ElHacker

This is great! I really like the retro look on the example models and the video.

I've never edited voxel models with the spritestacking 2D technique, I'll give it a try. Is it more efficient than placing voxels in a 3D viewport?

On a side note I've been building my own very simple voxel editor in VR you can take a look at it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiaGvePo6jo

I really enjoyed this video. Thanks for sharing

This is great news! I'll definitely be in line to get it whenever my turn comes.

A thing that keeps worrying me is the amount of people I've seen/chatted with (empirical evidence) that don't trust these vaccines. The most common comments they make are: "I don't want to be guinea pig", "How do I know the government won't control me", and more conspiracy theories. All of these fears seem to come from misinformation on the internet, friends and family get a ton of memes/fake news through WhatsApp highlighting the unproven negative effects of the vaccine. Is there any effective way to control the propagation of misinformation on these platforms? How would one even get started to tackle that problem?

I got excited when I saw the title, then checked the URL and it is a software simulation / game of building a computer. I'm not denying this can be interesting, but I've been thinking for a while to get my hands dirty with hardware as a side project. (I'm a software eng by profession). I haven't really done a lot of research on this yet, but does anyone have any recommended guides/books/tutorials on how to get started designing and building my own computer? (extra points it it's a mobile/embedded computer)

This is a great book! I recommend it to everyone that's interested in computer graphics.

I used this first book as a project to learn Clojure https://github.com/ElHacker/rt-in-weekend-clojure

I'm slowly going through the 3 books series https://github.com/RayTracing/raytracing.github.io/

This past weekend I finished the second book "The Next Week", also implemented it in Clojure https://github.com/ElHacker/rt-next-week-clojure

It's been a great source for learning!

> 81. Person heads up display

I'm sure this is happening in about 3-5 years from now, but not in your smart phone, but in an augmented reality glasses-like device (we can probably already build demos for this on NReal or Hololens). The HUD is going to be embedded in the real world. People will be able to control what information they show in their profile. I've seen some VR social apps already doing a very basic version of this, albeit in a 100% simulated environment.

This is amazing! Can't believe Sega had a VR Headset in 1993 and for only $200, it's a bit sad they couldn't get it out there.

I believe VR is coming very close to going main stream, probably in less than 5 years from now. Oculus Quest 2 is IMO by far the best overall VR device ever, and things will only improve from here. That's why I've recently made a career change to work full time on VR application development, I truly think this is the next big computing platform.

My favorite code editor by far is Vim. But I've tried newer ones over the years: Sublime, Atom, VSCode, etc. None of them seem to stick with me and I always go back to Vim. I think I've developed some sort of dependency to Vim shortcuts and on every new code editor I try I immediately install a Vim shortcuts plugin to make it feel more familiar. I still find the editors mentioned above to lack the "ease" of customization you can have with VIM. I put ease in quotes because learning vimscript is not simple, I highly recommend taking a look at https://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/ to learn how to do it. Thanks to that guide I was able to write my first simple plugin https://github.com/ElHacker/vim-gitstatus

I'm working on building VR applications with Unity and C#. For that task I have to say that VSCode works pretty well, it has a ton of really nice features I regularly use: like debugging unity code, autocomplete/snippets from the unity API, and my favorite Zen Mode. My biggest complain with VSCode is how slow it runs sometimes, I can type faster than VSCode refreshes which adds noise to my flow, note that I don't consider myself to be a fast typist. If they would only fix that I would be very happy with it.

I've recently started using VS Code and my favorite feature by far is Zen Mode. It allows me to focus a lot more, takes away a lot of the distractions I get from my million open browser tabs and other apps trying to get my attention.

I'm currently going through with my first startup, I'm a technical founder and this post definitely helps me to try to invest more of my time learning how to do sales. Thanks for sharing.

Wrote this simple plugin that just shows the new and modified files in vim's quickfix window, powered by git status.

I find it very useful to easily navigate to the files I'm working with in the current commit.

Hope you find it useful as well.

I would love to see a version of this applied to both VR and AR but it seems that the current implementation is still slow for the performance that VR requires.

From the site: "During inference, our system operates at 25fps on 320x240 images and 4-5fps on 800x1100 images using a GTX1080 graphics card."

For good VR/AR experiences you'll want better FPS

This is a cool project. I did something similar with LSTM in Tensorflow to generate Reddit comments. The biggest problem I found in my experiment is that the comments generated had not real meaning, nor even tried to deliver a message. Real Reddit users identified this right away, resulting in my Bot being banned. I think the author faced the same issues here.

