Isn't it crazy to think that, given where that photo is taken in Kyiv, that office space could plausibly be rubble now. It's quite plausible some of the programmers in this photo are fighting in a war right now.
> It even ended up on Hacker News with the classic “It looks like a sweatshop” and “exact type of workplace I wouldn’t want anyone to end up” comments.
Amazingly that was the comment I wanted to write after seeing the picture, its almost like free will doesnt exist.
I like your versions of a dystopia. Working in brightly lit concrete rooms, with plenty of diverse clothing and comfortable chairs, electric hubbub in the air.
My version of a dystopia is more like, everyone wears plain grey uniforms and is given the least amount of light and movement needed to squeeze the most product per watt-calorie out of them as is scientifically possible, where the human psychological meatgrinder is approaching maximum operational efficiency.
Honest question, not trying to be negative but are many hackatons like this? All the ones I went to were a delerium of sleep deprevation entangled cables, fueled by beer and energy drink. Maybe not very healthy but this picture looks like especially dull day at the office without any interactions.
Beer, pizza, more pizza, and coffee, in my experience. Lots of random impromptu spaces created from whatever furniture or walls are on hand. I basically developed my programming addiction from a couple very entertaining hackathons.
Ha yeah that was my experience of the one I went to years ago, which is why I decided that lifestyle wasn't for me :) This more boring orderly day-time affair would have been less off-putting, but also less appealing I suppose.
Anyone surprised about the setup? Most of the people seem to be using nice chairs (good) but they are using laptops placed directly on top of their desks. So there is no “flat” line between their eyes and their screens. Check out their necks! Holding that posture for 5h/day, 5days/week must be painful and have long standing effects.
I know the pic is about a hackathon… but I have seen regular workplaces that look exactly the same.
That whole room is designed like an office set from some dystopian movie. Employee indexing is quite convenient though, when you arrange them in a matrix like that.
Back then in 2017 it wasn't that common for people to have a foldable laptop stand in their bags. Nowadays I would expect more people to be using something like a Roost stand or Nexstand.
Especially if they regularly work from random cafes or coworking spaces.
The problem is now you have to carry another keyboard and mouse in addition to the one you're already carrying with your laptop. The ideal portable ergo solution is something like:
- Any small portable computer e.g Phone with Samsung DEX/RaspberryPi/Steam Deck
- Custom split bluetooth keyboard e.g Corne, Ferris Sweep
- Magic Trackpad or mouse
- AR Glasses (Viture, NReal Air)
- Large capacity power bank (imuto would be my recommendation). Alternatively a good charger like the Zendure Passport series.
It's less elegant as you're going to have a minimum of two cables involved (ar glasses to computer, computer to power bank) but ends up being a similar amount of space/weight, just distributed differently. You may argue it's heavier because of the power bank but if I'm taking my computer anywhere I'm normally taking my power bank as well because you can't rely on there being a seat near a plug in a lot of places.
I'm not OP but in their list the glasses are obviously acting as the computer screen they'd be working on, chosen because they're smaller and lighter than carrying an actual monitor around with you.
This. I've tried different monitors, different monitor heights, keyboards, chairs etc and I would inevitably end up hunching over my keyboard to the point where I was worried I was getting the beginnings of kyphosis. AR glasses have eliminated that as the monitor now moves with me. If you get tired in one position, you can look up and the monitor is now on the ceiling, or look down and it is now on the floor. The split keyboard also helps a lot.
I was super sceptical about VR/AR until I tried them but they really are the perfect solution for people who are suffering from this. The only downside is that you have to trade some screen resolution as all the current offerings are 1080p but I think it will only be a couple of years until we get 1440p and then 3 years after that I think we'll get 4k.
I 100% recommend them, especially if you're conscious about your posture. Some people can't get over the 1080p, personally I just stick the global font size up one level larger in the settings and use browser/text editor at 110% and find it fine. It is really, really fun to lay in your bed and watch a movie on your ceiling. Or to play games on a Steam Deck on a big screen wherever you are.
I've got a pair of both the Xreal Air and the Viture and I think I'm going to sell the XReal Air and keep the Viture. Reasons why, in order of importance:
- XReal Air give me a weird, sharp pinching pain on the side of my head after a while. It's weird because it comes out of nowhere and it is quite a sharp pain that is difficult to ignore but if you wear a thin polyester running headband underneath it completely goes away. I don't really want to wear a headband, even a thin one, just to use my AR glasses, so this is a major win for the Viture which doesn't suffer from this problem.
