gernb

What does it mean "WebKit peak 49% market share" in 2012. That doesn't pass the sniff test. AFAIK, Safari never had a big install based on Windows and MacOS+iOS certainly didn't account for 49% of web traffic in 2012

That assessment doesn't fit the reputation of the software that runs in most government departments including public transportation departments

how would it?

example: in the video an actor is sitting in a chair, youre in a room with no chairs. What does it show?

example: theyre in an open 20x20 foot room, no furniture, your in a 10x10 foot room on your bed. When they walk across their room you'd seen them first walk througb your bed and then walk through your wall

etc...

I saw a bunch of these types of things at a Japanese gadget show in 2018. One interesting idea that one had colored rings to wear. The colors made it easier to do finger motion tracking.

In fall 1999 the wife of one of my co-workers call me and 4 other co-workers all dorks because we were using cell phones. Now I'm sure she's more addicted to her's than her husband.

I'm somewhat skeptical though I'm sure I'll be proven wrong.

In my mind, AR glasses will make the world as shitty as most clickbait webpages. Ads EEEEEEVVVVEEERRRYYYWWWWHHHEEERRRREEE. Notifications all the time. Virtual billboards trying to grab your attention.

I can't think of the obvious use cases, except for virtual monitors, that are all that compelling.

Map navigation? Ok, well, it's not that bad now in non-VR

Info on people in your view? Maybe, but if think protecting your privacy is bad now you'll need much less of it for that to actually work.

Virtual pets running around your room? Seems 15 minutes of wow and then done. Plus the hard part of designing them to interact with your environment vs a pre-designed environment.

Games? Same problem as above, they have to adapt to the actual world vs current games where designers can design and build levels and worlds. So 1 or 2 Pokemon Go type of games and then you'll go back to playing PS6 or VR.

Porn? Same problem. The 3D video won't match your sofa, chair, living room, bed.

Virtual UI? People are already complaining that screens in cars are not as good as knobs. do I really want to have to put on my glasses to adjust my knobless stove?

All that said, I'd probably have made similar arguments against smartphones and been just as wrong :P

You have to start somewhere.

https://techcentral.co.za/the-cellphones-of-the-1980s/191544...

and yet people ride bikes, mountain climb, ski, surf, all things that requires equipment and setup time.

> The children's market is not what VR developers are going for.

I think VR developers would be happy to have children's market as big as Nintendo's

Be careful where you go, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and not some subtle representation of a penis.

One of my friends insists that "The Lion King" is a metaphor that white people should rule over non-white people. He points out that Scar's underlyings are all dark and all have "stereotype of inner city low income accents". Whey they get in charge the jungle goes to shit. It takes the lighter colored, "proper" accented to rule and bring the land back to prosperous.

I don't agree with that interpretation but it's hard to un-see

> Remember that movies are HIGHLY produced works, each item in a scene, the color and angle of the lighting, the angle and perspective of the camera, the editing (types of cuts, speed of cuts), any sound you hear, etc, those were ALL specifically chosen, if not outright preplanned by the director and his team.

Movies are no different than anything else. Tons of choices have no meaning as people rush to get their jobs done on schedule and under budget. Sure, sometimes they were consciously decided but not even close to 100%

I know it's a tradeoff but I think I fall on the side of I wish the language I was writing in required `this` or `self` for members/properties.

C++

    foo = bar \* 2;

Are foo and bar local variables or members of some instance?

vs

Python

    self.foo = self.bar \* 2

100% clear. No naming convention needed.

I bring this up because `_foo` for members is a naming convention that wouldn't be needed in a language that required `self` or `this`

That said, I get that maybe refactoring some code from standalone function to class method is easier if you don't have to change the code as much but I'd be curious how often that's a net win.

They want lock-in. If you write something in Swift and it's not easily portable to other platforms then you might decide porting is not worth the effort.

There are often other reasons. For example, in Korea console gaming isn't or wasn't a thing. It's PC gaming. Why? Because to Koreans in the 80s and 90s, playing something made by Japanese, their former occupiers, was unacceptable. Because of that they played games on PCs until that became standard for Korean gaming.

Other reasons PC gaming might not be a thing in Japan. It takes a lot less room for a console (especially NES/SNES/Gamecube) than it does for a PC. You plug the console into your exiting TV. A PC needs it's own space with it's own monitor and desk. Japanese houses and especially apartments are small.

I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons than just that a PC costs more.

Is Japan's software industry killed?

If you're asking why they don't have a Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook, could it just be because they speak a language that's only useful in Japan and not anywhere else in the entire world?

If you're actually in Japan they have tons of apps, tons of software, tons of games, tons of many things "software".

Certain things fit Japan better than others but for example Mercari (the ebay of Japan) is 1000x better than anything I've seen outside Japan.

Japan's feature phones ran rings around the rest of the world's phones until iPhone.

