I think what you're missing is that this is likely in preparation for some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so you can see through to the real world etc...
It is possible for different devices to have different interfaces optimized for those different interaction models. Apple has the money to support this.
My Mac screen isn't transparent. Why should its UI be?
If there is "some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so you can see through to the real world", limit the transparent interface only to that device.
> My Mac screen isn't transparent. Why should its UI be?
Mark my words, this is coming. It’s doable (as an effect) - rear camera captures what’s behind the screen, face tracking adjusts perspective in real-time to make it seem transparent/have correct parallax.
I look at my Mac screen to see what is on my Mac screen. Whether there is a tabletop, a window, or a cat behind my Mac screen is irrelevant. If I want to see what is behind it I would be looking it that instead of my screen
Repeat for application window, dialog box etc.
The only place translucence sort of kind of makes sense is for video content but even then, it still totally optional. My experience of watching a video is not really degraded if the play button is opaque.
As others have said, wanting to update the design simply because it looks cool is one thing. If that's the goal just say it. But Alan Dye's explanations do not inspire confidence. I get the impression that as in architecture, the chief audience of the design is not the user, but other designers.
AR glasses will have fixed-distance 2D overlays like your car's HUD. If they're preparing for a Vision Pro experience in spectacles form factor, they're about 10 to 20 years early with this glass UI change.
... could be the point of Liquid Glass on Vision Pro is to make AR on Meta's platform look bad. I mean, the MQ3 is a medium-spec smartphone on your face, the Vision Pro is a laptop on your face. The latter can support a much fancier UI without slowing down to the point where the video lags and you start crashing into things.
There is a reason that longevists, longevity researchers, and biohackers focus on mitochondrial enhancement through various means, supplementing NAD/NR, Ubiquinol, PQQ, ALCAR, photobiomodulation, etc
"Your eyes transform light into electrical impulses that coalesce into an image in your visual field, and your ears transform air-pressure waves into electrical pulses that you eventually perceive as sounds. Likewise, mitochondria transform dozens of hormonal, metabolic, chemical, and other information streams into their electrical membrane potential. This “bioenergetic” state then leads to the production of secondary messenger molecules that are intelligible to the nucleus. So in the same way you read messages on your phone, which receives signals, transforms them and projects decipherable information onto its screen, the nucleus of your cells can “read” the environment through the MIPS that surrounds it.
Rather than having supplementary roles like those of battery chargers, mitochondria are more like the motherboard of the cell. Genes sit inert in the nucleus until energy and the right message come along to turn some of them on and some others off. Mitochondria provide these messages, speaking the language of the epigenome—the malleable layer of regulation that sits on top of the genome to regulate its expression.
My colleague Timothy Shutt of the University of Calgary likes to call mitochondria the “CEO of the cell”: the chief executive organelle. This metaphor captures how mitochondria not only are involved in integrating information but also give orders. They dictate whether the cell divides, differentiates or dies. Indeed, mitochondria have a veto on cell life or death. If the MIPS deems it necessary, it triggers programmed cell death, or apoptosis—a form of self-sacrifice for the greater good of the organism.
So vital are mitochondria that in difficult times cells may donate entire mitochondria to other cells. “In cellular emergencies, newly arrived mitochondria might kick-start tissue repair, fire up the immune system or rescue distressed cells from death,” journalist Gemma Conroy noted in a Nature news story last April. Inside tumors, cancer cells and immune cells appear to compete for mitochondria, using them as a kind of bioweapon. An international effort I participated in, led by Jonathan R. Brestoff of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, recently created an entirely new lexicon to guide the emerging field of mitochondria transfer and transplantation.
All well and good, you may think. What does all this mean for my health or how long I’m going to live?
The short answer is that it may have everything to do with human health. Diabetes, neurodegenerative conditions, cancer and even mental health illnesses are all emerging as metabolic disorders involving malfunctioning mitochondria. And these findings are indicating new routes for intervention.
Mitochondria drive health—or disease—in several ways. One route derives from their role as energy processors. In an electrical circuit, if we crank up the input voltage too much, we can blow it out. Similarly, if our cells are exposed to too much glucose or fat—or, worse, both together, causing what doctors refer to as glucolipotoxicity—the mitochondria undergo fission and fragment into little bits, accumulate mtDNA defects, and produce signals that end up prematurely aging or killing the cell. Experiments in cells and in mice have shown that pharmacologically or genetically preventing mitochondrial fission induced by excessive glucose and fats may protect against insulin resistance.
Cancer, too, may be a disorder of cellular metabolism. Cancer cells can burn glucose without oxygen, which suggests either that something is wrong with their mitochondria or that they prefer to reserve mitochondria for use in cell division—and proliferation.
