Some men just want to watch the world burn, Master Bruce.
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Is his issue, “morals”? I think it is.
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Yeah, I’m afraid since he’s already sold to FB, an Oculus boycott would have no financial effect on him. But for the principle of the thing, yeah, I’m not going to buy one either.
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I think he genuinely wants President Trump. He’s always been a very proud American™, a right-leaning libertarian (is there any other kind?) but not an obnoxious asshole. Until now, I guess.
He’s that one friend who you get on well with but then they casually mention that Ayn Rand was great, you know? You can get over it and just say “Really? But you seem so normal?”
If he was just openly supporting Trump, even donating huge sums of money to his campaign, I’d be able to get over it. But secretly bankrolling Milo’s personal army? Nope.
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I wonder how many people even know what /r/TheDonald is? Or was the idea to create memes that get disseminated on other social media? I really wonder how much of an impact the shitstorm will have.
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I never planned on buying an Occulus (or any sort of VR for that matter) but now I can pretend I had a reason other than it’s stupid and expensive and I don’t need to retreat from the real world any more than I already do.
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Never heard of this Nimble thing until this article but after reading the referenced article and some of the articles it references, this Nimble PAC takes a page right out of [The Happy Mutant Handbook] (https://www.amazon.com/Happy-Mutant-Handbook-Carla-Sinclair/dp/1573225029/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474643352&sr=8-1&keywords=happy+mutant+handbook). As I see it explained, the devotion to Pepe is bigger than the devotion to Trump. The Trump movement is simply the convenient and available vehicle they are hacking to further their movement. For the lulz if nothing else. HRC is the establishment today. If Trump gets elected, he will be establishment and these same people will be working against him.
Lucky might as well have won the lottery. Guess what happens to most lottery winner’s money? Somebody’s got him figured out and he’s gonna pay for it.
Does shitposting really have to be explained on Boing Boing? It would have been a chapter title in “THMH” had the term existed when it was published.
I always wondered why they’d do it that way. A genome is huge, and that looks about the least efficient way possible for grappling (no pun intended) with the gaps.
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So, he’s behind /r/the_donald?
The name “Nimble Rich Man” checks out.
Wow.
So this is the guy who’s responsible for a sub full of shitposts. The guy responsible for trying to run an actual scam to get their users to donate money because yolo.
I thought one of the funnier things to come out of that was that Reddit actually changed the rules on what makes it to /r/all largely because of The Donald. So after the rules changed, they managed to score an AMA with Donald Trump. Now, the new rules limited the number of things per subreddit that made it to the front page of /r/all. So what happened? They had someone post some inane shitpost, and it went to the front of /r/all…right before the AMA. So the AMA never made it to the front page.
The tears. Oh, my, the tears! Muh censorship!
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with some work it can sort of be
issue is in setting up cameras in the space you want to use.
To be completely mobile youd need something like the Intel Realsense or Google Tango.
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This I suppose will be seen. From my perspective, I see a lot of attention being given to Oculus, and I’ve hardly even heard of Vive. So, as a Linux and Mac user, my understanding of the options hasn’t been affected by said “gaffes”. We will see though: affordable VR-capable GPUs are a relatively new thing, and the market has a lot of room to change/grow.
- and 3) are certainly not only engineering problems. While it’s true that there are still glaring technical problems with VR/AR, the large array of problems being ignored here on how to faithfully create / reproduce reality are pretty non-trivial. Once 1-5 are less of an issue, the problem space will certainly move toward a VR arms race of sorts, with different companies boasting more-accurate/realistic VR.
As far as FB’s contribution, we only need to look at their advancements in computer vision to recognize the strength in the buyout. Perhaps you’re unfamiliar / unaware of how Facebook has advanced machine learning, but it’s fairly incorrect to say that Facebook doesn’t have software strengths that would contribute to VR. What is odd is that FB would even invest so much into ML, but they do, and they’re one of the biggest players in town.
This is true, though it could be argued that Steam eats up resources. Valve has ~100 employees (as of 2014) and manages several products. Oculus has ~200 employees and manages one product. On top of that, they work with Facebook AI Research, which hosts some of the most highly sought-after minds in the world. I’m not saying that the people at Valve aren’t smart and that some of them aren’t awesome at ML, but there really isn’t any competition here on the ability to attract talent.
