I'm reminded of the lyrics from Pink Floyd's Time:
"And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
no one told you when to run
you missed the starting gun"
The longer you live, the more tiny little mistakes you make. Things that at the time you could have done better, if you'd known, if you'd been a bit more careful. And these weigh on you, emotionally, pretty consistently.
And while it's pretty absurd, in the story, such tiny mistakes having such outsized consequences, the story reminds us that such severe consequences are well within the realm of possibility. People do lose limbs off of little, careless mistakes. Doubly so with all the incredibly concentrated sources of energy we have in the modern world - power tools, automobiles, explosives.
Would one really lose ten years trying to pick out a single Netflix show? No. But could one wake up one day and realize that they'd accomplished nothing of note for a decade, that all their free time was dumped into Netflix shows that weren't even that good?
So, what do you do with all that? Memento Mori, I guess.
I don't know if that is true. For large swaths of the population, raising a child is their biggest accomplishment. Justifiably so.
Other accomplishments of note might be: a single conversation that helped someone change. Little acts that made the world a tiny bit better. Having brought happiness to other people. I like to think that is the meaning of not wasting your time – not just measuring your life's worth with a science/capitalism lens.
I guess I interpreted "of note" differently. Raising a child is not noteworthy, it's just normal. Millions of people do it. Nobody will be remembered for raising a child, except by the child himself.
When I'm gone, I'll leave nothing "of note" behind. I haven't won any great prizes or set any records. I haven't authored any papers. I haven't invented anything that changed an industry. I haven't cured any diseases. My name won't be on any buildings or monuments. I haven't really left any kind of discernable mark on the world or civilization or even my home town.
Raising a child is noteworthy. Same for the millions of people who do it now, and the millions of people who did it before them. Just because millions of people do it doesn't diminish the significance of it. Framing it as such, is like saying there's no point running a race if you don't come first. A personal victory is still a victory. If it matters to you, then that's all that matters. All of those things like authoring papers, winning great prizes, setting records, will all be eventually be lost to time.
I recently got into splatting. I looked for some good all-in-one tutorials, but didn't find any, and mostly muddled through through trial and error and LLM assistance. I present this workflow as a straight-line pipeline, though in practice it took a lot of iteration and backtracking and rework to get the final result. Here's what worked for me:
I captured a video on a smartphone camera, using the OpenCamera app. Specifically, this video was captured with exposure locked, framerate locked, focus locked, fairly high framerate and resolution. I walked slowly and carefully around an outdoor scene, trying to get fairly good coverage from multiple angles. I took roughly 20 minutes of video, weighing 19GB.
This video was sampled into individual image frames at about 5fps using ffmpeg. There's room for experimentation and improvement here, an adaptive, coverage-aware sampling strategy would be better. But fixed 5fps was Good Enough (tm). This resulted in roughly 8,000 images at 4k. This was a pretty hefty dataset for my limited 1080, but I made it work.
I then generated masks for these images, to ignore transient objects during the splat training. (i.e. to cut out people who transiently walked through the scene). For this I used Cutie (https://github.com/hkchengrex/Cutie). For outdoor scenes, it can also make sense to mask out low-parallax areas like faraway mountains or especially the sky, as these are difficult to train correctly. If masks are generated for some images, you'll need at least placeholder masks for the all of them. In the end I've got about 8,000 PNGs that are monochrome black/white masks.
Then the images are handed to COLMAP (https://github.com/colmap/colmap), using the 'global mapper' option. This registers the camera positions in 3D space, and generates a crude point cloud that's good for sanity-checking. This step required a fair bit of iteration to get right. The full reconstructed output from COLMAP is not necessary, only the pose-estimate .bin files. The output directory here was about 500MB for this step for me.
With COLMAP registration done, the next step is the actual training. I found two useful pieces of software for this, with different tradeoffs.
Brush (https://github.com/ArthurBrussee/brush). Was very straightforward to install and use, requiring very little in external dependencies and setup. It was also pretty speedy on training, and gave good results. Minor modifications to the training process were possible by editing source, though I didn't get too wild here. Brush takes the *.bin files from COLMAP, plus the original images directory, and the masks directory if it exists. Run on its own, this could produce gaussian splat .ply files, 500-800MB in size, containing 1-10M splats. More than that and my poor little 8GB of VRAM OOM'd.
nerfstudio (https://github.com/nerfstudio-project/nerfstudio) Was also useful, as many research papers get implemented in its framework. In particular, for this outdoor scene, I used wild-gaussians (https://github.com/jkulhanek/wild-gaussians/) to generate just a sky sphere (to help seed low-parallax areas in my particular dataset), stopped training, and used this as an init.ply to pass to brush.
I then set up a very simple viewer website, using SuperSplat (https://github.com/playcanvas/supersplat). I used supersplat's editor to align the splat's coordinate system with the rotation and scaling that I wanted, and then exported an optimized .sog file, roughly 1/10th the size. .sog is nominally open-standards, though I'm not aware of any other projects using the format. This gave fairly good framerates and adequate controls across a variety of platforms.
As a little bit extra, supersplat's splat-transform CLI tool was used to generate a crude collision mesh for the scene, enabling a walking mode that respected object boundaries.
If there's interest I can post my results, I got a bit sidetracked with other projects and other splats, and this particular one I got fiddling with some more cleanup. I can get it up with a few more hours work. But hopefully that's a good start, all of these are fully FOSS, and resulted in a good-looking splat.
