In Sweden there's an hatred for EV's.

Many of my colleagues at work complain that there's no "soul" in new EV's. They feel like it's smartphones on wheels, and there's no end to their excuses on why you should never get an EV and it's a big scam, explodes, freezes in the winter, low range etc.

When I talk with my coworkers (95 percent whom have regular ICE cars), they absolutely LOATHE EV cars, one of them passionately talks about the lack of smells like exhaust, gasoline and "real car feel", he likes the wrooom sound, he likes the shift stick and oils leaking from a car, he talks about it as if it was a thing that's is living.

Me? I've never been interested in car, I'm one of those who doesn't have a drop of oil in my blood (figuratively speaking), and I've used my cars over the years as little as I can get away with. I don't get that "gotta drive" feeling with an regular gasoline driven car, and I also always think of the startup gasoline costs everytime I have to go somewhere, warming them up and starting is expensive.

Then I got my first EV. And the world changed for me. For the first time in my life I got bitten by the "car" thing. I've never driven a car as much as I have when I got my first EV.

All the things I hate about cars was totally gone. No more smells, no more noise, no more need to purchase an insanely expensive car just to have silence while driving. And best of all, I just plug it into my wall charger when home, drive off wherever I like and I do that a lot now, because there's literally no cost associated with it, I can even plug my portable charger in at work, so even the low cost of electricity is reduced even further.

And albeit for 30+ years I've driven manually, I've always hated the manual stick. Usually in the morning - gear 1 - is cranky, even if not faulty, it's an artform to get it to be smooth, and you need to regulate and adjust the clutch till it hits the sweetspot, sometimes the weather makes the clutch pedal cranky, and it's even more annoying, you need to get it up in 500-2000 rpms to get up that garage hill I have, and it's never been comfortable for me, it works - but it's an annoyance.

Also when the neighbors warm up their car early in the morning, the deep-humming bassy sound resonates for 10-30 minutes and my mornings with these fossil fuel drivers are a pure nightmare, I've never liked it, people let their car run for half hours to hours when they come home, wrooom wroom, and they keep adjusting their cars, and fiddling with them, good for them - everyone needs a hobby, but does it have to be this annoying?

And the shiftless driving is amazing, much better than the 1-2 + automatic gear normal cars had, because in my EV there's just the traditional looking shift stick which looks cool, but it's essentially just Park - neutral, Drive and Reverse - that's really it.

And for the driving, there's two regenerative paddles behind the wheel, and I love those, I can adjust the speed with those in traffic, regenerative braking, and I use the hard-brakes when needed, but it's rare. It's actually kinda super comfortable just to do one-pedal driving, the traffic flow is so buttery smooth.

I can see my ICE counterparts constantly pressing their brakes and adjusting to the traffic while I just glide to match the speed, no gearing, no clutching, no mistakes, no stopping and running...it's the future.

I'll never go back.

At least in the Scandinavian countries I'd say they've been replaced by "fiber landlines" instead.

4-5G is still not reliable enough for gaming, and in the big crowded cities even regular use can still be an issue, but Fiber is always reliable, way better than the old dangling landlines were you could be pretty sure to lose your internet connection during a storm.

I'd say RIP landlines, you were great for 100+ years, but it's time to let go. Fiber is technically a landline, but we use them slightly differently if you don't count teams and other video-chat services for meetings, otherwise the wireless phones aka smartphones are ok for what they do, they've brought us an instant library in our pockets.

And computer clubs was a thing.

I still miss the days when every age group who got their first home computer came to meet up once a week in my city back then.

We often didn't have much software, and what we have we shared, and we often coded stuff ourselves, I remember fondly when I got
my first commodore 64 and every guest would gratefully play my weird mix of Arcade shoot-em-up I had coded in Machine-Language/Assemby code.

My first Lan party was awesome, I remember 2509+ people with kids dragging along mum and tons of heavy CRT monitors and their computers
lifelong friendships were formed and you met people with different skillsets, and oh boy was it fun.

We totally need that again.

Wait until your kids discovers VR, and escapes even deeper into a world they prefer, and when they are forced to come out for work in real life, they're not gonna be able to recognize anything, because their entire world is a made up one.

...than the ABB robots we've been using since the 80s to assemble, weld and paint cars?

Right now, preferably yesterday.

You don't want people to end up in misery, but you want your cheap stuff fast and cheap - to your door - preferably yesterday.

For some reason all ChatGPT stuff is blocked by our corporate at work.
We have Microsoft as our partner, and it's advertising Copilot for us all - ALL the time.

But here's the fun part.

We can't use it.

For example it will suggest an answer, but it just stop with something went wrong and searches forever.
Copilot's A.i. is blocked.

Yup, thats useful.

Has always been natural to me.

