If you go through coffee regularly, it's actually quite a nice thing to invest in. There are a really amazing number of craft roasters throughout the country, and simply having a quality grinder is enough. And you don't need a crazy espresso setup to enjoy it. My setup consists of a motorized flat burr grinder, a 20$ kettle from target, and a pour over funnel. The quality is so much higher than anything you can get from a pod that's been sitting around with pre ground coffee, and it only takes a couple minutes while you're waiting for Claude to rewrite your codebase in Rust or whatever it is "Hackers" do these days
Not for the President, unfortunately. Supreme Court precedent has effectively set him as immune from prosecution, and it's not like at his age he'd serve much time anyways.
I expect a lot of his administration to spend their latter years in jail though. Siding with him has basically never paid off for anyone.
> Siding with him has basically never paid off for anyone.
Which is the wildest part. Even before his first administration became a revolving door, he’s pretty much always tossed people aside. I almost believe there are people in his inner circle that are “safe”, but then he (the president of the United States) did once rape his own wife - the same one he pushed down a flight of stairs
"Unlike traditional monitors that force your eyes to focus at a near distance, Phantom allows you to look through the display and focus on objects at varying distances. This helps reduce eye fatigue during long work sessions by giving your eyes natural opportunities to relax and refocus."
Is there any science behind this or is it just a "sounds about right" claim?
There seems to be real evidence[0] for the idea that focusing on nearby objects like computer screens for hours on end can contribute to the development of myopia. Breaks might help.
I don't see any reason to believe that making the screen transparent rather than looking to the side of it is a better way to look out a window for a break.
I want some VR goggles that are light, only do text, and have focus at infinity or so. Not just 3D convergence at infinity but somehow manage to blur just right so my eyes can focus on it like it's across the street. I'm not an optometrist I'm just a consumer and programmer. A guy can wish.
It’s impossible with near-eyes screens. See mismatch of vergence vs accomodation. The best thing for your eyes is to stay away from any head-mounted ar/vr/what-have-you-r stuff.
That's not what VAC is about. VAC is caused by the focus distance of a VR headset being fixed while convergence varies for each object to stimulate depth perception. There is no optical problem displaying text at infinity (both focus and convergence static at infinity) using a headset.
That's if you get motion sickness. You'd get temporary discomfort, not myopia. But if you don't get motion sickness, then AR/VR provides the benefit of a greater focal distance than computer monitors, tablets, smartphones, etc.
Not everyone gets motion sickness though. I can use my VR headset for hours without discomfort from VAC.
From that publication:
The results of the study indicated that the visual acuity of employees who work with data glasses generally did not change over the course of a shift and over a period of six months. Nevertheless, there were groups that had an increased chance of deterioration. Eye strain was frequently reported after working with the data glasses.
Our study pointed out that employees aged 40 years and older are at risk for deteriorations of visual acuity, which is consistent with the findings of Yeow et al. (1991), who examined computer users.
There is an eye exercise for short-sighted people that involves painting a dot on a window glass and then repeatedly changing focus between the dot and the scenery behind the window.
Basically, focus on the dot for 10 seconds, then on the back. Rinse and repeat several times, 2-3 times a day.
I was given this exercise over 30 years ago and its goal was to stop the worsening of the eyesight. Fwiw, in my case, it seemed to have worked.
Unfortunately that isn't how optics work (former freelance camera person and VFX professional).
When you look at a thing you will have two mechanisms at work: (1) the imagined view line of both your eyes will cross over at that focal point, (2) your eye muscles and irises will shift the focus of each individual eye to the distance of that convergence point. Meaning the stuff you concentrate on will be in focus and on a screen that is the screen, even if it is transparent.
The target being 99% transparent doesn't magically shift your focus point backwards just because you can see the background. You would still have to look at it.
You can easily try this at home. Take a sharpie, write on the window and try reading the text while focusing on some object on the outside. You will find the closer you are to the writing, the harder it will be to still read without shifting the focus back to the front.
If anything you will find that reading on a non-uniform and potentially moving background will make it harder for your brain to focus on the text, not easier. The fact that they make a claim like this doesn't exactly fill me with confidence in their ethics.
It is healthy to not stare at the same focal plane for hours, but that just means heavy screen workers should make it a habit to occasionally let their gaze wander offscreen and potentially out of the window. The eyes are muscles, give them some movement.
I intentionally arrange my desk so that I can look past my monitor. On days where I can't refocus my eyes on something long-distance, I have difficulty focusing my vision after spending 1/3 of the day looking at computer screens. On days where I can refocus my eyes, I can go up to 2/3 of the day without issue.
I want to understand this more, so can someone please ELI5 what the theft in the article actually is? Theft implies someone lost something. I think it's theft from the non-profit? But what does that mean? Is it theft of taxes because of the wealth accumulated in the non-profit was not taxed according to how it would have been for a for-profit entity?
EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. I read the article and it's not clear to me. The entire article is written with the assumption that the reader knows what the author is thinking.
It seems like you're mixing "I don't understand X" with what's effectively an argument that X is false. Perhaps people feel that there's some bad faith in that approach.
Also, the article is very clear - the wealth transfer is moving the money/capital controlled by a non-profit to stockholders of a for-profit company. The non-profit lost that property, the share holders gained that property. It seems like taking an implicit assumption something like "the same people are running the for-profit on the same basis they ran the non-profit so where's the theft" - feel free to make that argument but mix the claim with "I don't understand" doesn't seem like a fair approach.
