If you want to play VR games but avoid Facebook, the main options are PC VR (Steam has a huge library of games) or PSVR2 (which can also be used with a PC with an optional adapter). Those are headsets that you hook up to a PC or console, not a self contained system like Quest. They can provide much better graphics than Quest, but the games are mostly the same.

Comfort is an issue with most VR headsets. They're big and heavy enough, you don't want to wear them for hours at a time. The main exception is Bigscreen Beyond, which has gotten it down to a remarkably small and light package. You pay extra for that, of course. I think it's about $1000 for the basic version, a little more for the version with eye tracking.

Yes, there's no question of that. Humanity is seriously screwed at this point. But there's still a lot of wiggle room for just how bad it's going to get. All the futures are bad, but some are a lot worse than others. The choices we make today will determine which one we get.

I mean, it's a tough choice. The German car industry or the future of humanity? They're both really important. Which should we put first? I'm sure there are good arguments on both sides...

China's per-capita emissions are 3.5x higher than India's. I really do not want India to emulate China on this!

I would say they need to be more ambitious. They plan to hit peak emissions in 2045??? The world needs to be aiming for net zero by then, not peak.

$21 trillion is a lot of money, but that's what they plan to spend over decades, not all at once. To both develop and decarbonize the world's most populous country, it's not really that much. And it will pay for itself and then some.

I do want to be fair to them, though. India and China have similar populations, but China's emissions are 3.5 times higher. India is not the main problem right now. If their emissions keep growing, though, they could become the main problem.

The name "GNU/Linux" is a shameless attempt by FSF to take credit for other people's work. In any modern Linux-based OS, almost all the major components come from sources other than GNU. That includes the kernel, the desktop environment, the graphics stack it's built on, the drivers to support your hardware, the package manager, the bundled applications (web browser, file browser, terminal emulator, etc.), and much more. None of these come from GNU. They think their relatively small contribution means they should get top billing on every OS that uses it.

The entire GNU project is only 387 packages, most of which are either obsolete or incredibly obscure. For comparison, Debian includes over 63,000 packages.

If you're looking for a cheaper laptop, the MacBook Air starts at $999. The MacBook Pro line is the more expensive models for higher end uses. The least expensive model in the more expensive line is not a low end laptop.

They probably believe climate change is real, and it's important to do something about it. The same way you do. It's just that other things are even more important, like their need to stay ahead of their competitors and your need to chat with your virtual girlfriend/boyfriend. They also probably believe it when they claim AI will magically find a solution to climate change, because believing that makes their lives easier and the human capacity for self-deception is incredible.

It's comforting to blame someone else, but morally speaking, the CEO who builds massive data centers is no worse than the ordinary person who eats lots of meat or drives an SUV because they like it better than a small car. They both choose to put their own desires above the welfare of humanity. The CEO's choices have a lot more impact, but there's lots of blame to go around. We just saw a few days ago that ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users. If those people weren't using it, they wouldn't be building data centers.

In this case, very little. They're using waste rock from quarries. From the article:

But you can't scale this very far using only waste from existing projects. To get this to the point that could make a difference to the climate, you would have to start quarrying and transporting rock on a massive scale just to crush it and spread it on fields. The tradeoffs become more complicated at that point.

It depends what your reference is. If the comparison is to having electricity in cities, but it's powered by fossil fuels instead of solar, then the cities aren't hotter.

They are. It isn't just Norway where EV sales are exploding. Globally they're up 25% in the last year. And before you try to claim that's starting from a tiny number, it isn't. 22% of all cars sold in 2024 were electric. 2025 is on track to be a lot higher.

The inverse relationship between size and life span applies to other species as well. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... for example.

We actually have a pretty good guess what one of the main factors is: height. Short people tend to live longer than tall people. Women tend to be shorter than men. In fact, that probably accounts for most of the difference. In the linked study, men were 7.8% taller than women and had a 8.4% shorter life expectancy. Other studies have reached similar conclusions. If a man and a woman are the same height, their life expectancies are likely to be similar. Once you correct for height, any remaining difference is small.

Let me fix that for you.

Because for a lot of people, EVs are far more practical than ICEs. In fact, the only concrete downside you keep focusing on is a mainly fictional one (loss of range in cold weather, which for modern EVs is about the same as for most ICEs.) I don't know what new technology you think is going to replace them, because there's nothing else on the horizon. For a while some companies were pushing hydrogen, but EVs thoroughly won that contest.

And that bit about destroying the planet. You really might want to consider it.

Let's see if I understand you correctly. Your argument is that EVs can't work because

1. Most people regularly drive to places far from anywhere populated or any major highway.
2. They're driving so far into the wilderness, they can't get through on a single charge. Perhaps because they're driving through the wilderness in the middle of winter when their range is reduced (but by much less than 30% on most modern EVs--they've gotten a lot better in the last few years).
3. This isn't an issue for conventional cars because there are sufficient gas stations in the wilderness, and the fact that conventional cars also lose significant range in cold weather somehow doesn't matter.
4. Installing EV chargers at those gas stations is impossible because... well, no reason at all.
5. This is the normal case that applies to most people. We can't just say, "If you have unusual needs, you need to choose a car with a longer than usual range." All EVs need to be able to get through hundreds of miles of wilderness in the middle of winter in exceptionally cold climates or they aren't useful.

Is that really your argument?

Let's see. I've never in my whole life driven to somewhere that was far from population and major highways. I've never driven anywhere when the temperature was below -20 C because, like most of the world's population, I live in a place that doesn't regularly get that cold. I sure wouldn't drive into the middle of the wilderness when it's that cold, because that's an insane thing to do. If your car breaks down, you'll probably die.

Here come the edge cases indeed.