Not sure which one the OP had in mind but if you're into more theatrical audiobooks / podcasts check out "An Unexpected Journey" by "Samwise Gamgee" on Spotify. Absolutely top-tier audiobook of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Wow, just listened to the beginning of chpater 1. This is really, seriously good. Thanks you. I was just thinking what's next for my morning commute...
His latest work, After Dark, has a more global focus:
"Following his début monograph, TO:KY:OO, which captured Tokyo’s beauty at night, Wong widens his lens from the city that became his spiritual and photographic muse to Osaka and Kyoto, London and Seoul, Paris and Rome. But he goes still further, seeking the rich tapestries of nightlife in the foggy historical streets of his hometown Edinburgh, penetrating the backstreets of the megacity Chongqing, and seizing the verticality of Hong Kong from its rooftops."
It's ok! those links to previous threads that I post are just for curious archive-combers. When a post is an actual dupe, we bury it.
It's true that the American Chestnut had a major thread less than a year ago, but the line that srcreigh quoted from the FAQ says "or so" to give us a few months' worth of interpretive wiggle room.
Adding to this, if you post a re-post you will be redirected to the old thread instead of your new one. So you will know that you're reposting!
(I was a little embarrassed when this happens to me at first, but I have gotten over it now. It's nice to have a computer fact check me. Even if it means my clever titles have to be thrown away!)
I'm a bit late to this conversation but I wanted to drop in and support this comment. I live in North Carolina and have personally seen dozens of adolescent American Chestnut trees in the Appalachians in the western part of the state. They love the high ridge lines out there. Most of the chestnuts I've seen look like shrubs due to how they develop and can easily be missed of you're not looking carefully for them. From what I've read elsewhere most American Chestnuts only make it to 5-10 years old before the blight gets them. I've only seen a couple of trees taller than 10-15' tall in the wild (and have seen several infected with the blight).
The American Chestnut is "functionally extinct", because despite the fact that they are somewhat prominent throughout their native habitat as adolescents, they rarely (if ever) are able reach maturity and develop fruit (and therefore can't reproduce).
Here are a few pics of some adolescent chestnuts if anyone is curious:
Beautiful pictures. Thanks for sharing. I am really fond of the shape of the leaves. Since this is HackerNews, I believe there is also an entrepreneurial angle for the reemergence of American Chestnuts for carbon offset markets and to produce food (roasted chestnuts are delicious!). If the GMO version of the American Chestnut is approved by the US government, it will be the first GMO tree.
When I think of smart glasses, I imagine the best possible version of them as an exercise in thought. It starts off with them being in a form factor that's effectively indistinguishable from "normal" glasses. After that, I imagine them having the processing power to provide full AR capabilities, as well as a battery that's able to sustain that technology for at least a day if not longer.
I suppose that in turn might make you ask, "What is 'full AR'?" For the sake of this I'm going to imagine a world where there are no nefarious actors or ill-intentions. This is a fantasy world where I can just geek out over cool tech.
To me, it's the ability to recognize any and all people you interact with, at a moment's notice. Think all social media networks combined, but in realtime, as soon as you lock eyes with a person. The ability to "remember" a person you met ten years ago at that one networking event is now possible. Extrapolating this into other social spheres, you could get rid of all of the traditional dating apps that exist on your cell. If you walk into a bar or [$genericSocialSetting], you can immediately see who is single, and who isn't (assuming they have this information broadcast). Dating just got significantly easier, and maybe a bit more organic since you can tell right off the bat who is looking (and maybe even see if you have something in common).
Looking into other areas of use, imagine having Wikipedia at your finger tips, overlain in your field of vision. I'm not talking paragraphs of text here, but rather some sort of intuitive UI that cleverly displays the most significant bits of information about a given object, place, person, etc, within your field of vision. "That plant is poisonous."
Smart glasses represent taking all of the data and information that's available on the internet, and overlaying it in the real world. The "killer app" for smart glasses is several years out, and it will take many iterations before it's perfected. They're going to augment how we function, just how smart phones have augmented us. You'll be able to record, snapshot, and replay scenes from your past just like you can do with your phone, but far more effortlessly. I can imagine a world where your smart glasses are constantly recording, but only choosing to "save" given your input (since a lot of moments we wish we could have saved happen without us having our phones out.) Again this is pretending we live in world with zero nefarious actors (Black Mirror does a good job of covering some potential negatives of tech like this).
I think we're a long, long ways off from this tech. It's going to be a big culture shift in many ways, and is going to happen slowly at first. In my mind this is the sort of thing that Thalmic, Magic Leap and others are pursuing. I see companies like that as the early Ford Motor Company. These early Smart Glasses/AR companies are producing the Model T. Our smart phones are the "faster horses" in this analogy.
