agar

No blog post on this? No further info? No sample output?

No way I'm giving this username/password credentials.

A forum thread about an obscure Atari 800 shareware game and the search for the registered version that was presumed lost. The developer appears and gives a lesson on 6502 game engine programming techniques - and the harsh realities of the shareware market in 1985.

Indirectly related: before visiting Thailand I heard that 7-Elevens were everywhere (they were) and a core part of daily life for locals and tourists alike. I expected them to be more like the Japanese model, but was surprised that they all had a very limited number of salty snacks, energy drinks, and toiletries - similar to the US.

Other than a nice selection of tourist-friendly pre-paid mobile plans, I couldn't really understand (or validate) the "important" role they played.

Anyone have a perspective on this?

Interesting that they chose an 8 meter diameter, probably assuming a launch on the 9-meter Starship as Blue Origin's New Glenn is only 7m diameter. It would be interesting to see a weight projection for a completed module to see how well it fits within Starship's planned capacity of between 100 to 200 tons to orbit.

A 50cm (max) gap between the module's outer edge and Starship's inner edge does not seem like much room for support or deployment infrastructure in the launch vehicle, and would also require bay doors that fully open - and maybe a robot arm to safely deploy.

I haven't seen any reference to explicit collaboration between Gravitics and SpaceX. Maybe it's still too early, but I would hope the two have open lines of communication to avoid expensive redesigns later on.

FYI, those use cases are the present, not the future, of tech.

Co-watching TV? Big Screen: https://www.bigscreenvr.com/software

Mini-Golf? Walkabout Mini Golf: https://www.mightycoconut.com/minigolf

Table Tennis? Eleven Table Tennis: https://elevenvr.com/en/

All are amazing, polished experiences in VR that give you a sense of being "present" with someone a continent away.

Symantec comes to mind.

If you actually listen to how Zuck defines the metaverse, it's not Horizons or even a VR headset. That's what pundits say, most of whom love pointing out big failures more than they like thinking deeply.

He sees the metaverse as the entire shared online space that evolves into a more multi-user collaborative model with more human-centric input/output devices than a computer and phone. It includes co-presence, mixed reality, social sites like Instagram and Facebook as well as online gaming, real-world augments, multiuser communities like Roblox, and "world apps" like VRChat or Horizons.

Access methods may be via a VR headset, or smart glasses, or just sensors that alert you to nearby augmented sites that you can then access on your phone - think Pokemon Go with gyms located at historical real-world sites.

That's what $50B has been spent on, and it's definitely a work in progress. But it sure doesn't seem dead based on the fact that more Quest headsets have been sold than this gen's Xboxes; Apple released Vision Pro; Rayban Smart Glasses are selling pretty well; new devices are planned from Google, Valve, and others; and remote work is an unkillable force.

The online and "real" worlds are only getting more connected, and it seems like a smart bet to try to drive what the next generation looks like. I wouldn't say the $50B was spent efficiently, but I understand that forging a new path means making lots of missteps. You still get somewhere new though, and if it's a worthwhile destination then many people will be following right behind you.

Nor could I. And I can't imagine sitting next to my wife watching a football game together on my phone. But I could while waiting in line by myself.

Similarly, I could imagine sitting next to my daughter, who is 2,500 miles away at college, watching the name together on a virtual screen we both share. And then playing mini-golf or table tennis together.

Different tools are appropriate for different use cases. Don't dismiss a hammer because it's not good at driving screws.

It's interesting how an analysis like this becomes a crucible for one's own preconceptions and biases.

Anti-porn? It's because of the porn

Anti-LGBTQ? It's because it's hard to have sex "when you're not even sure of the gender" of your partner (an actual comment on the Substack)

Parent? It's because less available childcare and more helicopter parenting expectations lead to less alone time

Young adult? It's nihilism about the future and crushing workloads with no way to afford your own home/apartment

Old? It's because people had more sex when "men were men and women were women"

An incel? It's because of women

Feminist? It's because of men

Anti-tech? It's social media

Environmentalist? It's environmental factors

I could go on. But almost anyone could argue for almost any reason, and it seems to be more enlightening about the person making the argument than about the problem.

Congratulations on the Oscar!

> There's a reason they gave a hard pass to a Google partnership.

AIUI, Google required Meta to basically cede control of a partnered OS to them:

"After years of not focusing on VR or doing anything to support our work in the space, Google has been pitching AndroidXR to partners and suggesting, incredibly, that WE are the ones threatening to fragment the ecosystem when they are the ones who plan to do exactly that.

