mox111's comments

I hear you. For months I had my Oculus sitting in the corner of the room gathering dust. Unlike a phone, it's not pinging notifications at you all day so it's easy to forget about.

But you know that saying "come for the tool, stay for the network"?

Right now, we are super early in the adoption phase. You can tell by looking at what fraction of your Facebook network are on Oculus (in my case it's about 2%). That's why most of us are playing solo games which feel a bit like mere novelties.

But now that all of my work colleagues have one, I'm using it heaps. The value of VR grows the more your buddies have access to it.

Sounds like you're speaking from experience here, so it's not for me to tell you you're wrong to feel that way.

But from my POV, we've started using VR for work meetings/social gatherings (we're a remote company, myself in Spain, the majority in SF), and we've been able to achieve a level of rapport with each-other that's just not possible via a webcam.

We will definitely continue to use it.

I think that a lot of the cynicism about this space comes from theorisers who have not yet tried VR for themselves and experienced viscerally + emotionally for themselves, the fact that it is a total game-changer for work and play.

The thing with this space is, enough smart people are sufficiently excited by this new media and working on realising its potential, that it will inevitably end up producing value that can’t be ignored.

Large swathes of smart people who see unrealised possibilities will always win out against individuals who only see impossibilities.

Whenever I see a failure to appreciate the potential of new media, I’m reminded of this conversation between Jeremy Paxman (British journalist) and David Bowie when they were talking about the internet back in the 90s. https://youtu.be/LaHcOs7mhfU?t=297

“The internet… it’s just a tool though isn’t it” ?

Most of the CRDT examples I've seen appear to be Electron apps e.g. https://github.com/automerge/pushpin.

My understanding is that CRDT's rely on having a safe place to store data on the user's machine (otherwise it's a bit like doing a `git clone` to receive new data, rather than a `git pull`).

Is this not a major limitation for people hoping to use it for web apps?

I used to blog quite a lot, but nowadays I often worry that my ideas are far too sporadic and random to deserve a single, self-contained blog post of their own, so I end up writing nothing at all.

Twitter incentivises this spontaneity, but I do think there should be some middle ground here.

Readwise (paid service) does this for me.

Lots of integrations (kindle highlights, hypothes.is highlights on the web etc.), and they present your old highlights to you in the form of spaced repetition, either via email or via the smartphone app.

Live in Barcelona too. Can confirm!

I do think this is true - but I also think that the ability to control anxiety (an increased tolerance for uncertainty) is a characteristic that is learned with experience and can be a marker of an experienced engineer. Someone who panics in an interview might also be inclined to panic when a manager frantically reports a bug in master, for example.

I get this too, and I think it has a lot to do with where your imagination tends to go.

If you often imagine negative outcomes, such as the negative judgement that you might receive if you served 2-minute noodles at a dinner party, then your sole motivation will be to avoid these sorts of outcomes. Life becomes about hazard detection. The anxiety that comes with this can obscure your 'true' interests to the point where you are not even sure what they are anymore.

Where does your mind turn when there is no sense of threat? If you bring yourself to imagine positive outcomes, then so long as they are realistic and accompanied by a strategy, then it is natural to be motivated to realise them. Failure to create a compelling future could just be considered a failure of the imagination.

I'd really recommend the book "Psychocybernetics" by Maxwell Maltz for more on this sort of stuff.

This article seems to have divided people somewhat. A think a great reconciliation between the practical and the theoretical when it comes to learning is found in Mindstorms by Seymour Papert:

"An important part of becoming a good learner is learning how to push out the frontier of what we can express with words. From this point of view the question about the bicycle is not whether or not one can "tell" someone "in full" how to ride but rather what can be done to improve our ability to communicate with others (and with ourselves in internal dialogues) just enough to make a difference to learning to ride."

Someone could fit very nicely into a given working culture despite that culture not being 'psychologically safe' by the author's definition. They are not the same concept.