I absolutely love this. I make VR experiences that run on the ICP, which delivers wasm modules as smart contracts - I've been waiting for a combo of node-friendly, wasm deployable tools and webLLM. The ICP essentially facilitates self-hosting of data and provides consensus protocols for secure messaging and transactions.
This will make it super easy for me to add LLM functionality to existing webxr spaces, and I'm excited to see how an intelligent avatar or convo between them will play out. This is, very likely, the thing that will make this possible :)
If anyone wants to collab, or contribute in some way, I'm open to ideas and support. Search for 'exeud' to find more info
Why the Blockchain there? I don't really see the value. But maybe I misunderstand. It's just that I tend to be pretty dismissive of products mentioning blockchain. Mostly from the time when this tech was severely overhyped. Like Metaverse after it and now of course AI. I do know there's some usecases for it, I just wonder what they are and why you chose it.
I think I like the idea but I don't think I fully understand what it is that you're doing :) But I love everything VR.
Take this with a grain of salt, as I run a startup in the industry.
Blockchain has taken a weird path. It started with Bitcoin offering something genuinely new - a Byzantine fault-tolerant mechanism for decentralized value exchange without trusted intermediaries. But the industry has drifted toward "web3" hype where the technology often isn't necessary.
Companies pick tech stacks for all sorts of reasons beyond technical merit - vendor relationships, development velocity, legacy system compatibility, and UX considerations all factor into these decisions.
Truth is, most blockchain companies today are solving problems that could be handled just fine with traditional databases and APIs. The industry is shifting toward abstraction layers that hide the consensus mechanisms anyway, focusing on user experience instead.
The project mentioned probably doesn't actually need a blockchain backend for what it's doing, except maybe for tradable collectibles on an ERC standard.
It is wise to be suspicious - spending even a small amount of time near the "web3" space will make attentive person suspicious of scams and parlour tricks.
I use the network to host the webxr experiences, which are bundled wasm files, from unity. All of the code lives on the blockchain so, in this sense, i really couldn't do without it.
If you are referring to blockchain-specific functionality, then this is largely true, however i have implemented some demostrations of the consensus mechanism being used from inside an immersive space. This is really to illustrate that it is possible, rather than try to sell you a meme coin.
In the near future I expect to be using the ICP for a lot more, however, since it provides some rather interesting technical opportunities. It is wrapped around something called a 'network nervous system' which acts as a sort of administrator for proposals, so your point about abstraction is accurate, but this is the case with any large vendor.
I choose to build on the ICP because it is more secure and straightforward for my particular stack, plus it has a lot of potential, despite the noise. I've implemented webrtc messaging to keep the cost of normal multiplayer data transfer as low as possible, because consensus is expensive and the network runs on a pay-per-use compute model.
I'm offering a new route, outside of big tech, if you don't consider Unity a menace, which i acknowledge that some do. I am taking an admittedly more radical stance, by including the hosting in this.
Now that I have the context, I find what you're doing super interesting, and well thought out. And greatly value the passion you're building it with as well.
I want to clarify, my message wasn't intended as a dig at what you are doing - especially since I didn't actually look into it at all before writing my reply.
By definition, and especially when explained with enough detail, anything that we do couldn't be done with a different tool, in the sense it'd have to be done differently.
What my comment was meant to address was the original comment's question regarding the value of doing something "on-chain". Mainly because it's something that I've been thinking about a lot, being a founder as well in a similarly-hyped vertical.
At it's core, blockchains are a database, and so any high level goal - beyond the composability/interoperability of on-chain primitives through tokens and shared state - can be achieved without a blockchain.
However, there are many reasons to leverage the position of a blockchain project beyond the technical _need_ for a DLT.
The VC environment might be attractive to some -leveraging the network effects of a sufficiently decentralized network, tapping into ecosystem incentives and growth programs, personal alignment with the moral values typically associated with decentralization, personal connections in the industry/vertical, etc.
All that to say; no one asks why you're using a relational database or a graph database with as much suspicion or caution as they do why you're putting your stuff on-chain, and while that makes sense because of the... unique circumstances of DLTs, there's a lot more nuance to it from a business perspective than just asking yourself the "is it a grift?" question.
I guess what i wanted to get across was that ICP is considerably more than a database, but tbh it's a massive rabbit hole, unless you're already into cryptography. I'm impressed by the foresight and scale of it though.