Your vision is well thought out and fairly realistic. I hate it though. Absolutely hate it.
The potential applications you describe around dating or knowledge display literally make the wearer see the world as a set of data points, which—while quite 2018—I believe is incredibly dangerous even without bad actors. It does not leave room for anything that doesn't fit into some arbitrary set of database columns or set of graph nodes or ML model; no room for nuance; no allowance for change or for the unknown or for the unexpected. Eventually, the data overlays stop augmenting reality and come to defined reality itself.
My ideal smart glasses would let me see and experience differently; see new spectrums of light or watch music dance through the air. In a world with no bad actors, AR adventures would take me new places and introduce me to new people. Visual augmentations would let me try on new personas or express myself in new ways. Reality itself becomes hackable.
If history is any guide, the future that I dream of will never come to pass and in 20 years these words will seem as quaint as those of early internet utopians. And yet I still have to believe in it—and I will still keep trying to explore it—because the bland, data dystopia that you unwittingly offered a sneak peak of is just too horrible.
> It does not leave room for anything that doesn't fit into some arbitrary set of database columns or set of graph nodes or ML model; no room for nuance; no allowance for change or for the unknown or for the unexpected.
Why not, though? Obviusly that sets limits on what kind of output the device itself can produce from each source of data, but that's not your entire experience of life as its user. To me it seems akin to saying that carrying a scrapbook would make you live in the past.
It seems to me that you're ignoring the huge increases on the far right side of the graphs in the article. How does the wage increase of the top 1% (or higher, even) factor into your view of the "less competitive" middle income working class of the US? Has the top 1% really become _that_ much more productive over the last few decades relative to the middle class? I really don't think so, but I'm not an expert on this.
It seems to me that you're defending the uppermost social class in the US, and are attempting to place blame on the middle class of the US for not being able to compete on the global stage against the lower classes of third world nations. They aren't necessarily more productive, they're just willing to work for less. A lot less. I may be misunderstanding your entire point, though.
> So in order to maintain the globally-superior wages we have become accustomed to, we must maintain and even increase our productivity edge. How do we do that?
Couldn't we do this by having competitive taxes on the highest income workers, and then reinvesting that money into things like: reducing the cost of education, reducing the cost of healthcare, improving mass transit and infrastructure, and other things that in general detract from the middle class's ability to "increase our productivity edge". This seems like at least a step in the right direction, instead of allowing the upper echelons of society to vacuum up and hoard billions of dollars that aren't serving any higher goals other than making a select few wealthy beyond reason.
> Has the top 1% really become _that_ much more productive over the last few decades relative to the middle class?
No, and that's actually the crucial point: High wage earners in the US have remained that much more productive than their competitors around the globe. They don't compete/compare at all with middle- and low-wage earners in the US. The "pie" we're slicing up isn't the US GDP (which would be the zero-sum game you-win-I-lose math assumed in the article), it's global GDP.
> It seems to me that you're defending the uppermost social class in the US, and are attempting to place blame on the middle class of the US for not being able to compete on the global stage against the lower classes of third world nations. They aren't necessarily more productive, they're just willing to work for less. A lot less.
I'm identifying the correct problem to solve. The goal is to return to income growth distribution closer to that seen in 1980, since there's a host of benefits to a pluralistic democracy when everyone is doing well. In particular it makes social transitions much easier, such as social justice and access to healthcare, because there's less sense of loss for the incumbents, and the costs of the changes can be borne more easily.
But if you misidentify the problem as mere existence of difference in income, or worse, that growth in the high-income bracket comes exclusively or even mostly from exploitation ("unfairness"), then you'll never solve the real problem, which is:
> They aren't necessarily more productive, they're just willing to work for less. A lot less.
Exactly. The same work, at the same quality, is now actually worth less in real dollar terms than it used to be.
In the 50s and 60s US middle-income workers were much more productive than their peers in other countries, and could charge more for their labor. Now others in the world have caught up (dramatically improving their own quality of life, it should be noted), and if we want to keep getting paid more than them, we have to increase our productivity again. Alternatively we could put trade barriers in place to tilt the playing field in our favor, but the cost for that is borne by consumers of all income classes (via higher prices).
They are much better but they are still basically the same designs as the late 90's.
A lot of things have improved but most of the problems are things that were recognized before and still aren't perfect.
They still need to get smaller, lighter, higher resolution, faster refresh rate, 4-8X GPU power, and wireless, but in another decade they should be awesome.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36864319