
Timing Technology - ordiblah
https://www.gwern.net/Timing
======
taneq
> Someone could have built the Rift in mid-to-late 2007 for a few thousand
> dollars, and they could have built it in mid-2008 for about $500.

That's not true. The thing that enabled the Rift was the rapid improvement in
cell phone screens in the early 2010s. I know because in 2011 I was trying to
design a VR headset that was basically the Rift. Readily available screens at
that stage were nearly, but not quite, good enough (most were around 720x480
iirc). I spent ages playing around with lens and mirror setups and fixed
foveated rendering etc. and came to the conclusion that it wasn't doable
(yet).

My failure of imagination was not realising that, while screens in 2011 were
inadequate, they were improving in resolution and response time rapidly and
were about to cross the threshold from useless to useful.

A year later 1080p screens were the norm and the Rift was a reality, but in
2007 it was a pipe dream.

~~~
jacobush
Also what always separated the wheat from the chaff in VR, was latency. (
_That_ kind of timing.) Naive approaches did not take low latency seriously,
causing users to throw up needlessly.

~~~
taneq
Yeah, there's an excellent series of blog posts by Abrash going through all of
the different triggers they found for VR sickness and how they tackled them.

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simonebrunozzi
I love everything written by Gwern. One day I want to meet him if he lets me.

But I am not sure I agree with this one. At least in my personal experience, I
had several good guesses at where tech was going since about the late 90's,
but couldn't capitalize much on it until very recently (e.g. by investing with
my micro-VC fund).

Perhaps it's my experience that's skewed, or perhaps I think too highly of my
past intuitions.

~~~
wmf
Even though you didn't have the money, did you identify specific companies
that were worth investing in? Did those companies succeed, or was it others
with similar ideas?

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Yes, absolutely. Public and private companies. And also some specific
technologies.

Edit: let me give you a simple example. In late 2005 I proposed an investment
to a wealthy relative: buy $100,000 of GOOG and $100,000 of BIDU. Any loss
would be covered by me as debt, to be repaid over the next 10 years, with a
stop-loss at -50% ($100,000). Any gain would be split half and half. Hold it
for 10 years, then sell. Unfortunately my relative didn't accept. Baidu did
30x in 10 years. Google did ~6x.

~~~
jeffshek
Did you write down all your bets? Not just the winners, but also the losers?

This is a bias that a lot of investors often make ...

~~~
gwern
I think a lot of people are surprised when they start using a prediction
market or prediction registry and track _all_ their predictions, not just the
ones they remember decades later. (I thought Google was a good investment in
2005 too. I thought a lot of things back then, but I don't remember what else
I thought.)

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hoseja
Oh, I thought it would be about timing instruments, crystal oscillators and
such, maybe time transfer protocols...

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jdkee
"Hindsight is 20/20."

Said someone better than me.

------
atian
Elliot waves and quantum entanglement.

~~~
gwern
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