I thinks it's also the first thing i would call an AI governor, and there is a whole liquid democracy protocol that's pretty well thought out, imo
Yes, the hype waves have been painful. I am still annoyed by the lack of good tools and content for VR lovers. I am personally trying to do something by offering a toolkit for building VR websites in unity.
My website has a few examples on it, including domestic interior, bowling simulator. Recently I helped to make a VR museum, which will be there soon, and I'm working on a flying game with realistic aerodynamics.
I've open-sourced both the toolkit and template for self-hosting, essentially providing a no-code route for creating interactive webxr spaces. Putting it on the IC means you can also self-host your creation and keep control of the data, code and costs of running it.
You could equally just use the unity toolkit and host it elsewhere, but i wouldn't be able to provide the same level of support, if it broke in unexpected ways.
What i like about the original post was the fully in-browser RAG and webLLM, as it looks compatible with the rest, so i could, for example, broadcast responses across webrtc data channels. So many options...
I think it's related to the perceived centrality of identity in the world. I see this as a natural consequence of individualism, which itself is championed by both modern capitalist and libertarian thinking, to pick two.
As the focus on the individual's happiness, wealth, values (etc.) have become more and more ubiquitous, the need to define oneself becomes more and more important. As this has matured, many systems have build that reinforce it. Representative democracy - one person, one vote, and welfare systems that address indivudual needs, are positive examples.
With this comes also a much stronger need for protecting these identities, and more weight is given to perceived categories, whether they are superficial, like skin colour, or structural, like religion or class.
So, when people talk about wokeness, they are not only trying to define the social contract, but they also aligning with it their identity, which gives a kind of existential urgency. The idea that we might be wrong about our position carries with it a sense of loss of self, which triggers most people.
> Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.
It seems that the defining factor is that there was no actual authority attached to the morality of the situation. He is essentially saying that life was better when one could get away with doing whatever they wanted with no repercussions.
This is such a well-travelled path that I am surprised his intellect, nor that of the people that he claims proof-read this document, didn't protest before hitting 'publish'.
Here's a question: how can social justice actually be justice without enforcement. The US constitution coded this as the 13th amendment - is that now a woke document? Is that an example of "radicals getting tenure", or is it example of progress?
Articles like this really don't age well. Neither, it seems, does the author.
I live in Europe (Germany) and we have no wokeness here. Saying something sexist or racist isn't a big deal. Some people will think you are an asshole and that's it. Our leftists go to the US and come back ranting about how oppressive wokeness is.
I'm a minority myself and have experienced my fair share of racism. But I have no desire to push for somebody to get fired for making a racist joke or some such thing. I will just lower my opinion of them and move on with my life. I don't want to live in a country where a wrong word at the wrong time might mean you're fired.
I think it depends on the word and the context. If the person speaking is your boss, there might be situations where 'moving on' isn't an option and the words might have wider implication in your life.
Germany actually has several laws in place that explicitly protect people in the workplace, such as the General Equal Treatment Act (2006, with revisions to 2022) which contains an explicit treatment of Harrassment, specifically mentioning that of a sexual nature.
Going further, in a judgment dated from 06.12.2021, LAG Cologne, sexual harrassment was explicitly stated as acceptable grounds for extraordinary dismissal. So actually you already live in exactly that kind of country.
What I think you're trying to say, though, is that you don't experience the kind of angry fanatical discourse that seems to a big feature of social media and US discourse, where laws are being weaponised and used as blunt political instruments, with which to do as much damage to society as possible.
In this case, I agree with you and am super grateful I don't live there.
And so the dance takes on a new rhythm. These well-meaning advertising execs, working diligently to support their struggling stakeholders, now have a new string to their bow. And the rest of us, the targets of their magnanimous demand-creation algorithms, we will have 'new and improved' ways to learn about and connect with out favourite brands, outrageous headlines and memetic schemes.
And then there are the sneakier ones; those who dwell in digital shadow, hiding from the luminous glare of corporate glory. What will these funny fellows do, when the fingerprinters tap on their windows and ask for their papers? What of their intent, and the glasses they wear to shield their eyes from the money-grubbing rays?
I agree with your abstraction of the problem, but I think you stopped half-way.
Regulators, producers and consumers are all following the same interconnected incentive structures, many of which have been designed with efficient production and an exponential increase of consumption in mind, not environmental concern.
