mindgam3's comments

> Hasn’t Mark said in public...?

I don’t know, has he? Citing a source would be constructive as I’m not aware of Zuck saying anything publicly about McNamee ever since his PR stunt kicked off.

April 2019. See link below for context.

To your point: being anti-Zuck in public is a transparent ploy for attention if you're not anti-Zuck in private.

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/roger-mcnamee-facebook...

Big defector, my ass. He doesn’t even have the cojones to call out his old pal Zuck. McNamee is merely profiting from the techlash to get his name out there.

Source: went to see him speak at Stanford. Asked him myself during live Q&A, if Facebook is so evil and must be stopped, why doesn’t he call out Zuck for terrible leadership given that Facebook culture and business practice comes straight from the top? His answer, direct quote: “well, he and I are friends.”

If this is our big defector, we’ve got serious problems.

I too remember forums back in the day. Usenet via AOL was my first online social experience. I think Twitter etc would be more like that old school experience - much more of a niche product, still with the usual trolls etc but in general higher quality to noise ratio.

Sweet! Will do.

This is a seriously great idea and looks well executed.

Just to add to the chorus of Firefox requesters. I’m sure you have limited dev resources but the spirit of this concept is very aligned with Firefox and less so Chrome. So it might be worth your time even if chrome has greater market share.

Look forward to seeing where you go with this project.

Any explanation of why social media is toxic without mentioning the Like button is incomplete.

All of the status-seeking behaviors the researchers describe existed before Likes, but by gamifying social status Facebook threw gasoline on the narcissism fire.

And yes, Facebook didn’t invent the like button (that was Friendfeed) but they made it a standard.

Also worth noting that a key component of Facebook’s initial positioning was that it did NOT have any gamified counters, unlike MySpace and Bebo which were fueled by profile views and friend counts.

Source: was Bebo engineer/exec 2007.

Easy. Chess uses the Elo rating system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

As you yourself point out, the brute force here refers to solving a problem by throwing more hardware at it.

Number of nodes searched is not the key metric for gauging how “smart” the algorithm is. You have less nodes searched but you only got there by having way more upfront processing.

I did point this out at the top of my original comment.

“I mean, it's cool that computers are getting even better at chess and all“

> direct comparison only makes sense with equivalent performance level

This makes no sense to me. 50% increase in performance can be compared to 50% increase in processing power to evaluate level of brute force-ness.

Sure, but both of them are more brute force than Deep Blue (unless anybody has a compelling counter argument), so we’re actually heading in the wrong direction.

> In this work we present the MuZero algorithm which, by combining a tree-based search with a learned model, achieves superhuman performance in a range of challenging and visually complex domains, without any knowledge of their underlying dynamics.

<rant> DeepMind "superhuman" hype machine strikes again.

I mean, it's cool that computers are getting even better at chess and all (and other perfectly constrained game environments), but come on. "Superhuman" chess performance hasn't been particularly interesting since Deep Blue vs Kasparov in 1997.

The fact that the new algorithms have "no knowledge of underlying dynamics" makes it sound like an entirely new approach, and on one level it is. ML vs non-statistical methods. But on a deeper level, it's the same shit.

Unless I'm grossly mistaken, (someone please correct me if this is inaccurate), the superhuman performance is only made possible by massive compute. In other words, brute force.

But it uses less training cycles, you say! AlphaZero et all mastered the game in only 3 days! etc etc. This conveniently ignores the fact that this was 3 days of training on an array of GPUs that is way more powerful than the supercomputers of old.

Don't get me wrong. These ML algorithms have value and can solve real problems. I just really wish DeepMind's marketing department would stop beating us over the head with all of this "superhuman" marketing.

For those just tuning in, this is the same company that got the term "digital prodigy" on the cover of Science [0]. Which is again a form of cheating, because the whole prodigy aspect conveniently ignores the compute power required to achieve AlphaZero. For the record, if you took A0 and ran it on hardware from a few years ago, you would have a computer that achieves superhuman performance after a very long time, which wouldn't be making headlines.

</rant>

0. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419

Zuck’s anti China stance has nothing to do with having a spine and everything to do with Facebook’s bottom line. He is merely using China as a very convenient punching bag and foil to deflect attention away from Facebook’s own gross abuses of power.

This is exemplified in his address on free speech several weeks ago - trying to position Facebook as a defender of American values (free speech and human rights) versus big bad China.

Make no mistake, if Zuckerberg actually cared about the values of a free society he would fix his own platform. Don’t applaud him for throwing shade at an even more authoritarian regime.

I’m not arguing about the motives of the big studios cashing in with superhero franchises. Merely pointing out that the root cause of the demand they’re tapping into is the exact opposite of what the parent comment claims i.e. childhood insecurity not security.

This commentary gets the psychology of superhero narratives entirely wrong:

> Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods

It’s the exact opposite. Superhero movies speak most strongly to those whose childhoods were traumatizing. The misfits, the rejects, the nerds who were bullied and had no protector. These narratives are about downtrodden heroes discovering their inner strength and standing up to evil and abuse. Look at the archetype of the mild mannered geeky protagonist who hides his incredible abilities - Spider-Man, Superman with his Clark Kent glasses and persona.

The reason these movies are resonating so deeply in this cultural moment is we have an entire generation of traumatized kids, now adults, who are searching for stories to help them make sense of their reality. This is directly linked to the rise of so-called mental illness, aka trauma.

I’m not saying that all of these mass produced movies are works of art, but you need to understand where the appetite is coming from. The root is in collective trauma.

The only connection to DW Griffit’s racist film is surface level - literally just the fact that masks and capes are involved. Pointing to that film as a forerunner of superhero movies is frankly absurd.

> The problem may not be connectivity itself but rather the way social media turns so much communication into a public performance.

This is a key insight. The performance aspect is what is killing social media and getting us addicted to Like and karma points. And of course these metrics are directly related to engagement and ad-based revenue models. It will be interesting to see how far these companies dare to go undoing the damage by hiding Like counts etc.

I don't really disagree with the possibility that Apple is working on AR in the way you describe. I guess the point I was trying to make — as a longtime believer in Apple's vision with the Macbook Pro/iPhones/Watch/Airpods to prove it — is that they didn't use to make products from a firehose of internal projects. They had a clear vision for the future and shipped it. Not all of them succeeded (Newton) but during the Jobs era they were right more than not.

This isn't to say that having a tournament of approaches isn't a viable way to figure out a new product. But it speaks to a different, less visionary approach.

Yeah, it’s within the realm of possibility that Apple truly is that dysfunctional these days (ie MacBook Pro debacle).

However I don’t think that’s the case here. You have to believe that they have their best resources working on wearables/smartglasses. Look at how Apple Watch and even more so AirPods are just crushing it. Because laptops are the past and wearables are the future. I would wager that this level of dysfunction is kept far from AR.

Also remember how there were widely reported rumors that Apple had canceled the entire project a little while back, which made no sense given that this is the future of computing and every big tech company has been investing heavily for years.

Given the wild swings of rumors (launching 2020! Canceled! Launching 2023!) it’s almost like Apple is deliberately seeding the market with leaks in order to confuse its real intent. Which would be smart.

My guess with no insider information is they launch smartglasses in 2020 or 2021. First version may not have optical display but still does something cool with a camera.

My reasoning is basically,

1) Snapchat spectacles are getting closer to normal glasses, all you need to do is miniaturize those ridiculous bug eyed lenses

2) ergo Apple needs to get in the market with something fashionable and useful before someone else steals their lunch

2022 is too late, IMO.

Link to bypass paywall: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/78d78b7c-fbf...