It's going to be interesting to see this compete with the Meta VR glasses. They are essentially identical for productivity except the Aura has physical light pass through while the VR glasses use external cameras to provide pass through. The Meta VR glasses will have better resolution I think, but then the Aura has access to the whole Android ecosystem - so that means real implementations of Microsoft Word etc.
But the real choice is the unfortunate one of who is least likely to abandon the whole thing when it doesn't take off and leave you with an un/poorly supported device. Both companies have terrible track records on this.
Resolution matters a lot for productivity, and Meta's displays have more than twice the number of pixels. Image quality for the display will be much better on the Meta VR glasses because of the lack of interference from outside light. See-through displays sound good in theory but require too many compromises IMO. There's no such thing as "black" on a see-through display, only "transparent". Definitely try before you buy.
I feel like Meta's track record of VR device support has been decent enough. Quest Pro still gets updates even though it was discontinued almost two years ago. When they ended support for Oculus Go they released an update that unlocked the device and granted root access. I'm sure you can find some complaints on Reddit but looking at what they've actually done I think it looks pretty good.
Yes I actually agree with you on the support question.
Quest Pro is a good example though because yes, they provided OS updates. But they never released anything like the required software to address professional use cases that they suggested would happen when they launched it. That's where I harbor the doubts about support. I just don't think Meta "gets" professional / business use. They aren't built with that DNA as a company.
It's true that Meta hasn't provided much software support for productivity use cases. At least the Meta VR Glasses will have DisplayPort support. So if you don't like the software on the device it will still work as a portable monitor setup for your other devices.
> The Meta VR glasses will have better resolution I think, but then the Aura has access to the whole Android ecosystem - so that means real implementations of Microsoft Word etc.
Those aren't mutually exclusive though. Horizon OS is based on AOSP, and the more applications cross over into big screens on Android, the more Horizon gains the ability to leverage them too. Whether they actually show up in Facebook's store is a separate question, but I also have no idea how common the use of SideQuest is, just that the store is somewhat of an artificial limitation. (Google Play, on the other hand...)
> But the real choice is the unfortunate one of who is least likely to abandon the whole thing when it doesn't take off and leave you with an un/poorly supported device. Both companies have terrible track records on this.
Agreed. I would never buy a device like this from Facebook, and while glasses as a display are super useful, I don't necessarily see the need for a dedicated compute device for them when this experience could just as easily be powered by a phone. (I could maybe see replacing a phone with this, but more for particular minimalist crowds and not as a mass-market sell.)
The devil is in the details. Every single UX design choice can have massive impact on productivity and creative tooling workflows. Don't predict anything based on the spec sheet.
It solves the problem with hand tracking if done correctly (and only Apple has come close).
Hand-tracking is a terrible idea without micro gestures and eye tracking - because your arms tire very quickly and pointing at things is very inaccurate.
There's a reason why brushes are more popular than finger painting)
Of course - we've already invented the optimum solution which is tracked 6dof controllers - but someone decided they aren't ever going to be mainstream so here we are...
Seems like a nice win even if it just does the example they have:
void matmul(Matrix2DFloat A, Matrix2DFloat B, Matrix2DFloat C, int size) {
for (@Parallel int i=0; i
But the elephant in the room is the Vector API. Is that going to end up like logging - a standardised API nobody uses because it came 10 years late to the party and isn't as good as what was already established?
And why confuse everybody by calling it a VM when it ships as a JAR file that runs in an existing VM?
You can do both. It supports nvidia's cuTile programming model through Tilecontext API or you can write megakernels in Java and compile then to CUDA or even add native libraries in the mix like cudnn. JITllm is a good example how all these can work together
i might be overly optimistic, but I'm assuming it'll do the tiling by itself with the above. As long as there's not an algorithmic reason to do it a specific way, in theory you could just optimise it for the target hardware.
I think most people in the tech sector and especially driving the AI hype have absolutely no clue how difficult it is to implement change in complex organisations. There are a bunch of technical reasons but half the reasons are not even technical - social, legal, etc. You have to shift the practices of humans and they have incredible inertia. Like decade level change response period. And during the change period they are less productive. Expect a decade type period before "productivity" impact manifests and even then it won't really be measurable directly because people will be doing different things.
> I think most people in the tech sector and especially driving the AI hype have absolutely no clue how difficult it is to implement change in complex organisations.
Simple organizations too, and sometimes especially so. The amount of unrealized productivity many small business stand to gain just by adopting simple automations that computers have been able to perform for decades may be as large as (or larger than) the productivity gains ML model and agent adoption enables. And that adoption may just be enabling someone who never wanted to learn Excel macros or regular expressions to command an agent to go do those things which have been possible yet unrealized in a particular small business for decades.
The problem has largely been (and remains) humans set in their ways, of the sort who stopped reading books or seeking any new knowledge whatsoever the moment their mandated or socially expected schooling was complete. Incurious midwits are definitionally the bulk of any workforce, and getting them to change any process is like pulling teeth whether they're working in a small business or a megacorporation. Change often doesn't come until the midwit on some particular throne retires, quits, or is laid off.