It makes sense for these companies to operate, following their obligation to shareholders. They are, by definition, successful and so the idea that they should be diminished in any way by taxation/regulation creates a dissonance that can easily be loopholed or simply undone by the next gov't. Tax is a political lever, but the incentives are emergent economic atttributes. This means that, as soon as there is enough economic influence within politics, the lever doesn't do much anyway.
This seems to amount to asking an LLM how it feels about Cheryl, discovering that it is performatively happy about her existence, and then deducing that the LLM has no capacity for genuine emotion, expressed in the form of logic.
The faulty premise lies in the formulation of the test and makes the responses both predictable, but also does a disservice to 'mind' because it tries to interpret it in such a way that an LLM could begin to grapple with the basics, but not in a meaninful way.
Perhaps it is useful to help build better context-specific logic flows (generally known as software) but it doesn't seem to provide any progress on the "theory of mind" front, which I guess is a borrowed notion.
I'm working on https://exeud.com. It's an open-source VR framework, including a Unity toolkit that includes character control and interaction, and a Web3 template that allows you to self-host your VR scene on the Internet Computer, which is a website-in-a-smart-contract.
I see it being useful for artists, indie devs and anyone else who want to fire up their immersive ideas and keep control of the content, code and costs of running it.
I love the word 'megabomb' as much as the next guy, and I'm about all threat escalation, but isn't ammonium nitrate also fertiliser?
Since this is one of the main (and historic) exports from Russia, I would imagine that one or two cargo ships have carried the stuff before.
A little more info on how it is stored/transported and under which eventualities the cargo would become bomb-like would give me a sense of journalistic satisfaction as an accompaniment to my sense of impending doom.
It's probably a fertiliser shipment, but if it were to explode while unloading the intended use does not matter much. If you've seen some footage from the Beirut port explosion in 2020, calling something 7 times as large a 'megabomb' is not inappropriate.
There are or were this kind of fertilizer shipments from other dates or countries that weren’t cataloged as megabombs? Maybe even bigger. A weapon is a weapon no matter who holds it. If coming from other sources, maybe in even bigger amounts, it is seen as something normal, then we are not talking about the ship.
I think the fact that the ship is damaged, making the fertilizer much more likely to explode, is why they’re calling it a megabomb. Circumstances have made the cargo more hazardous, and pushed the “explosive substance” part of its dual nature to the front of everyone’s minds
Experts have said in Swedish media that no such risk exists due to how it's packed/stored, unless someone intentionally mixes it with "organics" or stores it with fireworks (as in Beirut).
Organics such as fuel oil, which the ship likely has on board and might also refuel. If it accidentally or "accidentally" leaks into the AN, you get ANFO, "a widely used bulk industrial high explosive".
If Russia wants to nuke an European port city without using an actual nuke and while being able to at least leave some doubt whether it may have just been an accident, this certainly looks like a plausible way.
Who cares, it's quite enough to reason to refuse a ship to dock in port. The Beirut ship also had a Russian owner. The AN was bound to Mozambique to be used for explosives.
> A little more info on how it is stored/transported and under which eventualities the cargo would become bomb-like would give me a sense of journalistic satisfaction as an accompaniment to my sense of impending doom.
I agree. In fact the premise of the article - that this should be treated as a threat from Russia - hangs on the understanding that there is a legitimate reason a European port would accept a ship carrying this cargo. So how many such shipments are regularly made from Russia to Europe? What ports are designated to accept them? What safety measures do they have to handle the cargo? In what way is this particular ship different from those legitimate ones? Without this information, the article is incomplete.
If there are no such legitimate shipments the article cannot claim there is any ambiguity about the threat posed by this ship.
It could just be fertilizer, but Russian sailors are known to be reckless and often dangerously incompetent. Given that Russia's national interests are served by an explosion regardless of cause, it's just not safe to let them anywhere near shore.
No, Russia is deliberately using this ship to harass NATO countries. The ship was recently unusually close to a NATO base in Norway before the Norwegian coast guard chased them away.
Here in Denmark the Danish coast guard also had to confront the ship.
The ship has enough Ammonium Nitrate to cause an explosion several times the size of the 2020 Beirut port explosion.
Basically any other country with a faulty ship full of dangerous explosive material would tow the ship back and fix their own mess.
Russia is instead using it as hybrid warfare against geopolitical adversaries.
