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General Computer Thread

After my hospital stay over blood clots early August, I’d be lucky to have 8 bits…

Curses
 
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After my hospital stay over blood clots early August, I’d be lucky to have 8 bits…
In the article, it says you only use the full 10-bits when you're doing heavily intensive mental processing.

So that's your maximum when you're red-lining your mental engine.

Caltech-based scientists Prof. Markus Meister and Graduate Student Jieyu Zheng wrote the paper, highlighting the disparity between outer brain and inner brain data throughput. They question why the inner brain, where you think about the deluge of data we experience, works so slowly despite being home to approximately a third of the brain's 85 billion neurons.

The researchers say they used an information-centric approach to measuring human thinking speed, applying a wide range of techniques based on information theory. In addition to conducting their own experiments, the Caltech boffins measured human performance in tasks such as reading and writing, playing video games, and solving Rubik's Cubes to come up with their headline 10 bits per second assessment.

"This is an extremely low number," Meister admitted of the result. "Every moment, we are extracting just 10 bits from the trillion that our senses are taking in and using those 10 to perceive the world around us and make decisions. This raises a paradox: What is the brain doing to filter all of this information?" It also remains a mystery why most humans can only think about one thing at a time despite our senses being highly parallel.

So, the research paper seems to have sparked a lot of questions, but Meister and Zheng already have some ideas about the leisurely pace of human thought. "Our ancestors have chosen an ecological niche where the world is slow enough to make survival possible," Zheng and Meister wrote in the research paper. "In fact, the 10 bits per second are needed only in worst-case situations, and most of the time our environment changes at a much more leisurely pace."

There are also some implications here about technologies such as Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs). The researchers ponder, for example, if neural interfaces will be hamstrung at the same effective 10 bits per second. Perhaps this research will lead to a faster way to connect the inner and outer brain processes, making better use of those billions of neurons.
If your mind is idling, you most likely won't be using that many "levels of processing" or "bits of processing."

So it does seem to scale.

IMO, as a simple analogy, when you're idling while you're awake; your mind is most likely only using 1-bit.
Your mind will only go down to 0-bits when you sleep and need to recover.

However, as the immediate problem that you need to solve with your mind increases in difficulty or complexity, the number of bits you have access to will go with the mental load needed.
Ergo the bit registers in your mind opens up with the average person having 10-bits available.

Probably folks with super smart & well developed brains would probably have access to a few more bits than the average person.

Some persons brain might be in the range of 11-16 bits.

Depends on the person and how their mind is developed.

Smarter people & people with better developed brains would have access to more & more bits to process more information at a single time

This isn't representative of what knowledge you know, but just how fast your mind can process and how much info it can process.

Knowledge Depth is seperate from Mental Processing Speed & Volume, so please don't try to mix that up.
 
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Looks like Apple might be in the process of halting production of its Apple Vision Pro as they don't seem to be able to sell them. I think the idea behind them is not a bad idea, but I think this is a situation where pricing them as they did, they put themselves in a situation where they prevented them from taking off due to them being out of consideration of most people. Being already a niche product in the first place, the pricing certainly didn't help matters and effectively never even stood a chance.

 
Looks like Apple might be in the process of halting production of its Apple Vision Pro as they don't seem to be able to sell them.
They’ve sold around four hundred thousand, including this 1TB model which has transported me to the virtual shore of a photogrammetric simulation of Trillium Lake with Mount Hood in the distance—replete with ambient audio from the integrated audiopods or my AirPods Pro 2 (USB-C)—as a virtual text input box floats above and follows my Magic Keyboard with Touch ID (USB-C) which is intelligently filtered into the virtual environment along with my hands and arms.

Watching movies and videos on a giant 3D OLED screen is incredible and arraying windows and 3D models in physical space is extraordinarily futuristic. Photos can be converted to 3D within a few seconds, and third-party software can convert any video into 3D, either in realtime or through prerendering if you want a better result. Immersive 3D videos are even more impressive and are surely the future of cinema. You can also shoot your own immersive videos and photos. OTOY and The Roddenberry Archive have some impressive content developed exclusively for the Vision Pro. The virtual keyboard is terrible, which is why I bought a physical one, but the eye- and handtracking are incredible.

I bought this Vision Pro (US$3,900) with the official case ($200) and battery clip ($50) plus two years of AppleCare+ ($500) barely used on Swappa for $2,578 and the AirPods Pro 2 ($250 through Apple or $189 through Amazon) new for $154 on Black Friday (along with an extra pair so that I don’t have to wait for one pair to charge), paying full price only for the Magic Keyboard ($150) and Magic Trackpad ($130). I may also add an M4 Mac Mini (starting at $600, or $500 with a .edu email) since it fits in the Vision Pro case and enables the impressive Mac Ultrawide Display. iPhones and iPads can also be mirrored to the Vision Pro.

As Tim Cook said, this is technology of the future made available today.
 
