Is anybody making smart glasses that are just a display? For me, the rest of the feature set verges on being anti-features. I'd much rather a very rudimentary display that my phone or another device could send relatively low bandwidth data to over bluetooth or some other protocol and build from there.
Having a camera or a mic on the glasses themselves seems like something I'd mostly want to avoid for privacy, and having a speaker just seems like gilding the lily when we already have a variety of headphones to choose from.
This article* makes the case for mozjpeg cleanly beating webp when we are above 500x500px image sizes. So. There's a lot more performance/compression to be gained within the jpeg container format than people generally argue for.
I have been on a similar journey. The Bose headphones are nice, but hard to sleep with and they are ON-ear, which hirt my ears after an hour or so. The Bose Sleepbuds are okish, the best of all the products I tried, sadly discontinued. There was(is?) a reboot of the same product but do not have experience with those [0]. Anyone tried those ‘soft’ headband looking headphones for sleeping? Tips welcome
[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.]
The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community.
As relevant here:
1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some degree of rounding or unknown-unknowns. A -> B and B -> C means A -> C in a formal sense, but A -almostcertainly-> B and B -almostcertainly-> C does not mean A -almostcertainly-> C. Rationalists, by tending to overly formalist approaches, tend to lose the thread of the messiness of the real world and follow these lossy implications as though they are lossless. That leads to...
2) Precision errors in utility calculations that are numerically-unstable. Any small chance of harm times infinity equals infinity. This framing shows up a lot in the context of AI risk, but it works in other settings too: infinity times a speck of dust in your eye >>> 1 times murder, so murder is "justified" to prevent a speck of dust in the eye of eternity. When the thing you're trying to create is infinitely good or the thing you're trying to prevent is infinitely bad, anything is justified to bring it about/prevent it respectively.
3) Its leadership - or some of it, anyway - is extremely egotistical and borderline cult-like to begin with. I think even people who like e.g. Eliezer would agree that he is not a humble man by any stretch of the imagination (the guy makes Neil deGrasse Tyson look like a monk). They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of "anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm". That kind of framing can't help but get culty.
4) The nature of being a "freethinker" is that you're at the mercy of your own neural circuitry. If there is a feedback loop in your brain, you'll get stuck in it, because there's no external "drag" or forcing functions to pull you back to reality. That can lead you to be a genius who sees what others cannot. It can also lead you into schizophrenia really easily. So you've got a culty environment that is particularly susceptible to internally-consistent madness, and finally:
5) It's a bunch of very weird people who have nowhere else they feel at home. I totally get this. I'd never felt like I was in a room with people so like me, and ripping myself away from that world was not easy. (There's some folks down the thread wondering why trans people are overrepresented in this particular group: well, take your standard weird nerd, and then make two-thirds of the world hate your guts more than anything else, you might be pretty vulnerable to whoever will give you the time of day, too.)
TLDR: isolation, very strong in-group defenses, logical "doctrine" that is formally valid and leaks in hard-to-notice ways, apocalyptic utility-scale, and being a very appealing environment for the kind of person who goes super nuts -> pretty much perfect conditions for a cult. Or multiple cults, really. Ziz's group is only one of several.
For air travel, I really like my Xreal Air glasses now that I have a newer iPhone 16pro. Just plug in the USB-C cable, and you have a virtual 60" screen in front of you which works perfectly for Netflix, etc. And they cost less than 10% of the cost of an AVP, and are not limited to 2-3 hours of battery life (they get power from the phone).
Note that if you have an older (lightning) iPhone, don't bother with these. They require a pair of dongles. Not only does that make things really awkward, but one of the dongles ends up apparently blocking HDCP, and prevents you from using anything but ... your own... downloaded content.
The fact that you’re trying to read the tea leaves on gp’s post rather than discuss them correctly calling out the DEI corporate scam tells all you need to know about the bad faith of this discussion.
Edit because there seems to be some confusion about this: this is mainly constructed as a resource for farmers, grocers, etc, who are trying to bring produce to consumers in a state that it will arrive in their home at a good quality. Their requirements for length of time in storage/transport are very different from most consumers, and the resources they can devote to maintaining an optimal temperature, humidity, gas environment for a given type of produce are much more extensive. That said, there's plenty to learn from it as a consumer with the right eye, e.g. about how the tissue damage due to too cold storage may differ from too hot, or the ethylene interactions from storing various things together.
> which is very hard to justify on national security grounds
I think the people doing this have a completely different notion of national security than the general public, one that includes a supposed right to know about surprises in general and big events in general, not just about bad guys plotting to attack you. For example, they might believe that details of economic activity, prices, religious movements, relationships among foreign politicians, epidemics, boycott and antiboycott campaigns, etc., are matters of national security in the sense that they could eventually develop into things that would affect a society negatively, or that could tend to increase or decrease the power of a state.
In maintaining the idea of privacy, we have to also maintain that others have to accept surprises and uncertainty. I don't know my neighbors' religious views, I don't know what oatmilk will cost next week at the supermarket, I didn't know when my former coworkers started trying to organize a union, I don't know if anyone has a crush on me. But all that information exists somewhere in computer systems. I accept that I have no right to it, but it seems incredibly hard to get governments to think the same way.
