paid software is still a dubious practice, but in this particular case, I don't think it is that bad, as in, pretty much everything else is worse in Windows.
Subjectively I like the artwork, and I'm used to way worse ads on Windows like Bing popups when I open Chrome. In fact, that this extension has been delivering genuinely pleasant landscapes, cityscapes, animal photos etc. for many years now makes it so frustrating and jarring to get ads here too. I uninstalled it, but I doubt they care, since if they can't serve me ads how else would they extract value from me using the product.
Anubis is not free either, it is a matter of how much it costs to run Anubis vs to let bots in.
When I see LKML using Anubis when the pages it serves are tens of kB, all presumably static, I wonder if they do it out of spite rather than to protect their servers.
As a user/reader/viewer I absolutely hate Anubis and usually turn around when I see it pop up (at least on my phone where it takes ages to compute), but with stats like that, I get why a site operator would resort to using it.
I think the kernel.org post proves the parent point rather than contradicts it.
> At any one time, across 5 geo-distributed nodes, there are 14 CPU cores doing nothing but rendering git commits as html.
14 CPU cores total for running a website like kernel.org is laughable. This is not worth burning cycles in Anubis on client's devices, this is not worth the time of the engineer who worked on it. Provisioning more hardware would have been literally better for everyone.
> But no, let's in fact choose the stupidest possible way of doing it — by rendering everything as HTML commit by commit and then parsing it.
This drives me crazy with so-called SOTA LLMs that have "achieved AGI".
Fable, Sol, Astra, will start by trying to reverse engineer a binary to figure out how something works when software is open source and one search query away.
You let them know it's open source, and they will start using github API instead of just cloning and grepping.
There is an interesting case here with the "Hadopi" law in France, a particularly controversial anti-piracy law. They scan IP addresses for illegal filesharing and if it connects to your ISP, then you get a notification, and potentially get prosecuted for repeated offences.
But they can't prosecute you for sharing that file, they don't know if it is you, someone in your household, a hacker, or that hypothetical rogue AI. Usually, committing crimes require intent, and it is up to the accusation to prove it, meaning it is quite difficult to prove you are actually a pirate.
So instead they prosecute you for not securing your internet connection despite several notifications to do so.
In practice, very few people got convicted, and it never got further than the equivalent of a traffic fine. In the end whole system was an expensive failure, and most of its power was reduced to sending scary emails and sometimes letters, as most of the more serious stuff was deemed unconstitutional.
I still find it crazy that piston engine aircraft still run on leaded fuel. The only reason it is still the case is mostly regulatory. We can make compatible unleaded fuel, we could have done it decades ago, but it would have required costly recertification and maybe minor retrofits and the use of additives, and considering the small scale of GA, considered not worth it.
Things seem to go in the right direction, with an unleaded alternative in the process of being certified. But aviation, especially general aviation moves at a glacial pace, usually for good reasons, maturity is important, but not poisoning people is important too.
> That said, particle physics history is full of 3 sigma particle "discoveries" that disappeared with more data.
The idea is that because 3 sigma means a ~1/1000 chance of the thing being explained by random chance, 1 in 1000 experiments will produce a bogus 3 sigma result, and we do many thousands of experiments.
and also because a result always has the caveats of "if we did our experimental design and math right". A 1/1000 rate of experimental/code design errors will double the number of incorrect 3 sigma results.
As for wireless communication. I also thought it would be easy, but the lack of options despite the demand in the Oculus Rift / HTC Vive days proved otherwise. There have been some attempts, some worked, none of them great, and they usually involved hot hardware and batteries.
Steam Frame is apparently the best at being a wireless, PC-driven headset.
As for standalone functionality, my guess is that a headset hardware powerful enough to deliver a good wireless PC VR experience is powerful enough to work as a standalone headset for less demanding applications.
reply