"We would love to partner with them. They could bring their apps to Quest today! They could bring the Play store (with its current economics for 2d apps) and add value to all their developers immediately, which is exactly the kind of open app ecosystem we want to see. We would be thrilled to have them. It would be a win for their developers and all consumers and we’ll keep pushing for it.

"Instead, they want us to agree to restrictive terms that require us to give up our freedom to innovate and build better experiences for people and developers—we’ve seen this play out before and we think we can do better this time around."

-- From Mark Bosworth

As this change mostly affects filmmakers, it's interesting timing that Unreal Engine got a shout-out during an Oscar thank you speech.

According to Epic, this is the first time that a film made in Unreal Engine 5 won an Oscar for Best Animated Short. ("WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko")

Apologies for the misunderstanding, I thought I was clear but apparently not. Most of my comment was a reaction to the overall comment thread and not to you specifically.

> "people keep replying with factually inaccurate information"

If I was referring to you, I would have said so and quoted you directly.

> "this comment section"

Again, that's significantly broader than "your comment" - the comment section to this article looks a lot more like a Reddit thread than an HN thread, and that's not a compliment. Nor is it a direct commentary on your post.

I'm not trying to "sell this and justify the price tag." I'm really trying to understand the pricing dynamics and whether -- outside of emotion -- if reactions to the price are really justified.

Let me make a tech example. Someone says "I just got quoted $1m for an Oracle DB, is that fair?" and everyone replies, "that's BS, Postgres is free!"

That's not a nuanced discussion and may not be helpful. So if you really want to understand, you have to "push back" and ask questions. "What do other closed-source vendors charge, to get a direct comparison?" "Is Postgres really functionally equivalent?" "You define equivalency this way, but Oracle says it has these other differentiators. So are they really equivalent?" etc.

So when you compared it to a "bed tent" and I saw what looked like a fundamental difference between this and a bed tent, I pushed back. And my comment about 1st party costs goes back to my original question's premise, which is: is "rip off" justified in the context of 1st party aftermarket products like this?

Your comment wasn't necessarily emotionally charged (and again, I never said it was, I was talking about the dumpster fire of Elon hate the entire comment section turned into), but it didn't really answer the question in the context I was looking for either. Comparing the cost of a component off of Amazon to a custom fully-integrated product from the manufacturer shortly after product launch really doesn't seem like apples-to-apples.

No need to reply to this. I'm not looking for an argument, just trying to better explain the discussion I was looking for. I've already mostly satisfied my curiosity through various searches and a bit of further education.

I do remain a bit frustrated though that the OP didn't link the far better original source review instead of blogspam. I think it might have been a much better discussion. That's not frustration out of some loyalty to Tesla, it's because HN has some of the highest signal:noise ratios of the forums I read, and it's disappointing when it's manipulated into an emotional response. To be clear, that's in no way your fault and also not a reflection on your comment - just me explaining my "response about the motives of people responding to you."

As I said in my OP, I'm not well versed in this market - so I don't know what it's worth. But people keep replying with factually inaccurate information and that's frustrating.

Do I personally think it's worth $2,975? No. But I'm not in the market for one.

Honestly almost everything in the automotive aftermarket seems like a rip off to me, so it's hard to be objective. Your example of $1,400 for an "elevated to roof level" rack sounds like a rip off. Yeah, if 8 pieces of welded aluminum cost $1,400 then maybe $1,600 for custom-sized low volume tent is about right. Ford sells folding tonneau covers for $1,100. A tow hitch for a Lexus GX is $330. This is all extortionate. But millions in this market continue to pay the costs and find the value is worth it.

Can you find something cheaper on Amazon? Of course. But in the first-party world of $300 tow hitches and $1,100 pieces of hinged plastic, is $3K a lot? I don't know. The original reviewer says, "I think that much of the thoughtful and unique design elements might warrant the cost: it’s fairly lightweight + easy to install/remove the stowed tent from the truck, stays out of the way (unless you want to transport multiple bikes in the bed), doesn’t reduce range due to decreased aerodynamics, and has intuitive pieces that make setup + takedown a breeze." Of course this was omitted from Elektrek's copy/paste of the original review.

But I don't think the discussion is really about the appropriate cost for the Basecamp, which is what I'm really interested in. I'm reading a lot more emotion in this comment section than seems warranted for a tent.

@dang, the linked article appears to be close to a clickbait blogspam post trying to capitalize on Cybertruck/Tesla hate. From the title to the opening meme/image (which is all most will see) to the selective editing of the source material, it seems to have a strong negative bias.

The Electrek article simply copy/pastes a far more nuanced review which can be found here: https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/basecamp-...

Based on the general low quality discussion in this comment section (clearly many didn't read the article and even fewer read the original post), Electrek did a good job of riling people up. Doesn't seem like a great Hacker News thread though.

