anything that matters (which was implied by the rest of my comment)
They can check a box and make this press release though, I guess that’s worth something.
1 karma · joined October 28, 2025
They can check a box and make this press release though, I guess that’s worth something.
If you constrain a system to where it’s effectively useless and declare victory, that’s worse than trying to actually solve the problem and saying you’re not there yet.
It’s lowering the goal precipitously until you can achieve and then pretending you did it. Tesla has flaws, but this is a dumb article.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-...
Apple's focus on productivity is good too because it relies less on network effects for cool use cases. Part of why the Meta approach is hard is the social stuff requires everyone you know to have headsets, this (imo) is why Carmack was pushing for lighter, cheaper devices over the Meta Quest Pro - he saw growth and distribution as the core bottleneck for Meta's approach.
Since Apple's approach is around individual use and productivity, that frees them to build an expensive device that provides value to one user and then leverage that until lots of people have them, it's an easier way to bootstrap (and something they've done historically repeatedly). Of course it helps they already have a platform to extend too.
The big breakthrough IMO is commitment to pass-through for AR, this ultimately solves the "draw black" problem Michael Abrash wrote about at Valve in 2012 [0] before he joined Oculus. Ben Thompson of Stratechery makes an analogy to mirrorless cameras vs. DSLRs and I think it fits - people thought screens would never be good enough compared to natural light, but it turns out at some point they are. Palmer Luckey mentioned in 2021 that he thought this also should be the approach to it. The other major issue Abrash talks about in that blog post is latency, and Apple has solved this (though only just) because of their incredible custom silicon which was not easily visible back in 2012.
It's possible to imagine these devices getting smaller and lighter as they iterate, the AR and eye tracking means you may be able to do things like look at a light switch in your house and turn it out without anything else, UI for the real world becomes possible. Looking at little glass displays could become an anachronism of this time. Of course, it could also just be a common way to do desktop computing - hard to know.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120804140946/http://blogs.valv...
It's fun to look back on some old HN threads with predictions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Similarly to twitter third party api access with no ads doesn't make any sense for a business that's an ad business, it's stupid they've allowed this at all for as long as they have (and it was stupid for twitter to do the same).
If you want to build a non ad-based subscription business go ahead! I strongly prefer models that do that (e.g. substack), but if you're not going to do that then don't operate some weird half measure that's clearly counter to the company incentives. Apollo is just upset the free party is over.
I'm a little surprised reddit would not just shut it all down like twitter did since that makes more sense for this model, but having the price set crazy high is effectively the same thing anyway. It makes sense they don't want to negotiate, they'd rather have no third party API access at all.
This argument doesn't mean I'm a fan of data access and control (I'm not - I work on urbit to give people a way to escape it), but I recognize the business as it is. If you're running an ad business and allow third parties to build apps on your business that prevent you from controlling users at the client level (and prevent you from showing ads) you're making stupid decisions.
Like most things it's a problem of incentives. You can't fix the behavior without fixing the incentives. You can't escape the megacorp ad world we're trapped in by just wishing the existing incentives didn't exist.
Articles like this can just be flagged and ignored as low quality ad clickbait imo. Someone will always write one.
Sometimes the other device never appears despite having proper settings configured. Usually I’m trying to move a large video file.
It barely works.
Fun to see the incredulity in replies two years ago for what seems like was inevitably leading to this.
Still really curious what it’ll be like to use in person.
Basically minimizing cost to extort more cash.
People make similar claims about cars, but old cars broke down all the time and new ones are basically appliances that “just work” without the driver needing to know anything. Similar for computers to smart phones (though obviously both digital in that transition)
I noticed I had it less when working in the office in the Bay Area where it was more possible to engage in these kinds of discussions more frequently in person.
I suspect it’s just hard to get that kind of group together in the world outside of weird circumstances so it’s easier to find it online.
At some threshold of fame it seems like you just attract crazy people and the risk of them attacking you goes up substantially.
The delta between a puppy and a human is also a lot smaller than a human and a super intelligent AGI and humans can effectively train dogs.
If he can do that it requires one weak link human over an infinite time horizon.
Humans are already terrible at preventing breaches in a lot dumber circumstances without something smarter than them trying to do it.
