The specific background of Mr Lee is that he was the Senior Wrangler at Cambridge University (essentially, the top mathematics student in the UK), and was a very promising mathematician who instead chose the family business of running Singapore.
It's not a bad business. Senior ministers in Singapore are paid multi-million dollar salaries. According to Transparency International, Singapore is one of the least corrupt countries. I'd guess that's because there's no need for side hustles because the job pays so well.
> According to Transparency International, Singapore is one of the least corrupt countries.
This is not a pervasive opinion. The prime minister has directly sued personally anyone who attempts to investigate the state wealth fund and there is a lot of questioning about the motives and conflicts of interest among Singapore's ministers and their families.
The lack of free press, and that it is illegal to investigate these government activities, is worth noting as well.
> According to Transparency International, Singapore is one of the least corrupt countries.
Note this ranking is based on "perception of corruption". Given that Singapore is a one-party state with extremely little press independence (https://theindependent.sg/singapore-in-bottom-20-countries-i...), citizens would be less likely to hear of any major corruption that occurred as the media wouldn't report it.
As an example, PM Lee's wife was CEO of Temasek, the national investment company, for many years. Consider, of all the five million plus people in Singapore, what is the probability that the prime minister's wife just happens to be the most qualified of anybody in the country to manage the country's money?
> Consider, of all the five million plus people in Singapore, what is the probability that the prime minister's wife just happens to be the most qualified of anybody in the country to manage the country's money?
I spent some time there and I honestly believe that corruption is probably on par or better than other developed countries. They take it very seriously.
However, as you mentioned, if there was corruption, you’d probably never know. With the libel laws and control of the media, I doubt many would be willing to speak out.
Singapore’s system has worked so far, but all it takes is some corruption within for the whole system to rot to its core. It’s not setup to self-correct. It seems like a well oiled machine on the surface but that’s just because you’re not allowed to see all the warts.
He probably married within his social circle of the Singapore intellectual elite whose members certainly have a much higher chance to reach such a position than the average joe in the country. I don't know anything about this gentleman but I don't think it's enough of an argument to accuse him of corruption.
> He probably married within his social circle of the Singapore intellectual elite whose members certainly have a much higher chance to reach such a position than the average joe in the country.
Probably irrelevant, but I wanted to add that Ho Ching is his second wife. The first Mrs Lee died three weeks after giving birth to his first son [1].
For all of its many other issues, one thing clear is that Singapore is one of the few countries where being a public servant is a reputable and highly regarded career. It was described to me that Singapore inherited both from both the British public service and the imperial Chinese civil service systems - which have diminished or fallen apart in both of those countries and others which inherited them.
> For all of its many other issues, one thing clear is that Singapore is one of the few countries where being a public servant is a reputable and highly regarded career.
Singaporean here. It's mostly "reputable and highly regarded" if one gets a top-tier government scholarship [1], since that leads to civil service postings with more exposure and chances to take credit.
It's known that the ruling power in Taiwan is descended from the Nationalist government, it's perhaps less well-known that Sun Yat-Sen was a serious political thinker who designed that government, effectively singlehandedly.
There's a visible mix of Western (by way of America and Britain) and Chinese thought in how the Yuans are structured.
Taiwan also inherited a large and functional civil service from the Japanese occupation, this is less immediately obvious in the structure of Taiwanese government, but you can find small traces everywhere if you know what to look for.
UK civil service was actually modelled after Chinese one after missionaries brought news of how powerful, and well oiled Chinese bureaucratic machine was in comparison to contemporary British one.
Part of his great talent was that of weaving together factual minutiae with fictional minutiae such that the boundaries are impossible to spot without prior knowledge!
Even if you know you have to keep your eye open for it. E.g. my personal favourite is that I 100% did not spot until it was pointed out to me that the printing dwarfs in The Truth are all named after fonts...
This seems like a tech-community-only opinion to me, the same thinking that is currently killing Magic Leap. If you want to build a mass-market AR headset, you should have one priority: make it look like glasses. People like eye contact. People don’t like looking like alien telemetry pods are eating their eyeballs. Once you have that, then you can worry about things like resolution, fov, and color reproduction. The only companies I’ve seen understand this are Snap and Amazon, with the caveat that they forgot to make the glasses do anything useful.
I suspect this is why Apple is having such a hard time with their headsets. Above all else, Apple doesn’t release products that are dorky.
I don't think there is a market for AR on a consumer's face except like a side display like Google Glass. I think the market for AR is in industrial operations, military, etc. where people won't care what they look like.
Besides which, the military is historically a leader in tech that sometimes makes its way back to the civilian world. Notably, the internet was originally ARPANET, funded by the DoD, and the TCP/IP protocol was designed with military considerations in mind (e.g. designing a protocol that would be resilient to failures in parts of the network).
A company that secures a steady contract delivering AR equipment to the military will then have the runway to polish the packaging until it's palatable for consumers.
