"RoddyVision, please make all the cars look like hot rods and all the people walking look like babes on roller skates."

Sorry, but all RoddyVision allows you to do is pierce the alien signal and allow you to see things as they really are. Side affects include chronic migraines and an unfortunate tendency to run out of bubblegum.

...to an extent. Sure, the Army and Marines measure ground distances in kilometers and e.g. elevation in meters, and all services describe their weapons in terms of millimeters, but beyond that? The USAF and Navy still use nautical miles for distance, knots for speed, and feet for elevation. The navy still uses yards for range.

This is more accurate, and the reason is simple: those guys only see one color, and that's green (or blue for the Navy and Air Force) and there are no atheists in foxholes.

Just watching people walk around the grocery store juggling their phone (with their shopping list on it) while also needing their hands to reach for, pick up, and examine products seems like a good use case for "VR with 'ordinary' glasses" at a "reasonable price".

VR coupled w/input via hand gestures or voice could be used to:

• Show the price based on the UPC of the product being looked at.
• Check off items on the list.
• Show where the item is in the store.
• Scan an ingredient list for particular items (for those who fear there is gluten in their drinking water!)
• etc...

Home cooking could also benefit.

And that's without even thinking very hard or considering apps that would not be as popular.

However none of those require an "immersive" experience (and, in fact, users probably don't want "immersive" in apps that are just assisting in another activity rather than being the activity).

I'm largely in the same boat as you are....and while that is not my style, to buy $$ things only to return them....I might consider doing it.

I generally think it's sleazy to buy something with it being likely that you will return it because you don't "like" it. However when the product is available for testing "in store", but the access to it is intentionally limited to a scripted experience (and an unscripted experience would not damage the product) I don't think it's sleazy to "buy to try for real".

I was extremely disappointed by Three Body problem. I thought some of the concepts were pretty cool (I actually thought the part where the Trisolarians build the Sophons was great) and the the story through the lens of the Cultural Revolution was an interesting viewpoint. But damn, the writing sucked. Like you, I plodded on hoping it would get better and like you, I wondered if it was just the translation, or because I didn't have the right cultural background to get the cues, but ultimately... it's some good ideas that are just awfully executed.

Sell virtual "front row" tickets to NBA games. The NBA would add extra cameras and then write an application that intelligently stitches the video streams together into a real 3D image. Users could then experience something similar to sitting front row. There might be a market considering that front row NBA tickets are one of the few things that can make the Vision Pro look cheap.

If you "sneak" amendments into an agreement, arguably said agreement would be invalid because you were duplicitous which prevented a meeting of the minds.

Let's say I write you a letter (on paper) and I encrypt this letter using a cypher that only you and I know. The government intercepts this letter and asserts it contains evidence of a crime. Are you or I compelled to assist in the decryption of that letter? No? Then why should electronic communications be any different?

Beyond that, how does preemptive invasion of the privacy of all persons (which is exactly what backdoors in encryption amount to) so that, at some future time, the government can sift the communications of those who may have broken the law not equate to a general warrant?

Worse than that was the federal government asserting that you could not grow wheat on your own land for your own use because such constituted "interstate commerce." Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942) upheld that ridiculous notion.

Every change looks like corruption in the eyes of people who don't like it.

And corruption looks like evolution to some people.

Personally, I'm in favor of words meaning as much of the same thing over time as possible. It enhances communication and understanding. If you need a new meaning, you either need a new word or you need to explain yourself at a bit more length. Lest you "decimate" (cough) the listener's/reader's understanding... you get me?

[citation needed]

Aegis equipped ships have successfully hit ballistic missiles and satellites in testing (and probably under operational conditions as of last weekend), and both of those are, by definition, hypersonic targets. While the US Navy doesn't comment on what weapons a ship might be carrying, it's almost a certainty that all of them have some SM-3s in the magazines at this point.

The biggest current problem with the carrier groups projecting power is that their air wings have less combat power than they have had in the past due to both being smaller and composed entirely of strike fighters with relatively short ranges. Using half the Hornets as tankers solves the range problem but makes the availability problem worse in both the short and long terms. The F-35 appears to improve the range situation, shockingly (thought not by enough) and I would expect that, in war time, the Navy would probably augment the air wings significantly (there is definitely room on the decks).

As far as not getting close to anything that can harm them, any nation would be stupid to put its carriers any closer to anything that can shoot at them then it needs to. With that said, Ike is currently operating in the Red Sea where Iran's proxies can shoot at her and TR is currently in the East China Sea where China can shoot at her directly.

Is it?

I mean, I have no doubt that (barring something like Pearl Harbor) the US military would take the opening rounds of any US-China conventional war, but the but the supply of equipment possessed by the US Navy and US Air Force is relatively small, will attrit fairly quickly, and the relative industrial capacity and resource availability of the US and China today is very much in China's favor. It's doubtful that the US could execute a building program like it did from 1940-1945 (and especially 1942-1944) because it would take years to build the tools just to build the tools.

Because modern search engines (not just google) have decided that they know better than you and will often ignore your specific search terms to return the shit that they think you should know instead. Quoted search terms, exclusions, etc, are all cheerfully ignored to return a result set that is utterly useless for your purposes and somewhere there is a design team patting itself on the back for what a great job they've done.

Avoiding the interconnects can allow for improved performance but the overall impact is minimal. A system with equivalent performance while using modular memory could be designed as demonstrated by the numerous system that match M-silicon in performance. One just has to maintain the SN ratio in an increased noise environment by driving those memory lines harder.

The real advantage of integrated memory is reduced power consumption for equivalent performance. Apple generally sells devices that require a low power envelope so for them this is highly advantageous. This advantage becomes somewhat irrelevant when talking about desktop computers where power and space is cheap. But Apple doesn't sell enough desktops to warrant the engineering efforts required to develop new desktop-optimized systems. They just reuse the mobile solution with integrated GPU and unified memory - albeit bigger / stretched out for better performance.

I would love to see a M-series Ultra chip with silicon used for the integrated GPU repurposed for use as additional CPU cores. Then add support for external GPUs, plenty of PCIe lanes, and multiple memory channels. It could make for a killer workstation.

LLMs cannot do it. Hallucination is baked-in.

LLMs alone definitely can't do it. LLMs, however, seem (to me, speaking for myself as an ML developer) to be a very likely component in an actual AI. Which, to be clear, is why I use "ML" instead of "AI", as we don't have AI yet. It's going to take other brainlike mechanisms to supervise the hugely flawed knowledge assembly that LLMs generate before we even have a chance to get there. Again, IMO.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong. No sign of that, though. :)