AshDene

I'm neither an expert nor an american, but the idea that RFK Jr running as a third party candidate will hurt the democrats seems strange to me.

His policies, which can be summed up as "deny reality", align very closely with the modern republican party, not the democrats. It's hard to imagine that he would pull more votes away from Biden than Trump. Are there some people who would vote based on name recognition? Maybe... but surely it can't be that many? Meanwhile "Trump but not a rapist" must appeal to a number of the evangelical republicans...

#politics

x.ai will "work closely with Tesla".

Is this just a way for Elon to scam all the other Tesla (stock) owners out of the huge amount of money Tesla has invested into AI hardware? Tesla has invested a huge amount of money into it, designing their own very different custom silicon for their data center's even, something that only the likes of Google has done. It's hard to believe that "working closely with another company" and sharing the benefit of that investment is in Tesla's best interests.

Sort of like how it's hard to believe that Telsa engineers "volunteered" to work at Twitter for weeks/months and that wasn't just Elon miss-appropriating Tesla resources...

Or a glass house costing millions of dollars in materials is a good faith use of funds...

#technology

Apple's Vision Pro is incredibly cheap. Low in price, not expensive.

It's easy to get sticker shock because so are all modern computers, and it's ever so slightly less incredibly cheap, but it's still incredibly cheap.

The general rule of thumb for pricing is to start by asking "how much value does this provide to the purchaser" and try and price it just under that. The average professional uses a computer as their main tool of trade, it is absolutely necessary for their trade, and makes them $$$/year. Apart from competition driving prices down, that's how much computers would cost. The vision pro is an order of magnitude below that price. If you view it as targeted at the class of people that fly around the world constantly (and thus can't use a desktop) it might even be two orders of magnitude below that price.

The average American owns 4/5ths of a car (including kids and so on in that statistic). The average price of a new car in the US is just shy of $50,000. That's an order of magnitude more than the Vision Pro costs. Indeed just the difference between the sale price and the base models of a car is an order of magnitude more than the Vision Pro costs. To suggest that there isn't a population that can afford to buy (new) computers at Vision Pro prices is ridiculous.

While we're at it, for a good portion of the population computers are more important than cars, despite the fact that they spend an order of magnitude more on cars than computers.

All this is to say, the money is there, Apple is just trying to capture it. Given that there are no serious (capable) competitors at this point, there's no reason to believe that they'll fail because of pricing.

#apple

Pet peeve of the day: Games with "puzzles" that can only be solved by trying a bunch of different plausible answers.

If you know the right answer (but not that it is the right answer), and the reasoning behind the right answer, but you still can't tell that it's the right answer without engaging the games mechanic to check if it's the right answer, it's not a puzzle. It's just a game a brute forcing answers.

#gaming

I'm new to this whole #apple development thing.

Am I right in thinking that I need to upgrade to the MacOS 14.0 beta to use the new SwiftData apis?

How bad an idea is it to use that beta on my laptop?

Is it safe to assume that 90%+ of users quickly upgrade to new MacOS versions after they're released?

Are there any RTSes with no scrolling. Just display the entire map really small all at once?

It seems like it could be an interesting format on large screens these days.

#gaming