Does anyone has any suggestions on papers that try to solve that problem?

That's not what I meant. I'm pro-informed voters. Restricting the vote to only the ones that pass a quiz does lead to aristocracy.

You're proposing aristocracy, that would be a big step backwards. I think there are far better ways to inform people about their choices and give them the power to decide who they want to be represented by. In any case, we should make voting easier for people, not harder.

I really like that they used TensorFlow and published their code in GitHub. It will help a lot of people like me, that are new in the field and want to learn more about generative models. Amazing work by the OpenAI team!

Thanks for the suggestion. Will definitely see it.

> but knowing that there isn't a person behind those words, feeling what I'm feeling, definitely detracts from the experience of the whole.

It would be very interesting to create a secret fake person profile and publish AI generated music under that fake name and see if humans feel identified with the lyrics and music. See how far it goes, who knows, maybe create the next super star. Then to later reveal the secret.

Hello Sam. I'm a Software Engineer at a Big Tech Co. I've been ambivalent about going back to school to do a part-time master's degree in AI, or just do self-studying. Creating a startup in the US is not an option for me yet since I'm on a TN visa (hoping to get a green card in the following years). What do you think is the best investment of my time, and how far ahead in the future should someone plan to start a "hard tech" startup? (I'm on my mid 20's)

Having the habit of writing down your ideas everyday sounds like a good exercise to improve your redaction skills. I don't see much more value other than that. Yes, ideas are cheap, getting them to actually produce value is not. On the other hand I would argue that the best piece of advice in this blog post is the development of discipline itself.

Developing discipline is difficult and expensive. At the beginning is a hard process. You need to get used to come everyday, sit down and do whatever you are supposed to do. The first few days/weeks you might want to set an special time for your activity. This time slot must be immovable and sacred. As the days go by you will develop a certain dependency on your routine, I call that effect momentum. Once you get a bit of momentum everything becomes easier and very enjoyable.

I'm on the process of developing discipline myself. I come everyday for 1 to 2 hours after my day job, sit down, grab an English etymology book to improve my vocabulary, and do the exercises very methodically. I do this because English is not my first language. The days I don't do my work I notice that something is missing, I even feel guilty for not pushing myself to do my daily routine. Using excuses makes my guilt even worse. That's why I do my best to not fail my routine.

When applied, discipline is a powerful tool to fully develop any of your ideas. And that's where the real value is.

Sure, believing in your startup as a founder goes a long way. Keeps you motivated in coming back to work at it and walk the extra mile. But is not the founder's most important task to convince the press, investors, partners or even a team to believe. A mindset like that is only looking for acceptance in the external world.

The truly job of a founder is to focus on what really matters: user satisfaction. Working on the features they need, creating a 10x quality product, being the best at the specific area your startup is aiming at. Everything else will follow.

It all comes down to the scale factor.

The monolithic approach makes more sense for big companies that have a large portfolio of projects, an army of software engineers and the resources to develop their own tools around a SCM. This solves several problems like multiple commits per minute, resolving ever occurring merge conflicts, code search queries and code sharing. Someone might argue that it can slowdown the development process by having to load tons of data on a local machine but this issue can be solved by creating the correct custom tooling to download a sub node of the overall repo. At this scale level this is the only feasible solution to empower developer productiveness and to avoid headaches in keeping track of a long array of projects.

The project-based repositories solution has nice qualities as well: Service oriented projects, clearcut responsibilities and clear dependencies. This seems to be a good solution for a small to middle scale organization. Can design a well documented interface for every service and even expose some of those services to external clients when needed https://www.nginx.com/blog/microservices-at-netflix-architec... . Not that this service design solution is incompatible with a monolithic approach, is just that is easier to come up with a simpler answer when having silos of knowledge.

At the lower scale, where most startups reside. Either one seems to be a reasonable approach. Albeit a startup doesn't have the resources nor the time to spend on developing custom tools to manage a monolithic repo, it turns out they don't need to, because they have a small amount of developers and ongoing commit traffic. A plain simple git repo works as well as a multi repo. This is a matter of taste and the organization the founders/early employees wish to create for their project.

Thanks!

Very useful resource. Thanks for sharing.

I really like this approach. I'll do my best to write meaningful code every day to my side projects.

Interesting project. It would be cool to see the heartbeat contextualized with what you were doing at the moment.