silentsanctuary

The headline made me excited, the article left me disappointed. An offline mode that requires me to individually download the pages and database rows I’m expecting to need beforehand is not the kind of “offline mode” that meets my needs.

Actually, I used to like Elon and was almost about to buy a Tesla, before the overwhelming burden of evidence required me to change my mind about him.

What motivates your point of view? I'm genuinely very curious.

> TLDR: The status quo elite that have been looting the USA for decades is being replaced by the guy who runs SpaceX and is the most transparent elite we've ever seen. Why is that scarier?

The reason why it's scarier is that for those of us who've come to understand Elon, his actions, and his methods better, it's clear that:

- he IS "the status quo elite that have been looting the USA for decades"

- instead of being an incredibly smart polymath who turns things to gold, it's become obvious his main talent is actually just convincing other people that he's smart

- the successes of Tesla and SpaceX have had to come DESPITE Elon's management, and despite having huge budgets to hire some of the smartest people around, he's still an incredibly weighty anchor pulling them down

- rather than being transparent, he's playing at being a showman - and people who are only passively observing the situation are getting sucked into it

That’s an incredible superpower: you could just choose to be happy and bypass most of the hierarchy of needs!

> If you are outside of Russia using Russian based services is objectively better

Citation needed. That’s a very strong claim to make to then back it up with nothing.

The poster was mentioning London - there are 4 Samsung stores in London. That's more than "technically existing", no?

If Apple starts selling iPhones as full fledged iTunes devices, who would buy iPods anymore?

If Apple are losing a sale, they want to lose it to themselves. I'm not sure they'd be worried about being unable to extract more money from the customer, that's an area in which they seem flush with ideas (perhaps, an iPad Ultra with encrusted diamond frame?)

On my iPhone, long pressing the spacebar means that moving my finger around moves the cursor around as if I was operating a touchpad.

On my Android phone (running gboard), long pressing the spacebar means that moving my finger left and right scrolls the cursor left and right, but it doesn't operate like a touchpad (the cursor doesn't move smoothly, nor does it move up or down).

Is that not the same for you?

You're totally right that it was considered innovative - I was speaking mostly comparatively. Mass Effect did solve new and interesting problems, but my view is that the scale and inherent risk in those problems were on a different level. For example, Mass Effect released at the same time as Uncharted, which (though a shorter game) arguably outdid Mass Effect in terms of "cinematic" feel, quality of animation, etc. The big industry players trying their hand at the problem were able to meet them head on and solve them. Whereas when we look at the problems Star Citizen is trying to solve, several big players in the field have made substantial investments trying to solve them, but most have given up, and only CIG has actually managed to make substantial progress so far.

> Those games are huge, with ~40 hours of content each, easy.

This isn't really the way to measure the work required to build a product. A series of books that takes 80 hours to read doesn't cost twice to make as much as Mass Effect. Complexity and uncertainty is a huge factor. Mass Effect was a game principally composed of components that everyone involved has built many times before, and where most of the difficult problems are already solved. It's a complex project by some standards, but it pales in comparison to even what is already playable in Star Citizen.

A single feature of "being a person who walks into a ship, sits in a pilot seat, flies up into space, lands on a space station, gets out of ship and into the station, without clumsy transition screens in which you just magically become the ship" is a promise that many games (including EvE, Elite Dangerous) have promised and spent money trying to build for many years, and eventually given up on. Only Star Citizen has actually managed to deliver on this.

It's certainly the case that Star Citizen has lots of very annoying bugs, and doesn't have nearly the number of game loops it wants to have, even after this level of spend. However, it's also very intuitive to me that if someone is solving a novel engineering problem that the other leading experts have attempted to solve and failed at great expense, that this project that actually has managed to get further than anyone else is probably not going to be able to be cheap.

People say this a lot, but why wouldn't they? It's not like live service games struggle from a weak business model.

On top of that, each year CIG make money, it happens because more and more stuff becomes playable in the game. If they stopped developing new features or content, they'd stop making money. And since they release new patches frequently (or at least, several times a year), when (if they ever) "finish" the game feels less important - it's already a fun enough experience with enough content that many players enthusiastic about the space (whether you came from EvE, ED, NMS or somewhere else) can spend enough hours in it regularly for it to be more than worthwhile.

You have an audience eager for genuine alternative recommendations - why not use it? Instead you've spent a lot of words and mock despair not providing any answer to GP, when we want to hear what technologies you would suggest instead.

You can't take someone's OP-Z out of their hands and replace it with an iPhone and expect them to be able to continue, unless you're also recommending a specific iPhone DAW/sequencer with comparable functionality and usability? People would be very keen to hear which ones you like!

And replacing a Pocket Operator's functionality with a Ti-84? If the future of hope for humanity depends on everyone seeing that a Ti-84 is an obviously fully capable substitute for a Pocket Operator, should I be worried that I don't see it (it doesn't even have the right ports, for one thing)?

You seem to have a lot of conviction in your position, we'd love to see some of the substance behind it!

Well, if I don't trust them at all with it, then I simply wouldn't buy the headset (it's inoperable without it).

But at the moment, one of the biggest selling points for Apple is privacy and the responsible handling of your data, so out of most other similar organisations I believe they have an immense financial incentive to safeguard the data. And I think their actions so far speak to this being a critical strategy to the success of their business.

Regardless, whether or not I trust Apple with it, it's certainly a lot easier to trust just Apple, rather than Apple plus hundreds/thousands/hundreds of thousands of others whose incentives are much less clearly aligned.