Advanced version from early 2000s (US), incorporating several additional lyrical-flow improvements on phrases seen in the Tom Scott video and TFA:
"Dashing through the snow - - on a pair of broken skis - - -"
"Down the hills we go - - - Crashing into trees!"
"The snow is turning red - - I think I'm almost dead - -"
"And now I'm in the hospital with stitches in my head! Oh, -"
"Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg! - - -"
"Batmobile lost a wheel and the Joker played ballet! HEY!"
"Jingle bells, Batman smells, Granny got a gun, - - -"
"? ? ?, and shot a man in 1931! HEY!!!"
Could be, although not that particular completion. The second chorus was rare and I'm kind of unsure about "shot a man". Can't edit previous comment but should have just put it as:
So, building on this, we can view Beat Saber not as a music game, but as a *dance* game that figured out a reliable, precise way to track player movements.
It's interesting to note that similar movement-quantizing systems are at the core of numerous other hit games, most notably in Dance Dance Revolution but also to some extent Rock Band and Taiko no Tatsujin.
I completely agree that's a dance game. Similar way that Guitar Hero is a music playing game. It's not exactly a dance but delivers something close to dance feeling.
My brain can't dance, can't even perceive dance. When I see dancing champions perform, their movements make no sense to me and seem completely unrelated to the music they are dancing to. However when I played Beat Saber occasionally I feel glimpses of the feeling of dancing. That's pretty much as close to dancing as I can get.
To me it's almost more of a meditation game, similar to how Guitar Hero or other rhythm games could get when you got in the zone, but full body. On a hard track you don't have time to think, just move. If you get distracted, you might fail.
While I agree with the spirit of the post, I think that there are better and worse times to start something new, and in retrospect 2014 seems like it was one of those worse times. The period from 2014--2024 was an era where the sheer gravity of the big tech platforms crushed out innovative startups left and right. People with an extreme focus on product polish could succeed, like Slack (est. 2013) and Discord (est. 2015), but it feels like most of the tech-sphere was either just working on half-hearted products towards an inevitable acqui-hire, or fervently trying to mainstream blockchain in a wishful attempt to create an entirely separate, more open ecosystem.
Yeah there are, but it's hard to know where you are in. So best just to have fun & create great stuff. If focused on making people's lives better you never really go wrong in the longterm.
The large IT companies are acting in ways that are completely against innovation and self-improvement. I expect them to freeze-up like the old giant corporations that they are.
But the change only started after the US decided to change its free-money-for-rich-people policy, and that was last year.
Well, a startup (ish…) is threatening Google, and VC money is much much tighter. So I’d say the Silicon Valley era is officially over. I hope y’all enjoyed it! I for one am a bit excited to see what’s the next big consumer idea to capture the zeitgeist.
I am looking forward to software devs being affordable to industries outside of martech and SaaS encumbents.
I think boutique software producs built in house for non-software businesses could provide immense automation and innovation to small/medium businesses. Not everything needs to be a SaaS, highly boutique software could cater for exactly one business and be a really holistic advantage.
Realistically, even if it started to happen, the giants would simply swallow it whole, as they've done very effectively in recent times.
Long gone are the times where a small Google could disrupt a field and debunk everything around it.
OpenAI is half owned by Microsoft already. Without those resources they wouldn't be able to realistically compete against Google. So saying they are a "small startup" for me doesn't compute.
In my view this is a bit of wishful thinking. Today we have so many giants with monopolies that realistically competing in their space can only be done with huge amounts of investment. The one resource that has been dried up recently.
OpenAI. In my eyes, Google’s power is entirely in a) assets, b) an army of geniuses, and c) a brand that lets it maintain ubiquitous monopoly status over search ads. Google does a lot of other cute stuff, and they desperately want another revenue stream, but the simple truth is that the entire core of the company’s whole operation is search ads. Display ads are on the way out due to privacy concerns, and OpenAI has damaged both b and c.
I think that c might be inverted. It's the economic power/performance of their search ads that let them maintain a brand rather than the other way around.
To clarify: I think the reason Google control search is that the public likes Google, so there's no political will to enforce the law. It's starting to crack now with the "google search is bad now" narrative, along with the classic "google is spying on me" -- together, they've emboldened Biden's justice department enough to bring multiple suits.
I think Google's attitude of free products (Gmail, Google Maps, Android, and Chrome especially) has won it insane amounts of goodwill, and that's all that's keeping them at the top. Having worked at Google, I find it incredibly hard to believe that they have any sort of fundamental technical advantage when it comes to building a search engine. I didn't work on search and obviously didn't look for the secret sauce, so that assessment is based on company culture and attitude alone.