I'm absolutely not arguing that X is false, because I don't know what X is, and I am arguing in good faith. I will follow up with the question: if the non-profit and the for-profit are owned by the same shareholders, what is the theft? Is this not a legal transfer between business entities?
I am also a somewhat harsh critic of Sam Altman (mostly around theft of IP used to train models, and around his odd obsession with gathering biometrics of people). So I'm honestly looking for answers here to understand, again, what wrongdoing is being done?
I'm not 100% clear myself but I think that the criticism is that what was supposed to be a non-profit delivering world-changing technology for the public good was bullied/manipulated into a for-profit entity that would enrich investors and consolidate power among the wealthy.
So the "theft" is the wealthy stealing the benefits of AGI from the people. I think.
This is it right here. My foil is the Elasticsearch replacement because PG has inverted indices. The ergonomics and tunability of these in PG are terrible compared to ES. Yes, it will search, but I wouldn’t want to be involved in constructing or maintaining that search.
That particular issue is just a conceptual mismatch. Exactly 0% of the time do I want to segregate my activities as "chrome" things vs "terminal" things vs whatever. When I want a feature like that, multiple desktops (mission control or whatever) is the tool of choice.
The backtick thing is just a constant annoyance. My workflow is to open windows doing the things I want some, and I want to quickly switch to the window with my next work item. Instead, I need to keep track of extra mental state and figure out if backtick is the right keystroke or if tab and then backtick is the right thing to do.
It's...fine. I'm thankful I have better options at home, but it's tolerable at work with a few third-party apps.
That was the killer feature that convinced me to switch from Windows + Linux to Mac a long time ago. I often have too many windows open, and the conceptual separation between apps and windows helps me find the right task faster. Especially because I can also switch to an app that doesn't have any windows open at the moment.
Yep, my description was mostly negative (I personally hate it because I don't think that way), but I was serious about it just being a mismatch of expectations. There's nothing written in stone about the MacOS method being wrong, and it's nice that it works better for some people. UI is partly objective and partly subjective, and this particular point definitely falls on the subjective end of the spectrum.
My two cents about this after working with some teachers: this is a cat and mouse game and you're wasting your time trying to catch students writing essays on their own time.
It is better to pivot and not care about the actual content of the essay, but instead seek alternate strategies to encourage learning - such as an oral presentation or a quiz on the knowledge. In the laziest case, just only accept hand-written output - because even if it was generated at least they retained some knowledge by copying it.
Do teachers prefer grading papers or something? This always seemed like the obvious answer and there are no shortage of complaints. There is something making papers "sticky" that I do not understand. Education needs to be agile enough to change it's assessment methods. It's getting to the point where we can't just blame LLMs anymore. Figure out how to asses learning outcomes instead of just insisting on methods that you assumed should work.
Oral exams and quizzes are hard for reasons unrelated to understanding the subject matter. Language barriers, public speaking anxiety, exam stress, etc. All things that students should hopefully learn how to overcome, but that's a lot to ask a teacher to deal with in addition to teaching history or whatever. With a paper, a student can choose their own working environment, choose a day and time when they are best able to focus, have a constructive discussion with the teacher if they're having trouble midway through the work, and spread their effort (if they want to) across more than an hour-long test or 5-minute oral exam. In an imaginary world where they couldn't cheat, a paper gives the teacher the best chance of evaluating whether a student understands the material.
I don't think you're wrong necessarily, but there are good reasons that teachers like papers other than "we've always used them".
> Oral exams and quizzes are hard for reasons unrelated to understanding the subject matter. Language barriers, public speaking anxiety, exam stress, etc
People have some different challenges writing papers and taking oral and written quizzes, but is one way or the other necessarily easier? For writing papers, think about language barriers, anxiety about writing ability, stress of writing papers, need for self-motivation and time management, etc.
Because, assuming it's done properly w/o cheating, it's a great learning tool. It's sometimes easy to forget that certain tasks are the way they are because they're supposed to teach. We don't structure teaching and learning around what the least painful thing is.
I think the most realistic way is to do a flipped classroom, where middle-school and beyond, children are expected to be independent learners. Class time should be spent on application of skills and evaluation.
Why do we even grade people? Just teach the content and be done with it. Sure if a student wants to assess their knowledge to see how well they can answer questions they can do that for kicks. If industry wants well educated people, they should have supervised entrance quizes or exams, the onus is on them. This obsession with catching cheaters is out of control.
We need to grade people because that's the best way we have to determine (for one or more subjects) who's:
1. capable enough, so that we can promote them to the next stage;
2. improving or has potential for improvement, so that we can give them the tools or motivation to continue;
3. underperforming, so that we can find out why and help them turn it around (or reduce the pressure);
4. actually learning the content, and if not, why not.
Thankfully, everyone knows this system is flawed, so most don't put too much weight on school grades. But overall, the grades are there to provide both an incentive for teachers and students to do better, and a way to compare performance.
All good points, and I was sort of coming at it from the point of view of catching cheaters. ofc cheaters skew the data but theyre ultimately hurting themselves. They wont pass a companies' entrance tests or will soon find themselves unemployed if they cant do the work. Yes its a problem but I see a lot of effort being spent on trying to detect them. Is that effort proportional to the problem?
If computer usage hampers a child's socialization with the group he's learning with, maybe the simplest and most meaningful solution would be preventing children enrolled in language comprehension classes from having access to computers at home particularly at core language and reasoning stages in development.
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