• 1 Post
  • 58 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2023

help-circle




  • You are right, Apple also has some legit professional staff. And if the person using it gets paid a lot, then a one time hardware purchase becomes negligible.

    Accurate fine motor control and even basic stuff like typing does seem not quite fleshed out, so that is indeed an issue. But I don’t think it’s a deal breaker that you can’t do long shifts with it, since you’d probably only use it for certain tasks.

    Even more of a niche, but I could see it for something like architects. Both for work and to maybe even present to clients.



  • Meanwhile, on Vive, you could stand up, walk around, and manipulate the world with two tracked remotes.

    Issue is that if I remember correctly the vive was an outside-in concept that required base stations to be setup. So you lose the cable, but are still bound by location. And importantly also needs a pc aswell. So still far away from standalone.

    I think the core issue is that every piece of new technology so far has helped us get lazier. People used to walk around an office, then they sat at a computer, now they carry their computer with them and do things from the couch.

    Nobody wants to get up to do things if they can avoid it, and that’s the only real benefit VR/AR provides

    But I think VR/AR could make us lazier:

    For VR the promise is immersion. You get to experience a concert, sport event, unique experience or exotic place from your own living room. And for many of that it is just fine to sit on a couch and still have a benefit from the technology.

    For AR i think it’s a bit more productivity focused. For example less need to train personel, if you can project every instruction into their field of view.


  • Ordinarily, Apple is good at throwing its weight (money) around to make things like this happen, but it seems like there weren’t many takers this go-round, so we just got an overpriced, beautiful and fascinating paperweight.

    Yeah normally Apple is maybe the only company that has the scale and control over their ecosystem to force rapid adoption. But this was clearly not a consumer product aimed at capturing the masses, but more or less a dev kit sold to anyone willing to shell out the price.

    The PS VR2 sounds nice, but feels like it is only aimed at the gaming market and even there sony only captures a fraction.

    The Quest as a standalone device imo really would have the best shot at mass market adoption, but Facebook rightfully has an image problem. And despite spending so much on development doesn’t seem to create any content or incentivize others to do so.


  • but it’s utterly useless.

    That imo has been the issue with VR/AR for a while now. The Hardware as you said is pretty good by now and looking at something like the quest even afforable. What’s lacking is content and use cases.

    Smartphones had an easier time being adopted, since it was just moving from a larger to a smaller screen. But VR/AR actually needs a new type of content to make use of it’s capabilities. And there you run into a chicken/egg problem, where no one is putting in the effort (and vr content is harder to produce) without a large user base.

    Just games and some office stuff (that you can do just as well on a regular pc) aren’t cutting it. You’d need stuff like every major sport event being broadcast with unique content, e.g. formula one with the ability to put yourself into the driver seat of any car.


  • Didn’t they actually vote against the compensation package when it was originally proposed? I’d really like to hear a more indepth reason on why they changed their vote now.

    There is no way he is worth this kind of money for the future, so the only reason to vote yes imo is if they’d expect a court to uphold it, if denied, and that legal fights would be to costly. But with this sum at stake I’d take those chances.


  • Yeah, sadly from a economic perspective it is kind of obvious how a continuous source of revenue might be more appealing compared to a one time purchase. Especially with a product like TVs that usually have a pretty long lifetime before being replaced.

    Although i would point out that (at least in our current society) privacy and an ad-free experience in many ways is treated as a luxury good. Persumably a TV with a better OS would be sold at a higher price, and confronted with this choice many consumers would likely choose the cheaper one.




  • Same. The thing lacking is user base and content. Also a backlog of older content as knowledge source, but that would come overtime with through the former.

    As far as usability goes Iemmy is just as good as reddit was for me. My instance (lemme.ee) is stable and the app experience (currently “connect”) is just as smooth as it was for reddit (where I used “relay”).

    I sadly have to admit that I don’t contribute enough in terms of creating and posting threads.




  • Smartest thing they could do now is shut down their remaining software development. Ship the TVs with vanilla Google OS

    I think there’s a difference between smartwatches and TVs in terms of being able to monetize the operating system. On the tiny screen of a watch you can’t really put any advertisement (at least not without destroying the usability completely) and most of the things you can analyse are happening on the smartphone.

    A TV on the other hand gives you a huge surface in the living room of a families home and if you have control of the OS there are plenty of ways to monetize it (and companies willing to pay for it). You can preinstall certain streaming apps (and get payed for it), promote newly released movies and give links to rent them (either your own shop or again for commission), you can collect userdata and sell that to other companies, and much more.



  • Not really sure what to think about this one. On the one hand it does seem like a sensible implementation (unlike Russia’s), but is it worth it?

    The amount of additional recruits seems to be very limited (2 now, up to 50 under review as of now) and comes with additional work. Can’t really see those numbers change anything meaningfully.

    And on the other hand you give critics and easy target to attack. Now they get any easy way to downplay Russia’s use of prisoners (“see they are doing it too”), make Ukraine seem desperate (“they are running out of recruits and are scraping the barrel”), or any number of false stories.

    In an ideal world that wouldn’t have an effect, but sadly it does.


  • Not sure if friendship accurately describes the relationship between Russia and China.

    I think it is a very opportunistic and imbalanced relationship. With Russia having little alternatives, and China gladly taking advantage of cheap resources and selling opportunities.

    I can’t see China sticking with Russia for ideological reasons the second the situation becomes unfavorable for them. In that case they’ll drop them like a hot potato and swoop back in to profit once the dust has settled again.

    But you are right that they might not team up with the West and rather choose to just sit on the sidelines. At least as long as no one forces them to pick a side.