A second pathway is through mitochondria’s influence on gene expression. Mitochondrial signals alter the expression of more than 66 percent of genes in the nuclear chromosomes. By changing which genes are expressed and to what extent, mutations in mtDNA may completely alter the nature, behavior and stress resilience of cells and ultimately of the whole organism."
What about "fast apps" as in apps you build with AI to quickly fill a niche knowing it won't be a long term viable business, but build to just for that moment?
You're missing that Claude desktop has MCP servers, which can extend it to do a lot more, including much better real life "out of the box" uses. You can do things like use Obsidian as a filesystem or connect to local databases to really extend the abilities. You can also read and write to github directly and bring in all sorts of other tools.
This is one of the ways we get all of the secondary metabolites from plants, most of the compounds in supplements and drugs that are active in humans. They come from mutations of the existing DNA, then are able to change from there without impacting the plant's core functions due to being duplicates:
"Gene duplications drive the recruitment of genes for secondary metabolism. Gene copies are gradually modified to create genes with specificities and expression patterns adapted to the needs of the new pathway in which they are involved. Duplicated genes are often in tandem repeats, forming clusters within the plant genome. However, in some cases, clusters of nonhomologous genes have also been identified as forming a functional unit. The selective forces that have caused the establishment of new pathways are far from understood and might have changed repeatedly during evolution owing to the continuously changing environment. Recent data show that the way several classes of secondary compounds are scattered among species is attributable to independent recruitment and the inactivation of biosynthetic enzymes."
If you want to understand secondary metabolites, which is not the "how" do they work part of plant-derived molecules, but the "why" do they work?
You can follow this line of research:
"Over recent years, the consensus as to the mechanisms responsible for these effects in humans has shifted away from polyphenols having direct antioxidant effects and toward their modulation of cellular signal transduction pathways. To date, little consideration has been given to the question of why, rather than how, these plant-derived chemicals might exert these effects. Therefore, this review summarizes the evidence suggesting that polyphenols beneficially affect human brain function and describes the current mechanistic hypotheses explaining these effects. It then goes on to describe the ecologic roles and potential endogenous signaling functions that these ubiquitous phytochemicals play within their home plant and discusses whether these functions drive their beneficial effects in humans via a process of “cross-kingdom” signaling predicated on the many conserved similarities in plant, microbial, and human cellular signal transduction pathways."
Hi Boris et al, can you comment on increased conversation lengths or limits through the UI? I didn't see that mentioned in the blog post, but it is a continued major concern of $20/month Claude.ai users. Is this an issue that should be fixed now or still waiting on a larger deployment via Amazon or something? If not now, when can users expect the conversation length limitations will be increased?
Lol I don't think there are that many, which area? But gas stations can be like normal businesses there and often have restaurants and sometimes even hotels. I accidentally stayed at a gas station hotel once by the airport, when my go to hotel was full and I didn't know and booked online, and only when I arrived did I realize it was a gas station.
Not sure why Albanian bunkers are on the front of HN, but I've been living in Albania/Kosovo for the last couple of years working to use nickel hyperaccumulator plants to mine nickel (phytomining), while removing carbon with olivine minerals (enhanced rock weathering), with my company Metalplant...
I can confirm the bunkers are real. Albanians are some of the nicest people you will meet and are very friendly. Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong (except that they love Mercedes, that is 100% real). The country is beautiful with mountains in the North to beaches in the south that are pretty much the same as Greece and Italy (though rocky), with 3 Star Hotels for tens of Euros per night (they use a currency called Lek which is ~100:1 euro).
Everyone in the country seemingly knows each other and they are all like one big family. You'll notice things differ from other European countries in that they don't like lock up chairs from cafes, or have big like metal gates at bars and open air restuarnts. After hours everything is just like wide open its kind of wild to see. No one locks car doors, there is almost no petty crime, women will get up from the table to go smoke a cigarette outside and leave their purse at the table, etc...
The Albanian language is unique as well, look up a language tree and you'll see its the only one on its branch, they call it Shqip (and never Albanian, which was very confusing to me at first). Though nearly all of the young people speak English, and a good amount up to middle age, but not the much older people... One thing you would never know either is how much Albanians love America especially relative to how much Americans know about Albania.
Albanians have a deep gratitude to Americans because for 2000+ years they were stuck between the Roman and Ottoman Empires and had been fighting to protect their territory and keep their culture alive. But after the Ottoman Empire fell and WW1 was over they were occupied by Italy and others, and the "Great Powers" were about to carve up their territory. But at the League of Nations in 1919, Woodrow Wilson intervened and made sure they had a sovereign state.
