until whatever VR app has a plug in for every thing you’d want to do on your phone

Isn’t that the big difference with Apple’s visionOS vs the other VR headsets? It’s basically iPadOS, where you can run multiple apps at the same time and move windows around, without anything needing to know what else is going on, and everything uses the standard window and widgets toolkits. Unlike the Meta Quest, which is basically SteamOS where you’re switching between Unity games that take over the whole device and they all have to re-invent the world with slightly different controls and everything.

“A couple of days” seems like the worst of both worlds - it needs to be charged often, but not on a fixed schedule, so you have to keep tabs on the battery and plan ahead.

Personally I just have a charger on my night stand and charge it every night alongside my phone. It’s an easy routine and I don’t want to sleep with a watch on anyway (smart or not) since when I do I eventually get a rash on my wrist.

For those who want to do sleep tracking, they need to speed up charging so that the “charging while I take a shower” works for those of us who take shorter showers

Some places are basically cashless already though, look at Sweden

Windows NT historically ran on lots of CPU architectures, PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, Itanium, etc, and that included the bundled software like 3D Pinball. I would have expected it to still be quite portable.

For tech stuff, the best reviews to read are always the 1 or 2 star reviews, since you can see if the people complaining have legit gripes or they’re just idiots who bought the wrong thing for their task.

It mostly just shows how crazy fast modern SSDs are that they can do swap duties with performance that is acceptable to many people. The SSD in my MacBook Pro can read/write at 5-6 GB/s. That means it can write out the whole 8 GB of memory of one of those smaller machines in under 2 seconds. As long as your current task fits in 8 GB and you’re fine waiting 2 seconds to switch between apps…

Incentives like that are a lot easier your entire national population is smaller than some cities.

Maybe you should split your country up into smaller, independent regions that can govern more effectively.

You could call them “States”

The Korean laws around streaming services are absolutely bonkers https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2022/09/sender-pays-what-lessons-european-policy-makers-should-take-from-south-korea/

It used to be you’d search for something, click on the results and load the ads on the page with the info.

Then google started adding their snippets with direct answers, and yes, there has been an uproar from content sites about that. But some fraction of people still click through for more context.

With LLMs, all that traffic is 100% gone.

You certainly can run freight trains off of electrified tracks. E.g. the iron ore trains in Scandinavia, which go up to 8500 tons, using a pair of locomotives that together output 10 MW https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmbanan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iore

The US is running longer and longer trains as you have observed (up to a max of 14,000 tons), but that is only because they keep fucking over their staff so they quit, so they have to do that out of necessity due to a lack of drivers. It’s far more dangerous as it increases the risk of derailment, it means the trains can’t fit in sidings (which screws over scheduling as trains can’t pass each other) and ought to be stopped.

The higher the density of the city, the better public transit works. You can live in Tokyo or London and get by without a car, but everyone in the world can’t (or won’t) live in Tokyo-dense cities. It doesn’t make any financial sense building a subway in a city of only 100,000.

My favorite is the IEA forecast for Solar adoption

Selling their own music and maps subscriptions, ads, selling location data. Enshittification.

GM also views the new infotainment system as a way to generate more revenue from subscription services, including music streaming, audiobooks and vehicle maintenance. GM’s chief executive Mary Barra has set a target of $20 billion USD (about $27 billion CAD) to $25 billion (roughly $33 billion CAD) in annual revenue from subscriptions by 2030

I love nuclear but China is building them as fast as they can and they’re still being massively outpaced by their own solar installations. If we hadn’t shut down most of the research and construction in the 80’s it would have been great, but it’s not going to be a solution to the huge power requirement growth from EVs and shit like AI in the “short” term of 1-20 years.

If we’re still talking about AI, you can ramp up the AI training and batch workloads when the sun is shining and stop them overnight. It’s one of those things like aluminum smelters where you can adjust the load

The big companies like that get the laptops at cost because they sign up for juicy support contracts, which is where the real money is

People keep buying them and signing up for an ink subscription. If people are that dumb, they’d be insane NOT to milk them for cash

This grant was originally not going to even allow satellite providers - the idea was it was going to go to hundreds of small fiber and wireless ISPs who needed the money to build infrastructure to rural areas that is not profitable on the face of it.

A one-time grant like this isn’t going to make or break Starlink - they’re not building anything infrastructure with the money (the satellites burn up in a few years and need to be replaced - are they going to need ongoing grants?), so basically it’s just giving free money to SpaceX. Whereas if the money went to a company building fiber or wireless repeaters that money would pay itself back over and over again and the fees would just pay for maintenance

"RDOF rules set speeds of 25/3 Mbps as the minimum allowed for broadband service delivered by winners. However, participants were permitted to bid at four different performance tiers: 25/3 Mbps, 50/5 Mbps, 100/20 Mbps and 1 Gbps/500 Mbps"

If SpaceX had bid on a lower tier of service that they were actually capable of delivering, they would have been fine.

This grant was not designed to fund the development of new technology, it was designed to build infrastructure (fiber, 5G, WISPs, etc) and they were originally going to exclude satellites from the bidding completely. The companies who would have used the grant to build fiber or set up point-to-point wireless would have had no problem meeting the requirements since it’s all proven technology.

I like using wired headphones when I take phone calls. The headset profile that Bluetooth switches to when it needs to activate a microphone sounds like total ass and I have trouble understanding what people say as it is.