Home Depot does this with “smart” pricetags on appliances. They don’t move, and they’re always up to date. I don’t hate these one bit. I just look for yellow background that says “this shit’s 40% off”. I don’t like the CEO’s politics, but I don’t like ANY CEO’s politics, so I can’t hold that against anyone in particular.

If these could provide meaningfully good augmented reality experiences, I wouldn’t hate them – I even might like them – but I just know that some fuckwit is going to use them for evil, so if they’re never built that’d be great.

If they are made, they’ll inevitably be used to display German scat porn over the chocolate ice-cream one day, and I look forward to mocking that event on social media with everyone else. With a little luck, they’ll be regulated into a smoldering crater by Internet of Shit laws.

Another interesting point: those fuckers are heavy. It’s very easy to tug them hard enough to open a glass door, only to have a telescreen swing all the way past the point where it latches open. Leaving it that way is one way to voice one’s displeasure with this misfeature in a way that will be felt in the pocketbook.

When I see these things, I’m tempted to walk over to the hardware aisle, go pick up a hammer, and then make holes in every fucking telescreen I see in the cooler aisle.

I mean, I don’t, ’cause I’m not an asshole, but I can’t say I’m not tempted.

You’re being a twit and posting flamebait, but, I am an Apple fanboi who wants a thicker iPhone. I want the unholy spawn of a Motorola Lex L11 and an iPhone 15. iOS is non-negotiable, as is an Apple M-series SOC. An iPhone Pro camera array is negotiable, but I’m going to need a hell of a reason to give that up. I’d also like some pogo pin charging action like the Lex L10, potentially using the same pinout as MagSafe, for both cradle charging like is standard on ham radios and professional handheld transceivers, as well as for better “dumbass tripped on the cable” damage prevention.

USB-C is another sticking point; this will by default be filled with a Yubikey 5c Nano pretending to be a dust cover.

Do I think this product is ever going to happen? Hell no! It’s like a market of 1–100 customers, unless police departments, intelligence, or the DOD realizes that this device would be perfect for them. (Add a laser rangefinder to it, and it’d be a GREAT device for infantry to call in artillery strikes) But it’s nice to know what your ideal device would be, so you can tell quickly whether something is an upgrade, downgrade, or sidegrade, and pretend to be decisive about it.

Devil’s Advocate: the starships are unbelievably expensive, redundant, and reliable. The things we’re recovering are cheap, attritable drones.

Or d) somebody’s deep-black-budget drone program that’s been using “generative design” and “high entropy alloys” since the 1990s? The combination of those two techniques would result in some really fucking alien looking devices, while having a more prosaic origin story. Remember, the US is very much in the business of building UFOs. And that’s just the ones that were deployed operationally. Tacit Blue was retired in 1985, but only declassified in 1996. What the fuck else are they flying?

https://chimeraos.org

Might be the solution to your disdain for gaming on Windows.

So maybe you’re just looking for a good excuse to do planetary-scale engineering?

Well, you may have a point