There’s a reason people without training in sciences sometimes have the intuition that heavier things fall faster. This intuition isn’t developed in a vacuum (hah).
You can disprove this idea even in a simple thought experiment, you don't even need an actual experiment. If I take 2 large stones, connect them with a string so it's 1 object, will that object fall twice as fast than the 2 stones fall separately?
Working under the theory that large dense things fall faster than small things, you'd expect that the large stone would drag the small stone. Much like if you attach a piece of wood to a rock with a rope and throw it in water, the rock will drag the wood down.
You'd probably argue that even though they are connected with a string they are still 2 things and there's a density gap between the two of them.
Now, if you try and figure out what makes a thing a thing, it starts breaking down. But if you've already have the working theory, then making an explanation isn't terribly hard.
All I can offer without going into the weeds is that it is not the shape of the paths, but mearly the relative length of two paths though spacetime that matters.
Proper time and proper acceleration is possibly a pathway in flat spacetime?
Learning that the order, timing, and sometimes causality of events is also relative tends to be a barrier, thus some of these didactic half truths are useful.
The "Einstein train paradox" is the classic intro to the relativity of simultaneity if you aren't familiar.
In the SR case, proper acceleration is possibly the better option.
Good, the ad was really disturbing. An ad is just an ad and not the biggest deal in the scheme of things but that was really unpleasant to watch. For me, it was the visual of needless destruction and waste as much as the meta-message.
It's the needless destruction that really gets to me. I have a fairly visceral reaction to seeing things that someone put time, effort and scarce resources into making get destroyed for no reason, and Apple's ad hit so many nerves in that respect. It's just a complete waste, and that's before we get into the whole subtext of "tech is going to destroy 'IRL' art forms" that many people got.
What baffles me the most is the choice to include human figurines (the bust, the statue, the smiley right at the end). The imagery of human figures getting crushed is going to look disturbing even to the least environmentally conscious viewers.
I've always assumed he has a large backlog of comics, and a script that pushes them out on schedule.
He can always push new comics into the queue based on current events or fresh ideas, but at other times he can probably go for weeks without needing to draw new comics.
Treating refined sugar as the addictive substance it is, and keeping those products in a separate part of the store rather than at the checkout line. Removing subsidies for unhealthy ingredients, subsidising healthier ones. More education in schools. Better funding and requiring school districts to meet certain quality standards for the food they provide to children. Ensuring all children have the right to a healthy meal. Where previous initiatives have fallen short, critically evaluate why and make them better. Thinking about social psychological factors for our collective mental health and thinking about how this influences our dietary and exercise choices.
There are lots of actions that could be taken that are not just pharmaceutical.
This is more than just children, the food environment adults are subject to encourages unhealthy habits too. Locking kitkats up won't change a thing.
Just look at American portion sizes at any restaurant -- they're huge! The common mantra is that we want to ensure we get our money's worth. I was astounded on my trips to France. The dinners were still filling, but were much smaller than most American restaurants I've dealt with on the East Coast, Southeast, and Midwest.
Plus we put sugar/HFCS in literally everything. If you wanted to save a few calories and eat a ham sandwich at home, the basic loaf of white bread you're yanking off the shelf has HFCS, and for what?
This isn't even getting to the usual punching bag of fast food/fast casual, where you're easily set back 1000-1500kcals on the default menu selection.
It's interesting that this analysis implies intentionality on behalf of TikTok, and does not allow for the case that its users genuinely enjoy the service and therefore do not want to see it banned.
For all the reasons that this might not take off, what a thrill that people are trying something new--and it looks really nicely designed too.
I think this is easy to dismiss at first glance, but I genuinely believe they're trying to think about a new mode of interaction. The idea that "the computer will disappear" is probably accurate in the long term. Except for content delivery (reading, photos, movies), most tasks we achieve via computers and phones do not strictly require a screen. It's probably a good thing if computers did a better job of getting out of the way, and stop so loudly disrupting human interactions.
Whether this will be the solution is unclear; the privacy/creepiness angle is still real with an outwards-facing camera. Latency and battery life limitations might be too significant. The cost will be a non-starter for many (it is for me).
