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TwinIon

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Everything posted by TwinIon

  1. As I've been watching the reviews come out for the vision pro, I can't help but think it combines a number of issues we've seen from past Apple launches, but it feels so much further away from being a mass consumer product. The price is obviously a deal breaker for most people, and it's not super clear to me how much they can actually get it down in the near term. They can obviously cut down on the exterior screen, some materials work, and maybe they can find ways to track as well with fewer cameras, but if it's going to have Apple quality, it's hard to imagine them getting rid of the screens or all the processing required. That's where so much of the cost is, and that doesn't seem like it'll change in the next couple years. I don't expect a $1500 Apple Vision consumer version anytime soon. Like the Apple Watch, the biggest question is use case. It's just difficult to entirely grasp what Apple thinks people will use this for, but the barriers to entry are so much higher here. For the watch, there was always a base level of utility, and having a watch you need to charge isn't that a big deal. Wearing a pair of heavy ski goggles is a lot to ask, and if all you get for that is the ability to watch movies and use your mac, that doesn't seem like enough. It's not really even the best way to use your mac, given the limit of only a single monitor window. I'm typing now on a 48" OLED with a 27" portrait monitor on the side. I'd be losing so much screen real estate by using the AVP, but so would anyone who uses multiple monitors. They're really hyping up the media capabilities, and I'll admit that it does appeal to me. I've wanted a VR headset to be the best way to watch something since I got my DK2, and it seems like the AVP is close or there. This price obviously doesn't make any sense if that is your primary use case, but it's certainly nice to have. The lack of any kind of controller feels like Apple's insistence that they shouldn't have a stylus for the iPad. Yeah, I think the eye+hand controls are great for plenty of things, but I still feel like it's inevitable they put out some kind of controllers. It's Apple's aversion to games that does them another disservice here. Obviously they don't want to sell a machine specifically for games, but even if Meta has bigger aspirations for VR, right now games are the best use case for a VR headset, and controllers are just a natural part of that. The hugely positive way that the AVP is reminiscent of other Apple launches is in just how much better the UX is than the competition. From what I've seen this is easily comparable to the jump from Windows Mobile / Blackberry to iOS. Apple has quickly shown in their first gen product that these devices don't need to be painful and difficult to use. It was easy to forgive little Oculus for not having it all figured out, but Meta has now owned them for nearly a decade, and the UX is bad. It took a few years for alternatives to iOS to reach a similar level of UX polish, and I think it's going to take even longer here, given who is in the space. I still just can't get over the use case. I really feel like Apple is ceding that to developers and hope they figure it out, because even if this thing was $1000, I don't know who I'd recommend it to. I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wanted a better way to use their computer. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to gamers. If you don't live alone, it's hard to recommend it just for media.
  2. As someone that follows F1, Horner does seem like exactly the kind of guy that would end up with these kinds of allegations, but this is still a bit of a surprise. The fact that it's the Red Bull drink company doing the investigation makes this a complicated situation. Horner doesn't own the F1 team, but he's been in charge of it since it's started in 2005, and they've been one of the most successful teams on the grid since. It's not literally his team, but it really is his team. If he were to be removed it would be a massive shock.
  3. I don't really disagree with this so much in general, but AB205 was not a great way of going about it. For those unfamiliar, AB205 introduced fixed rate electricity rates based on income and power provider. In SDGE territory, it worked out to $24 /month for the lowest group, up to $128/month for the highest. This money would then lower the electricity rate. That seems reasonable enough on the face of it, but it feels predatory to anyone who uses very little electricity, such as those with home solar. We invested a lot of money to get solar in order to lower our monthly bills. Introducing a fixed charge will roughly double our power bill, greatly reducing the ROI and the value of solar systems like ours and greatly lowering the incentive to install new solar or new batteries. Meanwhile, I know wealthy families that spend so much on electricity that the lower rates will greatly lower their bills, even after the fixed charge. I'm fine with a progressive electricity solar pricing scheme, but this just felt like a way for utilities to go after home solar owners like me, without actually affecting those who use the most electricity and without actually saving the lowest income people very much money.
  4. The Book of Clarence 2/5 Book of Clarence is a messy and unfocused film that has an interesting potential as a satire dramady, but ends up becoming almost a weird black Hebrew Israelite Passion of the Christ. It's a film that starts out with a comic impulse, but loses its way when it gets too close to religion. Spoilers
  5. Stopped by the March Field Air Museum recently, which I highly recommend to anyone traveling along the 215. They have a huge collection of aircraft, including a B-17. Very cool to see these planes up close. I'm enjoying the show well enough, but I also really think they messed up by not doing a Band of Brothers training episode or two. I feel like it would really have helped establish the characters and would have gone a long way into reminding us that flying in general wasn't a huge thing when the war started. Many of these kids wouldn't likely have ever been in an airplane prior to joining up. Heck, the US Air Force didn't even exist yet and at the time of the first episode, the US Army Air Forces was only a couple years removed from being the Army Air Corps. I don't know if those organizational structures should actually have been part of the story, but to me it's a good reminder of how novel this style of air combat was. They're doing a good job of reminding us of contrasting the US and British approaches to bombing, but I kind of wish they put that in a broader perspective. It is a great looking show though. That Apple money might not have been well spent, but it's right there on the screen.
