Not to mention that screens tend not to move with you on the Vision Pro, and neither do physical keyboards and trackpads. Their text input story, other than with a keyboard (where you might as well use a real computer) is basically nonexistent, and a "spatial computer" that can only be used for media consumption device and gaming doesn't make much sense (because you might as well buy a Quest for a fraction of the price).

AVP has serious problems when lying down, though. Yes, if you can get a virtual screen positioned correctly before you lie down, it works, but try repositioning it while lying flat, and it jumps in random directions and is completely as unusable as the Quest 2.

AVP also lacks any obvious way for the user to mark a screen as "floating". One way I'd like to use it is as a media consumption device while out for a walk. Have a picture-in-picture with the screen floating in front of me. But I haven't been able to figure out a good way to do that. I'm pretty sure the Quest actually does have a way to do that, at least in some apps, though I don't remember how off the top of my head. So for at least one consumption mode, Apple's offering is actually inferior in some ways (though I'll grant you that its image quality is much better).

Passive LEDs have blocked light for decades. That's solvable. So in theory, if you combined a projection-style setup like Google Glass used with a 1-bit LCD panel, you might be able to do a passable job. But I've obviously never tried it, so I could be wrong.

It doesn't mirror the MacBook screen. It blacks it out and replaces it entirely, making it the ultimate privacy screen.

But you have to either use the computer's keyboard/trackpad or an external Bluetooth keyboard and mouse/trackpad/trackball, so you can't usefully use it as the only display unless you're sitting right at the computer, so it is basically useless unless you are working on an airplane, on a bus, in a coffee shop, or in an open office and you don't want other people seeing what you're doing.

Georgia.

One human pyromaniac with a bic lighter can probably do more damage.

I'm picturing a robot powered dog sled.

It is funny how you think that it is the red states that will kill this. Noncompetes are already not enforceable in many right-to-work states. It's the blue states where noncompete clauses had weight.

I actually believe that. Probably because that's what Hasan Ibraheem is quoted as saying in this article. He was already part of an organization No Tech For Apartheid. Here's the requisite quote from the article in case you don't feel like clicking on a link.

I don't see why this should be a surprising take. There are quite a few people that have become professional protestors. Nine people sat for a while in an office building with some very nice banners and somehow this has been in the national news for a week. These people came prepared, they were well-funded, and they clearly were plugged into the media well beforehand. He's done it once. I am sure that he has a long career ahead of him in this profession.

I want to make this very clear. I actually applaud this guy for his work. I am quite sure that he is genuine in his regard for Palestine, and it is hard to argue that it isn't an important topic. I just don't believe, even for a second, that any of this was a surprise to him. Hasan used his job at Google to catapult himself into this role.

It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.

I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.

I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.

Apple's only advantage is that they are seen as a status symbol by certain people. Apple has gone out of its way to make sure that you can tell if someone you are talking to is using an iPhone. If they aren't using an iPhone then the experience is degraded significantly. There are a million video chat programs, and they all work great, but the cool kids all want to Facetime. In group chats they care what colors bubbles they have.

That works great in places where there are a lot of Apple users, but it works against Apple in places where there is not. In China there are replacements for all of Apple's software that everyone uses, even if you have a fancy phone you aren't really in Apple's ecosystem. In essence you are buying an iPhone to become a second class citizen in all of the software you actually want to use. Everyone else is running Android.

Throw in major financial issues in China and all of a sudden Apple's phones look like a very poor choice, even without throwing politics in the mix.

Actually, I find it to work pretty well for that — better than a laptop screen, anyway.

What doesn't work well are:

• Low rate of iOS app compatibility — most iOS apps don't run on it, despite it theoretically being able to run them, because most developers don't check the checkbox
• No Mac app compatibility
• Zero keyboard or mouse control when controlling your Mac (i.e. you're still 100% tethered to the Mac when using it as a display)
• Almost zero games that are not part of Apple Arcade (subscription-only)
• Frequent inability to connect to nearby computers, and no way to figure out what's wrong, with the only reliable fix being a complete reboot of the Vision Pro

Basically, you can't do anything with it except in a few limited situations, and when you can, it's still a pain in the a**. It can give you a private screen for working in a cube farm or on an airplane, and that's about it. Mind you, its Wi-Fi support is miles ahead of what you can do with non-Apple hardware, which at least makes those things practical, but it is nowhere near good enough yet, IMO.

At some point, when the apps are there, this could be pretty cool, but right now, it really just isn't there.

Yeah, I'm overstating things a bit. I'm sure there are a certain percentage of people who aren't in power who want peace. But the problem is that the people with power mostly don't seem to want peace if it comes with any strings attached, and most of the people voting for them are too blinded by the rhetoric from their leaders to realize that both sides are the problem, not just one.

Until the overwhelming majority of people are willing to do what is needed to actually bring about peace — specifically, throwing out the people in power, running for office against them, amplifying the voices of the sane and reasonable, and speaking out constantly against abuse, oppression, prejudice, and violence, without regard to who is being abused or oppressed or being prejudiced against or committing the violence — I don't expect anything to change.

People have to not just want peace, but want peace badly enough to choose moderate leaders, knowing full well that their long-time enemies could easily take advantage of reduced militarism to do them harm. And that's hard. I get it. That's really, really hard. The tendency to "other" people who are not like us is so ingrained in human nature that even when we're taught not to do it, most people still seem to go out of their way to find different ways to do it. And that's doubly true when your actual life could be on the line.

But that's what it takes to have a lasting peace. That's the only way. One side has to take the first step by standing down, and given the lopsided power dynamic, nothing the Palestinians do will change anything, because all it takes is one bad seed deciding not to do so and killing some Israeli settler while shouting some anti-Israel chant, and Israel will send in missiles again. Israel, being the side with all the power, is the only side that is truly in the position to end this long-term, by actively choosing not to use their enormous military might against the Palestinians on an ongoing basis — actively choosing not to overreact — actively choosing not to punish all Palestinians for what are presumably the actions of a few — and instead using diplomatic means to coerce the Palestinian government into bringing the responsible parties to justice.

But that also depends on there actually being a functioning Palestinian government that isn't a branch of an extremist group. And that's not going to happen unless a whole lot of things change, and that change will take decades, and it only takes a single aggressive response by Israel to set such changes back by decades overnight, losing any goodwill that might have been built up prior to that point.

At this point, I don't see an obvious way out that doesn't involve massive third-party intervention. The Israeli and Palestinian governments have simply both done too many bad things over too many decades, creating an environment of distrust that won't be easily fixed. IMO, the threat of international action against both sides would go a long way towards pressuring both sides to come to the table in earnest and to stick to their promises for once.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe in the near future, Israel will stop this latest wave of attacks and will begin working to help the Palestinians rebuild (without putting Israeli settlers and businesses in the newly built houses and buildings). That would at least help repair trust a bit. The longer this goes on, however, the less likely a positive outcome seems.

Not if they're allowed civil autonomy. I'm not suggesting a plan where they would be *governed* by someone else, just one in which those governments don't have an active military or police force, relying instead on a neutral third party for all security for an extended period of time. And yeah, they might eventually grow to resent the rest of the world subjecting them to that, particularly if policing isn't even-handed. But them not being happy about it isn't in and of itself a good reason not to do so.

Realistically, neither side will trust the other side's negotiation to be in good faith, because both sides ignore any agreements whenever it suits them. Nothing short of a neutral third party tying their hands militarily can realistically fix this unless both sides *want* to change.

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.