hrbf

That doesn’t change the fact that it has no application in the real world beyond being meaningless garbage pushed for a grift.

> when you remove the human greed part

So they are theoretically a good idea with no practical application in the real world.

What a depressing outlook on future work. Is it really impossible for you to see the dehumanizing aspects of this?

If you’re sitting anyway, what’s even the point of a VR meeting?

> Meaning this generation will never fall in love with the possibilities and potential of VR.

I see that as a good thing.

> a solution in search of a problem

Exactly like cryptocurrencies. Technically impressive but entirely useless, even dangerous.

I’m currently looking into working with disadvantaged children at a local school, teaching computer skills. I may also move towards psychology and coaching (the kind that takes proper training). There’s more on the table: professional gardening, writing books, starting a (small) plain fare vegan restaurant.

> Neuralink-style HMIs

Cyperpunk is interesting as an aesthetic and all that but I’d never in a million years would want to actually live in that dystopian nightmare.

It’s not surprising that people who care about the tech would care about its execution.

At the same time, if you‘re looking to create a solution to anything beyond scratching your own itch, users are key.

The job essentially becomes dealing with irrational human wants and desires when it’s quite possible that one of the reasons you went into the profession was to precisely not having to do that.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and wish the project the best, on grounds of the hacker mentality that doing something just for the sake of it is the entire point. Which is great.

At the same time, in the real world, I expect it to go nowhere at all. For that to happen, the technical implementation matters not a bit. You’d have to provide _anything_ new, different and “better” as compared to what is. To be an alternative, it has to provide similar functionality but improve on it in some regard. Instead, this is a worse experience in every regard.

Maybe it’s just way too early to release anything. But I believe the entire idea is deeply flawed, if targeted for general public use.

After trying this on my iPhone via Blink, it suddenly struck me that we indeed live in the future. Given the hardware to play with and its age, almost absurdly so.

It’s unconscionably incompetent how a financially-stressed federal government appears to be unable to immediately seize an opportunity like this, along with doling out harsh repercussions for the executives who have decided (and still do) to cash in on this scheme.

This has become a repeating pattern to such a degree that claiming plain incompetence cannot plausibly explain it any more. Maybe it’s not outright malice but corruption and fraud indeed.

The part about the grocery stores reminded me of why I love shopping at Aldi. Not only are the products great and affordable, the layout almost never changes in one store. Get in, get the goods, get out. They optimize for overall throughput, not cart volume per customer.

Upon reading news like that, I’m convinced I have made the right choice following my gut feeling and intuition to move away from the tech world. It’s absurd. This is adding yet another layer of needless complexity, just for the sake of earning yet more money. It does not solve any real issue, it benefits very few people at the expense of most. In this regard, it’s like the cryptocurrency of business applications. Late-stage capitalism in fully swing indeed.

I’d argue that naive tech-positivity has run its course and more initial believers are sobering up to the reality of what kind of monsters this debonair optimism helped create.

If recent history is taken into account, the goal of anything in this space is, or will ultimately turn out to be, engagement. “Social” platforms today are unhealthy places as is. Do you really think another layer of abstraction away from a common reality will turn out to “bridge human, emotional connections where none could before”? I’m curious: what exactly are you referring to?

I do see potential applications in fields like 3D-enhanced medical imaging, as highly specialized tools for professionals. But not as a general tool or device.

Long-term, I find it more likely that people who can escape into a convincing, curated reality, will do so with increasing frequency and in turn stop caring about their surroundings. Because we’re human primates and not responsible enough to deal with complex change like this yet.

I believe the visceral pushback is happening because this is a perfect example of a technology and platform that should not be. And most people instinctively sense that.

We need more humanity, care for ourselves and others, more love and connection to humans and everything surrounding us, to experience what it means to be alive and being a part of the universe. This tech aims to isolate us even more than we already are, through its fundamental design. When you put human values above the maniacal quest of a boy billionaire for relevance and power, you come to the conclusion that this is the entirely wrong path.

The hardware is inconsequential.

I’d like to throw in lz4 compression as a ridiculously fast, low CPU alternative while still providing acceptable ratios for the presented use-case.