But I'm still impressed because there was a vision here. The conversational interface has never worked before for many reasons, but that does not mean it cannot work in principle, or that the ideal implementation would not be spellbinding. I'm glad they're trying. Also, the laser display is neat!
First, I’m really excited people are trying new things, but I won’t be buying this just based on the demo.
> The conversational interface has never worked before for many reasons, but that does not mean it cannot work in principle, …. I'm glad they're trying. Also, the laser display is neat!
So I did a lot of work over the years to research voice UI/UX and I’m very skeptical about this, even with the LLM stuff. I think an LLM was missing from the Siri/alexa era to transform it from “audio cli” to “chat interface” but there’s a few reasons besides that it didn’t catch on.
The information density and linearity of chat, voice especially, is a big problem.
When you look at a screen, your eyes can move in 2 dimensions. You can have sidebars, you can have text fields organized in paragraphs and buttons and bars etc. Not so with chatting - when you add linearity (you can only listen to or read one thing at a time, conversation can only present one list at a time) it becomes really slow to navigate any sort of decision or menu trees. Mobile-first have simplified this of course, but it’s not enough. Reading TTS becomes even slower to find the info you care about. It’s found a place for simple controls (smarthome, media, timers, etc) and simple information retrieval (weather, announce doorbell, read last text). Then there’s the obvious problem of talking out loud in public, false response recognition etc which are necessary evils of a voice UI.
I think the best hope for a voice device like this is to (as they’ve done) focus on simple experiences like “what’s I miss recently” and hope an AI can do a good enough job.
The laser display might help with presenting a full menu at once (media controls being an easy example), but it probably will end up being a pain to use (eg like a worse smartwatch).
Honestly though, my biggest hesitation (which could end up great) is the “pin” design. It’s novel, especially with the projector, but how heavy is it and how will that impact the comfort of my clothes? What about when wearing a jacket or scarf? Will this flop around while walking? Etc.
There is also a lack of serendipity or explorability with voice: How do you know whats possible? There is a reason a GUI menu is called a menu. It not only gives you access to multiple options but also at a glance an overview what options are there, like a restaurant menu.
It'll flop everywhere, not just while walking. Boom boom.
But yeah I've been thinking that too. "Oh, put my coat on - better spend 30 seconds messing around with my pin" [...] "Ahhh back in the office. There goes another thirty seconds moving the pin so it can film me looking at a screen for four hours"
And yeah, I feel like the weight would definitely pull my jumper or t-shirt out of shape, and make things like my collar/neckline look out of whack. Maybe they'll bring out a range of clothes suitable for it, or suggest you wear a coat indoors like the woman in the video is doing.
Linear conversation is a big problem for anything beyond simple, casual usage. It is the reason that YouTube is a terrible research platform. Is the information you want inside that 3-hour video? Possibly, but with text I can search an article for content or skim sections to determine if it's worth a deeper read.
Let's not forget the value of non-linear input. Good search terms are often constructed rather than spilled forth. Sometimes I enter search terms, read it and realize that it's like to return unrelated results and need to modify it. By the time I realize this while speaking to an AI it's already spitting out the wrong information.
This leads to a need for altered interfaces that allow these scenarios to be accomodated. This is v1.0. Let's see where it goes.
If a science fiction author was writing it, the need for stiffer fabrics to support chest cameras would synergize with a neo-Victorianism in generation alpha. (Formal button-up shirts and higher necklines for enforced modesty)
IMO, with LLMs we won't really need information density except for certain classes of people.
Even now - clicking through some insurance company's website hierarchy to find something out is insanely painful.
But even for researching things that we should probably care about enough to do it ourselves, correlating different sources of information or working through abstract/ambiguous problems... the vast majority of ordinary people will 100% take the easy way out and let LLMs do most of the thinking for them. Even with free GPT-3, people are unflinchingly having LLMs solve problems they don't want to think about too deeply. What they pay for, with occasional inaccuracy, is more than offset by convenience.