> If you want to build a mass-market AR headset, you should have one priority: make it look like glasses.
I so vehemently disagree with this because it's the same category of thinking that keeps XR in the dark ages.
The capital "P" Problem in XR is content. Behind every major innovation in content consumption technology has been content to consume. As of yet, there is no such content for XR, and the one thing Magic Leap did (and this was a few years back) was to invest in people to create content for their platform and dev tools to make it.
You can have the ugliest piece of garbage tech tethered to a desktop PC, and people will pay to use it if they get to experience some piece of content created by a team of artists that can't otherwise tell the stories or convey emotion as effectively in any other medium.
Throughout the history of consumer media you find that a successful medium is determined by what art is created upon it, not by its technical aptitude. There is always something better, but what makes it useful is what artists can do with the limitations of the medium today.
That's why we see this pivot to the nebulous "enterprise" (without real success). It's because they haven't found artists that can create real content yet, at least nothing people want to experience. The most successful so far was LBE (location based entertainment) which was seeing good growth pre-covid.
I agree with you where VR is concerned, just not AR. This is why I don't like the term XR, it conflates markedly different devices. The Quest 2 is good enough that content is becoming its biggest problem, and if it gets some really killer games or social apps it could gain serious traction. It already has way more satisfied users than the entire AR industry, because AR hasn't reached that "good enough for content" milestone.
I follow VR more closely than AR. It has a ton of examples as to how people will not pay to use ugly garbage tethered to a desktop PC. This is why Facebook's pivot to standalone headsets has been so successful. PC tethered VR apps look better, are more interactive, and are vastly larger and more in depth. No one plays them, because a slick single device is more important than every other factor. When I used to demo PC VR apps to people, they'd be blown away. They'd ask how to get one, I'd explain the PC and the base stations, and their faces would fall. No one ever bought one. When I do the same demo with the much worse apps on the Quest, people buy Quests.
Magic Leap's investment in content is another example. What good did that investment do? None, because the Leap itself was too big and clunky for people to buy.
“Being cool” is the biggest appeal of AirPods. As pointed out elsewhere on the thread, they made wireless Bluetooth so fashionable celebrities wear them in Zoom calls. Before AirPods wireless Bluetooth was not cool. AirPods are a carefully engineered phenomenon that Apple will be seeking to replicate with VR/AR as much as possible.
No one wants to wear a headset if it makes them look stupid. If AR glasses are a dead end then mass adoption of AR outside of gaming/enterprise is likely DOA.
I do think the AirPods metaphor is good but for the exact opposite reason: AirPods were the first "true wireless" stereo earbuds on the market with both a working microphone and reasonably good pairing and activation capability (at least with iPhones).
Previous Bluetooth headsets were either mono, for phone calls only, which quickly and probably correctly got associated with obnoxious salespeople yelling about deals in airports, or connected stereo affairs, which were generally strange looking and unwieldy. And the 2 or 3 "true wireless" offerings on the market ahead of Apple were hampered by hobbyist quality and poor Bluetooth behavior. AirPods offered a meaningful and substantially improved utility over their predecessors - not just a glossy style or some kind of marketing driven social change.
In this same way, true augmented AR offers genuine advantages over passthrough AR, in terms of comfort, safety, and utility. If the technology can be made to work augmented AR is likely to win over any kind of passthrough AR for reasons of utility, not just fashion.
Last time I went skiing I noticed ski goggles kind of look cool, and are the perfect form factor for pass through ar. I think that’ll be the form it finally takes when Apple makes it cool.
Absolutely. When you look at the compromises involved with optical using today’s technology, the rumors of Apple pursuing passthrough for their first set of goggles make perfect sense.
Why not just put up a head tracking 3DTV at that point? Only caveat is it'll look like a window to VR rather than an overlay to real world, but from psychological standpoint it might favorably communicates that the local and remote is physically separate with a substance inbetween.
Why not just augmented glasses? I mean with a transparent display that is just a display, showing the time and notifications in one corner. A larger view if pulled up through a menu.
I bet they could make them look very slick, since the hardware requirements would so much less arduous. There was a set of 'augmented' bicycle glasses here on HN some months ago and they honestly looked pretty compelling.
If you are talking for many "game playing" applications you may be correct.
But it be ridiculous to thing that people are going to be going out in public with a VR headset with cameras (known as Passthrough AR). On top of a number of human factor issues, it would dangerously block a person's view of the real world.
Cloning it wouldn't have got them the publicity. They'll be in news bulletins around the world. They'll own the name and trade dress, I bet they can sell enough merch alone by Christmas to pay for the acquisition.
This is how OKRs and Salesforce's V2MOM are supposed to work... the CEO does his, then the EVPs do theirs showing how they will contribute to the CEOs, etc.
In practice this is almost never done at scale because having them sequentially ordered means that they must be done pretty quickly and there are too many political turf battles to let them be done quicklty.
