trafficante

Vagueposting is a different beast. There’s almost never any intention of informing etc; it’s just: QT a trending semi-controversial topic, tack on something like “imagine not knowing the real reason behind this”, and the replies are jammed full of competitive theories as to what the OP was implying.

It’s fundamentally just another way of boosting account engagement metrics by encouraging repliers to signal that they are smart and clued-in. But it seems to work exceptionally well because it’s inescapable at the moment.

I wonder if Apple will be able to bridge the biggest gap between their hardware and Meta’s: the price gap

The new Ray Ban AR glasses retail at a Meta subsidized $800 - has Apple ever released subsidized hardware?

I remember when the Vision Pro’s BoM got leaked prior to announcement and people calculated out the pre-bulk discount cost at around $2500 (iirc). I saw crazy posts predicting it would get subsidized down to $2k, some saying they’d eat R&D and price it at hw cost, and a few realists claiming $2750-3000 was a more realistic target. It launched at $3500.

If history is any guide, it won’t matter if Apple Glass 1.0 is a generation and a half above whatever Meta is selling if they keep going with the 5x price differential.

Eye of the Temple has some of the coolest VR-specific movement tricks I’ve ever seen.

If you’re getting close to your IRL boundary, it sets up a rolling log as part of a puzzle. To stay on a real forward-moving rolling log, you have to walk backwards to maintain balance. So in context of the game, you’re convincingly moving “forwards” while in reality you’re walking backwards.

Pretty sure I took off the headset and geeked out at everyone in the house first time I realized what was happening.

This isn’t just good news for the oldies. Gen Z in particular seems at first glance to be balding earlier and at higher rates. I had no idea what the heck “Norwood” meant until some young Zoomer guy clued me in.

-American women are winning hard at college

-Chinese men once said in a survey that they feel threatened by high achieving women

-Therefore men as a group are most at fault for the decline in marriage and TFR

Has anyone written on this issue dispassionately? The marriage/reproduction rate for the entire developed world is cratering and we get “blessed” with a choice of three explanatory viewpoints: incel, femcel, purely economic factors

I do believe economic factors are the single largest culprit, but there’s obviously more to the story when you look at the U-shaped income/TFR curve or the utter failure of nearly all family-formation economic policies across the globe.

This baby brained “men bad” or “women bad” discourse belongs in the dumpster.

>> Who would go to Mars without a way back?

For a reasonable chance of being forever immortalized as one of the first humans to step foot on another planet?

Granted, I myself will never get the opportunity so it’s easy for me to say “oh hell yes I’d sign up in a heartbeat”.

I wish there was a sane and humane way of shutting off the infinite supply of out-of-state (and, increasingly, international) transients. Our homeless programs here in Portland are absolutely overwhelmed with people who arrive here daily from all across the country. Recent arrivals have been either a plurality or an outright majority of our homeless population for many years now.

I’d absolutely choose going all-in on affordable housing over a return to the war on drugs or doubling down on catastrophic decrim. But without limits on in-migration for social programs, the idea seems frustratingly doomed from the start.

If this wasn’t a cynical joke, I sincerely beg you to cover your eyes, plug your ears, and never again ask how the sausage is made.

The older I get, the more I can empathize with Cypher from the first Matrix movie. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

Remember about a decade ago, when you’d read about YouTube’s algorithm creating an “alt-right pipeline”?

Without making any judgments on the alt-right label, it was absolutely a real thing. Many documented cases showing how a fresh account could go from “Sesame Street, cooking videos, and CNN” on the default feed - and, within ~10 relatively innocuous clicks down the suggested video rabbit hole, the home feed would be full of Alex Jones tier stuff.

TikTok is heavily reminiscent of the old YouTube. Just taking a few steps down the Free Palestine recommendation road will get you into “Happy Birthday, Uncle Adolf” videos (hyperbolic, but only slightly).

I don’t blame certain parties for getting rather nervous over that. But I wish we could have some honesty from elected officials about why TikTok is suddenly such a pressing issue again.

Whatever happens, I hope they’ve learned from YouTube’s earlier mistakes. In trying to break the alt-right pipeline, they ended up breaking the entire recommendation engine for years (tbf it’s a lot better now).

Your frustration is understandable, particularly in this situation where the critical failures weren’t the fault of outsourced engineers.

But we really need to pump the brakes on the whole “everything must be in the passive voice and overly euphemized to the point of nigh-incomprehensibility”. If anything, it contributes to the click-bait problem.

I see: “Boeing outsourced to $9/hr SWE” and immediately start thinking about a dangerous corporate culture that prioritizes profits over lives. I’d argue most people probably interpret the headline in a similar fashion.

Just because some already-inclined reactionaries wrongly jump to “India lol” doesn’t mean the publication has some moral responsibility to contort the headline into something less effective that will get even more dramatically outcompeted by click bait headlines that actually bait racists (“Deadly Boeing crash was running Indian software”).

When the Democrats hold power, this crisis will be exploited to enact heavy taxes on 401ks and the like (recent think tank white papers are creating ground work for this).

When the Republicans hold power, this crisis will be exploited to cut Social Security for Gen X and younger and take an axe to other entitlement programs.

Yep, once your brain gets over the immediate novelty of VR, it’s very difficult to get back that “Ready Player One” feeling due to the absence of sensory feedback.

If/once they get it working though, society will shift fast.

There’s an XR app called Brink Traveler that’s full of handcrafted photogrammetry recreations of scenic landmarks. On especially gloomy PNW winter days, I’ll lug a heat lamp to my kitchen and let it warm up the tiled stone a bit, put a floor fan on random oscillation, toss on some good headphones, load up a sunny desert location in VR, and just lounge on the warm stone floor for an hour.

My conscious brain “knows” this isn’t real and just visuals alone can’t fool it anymore, but after about 15 minutes of visuals + sensory input matching, it stops caring entirely. I’ve caught myself reflexively squinting at the virtual sun even though my headset doesn’t have HDR.

Same thing with my nephew, though he did pick up on the cars.

He also was very confused by the “Ronald Reagan? The ACTOR??” joke but immediately thought that BTTF2 Mogul-Biff was supposed to be Trump.