Apple and Meta spent ~10 yrs and ~$80B making VR headsets knowing that 1/3rd of VR users get motion sickness, and that it was far worse for women, 17% of women versus 8% for men getting "clinically concerning" sickness. That was how desperate Zuck and Cook were to own the next PC platform.

New Glenn booster sticks the landing. Love it! We now have two reusable rocket boosters, Falcon 9 and New Glenn. Welcome to the party, Blue Origin!

mood

I appreciate you taking the time to read my posts. I don't expect engagement beyond that, but it does bring me joy to see the that notification indicator, and I wanted to say thank you for your likes and replies. What a marked difference from the other platform, where the notices caused me anxiety.

A film legend, Tatsuya Nakadai, has died. www.imdb.com/name/nm06199...

mood

If you haven't seen Wim Wenders' "Until the End of the World," it's really good. You want the 5 hour cut. If that one grabs you, then the 20 hr cut :D Also, one of the best soundtracks ever. Original songs from Talking Heads, Julee Cruise, Lou Reed, R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, and more.

Want to avoid being followed around the web by ad providers and brands? Get Firefox.

Nobody's ready for two lead guitars.

Happy 21st birthday, Firefox. This is our community-funded 2 page New York Times launch announcement. The names of nearly 10,000 small donor fans are designed into the first page.

Updated

If you're on a web page that makes it difficult to grab an image, and a screenshot won't do, Firefox has your back. Open Page Info (ctrl+i) and select the Media tab. Now you've got a sortable list of every image on the page for easy download or referencing directly by its URL.

I used to read more, and my plan to get back into it is revisiting favorite series from school years. Where should I begin? Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat Farmer's Riverworld Moorcock's Elric Saga Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber Pournelle and Niven's The Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand

I've just learned that Zohran Mamdani is a Daredevil fan, and rightly so. I like him even more.

Meta told staff responsible for vetting questionable ads that they weren’t allowed to take action if it would cost Meta more than $135 million. Meta *policy* explicitly blocks staff from doing anything about the biggest scammers. They are too big to fail at Meta. Zuck is a craven piece of shit.

That Meta is happily getting ~10% of its revenue from scam ads should be all the reason you need to adopt an ad blocker. You owe these ghouls nothing. The only trustworthy blocker out there is uBlock Origin. It will protect you from security threats, privacy invasions, and scams. ublockorigin.com

If the Epic vs Google settlement is approved, I think one of the most consequential changes will be one-click install of new app stores from the web free from scary warnings. You will be able to visit a website, click a button, and have their full featured app store on your home screen.

Tesla's gen 2 Roadster, announced in 2017, was slated for production in 2020. Official word now is the second half of 2027. Of course priorities shift as the world changes. No question. Thing is, Tesla strung people along, insisting for 7 years its priorities hadn't shifted. That's not okay.

Honda's decided the car industry's pursuit of increased vehicle rigidity is misguided and is building more flexible cars. "When a vehicle goes around a corner the outside of the structure will deform to push the outer wheel down and load up the grip to help improve steering and cornering..." Neat.

Forgot to comment yesterday, the Epic vs Google settlement looks pretty good, and it's global. Google can't block 3rd-party payment systems, can't block pre-installation of other app stores, can't arrange Play Store exclusives, and will list alternative app stores at its Play Store. Progress.

Internal Meta documents show last year it projected it would earn 10% of annual revenue, $16B, running ads for scams and banned goods. Meta displays about 15 billion of these scam ads to users every day. Zuck helps scammers screw his users because it makes him richer for zero cost and zero risk.

Vision Pro has text fidelity that's equivalent to what you'd see on a 2010-era 14" laptop with 1366 x 768 resolution. If the idea of working on a 15 year old budget laptop screen brings you joy, you're gonna love doing productivity work on Vision Pro.

Apple launched its AI assistant, Siri, on iPhone 4S in October 2011. 14 years later, not only has it squandered a huge AI lead, it has now thrown in the towel by outsourcing Siri intelligence to Google. Tim Cook knows how to keep Wall St. happy, but is absolute dog shit at products and technology.