- Viture has a proprietary magnetic cable whereas XReal uses a USB-C cable that slots into the end of the arm. Normally, I would be all about the reusable standard but in this case I'm all about the magnetic cable, for the same reason people like the MagSafe charger on the MacBook. It's very easy to forget you're tethered with these things, move, and end up yanking the cable. With the Viture this is less of a worry because it will disconnect, but with the XReal it's going to get taut and yank either your machine and/or the glasses. There's a lot of photos of people with cracked arms on the XReal reddit and I strongly suspect this is a major contributing reason though people try and claim otherwise.
- Following on from the above, more thought seems to have been put into the design and the ecosystem with Viture in comparison to XReal. Even the Viture carrying case and packaging* are more premium than the XRreal. The nose pads are far easier to swap out and there's four heights compared to the Xreal's three. The prescription glasses attachment just magnetically snaps to the glasses rather than fiddling about like the Xreal. There's an accessory cable available to provide power to your device and allow the glasses to connect at the same time (essential for the Steam Deck which has only 1 usb-c port). There's a neckband accessory thing which I could see catching on as the main way consumers use these things. In contrast, the Xreal just have an accessory called the Beam, which doesn't really offer anything other than wireless connection to your computer (still have a wire between the glasses and the beam), 6Dof and 4 hours of battery which doesn't really add anything for me. The Beam does solve the yanking issue mentioned above because you're meant to wear it on your person.
- Viture are slightly brighter and have a really cool electrochromic film feature that essentially darkens the glasses when you're in a bright environment in order to see things better.
- The XReal screen is slightly larger than the Viture, but the Viture seems slightly sharper than the Xreal, especially when you get the myopia dials right. These dials aren't the greatest, and I think if you're short sighted you're probably best off just buying the prescription lens that snap to the frame.
- Xreal have a halo of light around the perimeter of the screen. I can ignore it but it is annoying when I see it. The Viture have no such halo, but the very top and very bottom of the screen can sometimes blur, I'm assuming due to light leakage as I'm definitely using the right nosepads as the entire screen is in view.
To me, Viture are the superior product, but the problem they have at this point is that the Xreal have first mover advantage. Viture have only recently started shipping wheras Xreal have sold over 200,000 units. A lot of people with Steam Decks also have Xreal glasses so there's a lot of momentum for them in the gaming community. Ther...
It's almost midnight here so I've only skimmed your comment (it's much more in-depth than I'd hoped for - wonderful!) but will ofc come back to read it fully :)
So just discovered these today which are apparently the first wireless ones. Seems like a company launches a pair every month at the minute - the competition is fierce!
As a very recent grad, the hackathons I've attended are usually more chaotic than this but the situation regarding viewing angles is the same. You cant be bothered to bring an entire monitor, or even stands to the event.
Some venues provide a monitor, but thats usally one per team.
Comfortable viewing angle is actual about 15 degrees downward, where the eye muscles can rest. You can achieve this by tilting your laptop screen farther back. There is no inherent reason for your neck and back to be anything but straight up. People just have weak necks from insufficient exposure to neck exercises, which are fairly difficult to perform without some specialized equipment. Doing face pulls will help maintain more upright posture. I recommend starting your day off with 5 sets of 12 each morning to get you primed for the day.
Anecdotally, I have found a correlation between hackathon winners and proper posture. Also some of the best developers I’ve seen work with proper posture.
If you have your neck and back straight and your eyes angled 15 degrees down, wouldn’t the screen have to be like 3-4 feet away to point directly at your eyes?
Yeah, that’s what I was envisioning. There hadn’t been any mention of raising the laptop, just tilting the screen back, but maybe that part should have been obvious. I very rarely work from the laptop screen, so I wouldn’t think to bother with that.
”I do regret not processing the picture more: the horizon line is a bit tilted, you can spot chromatic abberation, the windows are overexposed.”
That’s exactly what makes it “real”. Overexposed windows are the norm in our most common photos, mobile phone ones. The tilted horizon only makes it more dynamic. Chromatic abberation, only ever photo geeks care about. If anything, it lends a credence to it, images without it can sometimes look almost like a render.