This is quite possible, equally though, what is stopping all these countries from simply refusing access to territorial waters for this ship. It seems to be travelling for thousands of miles just fine, so can't claim emergency shelter, and even then the danger to third parties seems to justify any refusals. The crew is likely tiny and easy to rescue if need be.
I can imagine this being a simple ruse to annoy NATO countries and their navies too, that wouldn't be out if character, but beyond that... That would be a very petty hybrid risk.
Or maybe Russia is just trying lots of things just to see what sticks..?
From my side, while I think using a semi damaged ship as a hybrid threat would be within the Russian MO, it also seems like an easy one to protect against.
I get that, and it is odd. Though Russia can also wash its hands off of that ship. IIRC it is Maltese-flagged, owned by a Maltese company, and the crew is international. It "just so happens" that it contracts for Russian cargos. Russia may perhaps (?) be the ultimate beneficiary but it's also not strictly speaking Russian.
Back to my question: can all these justifiably concerned countries not simply refuse access for this ship, end of story?
> can all these justifiably concerned countries not simply refuse access for this ship, end of story
Pretty much. Entire crews can be (and are) abandoned in international waters for years at a time if the company decides they don't want to deal with the ship any more.
Which makes some sense as to why the crew would bring the ship down to the North Sea from the far northern Norwegian coast (weather this week: down to 2 degrees C, wind up to 40mph). If you think you might be abandoned in late September, and ports in Murmansk and Arkangelsk could also decide not to admit you, do you want to overwinter at sea in the Arctic, or go literally anywhere else? And that's if the company does forsake them, which is also a hypothetical. More likely, the company also would probably rather the ship is not at risk of being disabled in the Arctic considering they presumably couldn't get a guarantee readmittance to the port of origin and decided to at least get to relative safety down south with better weather and near countries that at least plausibly would lift a finger if the ship really was at risk.
The ship started in Murmansk. How would it have gotten to Lithuania (or Kaliningrad, St Petersburg or anywhere in the Baltic) if it's not allowed though the passage by Denmark?
I'm not sure if this can be described as "warfare"- hybrid or not. You'd need to call the migrants boats that "harass" Italian ports a tool of war, too. Maybe that's warranted, but to me, it sounds like an unnecessary escalation.
Obviously, the ship shouldn't be used in such a way, but I would save the war-like language for a situation where it tries to ram its way into a port against the coastal guard commands.
For those who downvote the above, yes it presents speculation as if verified fact, but what it puts forth is actually plausible when you see how Russian military efforts tend to make use of uncertainty.
If you are going to dismiss it: dismiss it with facts and arguments. Don't just lazily downvote it.
Just to be clear, you want HN users put effort into a rebuttal of the factless speculation presented as a fact? This isn't how discussions work, this is flamebait (just like the article itself) and has no place on HN. This doesn't contribute to the discussion, and should be downvoted and flagged.
The two last statements of the post are indeed speculation. What was said up until that point can be verified. However, the speculation should be seen in light of recent history. Russia does have a history of shady maritime dealings covered by deniability. For instance you have probably heard of cables that have been mysteriously cut in the northern regions.
As for you accusing me of posting flame-bait: that's not very nice. I presume you have some way of proving your speculation?
The interesting thing is that ship was damaged almost immediately after leaving the port, had a chance to stop in Russian ports along the way but instead is doing a tour near EU countries.
The crew is either amazingly incompetent or malicious/complicit.
You don’t put a ship that can blow up near: a. Gas&oil terminals, b. military air base
...said the Filipino deck hand to the Egyptian navigator, no less.
(I don't know what nationalities the ship's crew has, but based on the ship's ownership, it would be pretty unlikely to be all Russian unless they've already disposed of and replaced the entire crew).
So not only is there now a suicidal crew of mad Russians, but they also killed the old crew. They just keep getting more dastardly! They probably caused the bad weather too! Andøya is usually so lovely this time of year!
Actually this rampant speculation thing is quite fun. I should sell this stuff to whoever is running the Tom Clancy estate.
This is a relatively constant factor along the Norwegian coast and has been for many years. In recent years the behavior has become a bit more aggressive with communication cables at sea going missing.
This tends to not make international news as this activity isn't exceptional. It just varies in intensity and scope over time.