> IMO, with LLMs we won't really need information density except for certain classes of people.
Maybe, but I don’t know if that day is here yet. I think “most people” do actually consume information. Like reading an insurance company’s website is pretty rare compared to things like using the Amazon App. Like it’d be hard to consume a list of 5+ push notifications via voice if you had to listen to them 1 by 1 instead of skimming them in a list next to their icons.
Even simple things like scrolling through a list of songs becomes painful. I have like 10k songs in my (streaming) library Sometimes I randomly scroll through it to find old music. That sounds impossible on voice. I’d be stuck with “shuffle” mode.
Being able to summarize and search text conversations via voice queries from their demo would be nice, but today that’s a task that you need a screen for.
The demo video shows the man buying a book online via voice after holding it up to the camera. How often is that the online shopping experience? I can’t imagine shopping without a screen 95% of the time.
we may not need it but we certainly prefer it. People went completely voluntary from voice calling to texting and within texting to ever terser forms to the point were an entire website was built around a short character limit.
Except for people with disability I have not really seen a single case where that tendency towards compactness is reversed in communication.
> most tasks we achieve via computers and phones do not strictly require a screen.
X (doubt). There are unfortunately only 5 senses that our brains can interact with the outside world, and visual ways are the most information dense and the easiest to utilize. The screen isn't going away anytime soon.
Projector to me are same as screen - they've been around for as long too.
Though I do look forward to direct computer-brain interface, like introducing a 6th sense.
I highly doubt this thing is even usable outdoors. You would need pretty insane brightness levels for this to work in the sunlight. Companies have been trying to make projects with touch input for years, and nobody has gotten close to anything resembling a consumer product, I highly doubt they achieved it here
I agree, even though I'll reserve judgement until trying it. But it remains that limitations in power are unavoidable, and projecting a laser image onto a hand in daylight is going to use an awful lot of juice, particularly given the projector is so tiny I've no idea how this can be done so it's functional, nevermind "insanely great". Same goes for their claim that the speakers inside this tiny device are worthy of getting sound to the ears while skateboarding outdoors. You can have all the Head Related Transfer Functions in the world but again, you need speakers and amplifiers on the order of several watts to get the sound up to the ears. My iPhone Pro Max sounds great and loud in a quiet room, but take it onto the street to play music, it's barely audible. Also not sure how the device will know what kind of HRTF to use given its placement is going to vary so much.
Well, for instance, what is commonly referred to as "touch" is actually a whole bundle of senses. There's the actual sensation of pressure, but also texture, temperature, surface finish, the physical position of your various body parts, your sense of balance, etc etc.
No, but points for a solid attempt. Senses are input (to the body), not output. Glove controllers are just output via movement, just like keyboards and touchscreens.
True, part of what makes them cool is that your proprioception more or less agrees with the virtual hand that you see in your headset, but that's just window dressing. The computer has no way to control that.
I'm no biology expert but had to study some of this for my robotics degree not so long ago.
"Sight"
split into rods for brightness sensitivity, and cones, each of which is deicated to one out of red, green, and blue. green is wider gamut of color than the others because there is a lot of green in nature. These sensors are fully independant of each other for the most part, although there is minor overlap between cones which is what we call other colors (yellow etc)
"Taste"
Again split into different specialised papillae sensors. I dont remember so well, but its something like foliate for sour sensing, fungiform for salty, and vallate for bitter/poison. There is also sweet I dont remember the name, and some argue for umami
"Touch"
There are an ungodly number of very distinct senses that go into touch. From more abstract ones like pain, heat/cold, moisture (not evenly distributed around body, for example have to touch things to lips to distinguish cold from wet), proprioception for joints (arguably an independant sense for each joint, or at least each "kind" of joint, because the biological mechanism is different for ball joints to saddle joints etc as well as specialised proprioception for eyeballs, tongue etc)
Then in actual touch touch there is Ruffini corpuscles sensing skin stretching and slippage of objects past the skin
Merkel discs, which senses pressure applied to the skin and low frequency vibration
Meissner's corpuscles, which sense vibrations in middle range. They are very sensitive and allow very slight sensing of tiny impulses such as picking up an insect's wing
Pacinian corpuscle sense extremely fast vibration which among other things allow the distinction between "rough" and "smooth" surfaces (by mechanical movement causing vibration)
There are also free nerve endings sensing stuff like itching and bruising.
