You also have to consider that faces are one of the things that we have the strongest perception of, with lots of our neurons dedicated to the task, so when you get things wrong it's far more noticeable than many other bodily animations would be.
One of my favorite “weird” conjectures is that the existence of the uncanny valley implies that at some point it was evolutionarily advantageous for us to recognize something that looked human, but wasn’t… and to be afraid of it.
Think also about face-like things we perceive because of pareidolia but might in fact be dangerous. One part of our brain is opportunistic about finding patterns while another is a sanity check on those patterns telling us not to just trust them outright.
I recommend thinking about what you can do that would significantly differentiate the gameplay from what is possible irl. Just putting laser tag in VR is a downgrade in many aspects from what you can achieve in reality, so you need a lot of gameplay innovation to make it a compelling proposition.
One small example of where just copying things from real life falls short:
Your proof of concept show walls (because that's what laser tag does to create compelling gameplay) but walls are a mediocre choice in a colocated VR game because the actual behavior (users can always walk through them in VR) defies the user's built in expectations about what it means for something to be a "wall".
It seems plainly obvious that history shows the opposite is true; corruption is increased when money and power are centralized amongst a few people. There's a reason the term "Robber Baron" came around the last time we experienced massive inequality as a country. If you have some examples to the contrary I would love to hear them.
This article's title is disingenuous and is guilty of the same thing it accuses the study of.
The actual content of this article is the following (TLDR)
1) That the study didn't show a reduction in negative health outcomes, rather the control group showed an increase in negative outcomes.
2) The author of the article disagrees that this is equivalent to the stated claim, and offers a number of alternative explanations why you might see this outcome in the data
3) The author offers some critiques around lack of data transparency and the statistical rigor of the study.
In the end the title is a semantic nitpick around the difference between "improved absolute health" and "improved relative health outcomes" and not the smoking gun of bad faith actors it implies.
That's true, but WeWork also competes with national office space companies (Regus, Premier) -- so national presence is not exactly a unique competitive differentiator.
The USA is already one of the world leaders in percent of population incarcerated; it doesn't seem we are suffering from an inability to imprison. If we as a society decide to revoke someones freedom and choice, then we should be willing to shoulder the cost. Making imprisoning low cost, or even worse profitable, creates massively perverse incentives. If it costs the system little to nothing, why bother to make sure people are really guilty? Why bother to spend the money to rehabilitate? Your goal should be to align incentives, which makes a high-cost and humane prison system have lots of favorable characteristics.
All these "illegal" guns started their life as brand-new perfectly legal firearms. It's a very leaky pipeline, one in which the industry and industry funded lobby groups have at least a bit of a mixed incentive to solve. The vast majority of the proposed gun-control laws focus on tightening up the leakiest parts of the supply chain, or on reducing the overall demand for various firearms.
My neighbor was the spokesman for the New Orleans police department. He gave a pretty detailed explanation of how illegal guns are used, and where they come from.
Most of them come from purchases at gun shows (as laws are considerably laxer on private sales). The serial numbers are filed off, then they're hidden in abandoned buildings by a person who rents the guns out to be used in murders. The same illegal guns are typically used in numerous murders, making it more difficult to trace them back to any particular person, if they are found.
There's a difference between the way our minds work and the way reality works. In reality a physical object can only exist in one place which naturally leads to hierarchal organization being the dominant paradigm. On the other hand our minds operate associatively.
When we started to build out computer systems we based the UX on metaphors of real-life tool equivalents. I would posture though that as we become more of a computing-literate society and as computing moves closer to becoming an extension of our minds as opposed to an extension of reality, the dominant paradigm will shift towards associate models of organization.
> On the other hand our minds operate associatively.
The mind doesn't just "work" one way or another (certainly in no way that can be boiled down to a single adjective) and does everything it does that one way.
And hey, that we consider a thing a physical object distinct from its environment is a distinction we made with our minds, rather than the other way around, and that I have folders like "docs/images/photos/people/$city/$person" or "docs/images/created/cheatsheets" is also not because I'm used to that it being that way in real life.
The whole point of a taxonomy is for things to belong somewhere in it, roughly or neatly. You don't have to remember the place, you just have to be the same person with the same heuristics. That enables a very fast binary tree search, so to speak, both when looking for a thing and when looking for a place to put it.
That's a positive, not a limitation or baggage from the physical world, that makes it so great and quick. That's why we used them since forever, including for purely platonic ideas even that have no resemblance to physical reality, and way before computers.
And are we really becoming that much more computer literate, or are machines that can read the books for us becoming more widespread? There is a difference between proposing a better way to store and find things, and proposing someone else do it for us (until they don't).
> When we started to build out computer systems we based the UX on metaphors of real-life tool equivalents.
They started out as tools that were sold and learned and used, now they're turning more and more into a foot in the door for companies to capture consumers however they can.
Taking care of one's own documents and personal affects is part of what makes a person an adult, and if these documents and media get moved into the digital realm, where vast amounts of them can be ordered and re-ordered within seconds, that is all the more reason to think about what they are and how to order them. If that's hard, then that's even more reason to not put it off.
How do you tell the difference between a.) the company gets to be the middleman not being good enough to find what you are searching for, b.) that company censoring you, or c.) you having misremembered that thing existing?
You've eloquently expressed something I've been feeling for a long time, but couldn't put into words myself. Bookmarks and file systems are frustrating ways to organize digital thingies.
So what would be a less frustrating way -- tagging everything with as many (or as few?) keywords as possible, and then ad-hoc searches as looking through "virtual folders"[1,2] with the tag as the "folder name"? And more systematic ones as (SQL-style?) queries of tags with "AND" and "OR" logical operators? Or something else?
Yes - extremely rich metadata combined with robust search features.
For example: "I want to see all..."
- excel files
- that I myself have created (not downloaded)
- anywhere on my hard drive
- tagged with a particular project name
- containing a particular word inside the file
- sorted by "last opened" date
Then ideally you'd be able to save this search/filter/view for future use.
This isn't impossible to accomplish today, but it's so painful and slow that you're basically forced to fall back to folder hierarchies for organization.