You can keep a window bright and “natural” while not completely blowing it out tbh. Horizon lines shouldn’t be tilted without intent, such as making the viewer feel uneasy. As for CA, yeah some people worry too much about that now, but most people don’t care or notice even subconsciously.
That was a fun story and congrats on winning that competition!
From the judges:
>Our lives, especially in our twenties, feels like a competition. From school, to university, to getting a job and progressing through our careers – it’s a never ending competition.
Is that really how people feel? The last time I felt remotely similar was in high school during the university entry exams, but even then, it didn't feel much like a competition, more like a group of kids bonding over going through a stressful time together. Then uni was just socializing, taking fun (and some not so fun) classes and enjoying life without any real responsibilities outside of class and mundane student jobs. I know that my friends felt the same. Where is this competition taking place that the author says applies to everyone?
Yeah I've never experienced that either. But I have a son now who sees everything as a competition. I think it's just a personality trait, and that people who have it see others as competing even when others are not... mostly because they are so deep in the competition mindset that they can't believe it's any other way.
The human brain is generally wired to see others as more similar to ourselves than they actually are, hence Typical Mind Fallacy being a thing.
Remembering that most of the rest of our cognitive processes are running on top of a hyperactive pattern matcher with a tendency to overfit (and to overestimate the comprehensiveness of the training data it's ingested to date) allows one to derive an appropriate lack of surprise at a lot of human behaviours from first principles.
(or at least it seems to work out well for me, it is of course entirely possible that I'm overestimating how well it would work for any given other person for pretty much the reasons I just outlined above)
I can't speak to this one specifically, but most events have agreeing to be photographed as a default condition for attending. It's pretty much 101 for anyone with any experiencing running an event (unless it's an event where there's some specific reason to not want any photos of).
49 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadThe 2022 edition of Dev Challenge didn't happen there though, it happened in Poland instead, but the organization is still located in Kiev.
And yes, maybe some of the programmers are fighting in a war, directly or indirectly, with guns or with computers.
Amazingly that was the comment I wanted to write after seeing the picture, its almost like free will doesnt exist.
My version of a dystopia is more like, everyone wears plain grey uniforms and is given the least amount of light and movement needed to squeeze the most product per watt-calorie out of them as is scientifically possible, where the human psychological meatgrinder is approaching maximum operational efficiency.
I know the pic is about a hackathon… but I have seen regular workplaces that look exactly the same.
Especially if they regularly work from random cafes or coworking spaces.
- Any small portable computer e.g Phone with Samsung DEX/RaspberryPi/Steam Deck
- Custom split bluetooth keyboard e.g Corne, Ferris Sweep
- Magic Trackpad or mouse
- AR Glasses (Viture, NReal Air)
- Large capacity power bank (imuto would be my recommendation). Alternatively a good charger like the Zendure Passport series.
It's less elegant as you're going to have a minimum of two cables involved (ar glasses to computer, computer to power bank) but ends up being a similar amount of space/weight, just distributed differently. You may argue it's heavier because of the power bank but if I'm taking my computer anywhere I'm normally taking my power bank as well because you can't rely on there being a seat near a plug in a lot of places.
I was super sceptical about VR/AR until I tried them but they really are the perfect solution for people who are suffering from this. The only downside is that you have to trade some screen resolution as all the current offerings are 1080p but I think it will only be a couple of years until we get 1440p and then 3 years after that I think we'll get 4k.
I've got a pair of both the Xreal Air and the Viture and I think I'm going to sell the XReal Air and keep the Viture. Reasons why, in order of importance:
- XReal Air give me a weird, sharp pinching pain on the side of my head after a while. It's weird because it comes out of nowhere and it is quite a sharp pain that is difficult to ignore but if you wear a thin polyester running headband underneath it completely goes away. I don't really want to wear a headband, even a thin one, just to use my AR glasses, so this is a major win for the Viture which doesn't suffer from this problem.
- Viture has a proprietary magnetic cable whereas XReal uses a USB-C cable that slots into the end of the arm. Normally, I would be all about the reusable standard but in this case I'm all about the magnetic cable, for the same reason people like the MagSafe charger on the MacBook. It's very easy to forget you're tethered with these things, move, and end up yanking the cable. With the Viture this is less of a worry because it will disconnect, but with the XReal it's going to get taut and yank either your machine and/or the glasses. There's a lot of photos of people with cracked arms on the XReal reddit and I strongly suspect this is a major contributing reason though people try and claim otherwise.