We’re constrained in all sorts of ways because of biology, natural selection, energy, etc. I find it unlikely we just happen to be close to the max threshold.
If something can think a lot faster that’s already a major shift and it seems likely to me that would only be part of it.
I think the underlying arguments themselves though are good.
With AI we’re seeing the capabilities improve rapidly and the arguments about why AGI is impossible or will be constrained for some reason are the weak ones.
People are famously bad at predicting when right up until they have already done it.
“In 1901, two years before helping build the first heavier-than-air flyer, Wilbur Wright told his brother that powered flight was fifty years away.
“In 1939, three years before he personally oversaw the first critical chain reaction in a pile of uranium bricks, Enrico Fermi voiced 90% confidence that it was impossible to use uranium to sustain a fission chain reaction. I believe Fermi also said a year after that, aka two years before the denouement, that if net power from fission was even possible (as he then granted some greater plausibility) then it would be fifty years off; but for this I neglected to keep the citation.
“And of course if you’re not the Wright Brothers or Enrico Fermi, you will be even more surprised. Most of the world learned that atomic weapons were now a thing when they woke up to the headlines about Hiroshima. There were esteemed intellectuals saying four years after the Wright Flyer that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, because knowledge propagated more slowly back then.”
It’s a logic argument.
1. Super Intelligent AGI is possible.
2. Unaligned super intelligent AGI is an e-risk likely to wipe out humanity.
3. We have no idea how to align AGI.
There seems to be more consensus around 1 now than there was even 3 years ago. I think most also agree with 3. 2 is where people are incredulous, but the incredulity is backed by (imo) bad reasoning.
People think of a smart person they know as an example of something “smarter” and use that as a justification of why it’s not an issue. We’re constrained in all sorts of ways (head size, energy) and the distance of intelligence from a dumb human to Einstein is very tiny on the overall spectrum.
They’re frustratingly dumb, I’d like to see some good arguments or steelman but they’re honestly very hard to find.
Ultimately it seems like there’s nothing most individuals can do so just live your life as you would and hope the timeline is farther out than it seems.
Worse than the Cold War nuclear risk imo, at least in that case it was possible for humans to stupidly build thousands and then decide not to use them (and it’s relatively easy to restrict uranium access/control the development of nukes). Not really the case with superintelligent AGI.
People have a bad heuristic for what tailrisk exists. They think extinction talk is impossible or crazy. We won’t get the opportunity to mess up and try again in this case.
https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...
Thankfully I’m now in a building with Google webpass that has 1gbps symmetric (and no data cap) - much better.
The constant lawn equipment in suburbia make them incredibly loud. Gas leaf blowers are banned but it doesn’t matter, they’re used anyway along with hedge trimmers. They are basically going at all daylight hours, it was one of the surprising perks of moving to the city - much quieter.
The people I know living in these large houses that were cheaply built with weird architectural accents were primarily middle class people in suburban areas with low cost of living and larger families. Often they grew up with less money and were the first of their family to do well. Typically they bought a house in some new development with a good school.
The people I’ve heard complain the most about it are the upper-middle class people on the coasts that went to Stanford, I mostly only heard this style of complaint after moving to the bay and meeting people that grew up in these higher classes.
It really comes across as a way to look down on the lower classes that “don’t have good taste” dressed up as something more intellectual. Actual rich people (not upper-middle) don’t give a shit, probably because they’re not afraid someone will mistake their status for middle class - they just live in their estate in atherton and don’t read articles like this.
I don’t like suburban sprawl either, but I have an allergic reaction to this kind of elitism.
It’s true - middle class people often don’t know how to properly signal status because they didn’t grow up in it, but how to properly signal it is also a moving target (intentionally) by those a little above them. I just find it tedious to watch.
I'm in the beta but still haven't tried it because unless you live directly in the zone it operates it's not useful. Even then rarely am I ubering in the middle of the night anyway.
As is, I'd have to take an uber to the zone it operates in after 10pm, then get a cruise point to point in an area where everything is closed, then take an uber home.
Specifically this is the relevant part: https://youtu.be/g6bOwQdCJrc?t=1370
They removed radar because it was making things worse.
High resolution mapping works for localized solutions, but not in the general case.
I'm glad both groups are working on different approaches, it'll be better for us in the long run imo.