That's because they knew if you actually tried to do anything useful with it, you wouldn't even think about buying one. Right now, it's a toy. It's an enormously capable piece of hardware locked up behind a walled garden that massively limits its potential, with no usable input capabilities that don't involve throwing (usually third-party) hardware at the problem.

I have one, too. Also powered off, but not when I'm wearing it.

This feature is widely requested, and might even be moderately useful, IMO, were it not for the lack of one other very critical missing feature: a usable virtual keyboard and mouse. If you have to be tethered to your laptop's keyboard and trackpad or to a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, what's the point of a virtual display? The only time I ever use that feature is on an airplane, because it lets me have absolute privacy. (The computer's display is dark when the virtual display app is connected.) Beyond that rare use case, the whole thing is, IMO, kind of a novelty feature, rather than something super useful, no matter how many displays it can imitate.

Solve that problem, and you've not only made the virtual display software a lot more useful, but also made it a lot more plausible to get Mac apps running directly on Vision Pro, at which point it might actually live up to its potential as a spatial computer, rather than just being a stereo-vision iPad on your face.

The system as a whole does, yes. Some of that profit is made by the utility companies themselves, and some of it is made by generating companies, and some of it is paying settlements for fires caused by negligent maintenance, and some of it is paying $17 million salaries to CEOs (PG&E, I'm looking at you), etc., but yeah, there's a lot of money being made.

There's a reason I've been saying for the past couple of decades that California needs nonprofit/municipal utility companies like most of the rest of the country. If TVA can keep their residential power prices that low, there's no reason California can't. Even if you assumed that 100% of costs came from wages somehow, these rates would still be twice as high as they should be. There's just no plausible reason for it.

California's regulated monopoly approach has failed. We need to stop pretending that it will ever succeed and switch to a model that is actually proven to work efficiently, cheaply, and reliably — government-owned nonprofit corporations (e.g. TVA).

Usually a gas furnace doesn't take up any additional space if you have an air conditioner. It shares the fan and duct system with the air conditioner. There's an extra vent pipe up to the roof, and they're typically taller, but you're not going to store something on top of an air conditioner anyway.

As for maintenance, a gas burner is basically passive. Gas flows through a tube and comes out through holes and burns. You do have a gas valve that could fail, and you do have an electric igniter that could fail, and in theory, the heat shield could develop a hole or something, but realistically, if something fails in a furnace, it will probably be the blower, which is shared with the air conditioner. So you're not adding much new hardware that can fail.

Air quality is great and all, but when you're asking people to pay a whopping 41% premium for their heating, you're going to have a hard time justifying it by saying, "You're saving the planet."

And no, I basically have been told that I can't put solar on my house. It's a modular home, and solar companies won't touch them with a ten meter pole because of inadequate structural bracing.

Additionally, my electricity isn't metered by PG&E, which means I'm stuck on a rate plan that I can't control, and I can't put power back onto the grid, so even if I could convince someone to install it, the only option for solar would involve going off-grid with a transfer switch for when the off-grid power runs out. PG&E is in the process of running new lines (and wrecking the neighborhood in the process, and putting up ugly meters in front of our houses whether we like it or not), but that project won't be finished until probably 2027, if memory serves.

So basically, the folks making the rules have made it really, really hard to do the right thing even if you want to. Were it not for that, I'd have been on solar power ten years ago, and I'd have installed a heat pump when I replaced my air conditioner a couple of years ago. Instead, I'm seriously considering preemptively replacing my gas water heater in late 2026, because if I end up paying a 40% premium for hot water, that premature replacement would save me ~$2500 over the ten-year life of that new water heater.

But I can at least afford to do that. The poorest Californians are screwed. They can't afford solar, and they can't afford to pay half again more for hot water and heat. That's why it seriously angers me to see CARB banning gas water heaters and furnaces without doing anything to fix our obscene electricity prices.

The fact of the matter is that California's electrical prices are a major environmental disaster in the making, and have been for a long time. They are the reason why heat pumps and heat pump water heaters and EVs are often less affordable than using fossil fuels at this point. And that's really not okay, because the opposite should be true by a very large margin. If you want to know what I want to see most from politicians, it's taking a stand on our high electrical prices, because it's a big problem that needs to be fixed.