The internal resources aside (of which I think your point is hard to prove), it is certainly the case that Valve has a great relationship with developers, and this may make a huge difference in the short/long term.
Everything above said aside, there seems to be a lot of Oculus/Valve love/hate/passion which I don’t really care about. I’ve been in enough platform wars (mac vs pc / linux vs pc / nintendo vs xxx / ps3 vs xbox, etc etc) to not really care whether one or the other wins anymore. What I know is that there is a huge push toward VR by some very big names. These are the same big names that have been redefining the space of machine learning problems over the last few years. We’re in a very exciting time has far as VR, but from what I can tell, Oculus has a distinct advantage. This advantage is real: Apple chose to ignore ML research; they considered good NLP to be an “engineering” problem. As a result, they’ve fallen years behind Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and this reflects in their products. Now that they’ve finally figured it out, they’re acquiring companies at a rate that would make MS blush and finally opening up a machine learning lab of their own.
It’s been confirmed on reddit, that’s Palmer login. Or at very lest someone using that login was asking for donations to his pac. The trump trolls are denouncing him. There are accusations that the pac is a scam.
How are “increasing display resolution” and “mitigate motion sickness by improving tracking fidelity” not strictly engineering problems?
You’re comparing two things that I don’t think are comparable. You can use machine learning to make computers better at recognizing speech, or picking out a dog in a photograph. You can’t use machine learning to increase the resolution of a display, force a GPU to push more polygons at a faster frame rate, or increase the fidelity of motion tracking to reduce simulation sickness. Facebook’s investments in machine learning aren’t odd at all; as you pointed out, machine learning is great for the sorts of things that are already in Facebook’s wheelhouse: picking out people in photographs, understanding what a person is interested in seeing, and figuring out complex real-world social networks that help them improve their suggestions of who else you may want to be “friends” with.
AI and “realistic” VR environments are not products of the headset itself, they’re products of the software running on the computer that the VR headset is connected to. When it comes to gaming experiences in particular, these are problems that will be solved by game engine developers, game studios, and graphics hardware manufacturers, not Facebook. For all its complexity, VR is just a fancy display and control scheme. The real power and brains still rest on the computer and the software running on it. That’s why Facebook wanting to own a VR platform is odd; they’re not investing at all in the side of the equation that actually drives the thing you’re wearing, and their platform’s only software advantage so far has been their ability to restrict games to their own headset through DRM locks - games that are often Rift-only because Facebook is throwing millions of dollars at game developers to support them first.
Maybe I’m missing something, but hand-wavey references to a “VR arms race” and Facebook’s strengths in machine learning don’t immediately translate to “Oculus is a more solid platform”. Could you perhaps be more specific about why you think Facebook has an advantage here?
Can you provide a reference: I want to see what you’re talking about.
I’m on moble hard to search, was talked about when this was posted to /r/politics. The drama happened last week in /r/TheDonald
I think we can all agree that the rise of weirdness that was and is coming from /r/TheDonald, it never felt organic, and it seemed completely manufactured from the start.
Mitigating motion sickness is a great example of how it’s easy to misunderstand a very complex problem as simply “engineering”. Timing of visual / acoustic signals plays a role in how / why stimulus might generate unpleasant responses. Mapping from the space of possible signals to those that don’t get the subject sick is incredibly difficult to do by hand because the space of the problem is just so huge and poorly understood (except on a very basic level).
This goes for huge part of what VR is: how do you generate stimulus that the user won’t perceive as “fake” or “problematic”. To do this, we can tweak our toolboxes, using feedback from users, to slowly move our dev packages toward something that, when developers use it, they have to do less work to generate something “realistic”. This is sort of the “old-school” way to approach problems that involve human perception, and it can work, but we have seen a real threshold on how well you can do this way. The better way is to train a very flexible model to learn the very complicated mapping from what the designer wants to how it should be perceived. From a engineering standpoint, the problem shifts to how to train these things, but this is exactly where these big companies have been excelling at.
You seem to be focusing on FB’s intent for the device, which is quite a different thing. They really are dedicated to good machine learning, but I cannot speak for or defend their intentions.
Sic transit gloria mundi…
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Oh, thanks a lot. Now I’m going to be aware of seeing my nose all day.
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