Maybe obvious for many but still worth mentioning is that on Unix-like systems any external compression can be used by piping to stdout, no need to rely on built-in support. Especially relevant with BSD tar implementations. Example:

    tar cfv - /path/to/files | lz4 > output.tar.lz4

Trivial as compared to taking away the freedom of being able to purchase stuff like that at all via mail order – which I do not necessarily consider to be a reasonable request, nor do I agree with the lawsuit as is. There are already established mechanisms to verify age and identity in place to do that, package delivery companies do it all the time. It’s simply more expensive to do that. But Amazon clearly did not respond to reasonable discourse. I fail to see what you consider radical or restricting about my position.

There was also a quickly deleted response accusing me of ”pathological empathy that would abandon any principled position if it offered an immediate salve” to my “emotional panic”.

I believe this reveals more about the character and expectations of the commenter than anything else. To their credit, they deleted it.

Rational discourse about touchy subjects appears to be largely impossible. I expected better from HN. It doesn‘t follow that because you apparently hold an absolutist stance regarding what you consider freedom to be, that I am on the opposite end of this absolutism.

So providing an effective means of protecting depressed non-adults from the frictionless purchase of above-laboratory strength chemicals to potentially kill themselves by as trivial a measure as verifying age on delivery is somehow infringing on your liberty. Got it.

I had been using Stripe for a short time a couple of years back. I looked into collecting sponsorships and donations for OSS development via BuyMeACoffee (I strongly advise against them).

As expected, just a couple of bucks accumulated. Then a user sent an unsolicited $15 donation, along with an accompanying comment, asking for macOS user support, for help solving a user issue entirely unrelated to my project. I declined, explained the situation and offered to refund the donation. I never received a reply, but immediately after, I received a chargeback notification. Stripe took the $15 from my account as well as a $15 chargeback fee. The user claimed fraud. An appeal went unanswered, despite me providing all required proof.

In the end, this little experiment cost me money. It also opens up a disturbing avenue of hurting someone financially, given enough credit cards and chargebacks.

Those are very good questions I don’t have an immediate answer for. As with many things regarding human beings, it’s complicated. I don’t believe the best place to discuss them is a flagged submission on HN. If you feel like talking (well, writing) this through a bit more, my email address is in my profile.

> Why should I be inconvenienced because a rounding-error’s worth of people made the choice, of their own free will, to misuse a product to harm themselves?

I guess I’m not surprised that if self-obsessed people lacking nuance and empathy grow in number everywhere that they are also present on HN. Just look at the wording. I’ve noticed them more frequently as of late, in threads regarding war, death and suffering.

Furthermore, to claim a severely depressed teenager is a fully-formed person doing something “of their own free will” betrays fundamental ignorance regarding what depression is, as well as how teenagers function.

My interpretation is that Horizon obviously sucks. Bugs have never prevented an exciting experience from being exciting.

Crisis, combined with the pseudo-anonymity of the internet has a tendency to encourage people to show who they really are – and amplify their worst instincts. Unfortunately this leads to the conclusion that many (if not most) of those commenting online are full of shit.

A German word, “Realsatire” comes to mind. As you might guess from the words alone, it describes something so absurd, you wouldn’t believe it not to be an exaggeration if you didn’t experience it yourself.

How would your client know what other clients have uploaded to other clients?

I’ve tried it before: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux with X and regular as well as tiling WMs. In the end I found no productive advantage to just using Rectangle [1] and LaunchBar [2] on macOS. The system mostly works and enables access to all the Unix software I need. Most of the time I just need a shell, tmux and a web browser.

The ongoing fiddling around – to this day – with a substandard experience regarding battery life, WiFi performance and GPU issues as well as HiDPI especially on laptops is a dealbreaker for me.

But then again, that may be a major purpose of desktop Unix, Linux especially: to enable those who see fiddling around (read: hacking) as an end in itself. After all, a dedicated car mechanic will never be truly happy driving a Toyota.

[1]: https://rectangleapp.com/

[2]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

It’s probably impossible to track that with any meaningful precision. Historically it’s the (central) tracker that implements the bookkeeping.

Since when are vaccines or has any medical treatment been about “guarantees”?