My mind adapts to visual stimuli very easily since a very young age in the 80s, I always had an insanely vivid imagination.
When I learned to draw (went to Animation School) and first learned how to draw 3D by hand, it came very naturally to me.
Then I quickly went to using 3Dmax (also known as 3D studio max later)

And my mind quickly adapted that way of visualising things, I often had fun with my internal visualisation powers, and powerful it is.

You may not believe this (I've totally given up telling my friends how I see the world by now, no one even grasp it)

But hear me out - I can do anything with everything around me.

Inside my mind I can quickly visualize an entire city, the entire store, properties around me and the people I see around me in an instant.
I can create scenarios (and it's a ton of fun) where I can add physicial events to just about anything, imagine a water pipe that burst out of a man hole
or rips up the streets, cars being tossed over, every single detail will be there (probably not entirely physically correct) but it sure looks like it.

I can literally re-arrange the furniture inside a huge home in an instant inside of my mind, I can break things into particles, parts, and arrange them together
any way I want inside my mind, it's almost like a superpower. I can simulate a building flooding, the grocerices on the shelves will fly across with the water, crash into things, things get wet, rips appart according to material qualities, and it's absolutely spectaccular.

No idea what to do with that kind of visualization powers. But I've always been capable of doing this, pretty much anything I can think of.

...Because I have a Meta Quest 3, and it doesn't like bad words.

For example I have a very bad word as a part of my Router password.
If I use any other router password I will be allowed to submit that in the Meta Quest 3 browser.
But it won't let me submit in the "field form" for Password with that bad word in it.

But it works on the PC with that word.

Yeah, as if they're going to be "that open". Nope and nope!

Quite literally!

Kids should not learn to code?
As if A.I. is perfect or ever would be.
In fact - more than EVER should kids absolutely learn how to code.

We're in deep trouble with Generation Alpha, they've grown up with a smartphone thumb muscle memory, they don't know anything else than being a consumer of content and products.

They should get creative and have fun coding, and if they don't - we'll have a serious lack of skilled minds to see what really goes on behind the mystery world of programs, apps and software. We need those eyes to become super skilled at finding flaws the powers that be will not want us to find.

We need the future to have ethical hackers, people who are interested in what is going on under the hood, if we don't have those with the basic skills - we're doomed, for real.

For the same interest an automechanic was interested in cars as a kid, and wanted to know what makes it run - for the same reason kids needs to be curious by themselves to find out, why - why is this doing that, and even more important - how can I take BACK control of it?

Oh yessir, we need kids to become coders!

The sub-orbital "Who'll get hit".

The chances are 1 in a billion, they say - will you be the "lucky" winner to have space debree hit you during your sunday morning walk?

Just look at youtube the last few weeks, every single youtube video is a repeat of itself, same experience, same amazement over some tech demos.

Fun until it just ain't and reality sets in, there just isn't enough stuff to use it, or even have fun with it. Sure, I can buy the "cinema" experience, it's gotta be grand for that, but it cost over 3 grand and that only makes it an expensive showoff piece, which is good enough for some, but not for most.

Take the nearest competitor which ofc. is the Quest series. Sure, no one is playing in the Metaverse, but that's not even it, it got SteamVR, it's got Bigscreen for movie experiences, and the resolution is good enough for the same entertainment value the 7 x pricier competition have with much less FOV and smaller lenses.

Just to make things worse, it's front heavy WITHOUT a battery in it, and you're tethered to a battery to boot, with a cable strap down your body, not most peoples idea of fun, its cumbersome, it will always remind you that you're not in a different place, much like the first generation of HTC Vive did with is clunky headset and cables you needed to untwirl every 5 minutes.

And despite it's relatively heavy processing power, it's nowhere near powerful enough to handle VR with that insane resolution, this was the problem that the Pimax series with 8K resolution suffered, there's STILL not enough computer power in a Desktop to handle that kind of resolution, the way Apple solves it is by blurring the things you don't look at, hence lowering the resolution and polygonal details.

And the last but most important thing, Quest has built up an entire ecosystem around their platform, and they're open to other players such as Microsoft and Steam VR, with Xbox support, All the thousands of VR games from Steam VR and Meta-store together is enough to make it a viable entertaining long-term platform.

Apples closed ecosystem and draconian demands from their developers and "partners" - not so much. It was doomed to be a showpiece where Apple "went there" tried that, and kinda wonders where it will go, but still - closed and restricted.

They would have had a winning chance if they opened up to the entire world, and included a few controllers to open up to Games, but Games isn't Apples thing, theyr'e so "oooh serious", and that's fine, it's a niché to be "serious only", it will sell - but the Vision Pro won't because it's embarking on an area that ALREADY is very niché, and took over 8 years to build up from scratch. And you don't built that up by starting off "closed" to the rest of the world.