How about reigning in Israel and not, like, genociding. That would be nice.

I’m going to start calling it the ‘camera tumor’. Thanks for that.

That’s one of the things that really gets me about all this. This didn’t happen suddenly, but there has never been any actual effort by the opposition party to counter it. They never address the trend in any organized way, and never really raise awareness of it. The closest they get is to fundraise off the threats, but it never translates into action or progress. If anything, they organize to ostracize the few members of their party that do speak forcefully about it.

Please. Of course any president could always do anything, and of course it’s always up to the prosecutor to make a case. Are you really claiming that the Supreme Court setting the precedent that presidents are exempt from criminal liability is not a change? Does the weight of that precedent not make prosecuting presidents vastly more difficult and, apparently, impossible in many important ways? Does that fact not make it much more likely that presidents will commit crimes? You may want that change, but there is no merit to the argument that this decision doesn’t change anything.

Why should anyone believe either of those processes are possible anymore, now that the president has been granted the power to coerce members of both branches through threat of force?

Hey Apple, you’re building it wrong.

We already basically do this with things like the differentiation between Varsity and JV. Not sure why this is such an offensive concept to some of you (just kidding, I’m pretty sure I understand exactly why y’all are offended). If competition is what is great about sports, then excluding some competitive participants because of arbitrary physiological characteristics actively diminishes the sport. But perhaps competition isn’t actually what some of you think is great about sports. I suspect that what some of you actually value about sports is to experience a kind of masterbatory high of seeing someone you can identify with, in shallow ways, achieving things that you yourself cannot.

I literally cannot understand the argument that you’re making. People with different physiological characteristics are not going to have the same skill levels. Nothing you listed argues against my proposal. All the physiological advantages that you listed are fine. Some females may be better than some males at some tasks and vice versa. Why not let them compete against each other. Seems like creating a larger pool of competitive athletes would improve any sport. Carving out leagues that cater to different capability levels would open opportunities for more people. I’m proposing that we have more, better, more competitive and exciting sports. What exactly are you objecting to?

Weight is the wrong criteria to use. Why not just have it classed by skill level. Enforce equity in school sports by mandating that a meaningful distribution of skill-based leagues are funded. This seems like a very simple solution to me that would address gender-based inequities in general as well as improve sports overall.

I’m old enough to have lived through the advent of the World Wide Web. I was so enthusiastic about the potential of these technologies. It was going to finally democratize information and do away with misinformation and pseudoscience, and promote critical thinking, freedom and democracy. I crafted an entire career around my optimism about this stuff. It’s now obvious in retrospect that none of that happened and we have collectively regressed on all those fronts. I’m not making a causal claim about damage that the internet might have done. I don’t know if this stuff would have happened anyway. But, it certainly didn’t deliver on the promise we were so excited about. IMO it all went wrong when we handed the keys to the whole thing over to commercial entities.

A while back, I launched a site that used a stock trading mechanism to rank posted links and content. It was kind of a speculation market. There was a flurry of activity as a community embraced the game aspect of it, even though no actual money was involved. However, I learned that it’s difficult to manage such a system when many clever people are trying to game it. Eventually pulled the plug as I didn’t make enough time to properly grow it. Still think the concept has merit.

Let me clarify. My complaint about the retro-futuristic nature of XR is not the age of the idea. The problem is that this approach has been speculated about and productized in various ways for decades. Through all of that, it has never amounted to more than niche applications, has been rejected by wider markets repeatedly, and failed to inspire much more imagined usefulness beyond being an escape vehicle from some kind of real-world hellscape. Despite all of that, entities like apple insist on trying again, and again, and again. I am convinced that Tim Cook sees this as the future because of the residue of his childhood musing about the future. I know for a fact that Zuckerberg is motivated by exactly that.

Now let’s compare that to audio UIs. These have also been around for a long time. In that time, they have only become more pervasive, useful and inspirational (see again my reference to Jarvis). Additionally, I’m not just talking about the audio part of that interface. I’m talking about the agents that can act independently, and spontaneously to help humans do what the want to do. We are making tremendous progress on that front, but Apple is (in terms of this product line) mired in the past.

I have so much to say about this, I hardly know where to start. A few brief points:

Yes, this product direction is problematic in many many ways. There is a reason why science fiction has been speculating about these types of devices for decades and nearly always portraying the technology as an escape mechanism for a horrifying dystopian reality.

We’ve experienced several really big technology revolutions in just a few decades (pc, internet, social, mobile). All have brought wonderful improvements to life, but all have had profound, and unanticipated side effects. In all instances, we would have benefited as a society by interrogating consequences more completely at the beginning, rather than just letting market forces alone to drive them into mass adoption.

The good news is that none of this is really new. This appears to be a pretty good implementation of a UI model that consumers have been largely rejecting for over 30 years. There are absolutely very useful, very good uses for these UIs, but these are niche markets overall all.

In many ways, XR (a catch all term for both VR and AR) is a retro futuristic idea. This is a vision of the future as seen 40 years ago. Really innovative human computer interfacing doesn’t look like this anymore. Actually useful innovation involves things like agents, voice ui’s and so on (think Jarvis from the MCU).

The question is, can Apple’s marketing prowess and effectively infinite budget push a largely unpleasant, unneeded, and expensive product into mass adoption? I am hopeful that they can’t. I am hopeful that reality isn’t sci-fi dystopian enough to create a wide market for this. If they can, it may say more about how dystopian our real reality has become. That’s the really worrisome part to me.

Removed by mod

Veritasium. After he put that uncritical commercial for the self driving car company on his feed I couldn’t take any of his content seriously anymore.

Ethan Klein and H3. Before the Israel stuff happened in October, the silliness was enjoyable because it seemed like the guy had an earnest, intellectual curiosity underneath it all.

Like many, I stopped wearing watches when smartphones became a thing. Then I adopted the Apple Watch when that came out and wore one or another of them until this month. Something switched in my brain and I just decided that I hated that thing. Hated having to charge it. Hated the notifications. Hated feeling a need to close the rings. Hated the look of the thing. Hated that everyone seems to wear the same thing.

I started to learn about mechanical watches and bought an inexpensive but reportedly good quality one that looks nice to me. So far, I love it. There’s something viscerally satisfying about watching the movement through the display back, hearing the subtle sound, occasionally winding it, and contemplating that people can make such complex things that actually work.

If the Biden administration really wanted this, they wouldn’t ‘call for’ it. They would demand it and coerce those fascist fucks to comply. This is theater. It provides Biden a talking point to claim that he isn’t quite as ghoulish as a few Americans are starting to realize that he is.

How about restraining Israel so they aren’t bombing in such a dangerous manner. How about acting as a mediator to get the hostages released? How about pushing Israel to stop its self destructive and inhuman behavior including: settlements, occupation, apartheid, and actively promoting Hamas. How about not pushing to make arms sales to Israel secret. How about securing public assurances that refugees will be able to return. I don’t understand why these things are so exotic and difficult to imagine for so many people.

Perhaps Israel could make its ‘defensive’ operation more efficient by, oh let’s say, building a series of showers and ovens in northern Gaza. I mean, they’ve already got the concentration camp part down. I bet the US would gladly supply the zyklon b.