When Glenn Greenwald first talked about how spying on Petrobras wasn't a matter of U.S. national security, I thought that was obviously right. Petrobras isn't going to attack the U.S., it doesn't have any means of attacking the U.S., and it doesn't have any obligation to sell or not sell oil to the U.S. or any other country at any particular price. But now I think that it's not just like "the NSA must plan to help the Texas oil industry" or "the NSA must plan to help the Saudi oil industry" or something; it's more like "they don't accept that they should have to contend with surprises and uncertainty".
To be clear, I think that spying on Petrobras is wrong and I wish that Petrobras had a remedy for it. And I think disclosing that it happens is right, but it doesn't seem to have led to the kind of discussion or debate that Greenwald seemed to hope for.
> If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified. To have a free society some level of risk must be accepted.
(But in this context we're not just talking about risks of violent attacks, but really risks of anything disruptive.)
Edit 2: The U.S. in particular is powerful enough to enforce economic sanctions which are themselves justified on national security grounds, so then there's also the sanctions enforcement part like figuring out whether Petrobras is working with the Iranian oil industry or whatever. Most countries probably wouldn't even expect to be able to do anything about that, although they might want to exert diplomatic pressure like "please stop trading with our enemy, from whom we concretely fear a physical attack".
Both the review and the sample of the book available through the book's marketplace listing leave me unable to describe either of them with any single word other than "inspired".
That's a very interesting idea, and one that I hadn't considered. And indeed, Ireland in comparison is a place where people try not to get too political in conversation for obvious reasons, especially in the North where I grew up.
Your comment reminded me of another story, from the first time I visited home after being over here for 2 years, bringing my Dutch girlfriend with me to show her around and share with her a better understanding of where I came from.
I grew up in Belfast, which outside of the city centre was strongly divided between Protestants and Catholics. I grew up myself close to an interface between two of these areas, where violence was so bad and so regular that a wall had been erected to keep the communities apart and keep them from fighting.
This was one of the things that was shocking to my girlfriend, as well as the paintings on the wall showing masked men with guns to denote who controlled the area. After talking and walking for a while she noted that she was curious about the paintings on "the other side."
I explained to her that, by the age of 27 when I left the country, there was large portions of the city that I'd never visited because I didn't feel comfortable going there. She argued that peace had long been found and that if we went there no one would ever even know where I was from, so I agreed and we took a visit to The Falls Road in West Belfast, a working class Catholic area which was important in the history of The Troubles.
We saw their wall, we saw their murals which were honestly less intimidating than the ones I'd grown up with. We got to the top of the road and explored some side streets, one of which had a house pub, a house that had been converted into a pub.
My girlfriend wanted to go in and get a real sense of the local life. I was honestly quite scared because, on my side of town, such bars were always strongly associated with a heavy paramilitary clientele and would be unwelcoming to outsiders. But, I guess being Dutch, she said "Come on, we don't have to talk to anyone, we'll just get a drink and enjoy the atmosphere and you can say you've done it." Again, I agreed.
We entered into a small dark room. We hadn't even ordered our drinks before the locals noticed we were having to think about what was available and became curious. As soon as my girlfriend opened her mouth with her Dutch accent we were asked by the group around the bar, and the barmaid herself, where we'd come from.
She explained that she was Dutch and was welcomed with a friendly joke about "King Billy," William of Orange who had fought in Ireland for the Protestant Ascendancy in the 17th Century.
While this was happening a man approached me from antother part of the room and asked if I was a musician, as I was holding a set of mandolin strings. We got quickly into conversation as he was himself a banjo player, and I had been curious about finding a bar to hear some traditional music as I had started playing it myself while living in Holland.
Another gentleman then joined us and asked us where we were staying and I, still feeling uneasy, was quick to mention that it was in South Belfast, a mostly neutral part of town. I was told we weren't the only non-locals in the bar that night as there was a boy from Scotland as well, and he was quickly pointed out.
Conversation flowed naturally on and eventually I was asked what part of town I was from, and I decided to be honest and say East Belfast. The latest gentleman to have entered the conversation assumed that I was from the Short Strand, a small Catholic enclave in anotherwise Protestant neighbourhood. He actually phrased it as, "What part of the Strand are you from?" to which I responded, "I'm not, I'm from the Other Side" and he asked immediately "What are you doing up here then? Are you not afeared?"
I explained that I'd left the country and seen things from the outside, seen that we were one people living on one island, and that I was here with my girlfriend who was Dutch and just wanted to see the whole city. He shook my hand and said, "Well, you're a braver man that I am" before moving to another table.
Soon after the first man I'd spoken to, the musician, came up and said he'd heard that I was Protestant. He too shook my hand and said "That's just the way it should be. I hope you'll come back again." We finished our drinks and left soon after, as we had agreed.
I'm still not sure what to make of it all. Sometimes I regret having left and contributed to the "brain drain" at home, not being there to do my part in helping with the peace process. But sometimes I look back on that day and feel that in some small way I did my bit.
Autoconf is one of those programs that solved real problems when it was created, in a way that was actually fairly reasonable at the time too. There's a reason it became so popular. But it's now 30 years later, and what was reasonable then is a liability now.
Sendmail is another great example of this phenomenon.
Having a camera or a mic on the glasses themselves seems like something I'd mostly want to avoid for privacy, and having a speaker just seems like gilding the lily when we already have a variety of headphones to choose from.