Kind of works is correct.

Ask yourself, what does Google do when they want to do MFA? The answer isn't call someone else.

I certainly don't, though I do keep some VMs around JIC.

Big businesses have policies they aren't going to easily change, and governments have even more, about what kind of software they will run for security and interoperability. And most of them which care about interoperation with others are cooperating with other Windows shops. Even if nobody else is using it, governments and those which want to interface with them are going to keep using Windows.

It's the same story of enshittification as any web resource. It gets enough eyeballs to sell ads, and more bullshit means more ad impressions.

I don't agree with his characterization.

I use a Windows 10 PC at work. It has had numerous problems which had to be corrected by someone to make it work properly. I am not that person, but I do get to watch most of the time. And because I chat up the IS personnel they tell me what they are doing and why even when I cannot see it. I have established my bona fides with them the old fashioned way, by bullshitting.

I use Devuan at home with root on ZFS. This is weird and even so it is not a big deal. It was a moderately big deal getting it set up, but you can have Ubuntu with root on ZFS without having to do any real thinking. That was what I did before this, but I decided to make life harder for myself and it still isn't that hard.

A noob can safely run Mint or Pop!OS or any of the other does-it-for-you distributions, and as long as they don't do stuff it's not designed to do, the system will be more reliable and require less attention than Windows. And it's designed to do a lot more than Windows, so no loss there.

And gamers, and small businesses. Most niche software is for Windows because it has been the dominant platform for so long, and gaming has been Microsoft dominated for the whole time it's been happening on PCs, since PCs were Microsoft-dominated.

The small business market is collectively quite large...

Google's LLM is now doing searches for you and providing multiple answers with links. It's a great imitation of a LLM being able to cite its sources, but obviously it works backwards from the sources. Therefore Google is able to do a better job of having a LLM that gives useful answers to questions than anyone else, because they have the best search database.

I don't see why that wouldn't persist for a long assed time, since Google has both a very strong ad network and the most recognizable name in search.

Whether anyone likes it or not, it all depends on what Microsoft does. Do they continue to flail and suck, or do they get their shit together enough to not have businesses looking to replace them? It only gets easier to do so over time, so you would think that Microsoft would be interested in demonstrating more competence, but instead they are pushing more spyware upon users.

Linux remains far in the background in desktop land as ever, but it is getting stronger in probably the largest part thanks to Valve. It remains a fact that games and porn are huge drivers of technology acceptance, and while Linux is only better for porn in that it's harder to get a software transmitted infection, gaming on Linux has never been more possible or more relevant and Valve is putting in a lot of the hard work.

The Steam Deck has also spawned a bunch of copycats recently, and while those machines come with Windows, Valve is working on bringing SteamOS to them as well. When users get tired of playing windows admin to keep their game machines working, they can switch them over and run practically all of the same games. Handheld PCs may be a big percentage of the future of gaming, because they combine portability and configurability and can also be used as desktop machines for most purposes.

So does Microsoft get their shit together, or do they continue to alienate gamers with performance-stealing spyware? Because they have the inertia, the applications and the games alike are written for Windows today, and it's their game to lose.

What's an interactive title?

No, seriously. Just like the whole Netflix game studio thing, I keep hearing about companies like Netflix cancelling things that I've never heard of and didn't even know that they did. Not that I would necessarily care even if I did know, but I've actually seen one of the shows that one of those interactive titles is based on, and I *still* haven't heard of it.

Maybe Netflix should use that top box to highlight new features instead of wasting it on shows that I am almost never interested in.

Computers vs humans. It could go either way.

It will take another fraction of a trip per trip, not many more trips. The plastic bottles are not that much smaller.

Something to do with eye of a newt and goat entrails?

... was construction of a data center nearby. Zuckerberg will just have to find another parcel of land sans bees. Of course, now that developers know what he is up to, land prices will rise.

There is nothing magic about a few miles one way or the other. True green-washing would be signing a purchase agreement for power delivered to a condo in NYC, generated by a solar farm in Arizona.