I've lived in Japan for a few months. I was about halfway through the article, thinking about how it seemed to be a counter-example, before the author called out Japan specifically.
For all the other differences in culture, the attribute of "People Actually Care" seems to have a huge impact on how pleasant a place it is to visit or live.
I don't know why it seems to be the case there. I don't know how to replicate it. I don't think it's magic. I've heard people bandy about the theory of cultural homogeneity. That might be a _factor_, but I doubt it's the full story.
I suspect if you dig into it, differences in economics are a major factor. In the US, it feels like caring is actively punished, economically. Caring is nice, but someone can only _afford_ to care if their other needs are met.
I also wonder if density is a major factor - not so much for the difference in economy of scale, but the difference of "if my physical space is incredibly constrained, I'm both more incentivized to keep it looking nice, and there's less of it to keep looking nice."
And, of course, it's not like Japan is some kind of otherworldly utopia. There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries. But it does seem like almost everyone, everywhere, just... puts in a bit more effort. Takes a little bit more time.
> There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries.
The collectivism of the society which both gives them a public sense of ownership of the whole country (thus, the caring), also yields crazy bullying in school and work, a high suicide rate, and lots of racist and xenophobic attitudes.
Maybe it's changing. It's been a long time since I spent any real time in Japan. My buddy who grew up in Tokushima also is out of touch with how things are there now. Who knows?
This is still pretty true. The xenophobia is waning as Japan's economy stagnates and there's a general vibe that Japan did something wrong economically. But otherwise, these all continue to be real issues in Japan.
These days there's also huge problems with infidelity, marriage rates, and divorce.
The suicide rate in the United States is higher than it is in Japan if you believe official government figures of Japan and the United States. The talking point about suicide in Japan is one of those that's 30 years out of date.
For what it's worth, it seems like "lego spike prime" is effectively equivalent to mindstorms, in that it includes a programmable brick that can connect to multiple motors, sensors, and can be programmed in a scratch-like environment.
I don't know why there was a branding change, but the capabilities seem pretty similar to the RCX I had as a child. Though programming over bluetooth is likely to be more reliable than the IR adapter.
Another approach I've found useful for this - turn off your monitor, or turn your brightness down to 0.
You can often do this pretty easily, with keyboard shortcuts or hardware buttons, and it does a lot to limit your temptation to re-read your draft while you're still writing, and makes editing (temporarily) impossible.
The examples of Dropbox and iPod being criticized on tech sites, but going on to become very successful, seems practically a part of the mythology at this point - but it seems to be _always_ those two examples.
Are there legitimately multiple good examples of "Criticized on HN pre-launch, yet became surprisingly successful"? I'm curious if the lesson to learn from Dropbox & iPod is more of "believe in a product, despite the criticism" or "sometimes, even accurate predictions are wrong"
California's Proposition 13 law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13) "locks in" property taxes on homes at the time you purchase it. Most other states do not do this, the value of your home is re-assessed annually, and your property taxes are based on the current value of your home.
In general, home values have consistently increased, year-over-year, in California. This means that many people pay less property taxes than they would if California didn't have its unique Prop 13.
Many people feel that this is an unfair law, as it largely benefits people who are _already_ financially established.
This article satirizes the situation, by framing the law as an intentional 'welfare program', rather than a tax break with unintended consequences. Part of the humor is that this 'welfare program' benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor, contrary to how we typically think of philanthropy.
Many localities apportion property tax out of the budget, so if everyone’s property doubled in price but the budget only went up 2% - property taxes would increase 2%.
In fact, we had a reappraisal recently and my value went up and total tax went down.
> "locks in" property taxes on homes at the time you purchase it.
All real estate whether a 1200 sqft house owned by a 90 year old widow, a foreign owned apartment building, or an oil refinery owned by a multinational.
Note, for historical perspective, California hasn't always been a solid Democratic state, most trace the recent Democrat domination back to a Trump-like nativist politician that pissed enough people off that the Republicans made themselves irrelevant in the state
Property tax is regressive and nobody should be forced out of their own home because of rising property taxes that might only be due to a housing bubble. I don't see the problem.
Capping property tax increases is similar in effect to rent control; it benefits people that were already there at a given point in time and hurts everyone who moves in afterward (proportionally).
Freezing property tax ends up being wealth redistribution from the entire rest of society to landlords as the article walks through. Second order effects also end up locking up the housing market as a whole and pushing prices ever higher making everyone worse off in the long run.
Then read the article. The problem is that in reality the money flows from low income to high income households. So it works the opposite of how you think it does.
If you don't drink alcohol - don't be afraid to ask for a non-alcoholic pairing!
Worst they can say is "no can do".
The one time I asked, it turned out that our server was ~30 years sober himself, and asked their bartender what they could do.
What they could do was, a variety of alcohol-substitute drinks, mixes of spices that didn't replace wine, but achieved the same culinary role, and custom dry cocktails. Drinks that, given the description, I never would have ordered. Drinks that, by themselves, didn't do what I thought a beverage did. It was amazing.
And while it's pretty absurd, in the story, such tiny mistakes having such outsized consequences, the story reminds us that such severe consequences are well within the realm of possibility. People do lose limbs off of little, careless mistakes. Doubly so with all the incredibly concentrated sources of energy we have in the modern world - power tools, automobiles, explosives.
Would one really lose ten years trying to pick out a single Netflix show? No. But could one wake up one day and realize that they'd accomplished nothing of note for a decade, that all their free time was dumped into Netflix shows that weren't even that good?
So, what do you do with all that? Memento Mori, I guess.