So back to the bunkers finally, after WWII Albania was allied with the Stalinist communists and Enver Hoxha (who they call the "Dictator"), became increasingly paranoid about invasion from all sides including the Russians and NATO, so he started building these 700,000 bunkers. Some of them are small enough for only a couple of people, and whats crazy is where we are up in the mountains, you see just very small ones up a hill and in random spots. Later on, Hoxa allied with Chinese communists to keep Russia out, and then it stayed a closed country until the early 1990s, which explains a lot about why everyone feels treats each other like family and most outsiders don't know really know about Albania...Some people compare them to being a North Korea of Europe, though I don't like this description, but they were isolated and had to become self-dependent including growing nearly all of their own food etc.
But again, it is an amzing place that welcomes foreign tourists, especially Americans. I first traveled there at the end of 2020, during peak pandemic winter, and on the travel map of places you could go, it was one of the only countries that was Green and accepting Americans...
Okay that's a lot of fun facts about Albania. AMA on any others.
> Pretty much every stereotype you may have heard about them is wrong
I went there about ten years ago, walking across the border on a small road from Macedonia. The Macedonia border office was small but tidy. Then there was a 100m no man's land, then a Welcome to Albania sign that was full of bullet holes, and a table of Albanian border guards drinking and playing cards. Super friendly guys.
We walked about 5km into the local town, passing tons of these bunkers. Nearly every single car and truck that passed us was a Mercedes, except for the police cars which were tiny battered Fiats.
Can confirm the people we met were incredibly friendly, and the place felt very welcoming and nothing happened to make me feel unsafe.
However, I have heard some crazy stories from another friend who travelled there more extensively that make me think, while it's a relatively safe country as a tourist, it won't be uneventful if you stay there a while, especially if you get off the normal tourist track.
Given that most of the stereotypes I'd heard about Albania up to that point were "bunkers, lawlessness, and Mercedes but lovely people", I'd say that it absolutely did live up to these. However, a lot can change in a decade so maybe it's different now. Or maybe we just went to different parts of the country.
Not sure what you mean by that, but my last trip was last year, and it was new models also. Mercedes is like the Theme there. Most lovable car in Albania.
Tirana is full of coffee shops that are full of groups of 3-4 guys who sit around smoking and drinking coffee all day, eventually leaving in brand new 2024 S-Class Mercedes or range rovers. There are tons of brand new luxury German cars everywhere.
My coworkers in the former Yugoslavia countries said they import cars from Germany after TUF denies them. I think they are getter “newer” cars now, newer meaning 10-15 years old.
Rightly or wrongly, in the UK Albians have a terrible reputation for organised crime, particularly drugs.[0] How is that perceived in Albania, and is organised crime a big issue in Albania? You make it sound like everybody is very trusting there.
My only direct interactions with Albanians here was a restaurant I used to go to regularly in London which was run by Albanians, who were all lovely and recommended books by Ismail Kadare, particularly The General of the Dead Army, which I thought was wonderful.
[0] Rather like the philosophical game "All crows are black, but not all black birds are crows" I have a feeling this may be due to a majority of illegal drug networks being run by Albanians, even though a large majority of Albians in the UK have no involvement in it.
Most of the leading crime gangs in europe and worldwide are Albanian [0]. They are a global operation thats present in almost every country thats relevant to the drug trade, and thats as a result of their massive diaspora (something like 30%-40% of their whole population has fled albania since the 80s). VICE declared Albania as the first and only european narco-state.[1] I actually have a friend who worked for the UN researching the narco economy in Albania, and the conclusion was that the GDP of the drug trade was half the GDP of the whole country [2]. In 2014 there was an incident where Dutch tourists that were hiking the mountains there accidentally discovered endless cannabis plantations and posted it on YouTube after leaving the country. This prompted wide outrage everywhere in Europe, and hence the Albanian government had to do something to save face, and they burned all the crops there in the region.[3] The thing is, the government and the narcos are all the same. Albania is still the major exporter of cannabis across Europe, and Albania is still the reigning king of drug transport. The Italian mafia is closely associated and probably dwarfed by the Albanian mafia.
I found that many people think positively of the regime and its dictator. The population was ill-equipped to deal with a market economy when the regime fell, and many Albanians believe the country has gone down a very chaotic path. They thought the dictatorship provided more structure. My grandmother-in-law (in her 60s), whose family suffered greatly when Hoxha took over, is one such Albanian who thinks positively of him, despite how the regime treated them. This feels a bit like Stockholm syndrome.
This mass Stockholm syndrome shit that every post communist country goes through with their hitler-tier leaders is evidence for me that god doesn't exist, and that we deserve the leaders we get.
I swear to god, we could liberate North Korea and they'd turn around and cry about how good it was during the Kim era because apparently we humans are deeply masochistic to our core. We want the boot stomping on our face forever.
That's too bitter. Speaking as a westerner married into an East German family, what people seem to crave more than anything is stability, which the dead hand of The Party delivered. When I talk to them about the comforts and freedoms of their post-1990 life there's a long list of details but behind it there's a ground state of "Ostalgie", gentle yearning for a time when if tomorrow wouldn't bring especial wonders nor would it bring calamity. And crucially this would be true for everyone in your community: with far less latitude for personal decisions of consequence nobody was far ahead or behind.