Hair foillicles also sense movement and stretching of the hair they are attached too, which provides more touch data. Incidentally this mechanism is also used for balance and hearing via really complicated interactions of tiny hairs in the ear.
"Smell"
Smell is fiendishly complex, it actually is more akin to the way antibodies in the body are made in the sense it consists of thousands (and millions) of specialised sensors made to "fit" and attach to individual compounds, so there are almost limitless individual senses of smell
There is also a whole lot of internal sensor data for things like breathing (you know when you are short of breath), digestion you know when you are full, or when you are craving one of a number of things sweet salty etc), bladder control.
This is mostly off the top of my head and i'm certain i'm misremembering some of the subtlties and a whole bunch more senses both obscure and immediately recognisable ones to any owner of a human body
This is super interesting, and I appreciate the level of detail and thought that went into your response. Some I'm willing to accept, like hot/cold being distinct from pressure being distinct from pain. (Spinal cord injury, for instance, can impair pressure perception in a particular part of the body without affecting hot/cold. And lumping joint pain in with "touch" is just silly.)
On the other hand, in the context of the discussion, it's hard to support the argument that you can count each colour channel separately just because the biological mechanics differ. You can't actually triple the amount of human-perceptable information by going from a monochrome to full colour display.
The point remains that we've plucked the low-hanging fruit when it comes to high-bandwidth human senses (or meta-senses if you insist on being pedantic). No one will buy a PUI (pain user interface).
absolubtely! sight is an amazingly high-bandwidth sense, as is hearing.
Other types of interfaces do exist, for example ive worked with vibration motor arrays placed on the skin for various purposes such as assisting in guiding the arm of a patient to target a specific point (vibrate on side closest to target) etc. We also worked with pads of electrical patches that pass small currents through the skin to produce a distinct sensation, like pain but barely at the threshold of being noticable. These were used for first responders, placed along the side of the torso underneath the clothes with flat profile, allowing them to have handsfree silent communication with low bandwidth. Something like "up up left left" being pre-agreed to mean leave the structure now etc. Another fun one I wanted to mention is in-mouth joysticks controlled with the tongue for quadreplegic patients to allow them to move a wheelchair or robot arm to regain some small independance (might seem like it would be uselessly hard to achieve anything with an arm controlled that way but the emotional impact of independance can't be understated for such people, even a simple task can be very meaningful)
They won't be as good as screens or audio unfortunately. But they can exist. Even braille screens and keyboards exist as a nice product and are reasonably high bandwidth.
> On the other hand, in the context of the discussion, it's hard to support the argument that you can count each colour channel separately just because the biological mechanics differ. You can't actually triple the amount of human-perceptable information by going from a monochrome to full colour display.
You absolutely LOSE perceptible information when you lose one of then channels, like in color blindness.
It's funny, I see people cover up the webcam on their laptops all the time, but not their phones. They forget that there's a camera on both sides of the phone.
Webcams in laptops are shitty cameras, and for most people, they're useless anyway (even in post-pandemic era, hardly anyone does conference calls, video or otherwise). Meanwhile, "selfie camera" is like literally the main purpose of the phone for a large chunk of the population.
I think what the parent comment was saying is that when being held in a normal manner, the phone is facing about 45 degrees below the horizon, so it can't see much except people's legs. To film people's faces and such, you'd have to tilt the phone up much higher than you would if you were just writing a text message / email or browsing the web. If you try writing a text on a phone that's angled up to the horizon like that, it's harder to type and harder to read the screen.
True. I suppose the social conventions around overt vs covert use of smartphone cameras evolved before wide-angle cameras on phones became common, since wide-angle cameras on phones are a pretty new thing.
And especially since we can now make cameras small enough that you'd never know they were there. Even OVM6948 is commercially available, the size of a "grain of sand".