They’ve sold around four hundred thousand, including this 1TB model which has transported me to the virtual shore of a photogrammetric simulation of Trillium Lake with Mount Hood in the distance—replete with ambient audio from the integrated audiopods or my AirPods Pro 2 (USB-C)—as a virtual text input box floats above and follows my Magic Keyboard with Touch ID (USB-C) which is intelligently filtered into the virtual environment along with my hands and arms.

Watching movies and videos on a giant 3D OLED screen is incredible and arraying windows and 3D models in physical space is extraordinarily futuristic. Photos can be converted to 3D within a few seconds, and third-party software can convert any video into 3D, either in realtime or through prerendering if you want a better result. Immersive 3D videos are even more impressive and are surely the future of cinema. You can also shoot your own immersive videos and photos. OTOY and The Roddenberry Archive have some impressive content developed exclusively for the Vision Pro. The virtual keyboard is terrible, which is why I bought a physical one, but the eye- and handtracking are incredible.

I bought this Vision Pro (US$3,900) with the official case ($200) and battery clip ($50) plus two years of AppleCare+ ($500) barely used on Swappa for $2,578 and the AirPods Pro 2 ($250 through Apple or $189 through Amazon) new for $154 on Black Friday (along with an extra pair so that I don’t have to wait for one pair to charge), paying full price only for the Magic Keyboard ($150) and Magic Trackpad ($130). I may also add an M4 Mac Mini (starting at $600, or $500 with a .edu email) since it fits in the Vision Pro case and enables the impressive Mac Ultrawide Display. iPhones and iPads can also be mirrored to the Vision Pro.

As Tim Cook said, this is technology of the future made available today.

yeah there's no doublt it's a powerful and high quality device - it's just not affordable for many people and seems to lack a killer app to entice people to platform even if there was lower spec/lower price model (which was rumoured at one pointed)

other people will go on about the apple tax and frankly some of their prices are ridiculous (hello mac pro and wheels for said mac pro)
 
They’ve sold around four hundred thousand

Kind of a drop in the bucket when considered with other similar devices. The tech itself is nice, but it's kind of difficult to convince people when it's so far out of reach for most people, hence why it's not been successful. And that was always going to be a difficult sell from the outset. It's a niche further divided by its high cost.

There are plenty of examples throughout history of revolutionary hardware that never caught on for whatever reason. This is just the latest.
 
There are plenty of examples throughout history of revolutionary hardware that never caught on for whatever reason. This is just the latest.
Development is still fully underway on the next versions (a new Pro model and a cheaper alternative). People are confusing the possible early discontinuation of this model with the cancellation of the Vision line altogether, which is certainly not happening.

VisionOS development is ongoing, as well.
 
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Development is still fully underway on the next versions (a new Pro model and a cheaper alternative). People are confusing the possible early discontinuation of this model with the cancellation of the Vision line altogether, which is certainly not happening.

Ok, even so, it sold much less than it was expecting, given the price and the backlog of unsold devices. Even if they were to hypothetically continue with a new Pro version and a new lower-end version, it seems highly optimistic to me that they would go through with it given how the first one sold. I think what they should have originally done was release the lower-end version first, then ramp up to a Pro version. This would also have given developers time to develop apps.
 
Even if they were to hypothetically continue with a new Pro version and a new lower-end version, it seems highly optimistic to me that they would go through with it given how the first one sold.
A new Pro version has reportedly been delayed but will inevitably appear eventually as technology improves. There's no chance of Apple permanently abandoning extended reality. Before that, a refresh of the existing model with an M5 chip and Apple Intelligence may appear late this year or next along with a $2,000 version with reduced features.
 
No doubt, and I'm not saying they shouldn't. I was just linking to the story that they may have gotten wrong. But you can't deny that it wasn't a risky gamble on Apple's part. Pricing it as they did only further divided the fragile niche it was trying to create.
 
What about the look, to me they just looked very goofy. Surely they could have made them look a bit more attractive.

haven't paid much attention vr headsets have you.

by their nature they're all going to look goofy because there's not much you can really down with a big lump of electronics etc sitting on your face.
 
Augmented reality smartglasses are a smaller, lighter, cheaper, stealthier alternative.

I preordered the $600 XREAL One Pros (shipping in March) which have dual 1080p, 120Hz, 600-nit OLED microdisplays and a 57° viewfield with integrated audio and 3DOF tracking within sunglasses weighing 87 grams (less than half the weight of a smartphone).

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Almost forgot, for when you did a clean reinstall of your PC, this will install all the visual c packages in one go, works great on 11, 10, 8.x and 7. :)

Also they have the DirectX runtime offline installer which is also really handy to have around.

TPU is a damn nice site when you're interested in computing. :mallory:
 
Linux Mint 22.1 Xia has been released, I haven't had the time to upgrade a machine yet but tomorrow I think I have the time to upgrade a test machine to that version.
 
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