Just don’t call it VR

As if it doesn’t when you input it for other sources? I haven’t had a single issue I can trace to Temu specifically. I get my Thai slave-mill “found your number in my phone” or “are you available for dinner” scam text once every other day regardless. Xfinity has probably sold, or lost, my information to dark web resellers more times than I can count. Heck, I get an email every couple of weeks from one of the “free” credit monitoring subscriptions I’ve been given thanks to breaches at Equifax, OPM, Chase, etc. that my email - the one I’ve had for 30 years come this spring - has been “found” on the dark web. No fucking shit; I’ll bet the have my password from 1995, too. I’d worry about it but I have far more pressing things in my life - like making sure I’m not overheating the queso I just put in the microwave.

Temu is the current loss leader. You have to be careful as there are some items more expense than the Amazon or Aliexpress options, but many are 1/2-2/3 of the Amazon price with free shipping. Most items are 7-10 days shipping, but Amazon (to a rural address) is barely a couple days better with prime and about on par without.

Shipping has pretty much killed Aliexpress for me. I’m not willing to buy anything expensive as it’s effectively impossible to return and most sellers have an Amazon sellers account that is the same price or less once intl shipping is added.

Doubtful. 20 years in Afghanistan bought us nothing. Half a century of meddling in the rest of central America has produced refugee waves. While we could, theoretically, try to assist the Mexican government with funds we’d probably fuck that up too.

Any braking without energy recovery is wildly wasteful. Public transit (busses, trains) are fucking terrible wastes of energy due to their large mass and frequent stops. Hybrid and/or electric busses are, in this respect, potentially far superior to their diesel counterparts. I’m not a train person (engineer…train…haha) but I don’t think even the all electric trains use regenerative braking and there are few battery powered trains in service.

I’ve spent the last year altering my driving habits when I can. I try not to be an asshole when others are around/in traffic, but when I’m not pressed I will coast to a stop as much as possible (esp uphill) and use hills to gain momentum. Over 6000 miles, I’ve raised my overall mpg around 18%.

Not quite. EVs can still do door to door transport, are faster portal to portal, and have a vastly more diverse infrastructure, including the ability to (at least in a limited extent) traverse areas without track or road infrastructure. Public transit is still better, especially for rail, in reducing energy losses due to wheel deformation, reduction of human fatigue and dependence on attentiveness, and in some cases station to station speed and net air resistance per passenger mile. Since this is technology instead of fuckcars, it seems reasonable not to circlejerk too much.

In traffic, the largest reduction of efficiency comes from accelerating and the braking. You use energy to start moving (proportional to m V^2) and then you dump that energy into heat in your brakes to stop. The second comes from idling where you use energy to keep the engine rotating. As others have mentioned, EVs use regenerative braking so a substantial portion of the energy used to slow and stop the car is used to recharge the battery. EVs have no need to keep an engine running so unless you’re running the a/c there are minimal demands on a stopped/idling EV.

On the highway, you have the internal friction in the drivetrain to overcome, the constant deformation of the tires, and - most importantly - wind resistance, which is proportional to cd x rho x V2.

Cd (drag) and rho (air density) are low, but that V (speed) squared means driving at 75mph incurs 25x the energy use as driving at 15 mph. An EV gets no sage harbor here - plowing through a fluid (air) is essentially the same work.

To give you a sense of numbers, my vehicle (F150) gets less than 10mpg the 5 miles to my local pool/gym. The speed limit is 25 mph but there are stop signs every block or two. Lots of braking loss. On back roads with gentle curves and a 45 mph limit I get close to 30 mpg. That’s the sweet spot between overcoming transmission friction and air resistance. On the highway at 60 mph I get 22-23 mpg. At 78-79 mph I get 19 mpg. These are all generally on flat stretches using the 6 min average on my dashboard.

(Sorry for the long post…I’m an engineer and mechanical efficiency and aerodynamics are my happy place)

I still wish it could render rich text and pdfs/attachments in the composition window, but other than that (and lack of native ocr) it’s been a perfect EN replacement for my uses.