The last thing Slack had was an extreme focus on polish. As a chat system, it's hardly functional and far less so than irc which came before. Slack managed to sell chat to big corporations, that was its innovation.
2013 was a great time to join in the fray, I think the clarifying point is that you are working on the machine, you are not embodying the success or failure of the machines of that time.
I wholeheartedly support this. But frameworks exist for one simple reason: HTML has never been powerful enough for the work people do.
The last two decades of web UI framework development has shown, over and over, what people need out of HTML that they're not getting. Componentization is one big area, and fortunately, it's already far along the path of integration into the native web platform. But there's another, bigger, area, which has not seen a single ounce of integration into native HTML: reactivity.
So what if we could just solve that? What is preventing us from adding native reactivity to HTML, a language that already contains numerous interactive elements and hard-coded ties to JavaScript? Seriously, why is this not already implemented when we have things like Shadow DOM out there already?
We could get a huge amount of impact with just minor changes. In my view, HTML could meet 90% of peoples' reactivity needs with just two simple tags:
1. `<sync value='variableName' />`: Renders as a text node that shows the current (live-updated) value of the referenced JS variable. If the value is undefined, renders nothing (special case).
2. `<test if='variableName'></test>`: Renders as its children if the referenced JS variable is truthy, and as nothing if the variable is falsy.
That's it. Just these two almost-trivial tags would solve an incredible amount of use cases. And with sufficiently expanded componentization (say, React-style props for `<template>`), the web platform would be well positioned to cover all others in time as well.
(You can toggle the layers to switch between no/some/many rat data. Sorry about the colors, best I could find. More purple = higher frequency of rat observations.)
Isn't it more likely to be the case that no one was willing to pay for the investigative journalism?
You see this everywhere. The clickbait is a funding source for the real work. Journalists almost never want to push garbage on the public --- they're usually forced to by management, either as an attempt at growth-at-all-costs or as a revenue source of last resort.
The rebuttal to that is that neither worked. They wouldn’t have switched if the original style worked. They wouldn’t have gone bankrupt if the switch worked. They would have gone back to the original style of it worked before the switch.
Yeah my comment wasn't actually intended as "rebuttal" so much as an observation that something is seriously broken in traditional news media.
It is a business, and so it is reasonable to have to just accept that a certain amount of sensationalism, click-bait and other "metric-increasing" tactics will be omnipresent so long as "traditional news media" continues to exist in some form. I've read that this has always been the case anyway, and people complaining about it is as old as people complaining about taxes. But clearly the target audience is just not buying what they are selling these days, no matter what that is.
I suspect that, in addition to the Internet putting serious competitive pressure on print media, social media is also playing a big factor in the demand for traditional news outlets. In current year, everyone is carrying a camera with them at all times and the ability to publish content instantly. When most people are so "connected", such that they can find out what is happening around them the instant it happens in a quick clip or headline, what use is there for long-form articles?
I would just say that, the internet allows for more niche things in general. If you want more sensationalized articles, it’s got that, if you want more rational takes, it’s got that. I can get exactly the flavor I want and in that sense why would I watch something that by definition has to cater to everyone. Similar to music, why listen to the radio when I could listen to the exact music I want 24/7.
Less a bug with news organizations and more a feature that the internet enabled. This same thing has played out in a dozen different industries for the same reason.
The big underlying factor is that so many software prices are artificially low because they're subsidized by collecting and making money off of users' personal data.
Unlike with physical goods, users don't know any "objective" ways to judge the fairness of software pricing. So they see (monetarily) free software everywhere and think that good software is cheap to make.
You can view the subscription/purchase debate as a second-order effect of people just not wanting to pay much for software, because they think that's what it's worth.
For comparison, US median house prices are up by 42% over the same period [1]. Hospitality prices (especially for traditional hotels, which raised rates by about 10%), are actually significantly trailing inflation.
Rather than scrolling through the obligatory endless speculation in the comments, I encourage all of you reading this to open up the section entitled "Long time coming" at the end of the article, and reflect on the fact that worthwhile science is hard and takes a long time to do, and nearly every incentive in academia or industry works in opposition to this.
How many other teams could we get working on projects in this field, were it not for funders preferring less risky but far less valuable studies?
It's sad that we so often have to rely on billionaire's pet projects for work like this. An example being Elon's Neuralink, which from an investment perspective looks like an awful return, but does have insanely high upside if successful.
And more generally: I think a lot that’s wrong with this world stems from the fact that humans are risk averse. This served us well in evolutionary times, when failure often meant death. But in modern societies it causes a lot of problems.
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