Since the comments are going to be flooded with people reactively assuming it is straight up directly accessing them, here is the actual qualification:
> [they will not use for ads] ... unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads
So it is more reasonable than I think most people are assuming.
> unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads
I don't know if android has changed in the last 10 years, but my last android phone had constant popups in official google apps begging me to enable all sorts of information sharing right across google's ecosystem. The popups were constant. And it was full of dark patterns making it difficult to say no.
Google probably assumes you only see this stuff once. But if you say no, some features didn't work properly and it keeps bugging you.
I don't know how or why, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if 90% of gmail users unintentionally opted themselves in to this "choice" before the end of the year.
You literally can't do anything useful with Gemini (as a Google Assistant replacement) without granting it access to everything. And I mean that in the most literal sense possible. It doesn't know the weather, the time, it can't play music, nothing.
Taken in the most literal sense possible, if you're using Gemini in any capacity today, it's authorized to use your photos to serve you personalized ads.
Funnily it is against GDPR: one must not limit any service if they can be solved without the given data not allowed to be accessed. Of course this is vague enough, but EU has given big fines, thanks for Google's donations to this continent in 5 years.
I believe the "other services" here includes Personal Intelligence, which Google is pushing very hard anytime you use their AI products directly. I would bet we'll see nudges in more and places. Basically, they want to make it happen.
To be fair, I see where they're coming from: if they're providing you (what they consider) valuable AI services, they would want to monetize it somehow, because that inference ain't free. And people won't pay for it with their money, because they've trained this generation of Internet users to pay with their attention.
I also suspect they have little choice, because they foresee that the old search modality (and with it, their prized cash cow) withering away pretty soon. Personal Intelligence may well be their next big consumer cash cow, and competitors are already swooping in to try to capture that market (especially Apple with its privacy pitch.)
This is always how it starts. Then a couple months down the road when everyone has forgotten about it they'll accidentally push out an update that forgets you weren't opted in
> unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads
Yeah.. And how do you not do that? What are the steps to not make the data from these services available? Is it now? How can we tell? What are the services that support personalized ads anyway? All of them?
Also, I do not see how it is "reasonable". I find it evil and malicious. They benefit from user's data, get money and don't give anything to those who gave them their data here. That is also selfish from Google.
As jon said, it is a frew service. Someone, somehow needs to pay for the service, bwing through something as bad as ads from your photos.
We as consumers just need to be more comfortable paying a little to have these services. Immich on a vps is not that much
Don't worry, Google is a trillion dollar company. We've been paying with our privacy, our attention, our psychological health, our economic well-being, and our voice in the democratic process. Even those of us who have de-Googled are paying the price. How much more do we possibly owe them?
That said, I do appreciate that your proposal isn't to pay Google even more though.
Not defending Google in any way, but… they did give free email, search, and other things.
The slight is that they said they wouldn’t and people trusted that would remain true. Then some moral-less, scum sucking, soulless PM convinced enough people they could make money to justify snooping on hundreds of millions of people’s private conversations and enough of those people agreed to make it happen.
The most charitable interpretation is that gemini might get your pictures as context by connecting google photos, then comment on the content of said pictures in its output, and then the output is used to personalize ads (like what chatgpt is doing rn). This indirectly uses google photos data to personalize ads so they have to add this rule to their privacy policy.
I think that's a much lower bar than you are assuming. It's part of their playbook to tie very basic features and integrations with these more controversial measures -- I believe that "make calendar entries from flight confirmations" is on by default and is part of their "share my data with other services" toggle. "Declining to opt out" could also count to them as choosing to make the data available. etc.
To an extent yes. But there is no previous version of humanity that incorporates every perspective of every viewpoint ever expressed in writing before. It's obviously derivative of its training material but that doesn't stop it having a novel aspect.
Sure it's novel, but I don't think it's useful to anthropomorphize the model.
I think best mental model of what an LLM does, statistically generating continuations word by word, would be a football stadium full of people, each with a keyboard, and a giant jumbotron screen they can all see... A question (cf ChatGPT user input) gets displayed on the screen, then everyone types on their keyboard what the first/next word of the response should be, and majority wins with that word added to the screen, then they all vote on the next word, etc ...
This is really a very close analogue to how an LLM works, and it would be weird to describe the output appearing on the screen as the "take" of the football stadium itself - it's the group statistics of all the people (cf training data).
perhaps that is the original sin that leads to our ex post facto rationalisation tendencies. the moment we became prospectively rational we would be unable to content with our own forthcoming deaths.
You have to think the current administration is completely and totally owned by foreign interests at this point.
The question is, what do you do as the new administration coming in? Presumably you assume every system and every person is compromised all the way down, like a compromised server - clean wipe and re-install.
One would assume that, like any good hacker, the current set would be heavily focused on ensuring they can survive a reboot / wipe. The question is, what would they be doing to achieve that?
Prosecute and show no mercy, the current Iran war probably will still be going on when the new administration comes in. The only hope for Mr. Kushner and some of the other people is a rapid peace treaty before the end of this mixed-up administration even that probably will not help.