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You apple fanboys are just so cute. The AR in Apple’s headset will be laughably pathetic in 5 years. Their internal panel resolution is 1/4 of that already in testing by Meta and others - and even those advanced panels are barely at the resolution of the human eye. Vision pro is DVD quality to Full HD resolution on the human scale of acuity - passable but not great. They’ve included a 20W processor - a good one - in a headset that resolution that will get choppy and low texture on a dedicated 500W RTX4090 card (I’m curious how the advanced M2 handles the 6K/120Hz when the M3 can’t even hold 30Hz on a similar pixel/clock count on the desktop with full cooling). By the same toke, saying that the existing quality is unusable is laughable. Will the VisionPro be better? I have no doubt. For $3500 it had better be. It’s going to be a solid $1200 headset, I’d say, if it gets to that price by the beginning of 2025. If its 2026 before a real succssor…well, maybe it can come out at the same time as the “revolutionary” foldable screen Apple is “inventing” for their phones.

It’s cool kit, but it’s not revolutionary. It’s just one more step which is in danger of failing because of the size of the potential userbase. And that potential failure actually makes me sad because I think it could be much more.

What they call it is irrelevant. Removing the 1/8 jack was “brave”. Faulty antenna design was “holding it wrong”. An incomplete area of screen pixels is a “notification island.”

Lots of headsets already have AR. Is it primary? No. Is it underdeveloped. Yes. Is apples implementation of pass through /overlay vision going to bring vr/AR into the mainstream? Well certainly not at $3500 a pop. What will matter is what useful, life changing or must have applications arrive. The simplicity of mobile app development didn’t bring us full blown CAD or CFD or Desktop-level Photo, Audio, and Video production on our phones. It ushered in 100 fart sound apps and bunny ear filters. Even today the PS and other creative apps on phone and tablet suck compared to their companion desktop apps because, even with desktop level processors like the M2, complex manipulation of data is still hindered by the interface.

As I said, I HOPE this will find the next big thing. And maybe a $3500 3D viewer for 100 new fart apps is the path. But (IMHO, of Course) they’re leaving a lot of users - the vat majority - on the sidelines with their target audience.

Laughs in BizHub color laser copier that fell off a truck

My FIL owns an HP with a subscription. I’ve given up on the things he wastes money on; most of them he’s not really technically savvy enough to implement anyway. (And, yes, buying a printer and getting it installed may exceed his technical abilities)

You’re correct that the target audience will be media consumption; the miss - if I’m reading the GP correct (and, for the record, I tend to agree) - is that the majority of VR focused activities are game-based. There is certainly a contingent of health/fitness apps out there, but that market and content is trivially small by comparison. Could Apple come out with some really killer app? Sure - there’s always the possibility of a twist. Looking at the intersection of user input and iOS-style apps, you’re back to (mostly) passive consumption. I’m a huge believer that VR/AR is the future, but I’m struggling to see how these are going to function as an iPad replacement, second screen (primary screen, like Immersed, in special cases I can see), and productivity are going to find a foothold, given the limitations of the OS and lack of connectivity outside of the ecosystem.

That would require two things - a functioning public hospital system and a societal commitment to preparedness. Since 46% of the voting US population and 53% of elected national officials are diametric opposed to any preparedness expenditure that doesn’t involve the ability to blow things up, it will never happen.

This is the 2023 matchup. You don’t consider Jordan’s performance at UNC when determining their championship status this year. Heck, despite the past damage done, i don’t think. Bezos, for his 2023 tech fuckery, should have made it out of the first round.

By the same metric, Musk easily tops Thiel first 2023 and is the clear shoo-in as champion of the worst.

If all of your relationships end because of animosity between you and your partner, it may not be that your partners are the difficult ones.

It’s not exclusively peer to peer, so there must be infrastructure, no?

My FIL is going through some medical issues and considered going mostly vegetarian to try and reverse the (irreversible) organ damage he was told he had. His plan was just fish, eggs and poultry, with red meat just once or twice a week.

I’m not often speechless.

Saw some tiktoks with local footage of ground displacement and reports of 120cm ground level changes. I drove through Grindavik just last a couple of weeks ago. I really hope this magma finds a gentle way to the surface, out and away from the city.