Ron Lancaster

HN user, EddieDante:

It’s called “Medium” because the posts are neither rare nor well-done.

Brilliant!

I’d heard of the disasters happening in our national parks, but I didn’t really know why:

Climate change has increased temperatures across the United States. But because so many national parks are at high elevations, in the arid Southwest or in the Arctic, they are being disproportionately affected by global warming. A 2018 study found that temperatures in national parks are rising at twice the rate as the country as a whole.

The examples of what’s happening at our parks are devastating.

…climate change caused by humans—is well-established science. The evidence is overwhelming, and attempted rebuttals are incomplete, flawed, or fabricated.

When I read this, I wondered if this is still a contested issue - and, yes, it is. Fourteen percent of American adults don’t agree that global warming is happening and about that same number are unsure.

Source: Yale Climate Opinion Maps 2021

McKinsey surveyed 25,000 Americans. Some care should be taken with the conclusions, as this is an online survey, and may underrepresent “people with lower incomes, less education, people living in rural areas, or people aged 65 and older”.

However, the results are still informative:

• 58% can work from home at least one day a week (35% of the respondents have the option to work from home 5 days a week).
• Of those who can work from home, 87% are doing so.

Notably, of those looking for a job, the top reasons were pay and career opportunities, which were more important than the number three reason of working remotely.

Beyond these top three, it’s a great reminder that leaders need to focus on creating purpose and building a great team to keep their high performers.

A wonderful gift and a great example of the kind and generous people that they were.

Steven Nordberg and Betsy McDonald were dedicated volunteers who cared for what are known as bottle babies — orphaned kittens that have to be raised and fed by hand, around the clock to start.

“We knew that they had made a plan for animals in their estate,” Humane Society CEO Janelle Dixon said. “We had no idea of the dollar amount, so that $6 million gift was quite a surprise.”

(And the new Humane Society center on 280 looks to be amazing!)

Big update from Meta on an advancement to a general purpose learning algorithm:

Meta AI is excited to announce data2vec, the first high-performance self-supervised algorithm that works for multiple modalities. We apply data2vec separately to speech, images and text and it outperformed the previous best single-purpose algorithms for computer vision and speech and it is competitive on NLP tasks.

In a previous post from March of last year, then Facebook AI asserted:

We believe that self-supervised learning (SSL) is one of the most promising ways to build such background knowledge and approximate a form of common sense in AI systems.

This feels like a big leap going from an idea of how to generalize self-supervised learning to releasing working models, in less than a year.

We’re encouraged by the progress of self-supervision in recent years, though there’s still a long way to go until this method can help us uncover the dark matter of AI intelligence. Self-supervision is one step on the path to human-level intelligence, but there are surely many steps that lie behind this one. Long-term progress will be cumulative. That’s why we’re committed to working collaboratively with the broader AI community to achieve our goal of, one day, building machines with human-level intelligence.

Cumulative, but with big leaps along the way.

There are parallels to Sam Altman’s recent essay, “Moore’s Law for Everything”, with the well-known essay by Marc Adreessen, “Why Software is Eating the World”, shared in 2011.

Perhaps in a decade, we’ll look back with reverence on this latest essay in the same way we view the 2011 entrant. With the continued advances in AI, it does seem like he has it right.

The Information shared a new report which seems to corroborate Bloomberg’s from a couple of weeks ago. However, ArsTechnica is skeptical:

For Apple to launch a VR headset this soon (or at all) would be a surprising move, to say the least.

The company has no developer APIs for VR beyond nominal support for the SteamVR SDK in its custom Metal graphics API, even as it has spent years building up very robust AR APIs. CEO Tim Cook has also been publicly dismissive of VR in the past, citing its tendency to isolate users from those around them, among other factors. He has repeatedly pointed to augmented reality as Apple’s future focus.

Apple has been building up tools for the creation of augmented reality content since 2017. That’s when the company started using the iPhone and iPad—and their AR-enabled rear camera arrays—as a spawning ground for AR developers who could create experiences for a future app marketplace for AR glasses. As a result of that groundwork, Apple’s AR glasses could see an immediate wave of high-quality apps on release.

It’s harder to picture that situation with VR, so one is left wondering why Apple would focus on VR instead of AR to start when the groundwork is there for AR. And Apple is way behind in VR. The company made a half-hearted foray into VR with barebones HTC Vive support within Final Cut Pro and some other tools alongside the launch of the iMac Pro, but little was heard of that feature again.

Apple has surprised us before. But it is clear the tooling, partners, and ecosystem around a product are often just as important as the product itself.

It is likely, even expected, that Apple is prototyping VR headsets alongside AR ones. However, prototypes aren’t required to be shipped. Instead, the R&D effort is to explore the space and the focus is still on launching an AR offering.

Bloomberg is back again with a story about Apple that is almost certainly wrong - claiming that Apple will release a VR headset in 2022.

Apple isn’t looking to create an iPhone-like hit for its first headset. Instead, the company is building a high-end, niche product that will prepare outside developers and consumers for its eventual, more mainstream AR glasses.

As a mostly virtual reality device, it will display an all-encompassing 3-D digital environment for gaming, watching video and communicating. AR functionality, the ability to overlay images and information over a view of the real world, will be more limited.

Almost everything about VR is unlike what Apple represents:

• The most common case for VR is gaming. And while Apple excels at mobile gaming; VR is more similar to a desktop gaming experience - which Apple lags in.
• VR is an individual, but isolating experience. Almost everything Apple offers today is personal, but personal in a way that helps the individual more fully interact with their world.
• And most importantly, VR induces sickness in more than 20% of women and around 10% of men. It seems very unlikely for Apple to sell a device that makes so many people sick.

The article continues with more incredible ideas:

The company has also designed the headset with a fan, something the company usually tries to avoid on mobile products, the people said.

No, they will not sell a headset that has a fan.

To further reduce the device’s weight, Apple is planning to use a fabric exterior.

No.

By developing a less mainstream initial headset, Apple can invest in the underlying technologies, consumer education, content development and developer relations to give its eventual AR glasses the best opportunity to be successful — when they are ready.

Apple has already been doing this for years, by building AR into the iPhone and iPad. They don’t need to release a less mainstream headset to accomplish these goals.

The level design is wonderful. In this wide-screen view, it becomes clear that Sonic is a virtual roller coaster masquerading as a 2-D side-scroller.