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Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

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Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#341

Post by exporectomy »

gbrown wrote: post #324
exporectomy wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"way way behind" and "pretty bleak" are completely subjective and thus meaningless for trying to understand nature. If you can't quantify it, you're only able to think using feelings and feelings can't tell you important answers like what we should do. They can make you believe you know what we should do, but you'll be wrong because your feelings won't be accurately tuned to the reality.

Congratulations, you've discovered that I'm commenting on an internet forum rather than submitting something for publication. My assessment is based on my own reading, and on being involved in conservation efforts and trying to stay educated generally. Sorry I didn't prepare a set of bullet points for you, and instead went with an informal an easily intelligible lay summary. To the best of my knowledge, my language (…

It's not an easily intelligible lay summary because the meaning could be anything. It only conveys emotion, not knowledge about nature. I suppose you're being an activist trying to convert people to your religion of doom. In that case, you do need to convey emotions like fear to fool people into imagining things are unboundedly bad. Quantitative predictions put a cap on how bad it is so they're not as scary as the unknown.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#342

Post by Naracion »

jayd16 wrote: post #308
ehsankia wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bailed" is a bit over the top. I would characterize it more as being at a stand still. Earth VR and Tilt Brush are still around, and as mentioned about, Tilt Brush is even open sourced. They just haven't had as much interest making new stuff. VR didn't pick up the way most hoped it would, and at this point there isn't really much to do until we get another wave of innovation that pushes the boundary forward. Also Ta…

>Also Tango was more AR than VR. I don't think they ever had any lead in VR. They had inside out headsets before Oculus. Check out their partnership with Lenovo and the Mirage Solo headset. Despite working well for 6dof tracking it had the same terrible Daydream controller. A year later Oculus released the quest with a better industrial design, camera array and 6dof controllers to much more success. The chip was a ge…

Not just that, the Mirage Solo cameras create a _much_ more believable stereo image when you get pass-through. It's my favorite pass-through system. Have you seen the Rift S pass-through image? Horrendous. Quest is also terrible, but Rift S is just unbelievably bad.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#343

Post by baby »

keithwhor wrote: post #61

What's really striking to me about timelapse videos of the Earth is how, at a grand enough scale, the growth of human settlements on Earth really looks no different than the growth of bacterial and fungal colonies on Petri dishes. We think of ourself as special, as having conquered environments, technology and more - and when zoomed out you could explain everything we've built and accomplished as the achievements of…

I often think about that, and recently I thought about something else: zoom out enough and humans appear as a single individual /intelligence, the same way it you zoom out of our own cells the aggregate of it all seems to be acting as one intelligent individual (a human).

Now can we extrapolate? If we zoom out more do we see the same happening? Does the interaction between all the galaxies create a thought? A slow one perhaps.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#344

Post by exporectomy »

ehershey wrote: post #339
exporectomy wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"way way behind" and "pretty bleak" are completely subjective and thus meaningless for trying to understand nature. If you can't quantify it, you're only able to think using feelings and feelings can't tell you important answers like what we should do. They can make you believe you know what we should do, but you'll be wrong because your feelings won't be accurately tuned to the reality.

I found the “subjective” comment easier to understand than this one. Not every opinion or generalization requires citation. Your stance and reply are also subjective. I do prefer quantitative data and references, especially when the topic is at all scientific. It doesn’t automatically make qualitative or broad statements pointless though. It especially doesn’t mean they don’t contribute to understanding.

Sure, but the internet is awash with similar activist opinions when it comes to climate change, biodiversity, and sustainability. They go in circles reinforcing each other without being grounded in reality. Their aim seems to be to mislead people with fear instead of sharing understanding. I think that underhandedness is what grates on me when I read them.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#345

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

skeletonjelly wrote: post #270
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #40

I kinda wish that there was a timelapse for Google search. Search seems to be heavily biased towards stuff popular right now. It seems older things disappear fairly quickly. I've been in a position where I wanted to search for a website that was popular in 2012 without having the exact name, and having to find an old forum post that linked to it to find it.

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272 Does this help? foobar before:2012 It's not perfect but quick and easy for what I mostly do which is trying to find older news articles on stories that have changed

That helps actually!

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#346

Post by goldenchrome »

jayd16 wrote: post #303
goldenchrome wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology enthusiasts (read: HN users) may not like it, but it's a business practice that's working as intended. Sometimes Google may seem shortsighted but often times they're just measuring the market correctly. I worked on AR/VR at Google and the projects have mostly paused because there's no visible financial benefit. No one in the real world cares enough about VR to justify it as a business. We prototyped hundre…

You can say that but Microsoft just landed a $21B AR contract, the Quest2 has sold 2-3 million units and Apple is poised to enter the wearable market. I'm not surprised when Google walks away from things, but this seems premature and short sighted.

