Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, this is a fascinating hypothesis and honestly super believable. It makes way more sense than the intuitive belief that there’s actually something under the human skin suit understanding any of this code.
Context: micro (5 person) software company with a mature SaaS product codebase.
We use a mix of agentic and conversational tools, just pick your own and go with it.
For Unity development (our main codebase and source of value) I give current gen tools a C- for effectiveness. For solving confined, well modularisable problems (eg refactor this texture loader; implement support for this material extension) it’s good. For most real day to day problems it’s hopelessly confused by the large codebase full of state, external dependency on chunks of Unity, implicit hardware-dependent behaviours, etc. It has no idea how to work meaningfully with Unity’s scene graph or component model. I tried using MCP to empower it here: on a trivial test project it was fine. In a real project it got completely lost and broke everything after eating 30k tokens and 40 minutes of my time, mostly because it couldn’t understand the various (documented) patterns that straddled code files and scene structure.
For web and API development I give it an A, with just a little room for improvement. In this domain it’s really effective all the way down the logical stack from architectural and deployment decisions all the way down to implementation details and debugging including digging really deep in to package version incompatibilities and figuring out problems in seconds that would take me hours. My one criticism would be the - now familiar - “junior developer” effect where it’ll often run ahead with an over engineered lump of machinery without spotting a simpler more coherent pattern. As long as you keep an eye on it it’s fine.
So in summary: if what you’re doing is all in text, nothing in binary, doesn’t involve geometric or numerical reasoning, and has billions of lines of stack overflow solutions: you’ll be golden. Otherwise it’s still very hit and miss.
This feels super unfair to the gov.uk experience design which for me stands out head and shoulders above any other web workflow delivered by the public sector I've ever come across.
Pages are snappy, terse, consistent, clear and unsurprising. I agree this specific example feels a bit dark-patterny and occasionally stuff like self-assesment can have more steps than necessary, but overall it's really high quality.
In comparison the process for getting a DUNS number felt like going through some kind of a psychological experiment.
Finally, this:
> a party in power famous for paternalism
is just enclowning yourself with a partisan and non-sequitous point.
You're trying to paint me as someone who hates the whole gov.uk experience - which is not what I wrote or implied
I'm allowed to be frustrated and to criticise it - I'm a tax-paying British citizen.
> is just enclowning yourself with a partisan and non-sequitous point.
It's sequitous and highly relevant as GDS is part of the Government. Your comment just reads like a reflexive defensive reply by someone who can't stand any criticism of something they personally like.
The idea that a Labour Secretary of State would be phoning up the Cabinet Office screaming down the phone at them about interaction design on the website while a Tory one would just have their feet up is ludicrous and you know it.
So yes, you will need to show your ID which will connect to your account and obviously be used to surveil everything you post online. People on HN of all places need to stop being so naive.
If your theory is that this global push by legislators to introduce age restrictions is actually a secret Trojan horse to harvest government IDs orchestrated by the platform owning capitalists…how do you account for the fact said capitalists have been desperately lobbying against it for years?
For the same price you have the Minisforum UM760 Slim which should be 100% compatible and provide VASTLY superior performances. Or you can check cheaper models that would have the same level of performance as the A5.
Geekom make nice products but they are usually both very expensive and very noisy compared to competitors. Their selling point is mainly their top-notch design, but I find these to be function-over-form most of the time.
Yeah, definitely boils down to how much of a factor the aesthetics of the 'tiny carts' is for you in the whole experience. I can imagine some creative modding that would make a collection of themed USBs just as appealing, if not more :)
The original paper abstract [1] cuts through a lot of the jargon on the website, but yeah it's just a research platform for capturing (and doing limited processing on) video and telemetry for the purposes of AR-focused ML research.
It's not a new headset or a protoype for one.
"Egocentric, multi-modal data as available on future augmented reality (AR) devices provides unique challenges and opportunities for machine perception. These future devices will need to be all-day wearable in a socially acceptable form-factor to support always available, context-aware and personalized AI applications. Our team at Meta Reality Labs Research built the Aria device, an egocentric, multi-modal data recording and streaming device with the goal to foster and accelerate research in this area. In this paper, we describe the Aria device hardware including its sensor configuration and the corresponding software tools that enable recording and processing of such data."
I think one insight (that's maybe not obvious enough on their landing page?) is that their product appears to be multiplayer out of the box (in the same sense that Figma is) which I think you'd agree is a pretty significant value add over your proposal of Unity + Meta simulator.
Yeah, to be fair to Boris ordinary.space looks like a much more appropriate tool for interaction design than Mattercraft, which looks much more like a drag-and-drop tool for building relatively static, single user 3D scenes. Mattercraft also looks to be pretty bloated with random content features (3D Text?) in comparison.
While Mattercraft has some drag and drop elements, it's predominantly a development environment for content, featuring TypeScript and NPM support. So it's a bit like a 'Unity for the web'. Many of the features (e.g. physics, particles) are provided as optional additional NPM modules. The 3D text support is included in the base 3D module because it only adds a few kb and Mattercraft's built-in bundler doesn't bundle it if your project doesn't use it. (My team and I run Mattercraft )
Thanks for the extra context. I haven't actually looked at what you at Zappar are doing for a while. Would you care to comment on what the key differences are between Zapworks Studio [1], Zapworks Designer [2] and Mattercraft [3]? Their elevator pitches on those pages feel like they have pretty complete overlap with each other tbh.
Zapworks Designer - it's our no-code tool focussing on AR+VR. It's targeted at folks without scripting experience and is very much 'drag and drop'. Our customers typically use this for bringing simpler interactive content to, e.g. menus, posters and also for Learning & Development.
Mattercraft - this is our complete 3D development environment for the web. We took everything we'd learned from Studio and built MC from the ground up embracing the web ecosystem. It has a fully featured animation system, scripting, built-in bundler, live preview, collaborative editing - the works :-) Our customers use this for building high end campaigns and content for consumers.
Zapworks Studio - this is our previous generation of creative tooling. It was originally built to target native platforms but we ported its runtime to the web. Mattercraft is the 'spiritual successor' to this tool.
Yes, our company [1] is profitable providing a B2B XR meeting platform used by various heavy industries for different internal and external use cases including product design, high-impact sales and training.
We're in Oil & Gas, Healthcare and Higher Ed amongst others and currently support Quest, HoloLens and Magic Leap.
We (and loads of competitors) are growing at a steady pace, the numbers probably wouldn't excite a VC associate, but there's more to life and business than that.