That is true, but given the current level of trust between Russian and 'Western' authorities, would it not be prudent to assume the vessel is indeed a threat and keep it away from infrastructure and the general population if at all possible?
In the case of Arctic Norway, there are plenty of unpopulated, sheltered fjords. No need to dock it in a commercial port in an urban area.
If this were a threat, how would the Russians coerce a ship full of sailors to not surrender or abandon the ship rather than choose between vaporisation or arrest or death by navy when trying to escape the aftermath (assuming they even have boats that can get away from the blast)?
> (...) how would the Russians coerce a ship full of sailors to not surrender or abandon the ship rather than choose between vaporisation or arrest or death by (...)
Have you paid any attention to Russia's meatwave tactics in Ukraine that so far already piled up half a million of Russian casualties?
If you did, you wouldn't be considering this scenario implausible, because we see videos of said Russians needlessly marching towards their deaths on a daily basis.
Are the sailors actually Russian military? Or are there suicidal commissars on board along with them to put a gun in their backs 1000km from home?
I'm not saying it not possible, but the fact that there isn't a rather more concerted response involving, say, the SBS or an encounter with an Astute within the last several weeks while it's been tooling around the North Sea implies that the intelligence services don't consider it as much of an actual active threat as the media circus wants it to be.
Certainly if there was even a breath of Russian military on the ship, I don't think "hey sure, just drop anchor outside Margate and chill next to these other ships and right by the Thames and Channel shipping lanes" would be the call they'd make.
The people Russia is sending to their deaths in their meat wave tactics aren't exactly Russian military either. They are at best civilians under contract and moved to front lines weeks if not days after being hired.
Then there are the civilians pressed into service such as unsuspecting immigrants and Ukrainians who found themselves in occupied territories.
The key factor is complete disrespect for those under your control, and willingness to sacrifice themselves for the smallest reason.
Kind of seems like climbing onto or sending a message to the anchor hoy currently alongside and requesting asylum from the murderous Russians would be the obvious way out of that one.
Margate may not be luxurious, but it's not a Ukrainian front line.
The only evidence that it's anything other than a damaged ship in a shit situation (even shitter than your average Syrian/UAE cargo ship, which is probably saying something) with a very low chance of a very big explosion, trying to find somewhere to put in, is that the word "megabomb" makes good headlines and people want to have exciting things happen, even if "it" is blowing up a town, no matter how dreary, from 12 miles away with what would presumably be the biggest non-nuclear explosion in history.
“The [Ukrainian] commanders estimated that 50 to 70 per cent of new infantry troops were killed or wounded within days of starting their first rotation.“
The same way Russia coerces soldiers to go into the meat grinder against Ukraine - money, assurances their families will be cared after (well it might be with a sack of potatoes, but the poor fools can't know that).
Do not underestimate the importance of drugs cocktails in the meat wave tactics employed by Russia. Also the running Buryat and other ethnic-minorities from the east of the empire aren't told that IR scopes can see through smoke-grenade clouds, and seem not to be told that the trenches in front are not full of friendlies.
If the plan was to deliberately detonate the ship rather than just be an annoyance that can't be ignored, then it seems like a very obvious option to rig it with a timer and have the crew escape during the night. Risk of arrest for sure but they'd have a chance, and the west has shown no shortage of willingness in the past to exchange assassins for hostages. People take on worse missions all the time.
I'd far rather be crew on this ship than on HMS Campbeltown.
And if that were remotely on the cards, even within a shadow if a doubt, there'd be an exclusion zone around the ship. And there isn't. There are ships going right past it, right now.
This sentiment, that each is entitled to a life of choosing, resonates strongly with the spirit of individualism. Within it there is a disregard for obligation or belonging that, I think, is connected to the desire for mindless occupation and distraction.
I suspect that, the more one is cut off from a sense of collective purpose, the more one finds solace in activities that reinforce a sense of "alright" in place of true wellness.
Btw, I'm also a big procrastinator and I consider it a gift. Many wonderful things in my life have been helped by it. In this sense, I agree that there is something about an inner drive that should be listened and reacted to, but I am not sure that all activities are of equal value.
This will make it super easy for me to add LLM functionality to existing webxr spaces, and I'm excited to see how an intelligent avatar or convo between them will play out. This is, very likely, the thing that will make this possible :)
If anyone wants to collab, or contribute in some way, I'm open to ideas and support. Search for 'exeud' to find more info