I would like to have a cheap laser engraver/cutter but I am just afraid to buy one. Most kits don't have any protection at all except for some goggles. This might be fine for yourself but not for someone stepping into the room.
Lasers are no joke.
'Don't look into the laser with your remaining eye' is also no joke.
For the small uncovered diode laser cutters, I'd recommend setting it up & running it remotely. If you use a laptop with a webcam & some remote desktop software, you can operate one safely it from a different room.
There are many covered desktop ones that I think are a bit safer though. Ventilation is also a big concern.
But that is what I'm saying if your vectors are reduced to 8 bit scalar components you can represent a 256x256x256 worth of detail in the world (doesn't need to be linear but still really limited details) ?
I’m totally out of my expertise here but I have a question - from my understanding ray tracing is primarily used for lighting/shadows/reflections- wouldn’t it be OK for something like shadows to be inaccurate- maybe some sort of amalgamation over frame refreshes? Real world light is messy anyway. I’m talking about a game type scenario not something scientific.
Maybe another way to ask is- we’re trying to simulate a real world “analog” scene - maybe using an analog processing technique could actually be quite faithful for generating it?
Or not. Like I said I don’t understand too much of this.
Think about it like this : you have a spaceship model fits in 256x256x256m - to get the maximum resolution while still fitting in 8 bits you would make each axis in 1m increments and you have 256 values. So you can't have sub 1m details in geometry. Floating point is different because you have an exponent so it's not linear, you can technically have larger scale, but you sacrifice even more precision in mantissa.
Now I'm not sure what this 6/8 bit precision or analog precision means so I can't say with confidence, but if your scalars are that low precision you can't really do much. You could technically encode it with some fancy tricks like instead of storing coordinates for each vertex you store the delta from previous one etc. but I think this wouldn't work if the device was just some dumb analog matrix multiplier with baked logic.
Also having low detail shadows creates visual artifacts, see this for example [1]
Thank you for the reply. The article didn’t give details what it how it actually works so I went directly to the company’s site and found this [1]
> … leverages light scattering to perform a specific kind of matrix-vector operation called Random Projections.
… have a long history for the analysis of large-size data since they achieve universal data compression. In other words, you can use this tool to reduce the size of any type of data, while keeping all the important information that is needed for Machine Learning.
So it sounds like the whole point is to reduce the data size and then feed it into GPUs like normal ML. Kind of a neat idea.
Things are worth what the highest bidder is willing to pay. There are no other reasons involved. Taste doesn't matter, history doesn't matter, material doesn't matter, the creator doesn't matter.
The highest bidder does have his reasons, but they can be very different from person to person.
Things are worth at least as much as the second-highest bidder is willing to pay. If everyone has a completely unique reasons then there would be noone to bid against.
And a very important aspect for most buyers is the perceived market value. And that ties in with whatever the market values, and if the market supposedly doesn't care for taste/history/material/creator - then what does it care for?
Wel most of the time it's an investment.
So for those bidders the perceived market value is very important.
But you can also imagine this scenario: someone has a ring from a great great grantparent. The market value of the ring is $10. But the owner would only sell it for $100000. Then their would noone to bid against.
The ring example is interesting: if nobody actually buys it for $100000 (the best anyone else would pay is $10), then what is the 'real' value of the ring?
The only logically consistent answer is that value is always relative and subjective; 'objective' economic value is only an abstraction.
I think one simple legislation could help a lot: forbid to use the word 'buy' in this context. Instead it should be 'hire' or 'lease' or something.
Once I 'bought' an e-book that was copy protected by Adobe (my fault I didn't read the specs before buying). But because you can only read it when Adobe's servers are online no ownership is transferred to you as buyer. You buy rights to read the book on their terms.
'Hire this book' would be fair to use in this context.
(Afterwards I successfully converted to book to an e-book format that I owned with some Calibre plugins).
Nobody gives a flying fuck whether the terms are legally accurate. This distinction is entirely already covered in the existing terms of service.
People are annoyed that they can pay for something (sometimes an essential identity service), be arbitrarily denied it, and have no recourse other than maybe getting lucky by writing a complaint post that gets traction and read by some human who can tell the abuse department they've fricked it.