What people hate is that every such regime that falls is immediately picked clean by western vultures and remainders of old power structures in new coats. If you wanted people to think positively of liberal democracy you'd have the CIA going medieval on all the crooks behind the scenes, not apparently precisely the opposite.
If you liberate DPRK and the South Koreans march in, "legitimately" buy up all the land and property and "fairly" put all the poor inhabitants into functionally perpetual indentured servitude there will eventually be some resentment.
Plus the current state of North Korea owes a lot of its conditions to the Americans. Before someone accuses me of being a Tankie I do think the Kim dynasty is absolutely deranged and I obviously think that the average North Korean would be better off if they were toppled and I am an anarchist not an auth-communist.
But let's not forget that the Americans completely levelled the territory, including destroying dams that provided people's drinking water (a war crime then and now), and then gloated about it, and have then proceeded to consistently act in bad faith.
So when the comment above talks about "liberating" I do wonder exactly what they mean and how it would be different to the first time they tried it and how might the average North Korean react.
Maybe they would install a new dictator more amenable to the "rules-based international order" (i.e. the US and people who agree with them) like they did in South Korea or countless other countries across Latin America.
North Korea was the rich, industrialized half of the country, South Korea was poorer and extensively damaged by the Korean War. The fact that the South is now 10x richer and way better on any measurable metric tells you all you need to know about how well Juche and the Kims are working for the North.
the same apply to Vietnam and Cambodia. yet those countries are far more functional than DPRK. the extreme and dynastic cult of personality seems unique to the Kim family.
The problem is expectation management. In Eastern Germany and generally Eastern / South Eastern Europe, many envied the West, its lifestyle and wealth.
But once the various dictatorships, be it the USSR, Yugoslavia, Hoxha or whoever, fell... it became clear that it would take a long time until their life materially improved other than not having to be afraid of getting gulaged randomly. Corruption continued to exist on all levels from small (police "roadblocks" with made-up traffic violation tickets) over middle (building permits taking years if not "accelerated" with bakshish) to large (to this day, most government-owned companies are looted by the elites), cost of life expenses for everything not produced domestically can be on par with Western countries... it's not much in visible improvement over the "old days" where you could at least survive as long as you kept your mouth shut.
I was in Tirana last October, he seems to be treated as some kind of whimsical amusement and mascot rather than a historical tyrant. His residence is still intact and visible in the city center and is something of a tourist photo opportunity. AFAIK it's fully closed, but from the top of the rotating restaurant nearby you can see into it.
I am Italian, I know many Albanians and I visited the country too.
As far as I know there is still somebody that feel nostalgia about the dictator, but 90% of the people are really happy about the democracy and they want to join the UE.
Just to give an anedoct: in front of Berat there is a mountain where Oxha wrote with trees his name Enver. After the end of communism, they changed in Never.
The gratitude they have towards America is due to the USA declaring war against Yugoslavia and Serbia, and "liberating" Kosovo. Bill Clinton is considered a national hero and even has a monument declared to him, and even boulevards are named after him. [0]
Drive down to Lili’s restaurant in Berat and order everything on the menu (it’s small), and visit the castle while you’re there. It’s well worth it. You will need to make a reservation. It’s probably the most unique dining experience I’ve ever had, and the food was exceptional.
You can visit Bunk’Art in Tirana and then take the cable car up the mountain afterwards.
Lamar Tirana had some incredible sea bass.
Odas Garden is frequently recommended for local food to tourists but I found it to be overpriced and the dishes were way overcooked, but YMMV. The atmosphere is pretty unique. There are far better small time restaurants around for local cuisine (can’t remember the names).
My fav dish was Lakror, but it can be hit or miss in Tirana.
Do the free walking tour in the main square / Skanderbeg square.
There are bakeries everywhere, getting up early and walking down to the nearest bakery and getting fresh coffee and a pastry / burek and walking a bit in the sun is such a good way to start the day.
And I second the suggestion to go to Himare, we went via Vlore along the coast and down to Himare. They’ve built a new tunnel, I highly recommend avoiding it (I've heard it's closed now for final works anyway) and going over the mountain, there’s an amazing view point next to Mt Cika.
Get up to Montenegro if you can if you love scenic drives.
Tirana is nice, I suggest to go around for the Blocku (the neighborhood that during the communism was only for the nomenclature) it's really cozy.
Just outside Tirana there is an area with several artificial lakes, you should go there for a relaxing day.
If you have more time, I suggest to visit Girokaster: it's a castle city 2 hours far from Tirana, where Enver Oxha was born.
For food I really suggested a restaurant called Oda, not far from Skanderberg square in Tirana: it's a traditional Albanian house where you can taste all the Albanian dishes.