2 years ago Sam Altman said, "It’s totally hopeless to compete with us." This week he asked the government for loan guarantees. What a miserable lying crook.

Apple has lost its way. "Make the OS readable" is an option buried in the accessibility settings.

Yeah.

mood

I predict that vibe coders will be first against the wall when the business suffers meaningful financial or legal consequences from using LLM AIs to write software. Some who can demonstrate competence in the fundamentals can make it, but generally the machine won't be blamed, the operator will.

Our International Space Station has been continuously occupied since November 2, 2000. For 25 years, humans from Earth have been living and doing science on a ~1,000 cubic meter* space craft orbiting the planet at 28,000 kilometers per hour** Amazing! * ~35,500 cubic feet ** 17,500 miles per hour

The other game we played a lot was Monopoly. Kinda strange in retrospect. Monopoly and D&D are pretty much opposites. Both use dice, but one's a zero-sum, winner take all contest, and the other is a framework for creativity and collaborative problem-solving. I wonder what the adults were thinking.

My early childhood was in large and busy house. For a time it was 8 adults and 13 kids, and a bunkhouse next door with several young men in their late teens. One of my fondest memories of that house is me and about half the clan sitting around the living room playing Dungeons & Dragons. Good times!

Happy 41st anniversary, Dragon Lance. Weiss & Hickman's Dragonlance Chronicles, and their follow-up trilogy, Legends, remain among my favorite fantasy books. I attached to them like I did Lord of the Rings, reading and re-reading, until the spines split and whole sections fell out.

Sam Altman got all pissy and bailed on the podcast. Gerstner: How can a company with $13 billion in revenue make a $1.4 trillion spending commitment? Altman: OpenAI is doing great, with revenue far exceeding that number. Secondly, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I'll help you find a buyer.

Napkin math: Meta Quest 3 virtual display text clarity is worse than a 1280x720 physical PC screen. Apple Vision Pro virtual displays are only a bit better than 1366x768 and well shy of 1920x1080. If you are accustomed to "retina" quality displays, you're not gonna enjoy working on those one bit.

Most web browsers should have been extensions.

Commodore 64 was the best.

mood

Do you need a 4K or an 8K TV screen to get the best viewing experience? This excellent calculator will tell you.

This is why Apple didn't ship the original head mount with a top strap. The thick white band adds at least 50% more dork.

Apple is retconning Vision Pro as an enthusiast device, never meant for the mainstream. Consider: Apple spent ~$30B and 10yrs of focus bringing it to market. Suppliers expected a quick ramp, as high as 18M units/yr. Tim Cook was on Good Morning America and in Vanity Fair calling it our next PC.

Apple thinks this is good and legible.

I've been a part of making web browsers since 1998. I've tested Comet from Perplexity․ai and Atlas from OpenAI, and I am thoroughly unimpressed. Don't waste your time.

OpenAI's Chief Apps Bro told employees at a recent all-hands that he was looking into how advertising could benefit users. A year ago Sam Altman said ads was a "last resort" and "uniquely unsettling." Now he "finds ads somewhat distasteful but not a nonstarter." They're villains, all of them.

The first "killer app" for iPhone was the internet in your pocket, web, email, and messaging at your finger tips from anywhere in the world. The second killer app came a year later, the App Store. Vision Pro had no killer app when it launched 21 months ago, and it lacks one still today.

Snap thinks this is a good look for its marketing video.

Love it.

Samsung has released its $1,799 Galaxy XR mixed reality face PC. The company spent 2 years and approx. $1B making it. Samsung will build ~100K units. Galaxy XR will be the junior version of Apple's 10 years and $33B R&D for a $3,599 Vision Pro face PC with a production run of ~500K units.

Tim Cook was on Good Morning America telling the most mainstream audience imaginable that this was our next PC, that it could do everything our Macs and iPhones do and more. This is the personal computing future he wanted for all of us.

Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac: "Apple wanted to get [Vision Pro] into the hands of developers and early adopters so that it could begin the journey of jointly figuring out how it will be useful." Apple doesn't ship without a view on usefulness. It was never a dev kit. It is a failed consumer product.

mood