Companies shouldn't be able to shift the burden of the negative aspects of running an online service (dealing with abuse) entirely onto society by offering no meaningful appeal process. Regulation isn't an appealing option, but companies have full well demonstrated that they aren't going to handle these cases unless forced to.
> People are annoyed that they can pay for something (sometimes an essential identity service), be arbitrarily denied it, and have no recourse other than maybe getting lucky by writing a complaint post that gets traction and read by some human who can tell the abuse department they've fricked it.
I think the reasoning for changing the verbiage from "buy" to something more truthful is because most people don't even know this is a thing. Outside of hacker news and gaming subreddits, how many people are actually aware that digital video games they've "bought" can easily be revoked? I don't believe the average person is aware.
Words do go a long way and can make the distinction clear for potential customers.
As an example, in Sweden, a country with historically strong consumer-protection regulation, you are not allowed to market something as "gratis" (free) if you need to pay to receive it. You can say something is "included" or "receive X without
additional cost when buying Y", but free needs to be truly free of cost. You are also not allowed to say "the [best/fastest/strongest]" etc without pointing to an independent party backing it up. Carlsberg gets around this with "probably the best beer in the world", for example. They would not be allowed to drop the "probably", and it would take more than some random magazine or website to address that.
It does make a real difference in businesses ability to manipulate consumer expectations.
I agree with OP that requiring "buy" to mean actual transfer of ownership without hooks would make a huge difference.
I am not saying people give a fuck it is legally accurate. But since nobody ever reads the terms and conditions this could help to give a quick understanding of what you are paying for.
Everybody knows that renting a car is different than buying a car.
You're spot on, it might not fix the entire problem but it's a good start and can help waking people up.
This rent economy is horseshit. "You will own nothing and be happy". In reality we keep paying for things we never get to own, then one day have them arbitrarily taken away from us if the company feels like it. Remember how we used to buy things and then they were ours? Like the music we paid for. Now people have a subscription and when it ends your entire library gets deleted. I still don't understand how the majority of people actually signed up for this, it's a horrible deal that doesn't benefit them one bit.
The music example is more acceptable though, because you don't pay a 1-time fee to own a song anymore.
When you "buy" a game, you pay a 1-time fee with the implicit calculation that you'll own that game for enough time for it to be worth the cost.
When you listen to a song on Spotify, there's no expectation that that song will be available next month, and it doesn't matter, since you didn't pay for the song.
>I think one simple legislation could help a lot: forbid to use the word 'buy' in this context. Instead it should be 'hire' or 'lease' or something.
right, if I signed a contract to lease a game for 6 months and then my account was suspended for 5 months so I only got one months usage for my lease I would totally be like "that's so fair! Because word usage!"
That's a different problem.
Right now the problem is that people think they buy something but they don't.
Nobody is going to read the terms and conditions before buying. But when you are going to rent something you know the ownership is not transferred to you.
I don't think it's a different problem, there are people posting in thread about basically this problem, I'm pretty sure they were aware they were leasing the game and not owning it, nonetheless they lose access to the game for periods of time and that time loss is not reimbursed in any way.
The ToS says rent but the UI says buy, what gives? It may be technically correct that it's not a purchase but also purposely deceitful: this has to change.
IMHO a better way forward is to de-categorize downloads of “purchased” items from “downloading” in legal context, such that removing access is considered theft rather than enabling downloads to be considered willful distribution.
That’s technologically backwards, but it’s not like justice system behavior and software industry logic always converged nicely.
That sounds like a good idea. It would probably make sense to require that they specify how long you get to lease it for, rather than the current situation which is pretty much "until we decide not to run the service anymore".
While I kind of want to give a snarky answer of "actually, buying an ebook without DRM is exactly as easy as it is as buying one with, the trick is just finding one without DRM," the truth is that this is dependent entirely on the publisher. I buy a lot of technical books from Pragmatic Programmers, which are all DRM-free, and I believe they're not alone in that. My small press fiction publisher doesn't use DRM; Tor Books, the biggest sf/fantasy publisher, doesn't use DRM, either. People who self-publish through Amazon are given a choice whether or not to apply DRM to their books.