Yeah the Microsoft contract is up to $21B, and it's over 10 years. It's also a military contract, which is a different beast from consumer goods.

And if the Quest 2 has sold 2-3 million units so far, that's unremarkable. The Apple Watch was considered a failure in its first year and it made 10 million sales. We've already passed Christmas so you're not going to see a further spike in sales.

If Apple enters the market it might reignite the spark. Apple can do that because they deliver extremely high quality products that inspire people. Google can't do that because it's not in the company DNA and Googlers knows it, so it's a waste of time.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#347

Post by Grimm1 »

jiofih wrote: post #333
ianbutler wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here's NASA and the general gov saying what I said in my last comment, https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-cl... https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/can-we-slow... Going to need something a little stronger than xkcd here. I'm not a climate scientist but a lot of the names attached to both links seem to be and they're saying if we act decisively in the next 29 years we can avoid…

The first link says we can learn to adapt to the massive changes brought about by global warming . The second link says we are unlikely to keep global warming in this century below 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Celsius) which has severe consequences for the environment. I think you’re reading into their optimistic language a bit too much. Do you watch the news? Have you seen a completely ice-free North Pole earlier in Januar…

"It’s true that without dramatic action in the next couple of decades..."

You missed the first part of their sentence.

On the flipside perhaps you're a little too much into doomsday scenarios?

We've quite literally transformed the entire planet and way of living inside of 30 years since personal computation technology took off. I really don't see it as particularly farfetched that we can correct for our negative consumptive habits inside of the same timeframe, considering our rate of advance and change only accelerated within that same timeframe.

I'll live out just the end of this century if I'm lucky so I'll be able to eat my words just fine if I'm wrong, but I'll bet you I'm not.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#348

Post by gbrown »

exporectomy wrote: post #341
gbrown wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations, you've discovered that I'm commenting on an internet forum rather than submitting something for publication. My assessment is based on my own reading, and on being involved in conservation efforts and trying to stay educated generally. Sorry I didn't prepare a set of bullet points for you, and instead went with an informal an easily intelligible lay summary. To the best of my knowledge, my language (…

It's not an easily intelligible lay summary because the meaning could be anything. It only conveys emotion, not knowledge about nature. I suppose you're being an activist trying to convert people to your religion of doom. In that case, you do need to convey emotions like fear to fool people into imagining things are unboundedly bad. Quantitative predictions put a cap on how bad it is so they're not as scary as the un…

Are you seriously suggesting that every mention of a negative issue needs to be a self contained and cited polemic piece? Stop being absurd. If you want to talk specifics, make a specific objection, or at least narrow in on an issue you want to get into in more depth.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#349

Post by telchar »

Robotbeat wrote: post #252
OrbitRock wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we should ideally minimize our agricultural footprint and turn everything else into a nature reserve. But we’ve got to work from the realities of where we are today. Consider this image: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/img/2018... Notice that for the USA for example, not very much of the land is state or federal parks. The vast majority is used by humans in some way, and the reality i…

That “cow pasture/range” chunk is largely extremely low productivity scrub land owned by the federal government and leased basically for free by cattle folk. We could convert all of it to national parks without much more than a blip in food calories produced in the US. As far as actually farmed land, productivity has increased by an order of magnitude, MUCH faster than population, so we actually farm less land than i…

Some of that cow pasture/range land used to be better land, and has been degraded by bad farming techniques and/or overgrazing. The area around Pipe Springs, Utah for example, was significantly more lush 150 years ago, and now it's scrub land. It would be a mistake to think of land as static and only fit for a limited set of purposes, and to therefore exploit it without concern for what it is or could turn into (for better or worse).

We're also causing top soil to erode and blow away in much of the corn belt [0]. That productivity has a cost and shouldn't be assumed.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-say...

edit: I don't think we disagree, much. I'll leave the above for reference.

Re: Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years

#350

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

gbrown wrote: post #348
exporectomy wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an easily intelligible lay summary because the meaning could be anything. It only conveys emotion, not knowledge about nature. I suppose you're being an activist trying to convert people to your religion of doom. In that case, you do need to convey emotions like fear to fool people into imagining things are unboundedly bad. Quantitative predictions put a cap on how bad it is so they're not as scary as the un…

Are you seriously suggesting that every mention of a negative issue needs to be a self contained and cited polemic piece? Stop being absurd. If you want to talk specifics, make a specific objection, or at least narrow in on an issue you want to get into in more depth.

Sometimes it's better not to respond, gbrown.
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