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After the end of the startup era

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Re: After the end of the startup era

#201

Post by sikan »

computerex wrote: post #196
vladislav wrote: post #186

This article is using false assumptions about AI to back up its narrative. "AI doesn’t just require top-tier talent; that talent is all but useless without mountains of the right kind of data. And who has essentially all of the best data? That’s right: the abovementioned Big Five, plus their Chinese counterparts Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu." Making the next quantum leaps in AI is not a question of data advantages. 1)…

1) That's false. AlphaGo did not just train by self-play. It trained on millions of pre-played games, and the bot also uses hand-engineered features for their MCTS hybrid (best) model. Refer to their paper for details. 2) Read the article that you are referencing please. What you are implying is not the thesis of that article nor is it what Geoffrey Hinton is saying. What Hinton is saying is, we should throw out deep…

https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/

>After just three days of self-play training, AlphaGo Zero emphatically defeated the previously published version of AlphaGo - which had itself defeated 18-time world champion Lee Sedol - by 100 games to 0. After 40 days of self training, AlphaGo Zero became even stronger, outperforming the version of AlphaGo known as “Master”, which has defeated the world's best players and world number one Ke Jie.

Re: After the end of the startup era

#202

Post by chrisco255 »

KGIII wrote: post #194
pault wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disregarding the new applications enabled by the medium, think of it as simply a new display form factor. Once the quality exceeds the best flat screens we can produce, having one unobtrusively attached to your eyes at all times becomes a no-brainer (from a cost-benefit perspective; obviously there are lifestyle-altering implications that each individual will have to embrace or reject on their own terms).

A poster above mentioned that they experienced VR some 30 years ago. I, myself, had a chance to work with it in the early 1990s. Truth be told, it was horrible. It was rudimentary and the graphics were very poor as it was computationally expensive. Exploration stopped and we reexamined the tech a decade later, with similar results. I've long since postulated that I'd absolutely volunteer to 'jack in' to a neural meth…

That seems really far off if it's even possible.

Re: After the end of the startup era

#203

Post by pault »

KGIII wrote: post #194
pault wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disregarding the new applications enabled by the medium, think of it as simply a new display form factor. Once the quality exceeds the best flat screens we can produce, having one unobtrusively attached to your eyes at all times becomes a no-brainer (from a cost-benefit perspective; obviously there are lifestyle-altering implications that each individual will have to embrace or reject on their own terms).

A poster above mentioned that they experienced VR some 30 years ago. I, myself, had a chance to work with it in the early 1990s. Truth be told, it was horrible. It was rudimentary and the graphics were very poor as it was computationally expensive. Exploration stopped and we reexamined the tech a decade later, with similar results. I've long since postulated that I'd absolutely volunteer to 'jack in' to a neural meth…

I think the value of the technology hasn't reached a point where it exceeds the inconvenience of using it; namely the bulky headsets and expensive hardware. I agree that it won't be more than a niche technology in the near term future. I guess it all depends on how many more orders of magnitude we can expect to get out of miniaturization before we hit the wall. If it's possible to get a minimum of 4k per eye resolution and the graphics performance of a 2017 high end gaming GPU into a pair of wraparound sunglasses combined with a smartphone, I see it becoming the dominant display technology. The convenience of being able to summon any number of arbitrarily large displays at will is hard to deny, even if you completely disregard any value proposition involving AR and new forms of human computer interaction.

I'm sitting in bed with my laptop right now, and if I could choose between reading this on a pair of lightweight glasses or my laptop, I'm not sure what the laptop has to offer. The big issue is touch typing; no (macro) gesture-based virtual keyboard is ever going to be usable for professional workloads. I sometimes wonder if some kind of one- or two-handed finger-chording input could be as efficient as a qwerty keyboard. I would be willing to toss my decades of qwerty experience if I could eventually get something as fast without having to carry around a keyboard. I imagine something like this device from Children of Men: https://youtu.be/sJO0n6kvPRU?t=2m4s (1024 "keys" should be plenty, so it's technically possible).

