It seems like VR has some killer applications... but mostly in gaming / sims / entertainment. Augmented reality is eventually going to go big once displays drop down to a few hundred bucks and look like normal glasses / sunglasses - it just seems sort of inevitable to me, I guess, because it's going to be insanely handy to have computer-augmented vision... that is, if society can get over the concept of everyone wearing a device that's constantly taking a video of what they're looking at. "Glassholes" demonstrated we aren't quite there, so it may take another generation, but I think people will eventually become more or less desensitized to it.

But the whole "metaverse" thing, especially in terms of corporate involvement... I don't really see it at all. As far as I can tell, there's nothing to be gained on the consumer side by acting in a virtual world when you're just shopping. There are perhaps a few exceptions: tourism and real estate have some pretty obvious applications for people who want to tour a place virtually. Beyond that... it's really hard to see any upsides for a typical consumer.

Probably just FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out. Faceboo... er, Meta was obviously pouring a lot of money and effort into this. Surely something will come from it, they thought. And really, it's not too hard to make a few "plans" for when it takes off, I guess. Oops...

I'm not sure that really makes much sense. They are giving a transition date limit, by which time retailers must be ready with new 2D scanners - a whole five years. So retailers have a firm time limit by which they must transition. Beyond that point, we're going to see products with only the 2D codes. The chicken and egg problem is solved by declaring which one comes first, and in this case, it's the requirement for the new systems.

As for "millions of products and millions of retail establishments already have UPC barcode scanners..". what of it? Millions of retailers also didn't have readers that could deal with chip & pin credit cards, or NFC devices, etc, etc. Now they do. An industrial QR code scanner costs $40-$80 on Amazon. I guess grocery stores will want to update their POS systems, which will cost more, but again, it's not like this type of stuff doesn't happen on occasion.

I'd take you up on a bet as to whether or not this "fails" or not. Worse case, they stretch out the transition period for a few years to be nice to smaller retailers.

You don't scan the barcode with your phone?

Seems like a worthwhile move for manufacturers, retailers, and grocery stores, with better product tracking (good for safety recalls) and better inventory management. Sort of "meh" benefits for the consumer, but probably not many downsides either.

I'm not seeing any evidence that this will require sending any information about you and/or your purchase directly to manufacturers during the normal checkout process. In fact, I'd take a guess that's probably very illegal anyhow. If you happen to know differently, by all means, let me know, as I'm kind of curious about that aspect.

The QR code could certainly be track if you scan it on your phone, of course, but again, just don't do that? In the end, whatever tracking is done, will be done by the retail or grocery store, since you use your blah-blah discount card or whatever (you know exactly what THOSE are for, right? - yeah, tracking all your purchases).

Have you not heard of "the tyranny of the default" before? What it means is that people overwhelmingly tend to leave the default choices alone. That's why things like opt-in vs opt-out are actually important, or why selection order actually matters.

In this case, with many millions of Samsung users, the default option is that one that many users will first try, and undoubtedly, unless they're highly motivated to change, that's the choice a lot of users will likely leave it as. And Google knows this. Their dominance in search finances pretty much everything else they do, so they're going to fight aggressively for those top "default" spots.

You're kind of asking for the impossible. Other recent issues aside, you can't just "fix" C without completely breaking backwards compatibility. C++ has made a lot of forward progress, but even then, it's what I tend to call "opt-in security", because they can't remove the older unsafe methods, like manual memory management, or other legacy stuff inherited from C (whose backward compatibility is still an advantage sometimes), etc.

Also, not every application requires top-tier performance. Rust is known to be somewhat difficult to work with, so I'd initially reach for an easier language like C# or Java unless the performance requirements were fairly critical.

There's still a significant reason, beyond the obvious that it might provoke a US military response: it would threaten the US export market.

If they invaded Taiwan, I don't really see US just accepting the status quo and doing business with them as usual. It would, economically speaking, hurt like hell to break off economic ties, but it would hurt them more. The US is a HUGE market for them, and I don't think they're keen to lose it.

Look at how Russia has largely become a pariah state among the larger world community. Do you think China hasn't noticed that? I doubt that's where they want to be.

It depends on whether the game players agree that this is a fun part of the game or a bug that needs fixing, I guess.

It's typically the person that does the exploiting, not the people being exploited, who think those sorts of things are "fun", but maybe Eve Online players would disagree. I'm not one of them.

That was kind of what I was alluding to. They could use an in-game mechanism to prevent this. I was trying to be cute by calling it the "Eve Online corporate universe", but that's shorthand for "the devs need to patch this."

Maybe the EVE Online corporate universe should investigate the concept of a "quorum".

Yep, these sort of dark patterns really need to go. And frankly, the more countries (or US states) adopt laws prohibiting them, the more it's likely that companies will decide that it's really not worth having multiple ways of cancelling subscriptions (the easy/EU way and the pain-in-the-ass/Rest-of-the-world method), and will just give straightforward cancellation methods.

Sometimes people bitch about over-regulation of government, but fuck it all, shit like this is WHY new regulations and laws get created. Otherwise, there will likely be some asshole who takes advantage of the loophole, and from then forward (after government eventually respond), every other business (who may have been playing nice), has to do extra work to make sure they're complying with the new regulations. Regulations typically don't happen in a vacuum.

That's a good point. I had sort of put these from my mind. I write mostly in modern C++ these days, so that sort of thing is less frequently an issue. But memory stomps or use-after-free memory issues can be a bitch to track down. I certainly wouldn't have minded some AI help to track down those issues from my past.

But as you pointed out, there are non-AI solutions out there for those things... namely, avoiding manual memory management (kind of hard to avoid in C, but possible in C++), or runtime assistance that checks memory access like valgrind, although that's far from a perfect solution.

As I alluded to, I'm all for better tools, including AI-powered tools. I'm just slightly tired of the breathless over-hyping of these classes of AI systems.

Yeah, I agree. As long as you're running in a debugger, a crash is literally the easiest type of error to debug. In fact, if all you have is a call stack trace that points to a single function, you can often deduce what likely crashed just by examining the code for potential issues.

This is sort of impressive from a "that's a neat trick" perspective, and I guess it shows future potential, but we're not quite in danger of losing our programming jobs yet.

First, who actually made that claim? Maybe I missed it. In truth, it depends entirely on where you live, of course. If I buy an electric car, it'll be powered by hydro, natural gas, nuclear, and a few percent also-rans. But then, WA state is sort of an outlier.

And at the very least, they're very good for concentrated populations in that they don't spew a bunch of local pollution. Still an overall win, even now. Hopefully the needle keeps moving towards cleaner power sources as old coal plants are eventually retired and newer and cleaner plants are built, but that's a slow, ongoing process that will take many years.

That's not even considering color grading during digital post-processing. All modern films are digitally post-processed, and so directors have the ability to more precisely adjust overall lighting and coloration of scenes, no matter how they're shot. You still need in-scene lighting, but you can certainly fix a LOT of issues just digitally. "Slapping on a blue filter" to do day-for-night shooting isn't done physically or on-scene any more, of course. You just apply a digital filter in post.