If dems take back congress this election and the Iran war is still going by the 2028 election half the country will believe democrats started the war and want to continue it.
That's right. Punishment is the only way to deter the crowd of grifters. They act like raiding the government is risk free, because it is. No one of note in US politics or the Forbes 100 has been put in jail for a very long time. Why would they behave? There is no incentive to follow the law, and unlimited profits and power is too much to resist.
Trump is just going to pardon everyone around him like Biden did. Not saying anyone Biden pardoned did wrong, just that it's a thing that can be done without having to name any "crimes" the pardons may be for.
This is a good chance to remind people that laws can be changed. Including how pardons work by allowing Congress to override a pardon. This is all very clearly outside the bounds of the intent of the pardon power.
Most of the "loopholes" and gaps that the current administration takes advantage of are due to the thinking along the lines of "no one would stoop so low as to operate any other way." There's no way to close all the gaps, but you can certainly make an effort to narrow the number of gaps.
No ex post facto is in the constitution though. And any attempt to change the laws that can be changed by Congress would have enough lead time where POTUS could pardon just before the laws changed
Biden did not pardon "everyone around him". He made specific, targeted pardons for people the GOP had already stated they were going to persecute, like his son and Fauci.
But yes, preemptive pardons shouldn't be possible, but we'll need an amendment to reform the power at all.
He was elected by the "will of the people", and there isn't any "no felons" clause anywhere in the Constitution. He also hasn't been impeached, convicted, and removed for high crimes and misdemeanors. Any pardons he issues will likely be entirely legal.
(We really should require pardons to pass a bipartisan Senate committee where there is no odd-numbered tiebreaker vote and require one defection across the aisle to approve--or something like that)
Unless this administration is held responsible for their actions, I think it's safe to say that the incoming administration is compromised too. We had a bunch of hullabaloo from the Democrats about Russian influence and zero about Israeli influence (which is much more overt, severe and out in the open), so it sure looks like our entire government is a rooted server at this point.
Or in some cases, not necessarily "owned" but purposely acting on behalf of foreign agents. Kushner + Witkoff running point on all Middle East-related talks on behalf of Israel with their only credibility to do so is just being Jewish, apparently.
> You have to think the current administration is completely and totally owned by foreign interests at this point.
The internal dismantling of the US Government, and 'the identity of the US' in general, that this administration has performed must be beyond the wildest dreams of those who were on the other side of the Cold War.
Despite 'losing' the Cold War, Putin appears to have managed to arrange for the US to also lose, somehow, after the war was over.
100 years ago Pareto (yes that Pareto) told us what happens in "Circulation of the Elites" when he noticed a very small part of the population owns most of the assets.
Critically, in the intended approach for this, Claude itself (the harness) runs outside the sandbox. Their approach means you trust Claude is perfect, just the commands it runs need isolation. And to some extent, you trust its judgement on what and when needs the isolation applied.
I know there are distinct camps here, and the long term story may evolve - but for now I just want the whole harness inside a sandbox - ideally, a full VM - and THEN you can further sandbox things it runs if you really want different tiers within that.
I am sceptical of these things however since they are a well worn path that so far has taken off only to a limited extent. In reality, you get bored very quickly in these environments, and it's impossible to implement impressive visual fidelity in worlds that users build themselves. Horizon Worlds is probably the marquee example of that. Am curious what the differentiating angle is here to previous efforts?
The main difference is that these worlds are from User Generating. Not just limited to us developers. The visual is rather simpler than realistic graphics but I think the freedom users will have could be more important. but we will have to see.
> In my experience, letting the agent make every decision leads to a big ball of mud that requires touching dozens of files to make a change
It seems too early to make any conclusion like that. We've still only been doing agentic coding for a year and capability significantly improved during that time. I don't think anybody on either side of this debate can have actual empirical evidence to support conclusions about where it lands longer term.
The main argument I see is that it probably pays to be slightly conservative because the cost of being wrong by maintaining too much oversight and shipping slightly less code is better than the cost of ending up with an entirely unmaintainable system. In some cases it will be more than "slightly less" but in almost all complex pre-existing systems, you are rate limited by a lot of other factors outside of code production, so the effective difference just isn't that high.
At agentic coding velocity, tech debt becomes obvious much more quickly. Empirical evidence is a bit of a ridiculous bar to hold for software development - we are as quantitatively blind now as we have ever been - but at least for me the anecdotal evidence is very clear. Today's agents hill-climb and their software architecture is pretty reliably bad without a human in the loop.
And it's debatable how much better they will get quickly. Verifiable rewards for maintainability of software is, I think, possible but very hard.
When I said "in my experience" I meant literally that, my experience so far. I'm not making any predictions. I'm definitely anticipating things improving at a rapid pace, which is why I think it's good to run frequent experiments. If in a month I find that an agent can one-shot a 20k line project without creating an unreadable, unmaintainable mess, that will be great.
But the real choice is the unfortunate one of who is least likely to abandon the whole thing when it doesn't take off and leave you with an un/poorly supported device. Both companies have terrible track records on this.
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