Regarding direct brain-computer interfaces, I just don't see the technological barriers going away any time soon. You'd either need some type of non-invasive technology that could wirelessly stimulate the optic nerves (aside from light, obviously), which I'm not sure exists even in theory, or such sophisticated nano-machinery that it would be effectively invisible, like a neural lace. I don't see either of these things happening for decades at least (I would love to be proven wrong though!).

I don't know if the form factor that will finally trigger mass adoption will resemble currently available headsets. The breakthrough might be retinal laser projection or light field displays. I just think that if nothing else, the ability to move our current workloads to a portable virtual display is such an obvious improvement I can't imagine it not happening as soon as the technology is good enough. Of course the same can be said for BCI but that doesn't even work in the lab yet.

Re: After the end of the startup era

#204

Post by tertius »

DamonHD wrote: post #182
tertius wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll even out at about 10bil. Then this won't be a problem.

Indeed: if a few hundred million westerners made a real effort to curtail frivolous footprint then that 10b may happen with a lower-than-current total footprint.

Convincing a few hundred million to act in a certain way without force won't happen before we got 10b. I don't think that's an outlandish prediction to make...

Re: After the end of the startup era

#205

Post by tertius »

samstave wrote: post #173
tertius wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Educate? The only thing between me and a home cooked meal is fast food. Cooking is not inaccessible. If the only problem is nutrition education then that is not a rich person privilege. A large majority of the public cannot afford Whole foods but are educated enough to understand that home cooked meals from non-processed ingredients are healthier than their counterparts. If education is all it took we'd all be rich w…

See, your logic is sound, and the math isn't working out recently though. I learned to cook from my depression era grandmother. Home cooking is healthy, but not always cheap. My grandmother used to tell me "this meal is $1.37 per serving" As we made things, I learned to cook in le curset pots from a woman who used to travel the world with Martin yan and Julia child... (we were state department family and had a lot of…

I think we will enjoy a cup of coffee together.

Re: After the end of the startup era

#206

Post by KGIII »

pault wrote: post #203
KGIII wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A poster above mentioned that they experienced VR some 30 years ago. I, myself, had a chance to work with it in the early 1990s. Truth be told, it was horrible. It was rudimentary and the graphics were very poor as it was computationally expensive. Exploration stopped and we reexamined the tech a decade later, with similar results. I've long since postulated that I'd absolutely volunteer to 'jack in' to a neural meth…

I think the value of the technology hasn't reached a point where it exceeds the inconvenience of using it; namely the bulky headsets and expensive hardware. I agree that it won't be more than a niche technology in the near term future. I guess it all depends on how many more orders of magnitude we can expect to get out of miniaturization before we hit the wall. If it's possible to get a minimum of 4k per eye resoluti…

I would absolutely love AR. It'd be fascinating to look at a bridge or building and see who designed it, when it was built, how it was constructed, who died while building it, the floor plan, utilization rates, etc... Ideally, this would be done while not actually driving.

As for the direct methods, I think we may get there someday. We already enable paralyzed people to interact, albeit on a minimal scale, with a computer using nothing but their mind. There is even a DIY movement that has enabled this, again on a minimal scale, for hackers at home.

No timeline, no estimates, but I think we may get there.

My thinking is that miniaturizing is a limited endeavor. We're very unlikely to ever have things like AR by means of contact lenses. So, we're looking at something people will wear.

It is my own personal view that I see no great benefit in consuming print media by means of VR. For that, I have a tablet and a few ebook readers around the house. I am not sure that I (expressing only my own thoughts) see any great benefit in that.

Re: After the end of the startup era

#207

Post by KGIII »

chrisco255 wrote: post #202
KGIII wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A poster above mentioned that they experienced VR some 30 years ago. I, myself, had a chance to work with it in the early 1990s. Truth be told, it was horrible. It was rudimentary and the graphics were very poor as it was computationally expensive. Exploration stopped and we reexamined the tech a decade later, with similar results. I've long since postulated that I'd absolutely volunteer to 'jack in' to a neural meth…

That seems really far off if it's even possible.

