aivijay

I am wondering whether anyone has used Kafka as a database? To maintain a database like behavior with insert/read/update/delete operations. I know compacted topics could be used to behave like an update operation. With KTable and GlobalKTable seems to give more control on accessing the data. How has anyone used it if its been used partly like a database with some performance metrics on how fast or slow it is? Also, has anyone tried to use Kafka as a cache with materialized views for each service syncing with changes as they come in? What about performance and feasibility? Please share your thoughts and experience if any.

I am wondering how Avegant would have its Light Field Tech developed with their retinal display technology (using low powered DLP projectors to project to out to your eye directly). Its really an interesting idea of using two DLP projectors to project images directly to the eye with the Glyph. I am wondering whether with the Light field tech, they have these projectors projecting maybe we can say 10 different frames at 120Hz which could be in different focal planes, but the human eye only allows us to see one of those planes and when we change focus, one of the other frame which is already there gets focused on. What are your thoughts experts on this?

We hear big time that we need to colonize Mars in the near future as there is potential destruction of earth and humans should be ready to deal with it. My question is

1. We have the earth where we all live and thrive. But we are destroying it, by various means and are not bothered to safe guard what we have. But we are so much into travelling to Mars or some other planet where you don't know whether humans or for that matter animals/plants can live and thrive on those? There are lots of variables, like the basic gases for life, water, gravity and myriad of others we take for granted as we are already adapted to live in this environment on Earth. Or this travelling to mars, mining the moon etc., basically some one trying to make a quick buck at the end of the day in the name of advancing science.

I am not against the development of science and technology, but looking from what and how things are going, it looks like its more of someone or a corporation trying to make money at the end of the day than science or safety to humans?

Why not focus more to safe guard the Earth we have?

I had tried to support some few projects on Kickstarter in the last couple of years. It seems the success rate is extremely low on these crowd funding platforms. I supported around 5 projects on Kickstarter and in that one was successful for what I supported though even that scammed a bunch of other supporters on some accessory enhancement. Another project I supported, somehow finally got delivered after more than a year and a half though quite substandard in all respects. Another project I supported initially, and on the last day I revoked my support and boy was I right, that project never delivered anything and never even bothered to properly communicate to those supporters when they went down. Another project was cancelled by the project creator but at-least they refunded the money paid for the campaign. Later I found out, they had raised venture capital funds in millions of dollars and that lead to at-least these people refunding my and other supporters money back and cancelling the project. Then comes the project named Cmoar. It was a VR headset which was campaigned couple of years back and they raised around $120K. They were aggressive initially about the delivery dates and things started to push back and back and after almost a year and a half they told, that they were trying to get some more funds through venture capital to complete the project and after 6 odd months, claimed that they did not have any money left to continue the project and cancelled the project. Multiple supporters contacted Kickstarter, and Kickstarter's response was, once the money is handed over to a project creator, they don't have any control or responsibility and its the sole responsibility and integrity of the project creator to pursue and complete the project. Yes, we know that some projects do get to a point where you cannot deliver. But, with my experience on Kickstarter, you can see, that out of 5 projects, only one got to a point reasonable to deliver something to the backers. With Cmoar, they basically used the crowd funded money, around 100K which they finally received after kickstarter and other fees and they don't have any liability to deliver anything for that 100K which is unacceptable in any case. For a common person to get a 100K loan from a bank or something, its extraordinarily complex and tough to get one, let alone without any collateral for sure. Kickstarter like platforms don't have any control or responsibility of huge funds which gets handed over, through them and Kickstarter like platforms walk happily away with their share of a campaign and leave the backers at the mercy of the project creators integrity. Just based on integrity alone, how many banks will loan you $1 let alone $100K. This is a riduculous way of investing money and I would like to know, if there is someone who knows how we can make Kickstarter like platforms liable to handling huge chunks of money and not take any responsibility of that money handled properly?

Shanti Bhavan empowers children from India’s lowest socioeconomic class to break the cycle of generational poverty through education, leadership, and compassion.

http://shantibhavanchildren.org

We should build and maintain schools like this for better of India and for the world. Please help the cause if and when you can.

There was a company named MagicLeap going around creating great hype about their technology (mixed reality) sometimes back. What happened to the company delivering anything? Was it just a big hype?

I am just putting down some of my thoughts, questions and interpretations about AI(Artificial Intelligence) and AGI(Artificial General Intelligence) in general.