I've always said that privacy is an illusion, the usual example I give is: "You're lying in bed with the curtains drawn, you see a shadow fall across the curtains that looks like a person standing outside. Do you, or do you not have privacy?"
If the shadow turns out to be a person peeking through the curtains, then you don't. If the shadow turns out to be primal brain + tree shadow then you do. Schrodinger style.
Privacy is probably best described (as it sometimes is) as a "sense" of privacy I guess.
This doesn't feel like the right product for a lot of reasons. (Wait...do I have to pin it to the outside of my coat when I put that on? What's the battery life outside a coat in winter? Will it catch on my seatbelt?) Lots of practical problems for a lot of people. Still, LOTS of interesting ideas here.
> It's probably a good thing if computers did a better job of getting out of the way, and stop so loudly disrupting human interactions.
And that is not this. Talking out loud every few moments with verbal commands do a device is way more annoying that someone looking at and typing on a phone
That said, I agree with you at a glance it's neat. I think in reality though it's a poor idea given how often people need to give a verbal command.
The talking out loud I agree is problematic. The bluetooth functionality and increasing quality audio pass through give me hope for a simple earphone in one ear, and eventually... this: https://x.com/ruohanzhang76/status/1720525179028406492
Also bullish on hand gesture control. Maybe most stuff will eventually become jutsu level fancy hand movements lol.
What a time to be alive. It is easy to remain grateful in this age of rapid progress.
The problem is the voice-based approach: it won't work reliably in loud environments, it won't be usable in a doctor's waiting room, libraries and other quiet environments, and some people simply don't like voice UIs.
If you want the computer to disappear, why not a better smartwatch? Or glasses, this time without the sci-fi gadget look? Both could support the exact same featureset but with a screen.
> The idea that "the computer will disappear" is probably accurate in the long term.
Why though? Computer requires attention, which pretty much rules out doing something else while using it, except perhaps when passively listening to a podcast (which doesnt really qualify as computer use). Even though we may see new mediums, the mode of interaction will remain similar to that of a book
I am really glad arXiv is getting more funding. It is an essential resource.
For me personally, it’ll be really interesting to see if the frontend changes. No doubt there are some important improvements that can be made (a website can always be made more accessible, moderation tools, support for name changes as mentioned, etc.) However, to first approximation, arXiV’s website already seems almost like a platonic ideal. It reminds me of Craigslist. Simple HTML, loads fast, has the information and features you need but otherwise gets out of your way. I love it.
The arXiv team deserves a lot of credit for what they’ve done to get it this far. It’s difficult to overstate how useful and transformative preprint servers have been to science.
I had this same thought but was reluctatnt to state it as it feels like unnecessary pessimism. But honestly, this website works flawlessly. The last thing it needs is software developers trying to keep themselves entertained or impress people. If it ain't broke...
Cool idea! Is there a way to go to the arxiv page (https://arxiv.org/abs/...) of a paper instead of only going to the PDF (https://arxiv.org/pdf/...) without manually manipulating the URL?
Awesome, hadn’t seen that. I’m sure there will be a zillion edge cases where it won’t work properly for specific documents because of odd latex quirks.
If the pdfs were served by some of the megacaps who posts tons of papers (e.g. Google or Facebook) then it would be an order of magnitude faster. And said megacaps would end up spending peanuts relative to the value they get from arXiv.
An order of magnitude faster sounds unimportant. Is all the time spent by researchers sitting around waiting for 0.4s for a paper to download really an issue?
They probably could make it faster by rendering server-side a preview of sorts. I don't think that most papers are large enough for this to have a major impact unless you have a very slow connection.
SumatraPDF on Windows is lightning fast with the kind of PDFs you get from the arXiv (true PDFs without heavy graphics). I don't know what is fast on Linux, but probably some MuPDF-based viewers are (the MuPDF PoC viewer is fast even on WSL).
https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057
There’s a reason people without training in sciences sometimes have the intuition that heavier things fall faster. This intuition isn’t developed in a vacuum (hah).