Maybe? We have learned a lot about the brain in recent times. You can, today, hack your way into controlling a mouse with your mind. That's all external and, of course, requires a headset.

I doubt I'll be alive to see it, but it seems that is the most probable method to get mass adoption of VR. Right now, it is really niche. Right now, we are still trying to do it the way we've been doing it for the past three decades. Things are faster and smaller but there are limits to those two traits.

I'd absolutely love AR. I have a modest collection of automobiles and sometimes work on them. I sometimes make things out of wood. I sometimes can't identify an animal species or plant family. Having the ability to augment that would be a wonderful way to enjoy life even more - at least for me.

But, even if we got these down to the size of eyeglasses (which seems really unlikely for the foreseeable future) I'm not sure we will get mass adoption by Jane Q. Public. It's not a cell phone you pick up and put away, but something worn. The form factor is, by itself, a negative.

I dunno? I can't predict the future. I'd still volunteer to test a viable method. With the ubiquity of cellular network connectivity, it'd be fantastic to have the sum of human knowledge at your immediate beck and call and without the need for an external device.

Re: After the end of the startup era

#208

Post by ghaff »

KGIII wrote: post #187
curun1r wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your problem may be that you're using hindsight to see the PC, internet and mobile eras and using somewhat irrational exuberance to view the current "disruptions." It's a pretty good bet that not all of them will pan out or have the kind of pervasive impact on society that you're predicting and that 20 years from now, again with hindsight, you'll see the 1 landscape-altering technology that defined the current era an…

I have to wonder if some of that growth was related to Moore's Law? Namely, the number of transistors grew and the use of them grew linearly with them in a sort of 'if you build it, they will come' fashion? Now, as I understand it, growth has slowed outside of the labs and Moore's Law appears to no longer be valid. So, there will likely still be growth, but the growth will be more rare, difficult, and expensive? Like…

CMOS scaling is close to dead and that’s been a very special tech and tech enabler. It’s not the only way to continue ramping performance and function. See GPUs for example. But it’s hard to replace that kind of tech.

Re: After the end of the startup era

#209

Post by fpig »

adventured wrote: post #49
Cacti wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the argument that 1995 through 2015 was a cycle completely different from whatever the next one will be, is not without merit. I mean, it is easy to forget, but many, many things had to come together at one time in order for this to pop off like it did: * high speed internet * widespread consumer demand for high speed internet and services * multi-core, low-power hardware that gave us smartphones and cheapish "…

It is likely entirely without merit. Many thing had to come together from 1975 to 1995 to enable the things you're referencing. The list you made is not impressive versus the past, it's normal. What happened from 1995 to 2015 that was more important than the Internet, transistor, microprocessor, router, DRAM or the GUI? Good luck resolving that debate. Many thing had to to come together from 1955 to 1975 to.... I don…

Of course the technology wasn't all invented from scratch in that period, but it was when a lot of things progressed just enough to generate massive markets which pulled a lot of money into the system.

Re: After the end of the startup era

#210

Post by edoceo »

avip wrote: post #185
rdtsc wrote: post #42

I look at it from another end - I feel there is a sort of an app fatigue. Maybe it is jut me. I used to be excited about Uber-like things, note taking apps, DropBox, coupon sites, review sites. Installed some of them, used them, then kind of stopped. Someone at work would say "you should try this new thing, totally cool" and I'd be inclined to do it, but now would pass it probably. Extrapolating scientifically from t…

Dude you're just growing up that's all. You'll find the sandbox is also not as fun as it used to be.

Playing in the dirt is still more fun than tapping out Beets in Dirt Farm Island Saga-TM powered by interstitial ads-after-every-beet or add Nitrogen for only $0.99
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