So, no, it's actually quite possible to buy a DRM-free ebook. The question is whether the book you want is available without DRM.
I worded it badly. It's as you said. In my experience if I want to buy a given X book it's almost certain that I will not be able to purchase it in a non-DRM format. Because DRM became de facto in the industry and only a small share of titles are available to purchase without it.
> People who self-publish through Amazon are given a choice whether or not to apply DRM to their books.
Didn't now Amazon also sold non-DRM. I guess the authors of the books that I was enticed to buy opted for it.
> Tor Books, the biggest sf/fantasy publisher, doesn't use DRM, either.
Have read short stories published there. Content generally is good and innovative.
I think the real luck is getting on the ladder in the first place, where you have a prestigious job that is a natural step to even more prestigious jobs, ie you are always a likely candidate for the job above. Most hedge funds and FAANG employers get a lot of resumes that will never even be read.
Also you really don't know what you're actually applying for when you're a graduate. You think you know but only those who are fortunate are able to get it right. Plenty of people get a job thinking it leads somewhere. For instance, I've interviewed a lot of financial ops people who think they're on the ladder to becoming a trader. It does happen, but not that often.
But good on him, it still takes work and dedication to do something like this.
True in my experience. The path is set long before you think it is. Yes, you can jump on the prestige track later on (in my field, this means joining Apple after 5-10 years of working), but a Stanford grad naturally walks into these jobs. My spouse and I have the same degree and background, aside from alma mater, but they joined a FAANG, in a design role, out of school because that’s where everyone in their Stanford circle was going. I joined a tier 2 company in QA because that’s where my school was feeding people. 6 years later, my spouse is a multi-millionare* and I’m around 1 with 4 more years of experience.
I’ve been trying for years to jump to a FAANG and correct my initial career mistake, but it’s extremely difficult and I’ve only seen the top 10% of my company, in the right positions (not QA), do it. I need to do two jumps: QA to design, then tier 2 to tier 1. As a result, I’ve actually decided to throw in the towel and “reroll” as a software dev.
* For the purposes of retirement we track our net worths separately
[Edit] I also would like to mention that the article says as much
Absolutely. What's incredibly frustrating is that as I've moved up the employer prestige ladder, the level of talent definitely goes up, but so much of it is just a rise in credentials (e.g., better schools, better past jobs). Levels of motivation/effort don't seem too different: there are still the same groups of lazy people that put in the bare minimum and others that do a great job.
Each hop up takes a good mix of hard work and luck but it always results in a massive jump in pay
Changing career tracks like that is so hard. You almost need to hide your experience in interviews. I’ve had so many interviews get derailed because the interviewer finds out that I’m looking to switch away from a field I don’t enjoy and realizes that they have another opening there they’d rather fill.
> For instance, I've interviewed a lot of financial ops people who think they're on the ladder to becoming a trader
I think it is definitely possible to know. My college friends with parents in tech certainly knew.
When I was in college, I looked over H1B data to get a sense of what was really going on. The conclusion: finance, consulting, law, all vastly overrated in compensation unless you are doing quantitative finance or have a very rare job.
There is little point in discussing money and using yourself as an example when you are extremely well off.
Congrats to OP for having a lot of money in the bank, but there is nothing special or unique about their advice. It's the usual invest your money, don't spend too much, try to get into a top company, etc.
Even for someone in a similar situation, there is very little here that I haven't seen repeated elsewhere countless times.
> The author was lucky to earn a huge amount of money.
He's not earning "huge" amounts of money for jobs in that field. (Additionally, it's a field that most intelligent people can enter with 1-3 years of study.)
I run my own email. But I think it is a software problem.
It would be nice of you could just install an email program that will set all the right settings for you. DNS, database, roles and rights, certificates, firewall and so on.
There is server management software that can do this but then you have the same problem: it is just complicated for most people.
"Except of course that it isn't an artisanal choice, a very practical one that is made increasingly impossible by the few very large email providers that are left. It should be as simple as hosting a web server."
I don't get this one. How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email?
