GnarlyWhale's comments

Developers control what goes in front of the user and where, we'll still be able to tell plenty about a user's decision making process given that and how their head and hands navigate the space. There are plenty of companies that specialize in this as their entire product offering, assessing fitness for duty, alertness, attention mapping, etc. Plenty of published research on the matter as well.

The supposed security of blackboxing the eye data itself is illusory and functionally just for marketing.

This is pretty much exactly why I vehemently disagree with Apple's decision to draw such a firm line in the sand preventing devs from accessing the eye/gaze data directly. I'm part of an academic spin-off start-up that specializes in analyzing gaze and movement data. Locking the gaze information outside of the app sandbox severely hampers the ability to quickly iterate design and UI patterns that could be game changing for accessibility. Hopefully they make accommodations moving forward for these circumstances.

The issue is doubly close to my heart because my father has ALS and is nearly at the point where eye-tracking will be his only means of communicating effectively with the world. While existing Tobii systems work well enough, typing with your eyes is still exhausting to do.

Ultimately I don't think a platform like the vision pro is suitable for ALS patients, especially later term. They cannot support the weight of the headset and/or fatigue will set in rapidly. Many (including my father) also require use of a ventilator, accompanied with a mask that can seal effectively enough to support the positive pressure necessary to inflate their lungs. Unless the form factor for HMD's minimalizes significantly, it will likely interfere with the respirator's efficacy.

Locking the away the eye data is a big miss for me. With the hololens we were able to get interesting visual confirmation that what you were looking at was indeed focused prior to selecting objects using an air tap. This also limits enterprise use cases quite substantially. I hope in the future they move to a permission system where users can opt-in to their eye data (literally just the pointer location) being available for specific apps.

I challenged Sutton's reinforcement learning course this term (in spite lacking the appropriate pre-requisites) and, while my grasp of some of the mathematical theory was indeed lacking, some pretty foundational messaging really penetrated.

Incorporating curiosity and exploration of new experience into learning algorithms offers so much more utility versus relying solely on offline training and past experiences alone.

Anyone else get tripped up by being able to place bunnies and the dog on the same space? Instinctively I expected that to trigger a failure state.

What a needlessly divisive, inaccurate, and frankly disgusting characterization.

The literally definition reads: "Indigenous or less commonly indigenous : of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group"

In most modern contexts it's used to refer to the diverse peoples that inhabited a land prior to European colonization.

In extension, here in Canada the Métis People (explicitly descendants of MIXED European and Indigenous ancestry) are recognized as an Indigenous group with unique language and cultural practices. They are by no means thought of as "pure bred" as you reductively tried to frame it.

The University of Alberta has an excellent, widely accoladed, and free MOOC on Indigenous Canada that I highly recommend you, and anyone else interested in learning more, consider taking: https://www.coursera.org/learn/indigenous-canada

> While the racist violence that happened was deplorable, it is entirely amusing to me that we are fine with calling it UK/Brazil/South African/Indian variant but not call it the China virus/flu.

Why is this amusing? In N.A. there is currently (and pre-dating Covid-19) substantive differences in xenophobic response to China/Russia vs. the other countries mentioned. The former are the go to political boogiemen whereas the latter are either allies or patronizingly viewed.

I know a number of engineers/staff that worked/work at Jobber and they all say great things.

They're also very supportive of the local start-up scene. Highly recommend.

Here is a related previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24137127

This would allow TransPod to develop the longest hyperloop test track in Canada to my knowledge.

I'm surprised to see this level of interest by the Alberta government on tech that is very much unproven.

Plug for the RL specialization out of the University of Alberta, hosted on coursera: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/reinforcement-learn... All courses in the specialization are free to audit.

For those unaware, the university of Alberta is Rich Sutton's home institution, and he approves of and promotes the course.

In my experience it's more the latter. Not only is it simpler (no need to maintain parallel ui implementations, easier to update, speed-up implementation time) to use a framework that "optimizes" layout for all devices, but it also increases consistency in experience across them.

What part of the CNN fact-check was incorrect? It's not listed in the original link.

This period of Trump benefiting off unfettered, direct access to the public, and Twitter benefiting off of greater clout through hosting the president is most definitely coming to a conclusion.

Bit of an interesting inside perspective on an industry often said to soon be victim to AI/ML advances.

Not sure if the intent behind this is to placate current professionals or attract new ones, but in any case the author seems to mis-understand the current state of the art and appeal of this kind of research[1].

(1) https://speech-to-text-demo.ng.bluemix.net/

This is actually a really clever project, not sure why this is the first time I'm seeing something like this.

Aside, I can't believe I never realized that was the intended use of the grave key.

No one tell Ray Kurzweil.

I like the apple video more. The music pairing and faster cuts made for a more frenetic experience that is extremely effective at building hype.

For the record, you don't need to use Typescript for Angular 2, you can just use regular JS (or Dart for that matter). The documentation is definitely biased toward Typescript at the moment, but I anticipate the situation improving as the framework matures.