Meh, so Google knows your wifi password. So what? You think US intelligence will be calling up Google for that? Those protocols were backdoored before the first design went on a whiteboard. And they know your ___location? So what? You’ve been able to triangulate any cell phone within meters from day 1. It’s just how the cell towers function, no getting around that. Terrorists, smart drug dealers and murderers already know to leave the phone behind. Google wants to sell you stuff you don’t need. It’s a business, that’s their goal.

> I wonder how many of the critics actually put on a headset and tried it out

I guess one of the main problems is that Meta so far failed to create a compelling reason to try special-purpose hardware.

No that’s a very poor cop out. They shouldn’t criticize something they haven’t experienced, it’s a lack of integrity.

> They shouldn’t criticize something they haven’t experienced, it’s a lack of integrity.

"They" do not exist. You completely fabricated an hypothesis where you "wondered" how many people criticized Meta's horizon worlds in spite if never trying them out.

Your "very poor cop out" is the strawman you put together.

Went to a Best Buy recently. The VR goggles were firmly fastened to the counter. No way to try them on. That would be a good start.

Good question --- one that I discovered the answer to a few years ago.

They now price match with Amazon. Yes, you heard that right. If Best Buy has the product, you can pick it up right now for exactly the same price as what you can order it for on Amazon.

But if you think about it, Best Buy is actually cheaper for most people --- because you're not paying the "Prime" tax. The down side is there is no way for Best Buy to match the product variety available on Amazon.

What do you like about it?

And why is it better than VRChat?

It’s a social environment w chat and such, but you can build the world from inside, kind of like CAD for the environment you inhabit. It’s ‘down the rabbit hole’ amazing. I think the critics are totally wrong. Meta’s a golden bet.

Google Plus was great software too. That's not always enough.

Openship is wrong name.

Did she save lives? The soldiers she protected went on to kill more people.

Sure, they killed people. But there's a second order effect: They also probably prevented the soldiers of the other side from killing more people.

Ok so was her act of protection a net saving of life or simply a different form of violence?

That's probably very hard to say.

But consequentialism/utilitarianism [1] isn't the only form of moral reasoning. By most forms of deontological [2] morality, saving someone's life is a good act by itself, even if the fella goes on to become a murderer later.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

[2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/

The first one. If you are trying to prevent loss of life, that is admirable. Even if the people you save choose to commit violence later, that is on them; the responsibility is not on everyone who had previously helped or healed a (potentially) violent actor.

But you’re saving a soldier, in an active warzone. You can’t pretend to be naive and say maybe they’re going to have a change of heart and become a flower farmer. By saving that life, you’re executing the future victims of that killer/soldier. That you don’t actually pull the trigger on those victims is neither here nor there.

Of course she did. Just like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki "saved lives".

why not plug the mac mini into a battery? remove the psu and get a 12v battery.

why would you want that though? you want it on in your bag as you’re traveling? If you can power a screen, then you can power the mm. It doesn’t make sense and the mm boot instantly now

Three years to make a screwdriver. That says it all

No it doesnt. Have you ever developed any product?

Yea, I have. But look designing something often comes from the heart. You see a need and dream of filling it as a foothold for the next person in their experience. It’s a conquest, for others. But someone that designs a new screwdriver, with a trillion already made, is in a different place. You can extrapolate the world view from what people create, or aspire to.

Windows is a terrible OS. I don't even consider it an operating system, rather just malware that imitates macOS.

Which is a real shame, since MacOS has been imitating Unix since the beginning of time. And nowadays it doesn't even do that well, seeing how you can't run most containers without a second kernel running in a sidecar VM.

It's true what they say, there is no good operating system under the sun.

> Which is a real shame, since MacOS has been imitating Unix since the beginning of time.

Hmm? Mac OS being unix based is new. Just from 2001, with OS X.

And I wouldn't say it's imitating, it's just a BSD unix under the hood.

> seeing how you can't run most containers without a second kernel running in a sidecar VM

That's because they don't want to put the effort in to do a Mac OS specific solution though. Not because they couldn't.

There should be laws against these 'look at my clever wiz kid' articles. It's not that far off from beauty pageants and equally sick and pretentious. I remember just last week here in Berkeley seeing a young teenager playing Beethoven's 9th on an electric keyboard, perfectly. He was playing on the street and had all of $10 in change in his bowl. The look of misery on his face as his fingers effortlessly worked out the melody was astounding. He looked like a caged animal, living out his parent's dream in captivity. $50 says he blows his brains out by his thirties. This is abuse plain and simple.

Really? This kid clearly cares about the world and wanted to apply herself to a problem. There should be a law against rewarding such initiative with publicity? She's 17. When I was that age, I was completely bored to death by what I was "learning" in high school and I had one foot out the door.

With regards to that musical kid... I've got resting bitch face. When I'm focused on a difficult task, it's way worse; I call it "thinking murder face." I'm a musician, and if I'm playing a complex piece, I couldn't smile if I tried, even though I'm loving every second of what I'm doing.

Anytime there says “there aught to be a law…” there almost never should be.

That said, I agree the whiz kid articles are dumb, but not for the reasons you listed. More just “yea, let’s see how they do when they don’t have infinite time and zero responsibilities”.