I host my own email. It was a pain to setup so I try not to touch it since it is running fine.
Setting up email on your own server is just complicated unless you install server management software. I am not sure big email providers are to blame for this.
> How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email?
By randomly marking your email as spam without any recourse. This may be because they blacklist your provider en bloc, your IP address or some subnet, because they feel like it, it's Tuesday or because their spam filters suck.
But it happens and it happens often enough that running a business in that way will cost you money, sometimes lots of it.
"By randomly marking your email as spam without any recourse."
Correct.
I'd like to describe how badly this is implemented:
I run my own mail server and I have a 15+ year history of emailing (mywife)@gmail.com.
On a regular basis (mywife)@gmail.com will email me, and I will respond to her email and my response will go to her junk/spam folder.
And there is no alert, no bounce, no notification.
Let's unpack this:
Google (gmail) knows that these two email addresses converse back and forth, regularly, with a 15+ year history. Google knows that their own user initiated this conversation. Google knows my email is a response to their users email. Google knows my address has never been marked as spam/junk.
So, what kind of unimaginably bad heuristics would have to be in employ to allow this to happen ?
To be honest, this wouldn't bother me that much - I don't think google owes me anything and my wife doesn't pay for their service. What makes me so, so angry is that they behave this way without any notification or bounce email.
Business use of email tends to look a lot like spam and people mark it as such. An appointment reminder or notification that something just shipped is generally fine. Send out mass notification of your holiday sales and that’s going into someone’s spam folder.
Not so much a question of luck, sending out sipping notifications that for example include advertising is risky. Sending a high volume of appointment reminders for the same appointment is similarly problematic.
I don’t mean that’s the only way to trip up, there are a lot of unspoken self hosing email rules. Don’t use public data centers, don’t send news letters etc.
My email server is only used as a personal server for a few select friends and family. They absolutely do not send and have never sent anything that could remotely be considered spam. Everything in our setup is picture perfect (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, PTR records, etc). We still can't get email onto Microsoft's servers without it being marked as spam.
You are still hosting it fine. They just decide that you or your messages are suspect.
Also one thing - if people actually want your email they will contact you if they don't get an expected email. If they don't want your messages it is spam.
Even if your ip address/domain is not in the blacklist right now, it only takes a few people marking your correspondence as spam for it to be blacklisted. Since everyone is on these big free providers, nobody will ever see a single email from you any more. With less centrally controlled email, that would not be possible. I think that is the problem everyone is talking about.
I generally don't check my personal spam folder. I've honestly not seen any false positives with Fastmail. But I certainly do have to check every now and then for my work O365 account which is pretty bad at marking legitimate mail as spam. YMMV of course.
> How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email?
By not delivering mail sent by your mailserver to mailboxes hosted by them. There's not much use for an own server, if your mail won't be received by most users on gmail or hotmail.
The problem with e-mail, and with other forms of communication, is that two parties (or their service providers) need to co-operate. You can run your own e-mail server just fine, but Google, Microsoft and friends might consider you to be a spammer or silently block your e-mail just because.
What if email was based on a whitelist instead of a blacklist? So you'd only receive email from addresses of people you've already established contact with some other way (maybe using conventional email)? This eliminates spam and if the big providers supported this, it could also enable them to stop blackholing innocent servers (though whether they care is another question).
You'll get it when Microsoft decides you are a spammer for no other reason then sending email from port 25 from your house. Or when you can't seem to sign up for a service... until you use your old Gmail address.
Yeah, there was (is?) a period of time where viruses were used to send spam so if you got infected you'd suddenly be sending out a lot of SMTP traffic from a residential IP address. The entire industry adopted the practice of not trusting residential ips. Then the spammers shifted to cheap VPS providers and ip and netblock black lists became more common.
Most advise is like: do what I did, if you were me, in the exact place and time as I was, surrounded by the same people as I was, and so on...
I think advise in the form of a small life lesson is more helpful.
For example: 'Take good care of yourself if you work hard.' is more helpful than 'Work hard to become successful.'.
Lasers are no joke.
'Don't look into the laser with your remaining eye' is also no joke.