The original post has a nicely balanced conclusion that is overall missed by 98% of the commenters:

> my overall take on the Basecamp is similar to my take on the CT in general: it’s awesome and brilliant in many ways but flawed in a few areas... the jury is still out on the Basecamp because I’m not yet convinced that the brilliant elements outweigh the areas that need improvement.

According to the far better original review (found here [1]), this appears to have (1) a soft shell case; (2) easy setup (inflatable no-pole upper, hard bottom frame, fold-out design), but fussy tear down; and (3) can remain mounted during travel[2]

[1] https://www.cybertruckownersclub.com/forum/threads/basecamp-... [2] https://digitalassets-shop.tesla.com/image/upload/f_auto,q_a...

The original poster specifically compares it to a roof tent. Obviously since the Cybertruck has no normal roof, the definition is strained here.

However, from what I've seen "bed tents" have you sleeping on the bed. This product has a raised frame that performs similarly to a roof tent (given the CT's angled design); allowing you to store equipment in the bed when the tent is up or down. See image here: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/03/IMG_6...

While $3000 sounds like a lot, quickly googling for "F150 rooftop tent" returned many results for over $3K.

That a first-party product on a high-end vehicle with a tiny market share costs around the same as aftermarket products for the most popular truck on the market makes the price seem less ridiculous than headlines make it appear.

However, I'm not deeply enmeshed in truck culture. I'm sure many folks can weigh in with (hopefully) nuanced takes on the price/value equation.

I don't know if you'll ever see this, but thought I'd reply.

First, the original Rift headsets were as you describe: lightweight, passing through the PC VR image. However, Meta did not miss out on an opportunity. In what was perhaps the most effective A/B test they could run, they released the Rift S (tethered PCVR) and Quest 1 at effectively the same time. The market feedback was resounding: I believe it was a 10-to-1 preference for a standalone experience vs. tied to a PC. Since they doubled down on standalone (or all-in-one if you prefer), well over 20 million headsets have been sold. In fact, they're so popular that even the fraction that connects to Steam is basically tied for market share with the most popular PC VR headset ever, the Index.

Second, even as a PC VR HMD it was a real stretch to call it a monitor equivalent. It's wildly complicated to create compelling VR images. You need two screens at nearly 2Kx2K resolution each, running at 90 frames/second, sustained. Dip below that and you can induce nausea. Not every PC can do that, so you need careful engineering between the client and HMD, with tricks like time warp, space warp, interleaving, compression, prediction, pose estimation, etc. to take up the slack. Creating sub-millimeter precision of location with six degrees of freedom either requires external base stations (cost, complexity) or inside-out tracking with headset-mounted cameras and a processor running realtime simultaneous location and mapping and image recognition code, which implies a CPU and tech stack to support it. Nowadays people also expect passthrough (with real-time depth correction), hand tracking (AI routines for hand posing), and more. All this is to say that significant code must run on the HMD for a modern gaming headset (Meta's target market), as well as on the PC. And if you're investing that much in a custom software stack, you can't make it up on hardware margin - the cost to build an HMD is just too high. So you have to have an app store tie-in, because Valve sure isn't going to share its Steam profits with you.

Now, certainly there have been (and are) HMDs that tried this approach. HP (G2) and HTC (Vive series) both put out quality products leveraging the Steam ecosystem. Neither are sold in volume today, because the economics of selling a headset just aren't good enough.

Immersed and Big Screen are releasing very lightweight fixed-function HMDs for either work or movie watching that do operate the way you describe. Neither are expected to be high volume devices, and both are more expensive than Quest 3.

In short: VR is much, much harder than you may realize. Meta didn't miss an opportunity, the explicitly chose the market-tested, most popular solution that also has an economic model with some potential future payoff. If you want a "minimal experience akin to an OSD" then look at the Big Screen Beyond ($999, https://www.bigscreenvr.com/) or the Immersed Visor ($1,049, https://www.visor.com/). (Note: compare the price of these hardware-model pass-through devices to the Quest 3 ($499) which also includes a CPU, battery, storage, audio, more RAM).

It's also worth noting that Quest 3 is not online-only. It works fine offline once you've logged in once (people use it on planes, in parks, in the car, etc.). But this particular issue at Meta forcibly logged out users, then the API appeared online while failing all future login attempts. Ironically, users that work offline never noticed the outage because the bug couldn't log them out.

Agree, many posts I read seem like classic "I don't like Meta/VR/big companies/social media so let me use this specific incident to confirm my biases."

As you say, there's valid criticism to be made but it's hard to find the signal through the noise.