There are certainly other factors like possibly underpaying, not valuing experience, etc... but I think the basic premise of the piece is probably missing the forest for the trees.

Dating sites would disagree. The majority of profiles claim they love the job and are looking for someone that loves their job.

Of course maybe they're on the dating site because they love their job :P

Poverty also causes millions of deaths a year.

That just reminds me of a conversation last night. A friend's parents live in South East Asia and have a live in helper (common). He was describing the helper's bedroom as small and I was like "you just described a common apartment size in Japan".

Meaning, it was small because he's used to American sizes where the average residence size is 210 square meters where as in Japan is 93sqm add it's trivial to find apartments of 15sqm. No one blinks an eye because it's normal where as American often sees that and thinks it's some kind of exploitation.

Some of you might have lived in a space that small for a few years in dorm room in collage. You likely survived and weren't traumatized for being in that space.

This isn't to detract from the idea that many people in NYC might not be making enough money. Only that it's common to think people need more than they do ... And also that not being able to build smaller places means people end up having to pay for more than they could get by with.

For me (late 50s), I find that I don't feel productive as I use to be and can think of several reasons

* the project I'm on is not "mine". I joined a sub team of ~30 programmers who've been working on a 5 year project. I'm not familiar with the code. this in contrast to previous projects where I was a lead / main contributor. I wrote the initial implementation so I had a very clear view of the structure of the project in my head.

* the project I'm on is not a passion project. I got very luck that most of my career I got to work on things I wanted to work on so I had passion to make them great. my current project I don't feel that. I'm sure part of it is coming in late. I think it's great project but my heart isn't in it the same way it was for many past projects.

As a counter example, I got permission to prototype something on my own for a few weeks. I worked ~80 hours of over time those few weeks because I was so into it and I felt super productive because it was 100% my code that I understood, no waiting for code reviews etc... I appreciate code reviews but compared to prototyping without the feeling a productivity without is incomparable.

* my passion for coding seems to have dwindled. maybe this isn't true given the previous paragraph but coding things I used to spend time exploring I have a hard time working up enthusiasm for like I used to.

Everyone always thinks the current bandwidth is enough.... it never is.

I have no idea what the future hold but a typical VR movie is ~20gig

I'm not saying VR is going to take off but maybe streamed AR virtual presence might and it will require more bandwidth than today's video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7raHNfPc6A

And even if that doesn't, something always comes up that needs more bandwidth.

that is not remotely my experience. old monitors are low-res and the text is blurry compared to my current Windows PC and Macs

IIRC some people believe the universe at the smallest level just follows steps and these steps are basic and Turing complete.

never felt in a position to repay while they were alive.

they are no longer alive.

yes you can. Because it will likely be decades before the environment kills people but you can save a life today. Oh, don't drive that ambulance to go pick someone up and rescue them, it pollutes! Where as other solutions may exist for the environment in the future.

Here's another. Maybe no one should go hiking/camping/mountain climbing because the few that need to be rescued generally require cars/helicopters the burn fossil fuels to come to their aid, not to mention all the fossil fuels used to get them to their camp/hike/climb site and all the materials for their gear, all for "entertainment".

Also, you yourself are likely a net negative on the environment. Do you have an obligation to kill yourself?

very cool!

here's several games in 280 characters or less

https://www.dwitter.net/h/game

I feel like the phrase "you only regret what you didn't do" is survivorship bias. I'm pretty confident the majority of the people that die in these situations were not happy to die.

Lots of sites do this. Lately for me there's

https://www.typescriptlang.org/play

I'm mixed on it. It means it's mostly useless for having your own list of creations because you have to manually store the URLs (PITA) and you need to store them somewhere accessible if you want to repo the UX of the site actually storing them where you can more easily access them from anywhere.

It's very generous of you.

I'd like to point out my experience of taking the loan and never repaying it. I felt guilty for decades and more distant from the loaner. They never brought it up but my guilty mind did.

So I'm not 100% sure it was a net positive for our relationship.

If I was to do loan money and they didn't pay back in some reasonable amount of time I think I'd tell them explicitly it was a gift. Though I'm not sure that would fix things in the guilty person's mind (yea, I get I'm projecting my feeling on guilt on them. They might not feel any guilt at all)

The EFF tool is provably false. For one, it doesn't get enough traffic so it's not representative in any way shape or form of a website that would use fingerprinting.

But it also doesn't pass the sniff test. It tells me I'm unique. One of 185k. Let's break down that number. I'm in the PST time zone. There ~40 million people in the PST time zone. Divided by 185k is 216. They're basically claiming there are 216 iPhone 13 Pro in all of California + Oregon + Washington + British Columbia.

Bullshit!

It's basically fake news. The EFF should know better than to exaggerate with hyperbole. It might be true that almost no one visits https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/, but site that actually gets traffic is also a sight where it'd be closer to unique in 1 of 10.