Comment by surfingdino | Hacker News Reader

Comment by surfingdino | Hacker News Reader

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AR and VR is a wasteland where money gets burned on ideas that have not advanced much since 1990s and the first Virtuality devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product) in terms of being more useful than an Apple Watch, an iPhone, or a laptop for pretty much anything. A computer does not get better when you wear it.

Realistically, for a VR headset to be successful it would need to be as light as a baseball cap and have a ~12h power source that would not cause overheating of the wearer's head.

AppleVision is going nowhere. Apple is a mass market manufacturer of status products with a limited lifespan and support. When they work and are supported they generally offer great experience for the money. Apple Car and AppleVision are not such products, but evolutionary dead ends in Apple's history, just like Newton or Apple Network Server. Apple is investing money into an old personal transportation platform when the future of transportation will be based on something else and that "something else" will emerge out of new ideas for urban planning. Some of the tech developed for those products may make its way into those new modes of transport, but it will take a while and may lesser impact than we think.

Nobody needs any new ideas for urban planning. Urban planning mostly just makes everything worse when it's tried, so what's needed is ideas for how to make the planners go away.

I think having an infinite power source via plugging it in will work well enough for power in this case.

Do you think urban planning made Amsterdam worse in the last 40 years? That it made Paris worse? Or Barcelona? All these cities have been greatly improved because they planned it (after some terrible decisions too, especially all the decisions related to making more cars enter the cities). All great cities have had several planning phases, over centuries

The good parts of Amsterdam and Paris come from undoing previous bad ideas, and Paris is still too expensive because of height limits, so I don't think it's an impressive showing yet.

Good Asian cities' planning efforts are mostly making illegal to let NIMBYs have input on anything.

The height limits are a good thing. Keeps the city human scale. That’s why it’s expensive. Well, at least that’s part of it.

You're not supposed to look up at the sky while you walk, so I think it's fine.

Why aren’t you supposed to look up at the sky?

You'll run into people.

That's a good way to make new friends

> Urban planning mostly just makes everything worse when it's tried

Is that generally true or only in the US? I’m also wondering what you suggest we should plan urban centers with if it isn’t the methods of urban planning itself.

No, it's even worse in other Anglo countries, and China, Brazil, etc. (not sure of the details of the last one, just remember something about planned cities not working)

The US just has an unusually large money and land budget to spend on car dependency, but other countries have made their housing even less affordable.

Tokyo would like a word

And what the alternative would be? Grafton?[1]

Copenaghen or Amsterdam aren't perfect from the Urban planning PoV but after having spent a few months in an LA suburb vs a few years in those cities... Yeah, Thanks but no thanks, I think I'd rather have the imperfectly urban planned towns for the next few years. Matter of taste, I guess.

[1]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...

LA suburbs are not an example of no planning!

At this point I feel we're arguing a no true scotsman fallacy.

Care to point a good example of "unplanned" urban environment with an excellent quality of life for _all_ of its occupants? Outside of, dunno, some exceptionally small villages in the Swiss alps or northern parts of Scandinavia (which are basically unchanged since the middle ages), I can't think of any.

Tokyo is the usual example. (Of course, it has a planned road network too.)

American suburbs are just about the most planned things in the world though. Try building an apartment there - you can't do it. They would never exist if it wasn't for artificial zoning laws. Gotta read Strong Towns.

I think none of those "innovative future of transportation" ideas will come to life in any meaningful scale. Transportation for the most part is a solved problem. Car dependency is the main issue and no "super innovative personal transportation device" solves this.

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