I had been following some of the AI practical use cases for sometimes. In recent years its become a big thing that every company does some AI in one form or other or that is what they tell or project and investing a lot. Lots of prominent people like Elon Musk are talking about AI's implications and its perils. Recently Googles Deepmind "AlphaGO" has been creating waves. I understand that this tool has generalized the game enough to understand the game and out perform a human which is great. But my perception is, that most of the AI that we have are oriented towards solving a specific problem and we are no were close to an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). At-least not in the very near future. Neural networks have got very prominent in recent times as well, with these deep learning techniques and modelling some tasks around it. But these are very specific cases where the neural net is trained(with massive amounts of training data) and modeled very specifically and does its job well. But for an AGI to exist, this would be one in a billion of tasks which the AGI could perform. Also, where are we with commonsense reasoning? Without commonsense reasoning, an AGI could not make sense and interpret its reasoning at any point of time like a human. Yes there has been extensive research going on in common sense reasoning etc., but they are very primitive and has to go a long way I think. People like Ray Kurzweil have been claiming that within the mid of this century singularity will be achieved and that humans could enhance and interface with computers through human computer interface. But I think that goes in a different direction where its not about AGI but about human machine interface. Maybe that would lead to training an AGI in the future provided singularity happens and its safe to connect your brain to a computer or a network of computers.

The craziest thing is, I read in multiple books and journals that humans use only a fraction of the capacity of their brain. Hardly 10% or less. So if we humans learn how to use the other 90%, not even that, just another 10% we would have leaps on the abilities of humans as a whole which we cannot fathom as we don't know what we would be capable if we use that much more of the brain power we have and let alone going quite high up to the 80 or 90 percentile where we could be super humans with incredible capabilities. Then again what do you define as AGI, going back 10 years we would have a lot of notions non existent. So an AGI should be evolving all the time and that means common sense reasoning is at the core of it, if it ever happens. With reference to Marvin Minsky's book "Society of Mind" the thought process leads to where the interpretation of the human mind itself as a whole bunch of mind's in itself where the mind could critically analyze itself on different actions or make informed decisions before doing anything. Yes with Deepmind kind of technologies we have use of some form of AI for a specific purpose which is great, but for an AGI to exist its going to be a huge society of these Deepmind's (maybe billions or trillions) somehow interconnected and to work cohesively to a stable extent where critical thinking could happen. I am not an expert but would like to get others views and comments and interpretations on AI and AGI for the future.

I had been following Magic Leap and seems they have an incredible technology in the making and prototypes made already. Seems if the technology matures once its out, it could replace almost most of the stuff which we have a screen with (eg., Mobile phones, tablets, laptops, display screens, TV etc). as it would just allow for all those things to exist and more in mixed reality and each individual can manage it or share it as well with others. Has anyone here experienced some of the tech in their office in Florida and how did you feel about the light field technology? I have saw some recent videos and talks online which is quite encouraging and seems its materializing.

I was wondering what the state of Postgres High Availability and how people are implementing them. I understand there are multiple ways of doing this. But I would like to have an experience report where Postgres HA has been configured for HA and automatic failover. I have tried this with streaming replication with repmgr and configured repmgr for failover as well based on response timeout with 2 nodes. I would like to know how or some pointers for best practices where HA for postgres is setup with 3 or more nodes voting for master status and failing over gracefully withtout loss of data. Any latest Postgres HA setup using Pace maker and Corosync and how well it performs.

I am wondering, whether its worth it to buy OSVR HDK 1.4. I had been tempted to almost buy one in the razer store. But am wondering whether its worth it or not. I know Oculus and Vive are getting shipped. But OSVR's price point and extendibility seems more worth than the others. But am wondering how people who have bought already is using it and having content or hacking their own content etc., to play with VR. It will be great to hear experiences, pointers and disappointments.

VR hardware has been a big break this 2015. A whole bunch of companies big and small with their headsets. I have tried some of the mobile headsets from cheap gogle cardboard types in plastic and a good version of Zeiss VR one headset as well. The experience is there at varying degrees. But one thing everyone talks about is motion sickness and I had problems with strains in my eye with VR one though it has good quality optics. How safe are these headsets in the long term for the eye for prolonged users? Another thing I notice is the brightness of some content which is quite bright and moving right in front of your eyes whether it be a video game or some 3d content. This surely has impact on our eyes as well compared to a console or a pc which is not in right in front of eyes but at a distance and most times some ambient light as well. What do you guys think about this in the long run? I do enjoy some of games and content with these headsets but as am trying out things I had been wondering how this is affecting my eyes.

I am trying to figure out to know why would Lisp make the difference in a web application development when compared to ROR, Php frameworks, Python etc. I had been trying to figure out a way along with making my mind to start using lisp completely on one of my projects. I am wondering if people could share their experiences in developing web apps using lisp.

I know there are refs on alegro and other links on the web which point out lisp based applications. I also have come across where pointers point out to viaweb being developed in lisp and that being migrated away from lisp. Similarly reddit development starting with lisp and then moving off to python etc. Why doesnt lisp perform as web application programming language though it has a whole bunch of programming features better than other languages?

I also have tried my hands on a mix of some of the lisp based libs/frameworks (hunchentoot, weblocks, cl-who, clsql, postmodern and others) which help to develop web apps in the proces of figuring a stable mix of lisp based components to develop the web app.

Please share your experiences with web app development with lisp which are running in production environment currently and not those just being replaced or migrated to someother language (eg viaweb which should be now 10 years old, or reddit even).