- Following on from the above, more thought seems to have been put into the design and the ecosystem with Viture in comparison to XReal. Even the Viture carrying case and packaging* are more premium than the XRreal. The nose pads are far easier to swap out and there's four heights compared to the Xreal's three. The prescription glasses attachment just magnetically snaps to the glasses rather than fiddling about like the Xreal. There's an accessory cable available to provide power to your device and allow the glasses to connect at the same time (essential for the Steam Deck which has only 1 usb-c port). There's a neckband accessory thing which I could see catching on as the main way consumers use these things. In contrast, the Xreal just have an accessory called the Beam, which doesn't really offer anything other than wireless connection to your computer (still have a wire between the glasses and the beam), 6Dof and 4 hours of battery which doesn't really add anything for me. The Beam does solve the yanking issue mentioned above because you're meant to wear it on your person.
- Viture are slightly brighter and have a really cool electrochromic film feature that essentially darkens the glasses when you're in a bright environment in order to see things better.
- The XReal screen is slightly larger than the Viture, but the Viture seems slightly sharper than the Xreal, especially when you get the myopia dials right. These dials aren't the greatest, and I think if you're short sighted you're probably best off just buying the prescription lens that snap to the frame.
- Xreal have a halo of light around the perimeter of the screen. I can ignore it but it is annoying when I see it. The Viture have no such halo, but the very top and very bottom of the screen can sometimes blur, I'm assuming due to light leakage as I'm definitely using the right nosepads as the entire screen is in view.
To me, Viture are the superior product, but the problem they have at this point is that the Xreal have first mover advantage. Viture have only recently started shipping wheras Xreal have sold over 200,000 units. A lot of people with Steam Decks also have Xreal glasses so there's a lot of momentum for them in the gaming community. Ther...
It's almost midnight here so I've only skimmed your comment (it's much more in-depth than I'd hoped for - wonderful!) but will ofc come back to read it fully :)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/600385286/inmo-air2-the...
Some venues provide a monitor, but thats usally one per team.
If I possibly can and I remote work i setup at least a 27" 4k monitor and my 12' iPad as a second monitor with the laptop on the stand as the third.
Productivity demands it.
And of course separate keyboard and trackpad.
If somewhere for 3 or 4 days I'll ship things if needed.
Well worth the 10 minutes.
It's hard enough traveling with a 27 inch monitor, there's no way I'm lugging a 12 foot iPad through the airports!
Anecdotally, I have found a correlation between hackathon winners and proper posture. Also some of the best developers I’ve seen work with proper posture.
I know 80+ years old with better posture than most 20 something tech workers
That’s exactly what makes it “real”. Overexposed windows are the norm in our most common photos, mobile phone ones. The tilted horizon only makes it more dynamic. Chromatic abberation, only ever photo geeks care about. If anything, it lends a credence to it, images without it can sometimes look almost like a render.
From the judges:
>Our lives, especially in our twenties, feels like a competition. From school, to university, to getting a job and progressing through our careers – it’s a never ending competition.
Is that really how people feel? The last time I felt remotely similar was in high school during the university entry exams, but even then, it didn't feel much like a competition, more like a group of kids bonding over going through a stressful time together. Then uni was just socializing, taking fun (and some not so fun) classes and enjoying life without any real responsibilities outside of class and mundane student jobs. I know that my friends felt the same. Where is this competition taking place that the author says applies to everyone?
How rich was the country you grew up in?
Remembering that most of the rest of our cognitive processes are running on top of a hyperactive pattern matcher with a tendency to overfit (and to overestimate the comprehensiveness of the training data it's ingested to date) allows one to derive an appropriate lack of surprise at a lot of human behaviours from first principles.
(or at least it seems to work out well for me, it is of course entirely possible that I'm overestimating how well it would work for any given other person for pretty much the reasons I just outlined above)
https://www.devchallenge.it/
That's why is looks like a fancy SAT test, not a 3 day camp-in.
Built after the School 42 concept in France: https://42.fr/en/homepage/