> I view VR headsets and their peripherals as no different than a mouse, keyboard, and display

That could be valid when VR headsets were tethered to a PC via a DisplayPort or HDMI connection and essentially mirrored the display.

The Quest is closer to an iPhone or Android phone or an all-digital handheld gaming device. With integrated compute, display, battery, text input, pointing devices, mic, and speakers, it bears little functional resemblance to peripherals like a mouse, keyboard, or display with no utility unless slaved to another device.

Considering I can use my Quest with no wifi or other network to log in (once initial set up is complete), it seems that the Meta back-end APIs must have broke in some way that confused the headsets into thinking they were available when they weren't.

That's a matter of some debate. Somewhere between 6 and 12, I believe, is the range.

SpaceX plans to stretch the second stage to increase fuel carrying capacity for tanker flights, so the actual number is TBD until both the revised Starship and its engines (Raptor 3) are built and tested.

I admit to being guilty of the "YT?" or "Hi" type messages, but it's for a reason: the person may be presenting to a client and shared their screen instead of their window.

I've been on too many Zooms where the presenter's Slack pops up saying, "John, we have a call with <company name> about <topic> at 3:00. Can you join?"

Multiple times, this information was probably sensitive. I'd rather avoid that by waiting until I get a response.

Nice video. I have an Amiga 2000, Amiga 1200, and an old Mac SE in my garage that all worked 30 years ago, but probably need refurbishing at this point (I shudder to think of the damage from battery leakage).

Maybe someday I'll have time to do it...but these videos are nice inspiration and an indication of what's in front of me.

Thanks for the laugh.

I see. The important distinction that was a bit ambiguous in your post is that the Starship /program/ is better suited to LEO constellation delivery, not that the Starship rocket itself has some flaw that makes it ill-suited for Mars or the Moon.

Frankly, as someone very interested in Starship (and SpaceX in general), I don't disagree with you. But this isn't really a revelation - the strategy has always been Starlink first, HLS (NASA Human Landing System) second, Mars third. Due to delays and NASA-driven deadlines, it's arguable that HLS has moved into the top spot and limited launch activities will need to focus on fuel depot milestones instead of Starlink launches.

The Starlink business model is impressive. Two million people worldwide (as of Sept 2023) paying $200/month grosses $4.8 billion in revenue - about what NASA paid for HLS, IIRC. I don't see why pursuing that is a problem, and spending $5B on Starship to get a 30,000 satellite constellation in orbit to expand the capacity to 20 million subscribers per year or more is a slam dunk financially.

As for Mars, we know one thing: nothing will happen without a new heavy lift rocket similar to Starship. Once that's in place, doors will open - one may be to Mars, but I agree it's much further down the road than people think.

But I do believe that Musk's goal is Mars, and he's willing to spend a large percentage of his fortune to get there. In the meantime, he's betting that a lot of people will come along for the ride and address the challenges of a Mars mission (not even "colony") with new innovation.

Without Starship, there's no reason to research ISRU technologies like efficient Sabatier reaction equipment, or automated assembly, or million other Mars-specific technologies because we have no vehicle to get there.

With Starship, he's able to pull an entire industry forward. Maybe it is made of crazy dreamers, but crazy dreamers are often needed for a step-change level risk.

Other than its height, what is the concern?

No other ship can launch 150+ tons in a 9m-diameter payload bay, use propellant that can be created on Mars, and can vertically land and take off again.

It seems all of these are required optimizations for Mars colonization or Moon missions. The fact that NASA selected Starship as its human landing vehicle for the US's return to the moon strikes me as a remarkable vote of confidence by a highly qualified organization with far more data than we have and a lot at stake.

Could you elaborate on how they got it so wrong?

If only there was some multi-year programmatic environmental assessment that could be performed by experts in the field to determine whether this would occur or what mitigations would ameliorate the concern...[1]

Nah, that's crazy talk. Instead let's just speculate wildly.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-06/PEA_for_Spac...

You can think of LIGO as being the first new way to directly see the universe since the invention of radar telescopes. Our ability to measure the otherwise unmeasurable, such as black hole and neutron star collisions, could lead to a better understanding of dark matter/dark energy, astronomy, and both physics and astrophysics.

This expands the reach of knowledge of humanity; once made available, who knows how future humans will use these new discoveries to benefit mankind. Claude Shannon developed information theory well before networked computers were invented, but it's now critical to many disciplines and products you use every day.

Meanwhile, the actual engineering challenges overcome in the building (and refinement) of LIGO are directly applicable to development of more accurate sensors, quantum computing, and precision engineering - all of which will touch the lives of Earth's inhabitants without most of them even being aware of it.

This has famously already been raised in court during the Rittenhouse trial:

https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/stlr/blog/vi...

And discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29187820