  6. I managed to miss this thread along with every other bit of information about this film before my wife took me to see it. I knew there was a new Mean Girls movie, and I think I saw the trailer, but I didn't register that it was a musical, and I had no idea that there was a Broadway musical that this film was adapting. I thought it was a reboot of mean girls, or a legasequal of sorts; something that would call back to the original, but wasn't a complete remake. I'm also not unfamiliar with musicals that aim to go to broadway. The local La Jolla Playhouse is a place well known for Broadway bound musicals to test the water, and while I don't have season tickets, I've been to quite a few shows. Watching it with that frame of mind, I came out of the theater thinking that I didn't understand why it was such a straight up remake. Most of the best moments and jokes were straight out of the original, and most were done better then. I also thought that the music needed to be better if they wanted to go to Broadway, and that the moments chosen to do songs were odd and uneven. Knowing now that it's already been to Broadway is a surprise, but at least it explains why it's just a straight adaptation. It doesn't make it feel any more worthwhile. While nothing in this new film is horrible, it also just doesn't justify itself at all. It's a poor musical and a mediocre remake of a pretty good comedy.
  7. There's much to admire about Zone of Interest, but I also found it difficult to connect to. It's a lot of terrible people being mostly normal, but honestly the whole impact of the film felt like it was made relatively early on, and the film does little to compound or build on it as it goes. It doesn't so much hit a crescendo as play the same note over and over again. It's a fine entry if you want to meditate on the banality of evil, but it doesn't really go beyond that.
  8. I can almost understand not liking wind (even though I kinda like wind farms), but banning solar is outright petty. It's kind of terrible how knee-jerk reactionary American conservatives have become to anything "green." It's a pretty sad state of affairs. In slightly more complicated news about renewable energy, the "duck curve" in CA is getting pretty deep, to the point that it's causing some problems. The duck curve shows the demand remaining after subtracting variable renewable generation. Midday, when solar generation is at its highest, the whole state is getting close (and occasionally hitting) 0 demand. On the one hand, it's great! It means the state is being run entirely on renewable energy! On the other hand, you can see that most of the time that isn't the case, and as the bottom of the duck gets flatter, the economic realities for the gas and coal plants that provide that variable demand get more and more stark. It's one thing when you have to ramp down your power production in the middle of the day, but we're closing in on not needing them at all during daylight hours, which makes that a much more difficult business. Hopefully we can put more resources into energy storage and other non-variable renewables. In one more bit of CA energy news, it seems many of the same Dems that voted for income based electricity charges are now trying to repeal it before it goes into effect this year. Electricity bills here in San Diego have been a real pain point for many, and I'd personally be happy if that repeal goes through.
  9. Sea of Thieves was pretty understandable, but these would obviously be a complete strategy shift. I've thought MS didn't really want to be in the gaming console business since the OG XBox, but the nature of the market has meant they need to keep their own hardware. Until they can put Gamepass and / or a MS games store on the Playstation / Nintendo, it seems like the necessity of the Xbox hardware remains. I understand MS needing to recoup more dev costs by putting out games on multiple platforms, but sacrificing exclusivity on their biggest games is still a shock.
  10. I've been putting in some time on my Steamdeck and I've found a lot to like, and some that isn't really to my taste. It's no graphical showpiece, but it runs pretty consistently at 90 on my deck, which is great. I've really enjoyed a lot of the exploration and the movement stuff gets pretty crazy at times. It can be pretty difficult, but thankfully there are a lot of options to customize the difficulty. Personally, I think everything "souls like" about this game makes it worse, but I seem to be in the minority with that one. I feel like the generally high difficulty of both combat and platforming makes death more common and more punishing than I think is fun and diminished my desire to explore. That said, it can be satisfying to complete a particularly complex section. Some of the puzzles, even the minor platforming ones, are pretty clever. I wish there were more of them. I got stuck on a snake boss that is really punishing, but only after looking online did I figure out that you can upgrade gear, and that I'd long past unlocked that ability. I'll try again tonight and see if some upgrades make a difference.
  11. I'm kind of surprised that they didn't do more upgrades in the visuals. Not that the game really needs it, and for $10 it's not as if they needed to in order to justify the value proposition, I just usually expect Naughty Dog to go above and beyond. I imagine that they're probably not very far along tech wise with their next engine upgrade, especially given that they've had a bunch of resources being juggled around with the cancellation of the multiplayer game. My first instinct is that it would make more sense to release this in another year when Season 2 of the show is about to hit, but maybe that still wouldn't have been enough time for more tech to trickle down. I also wonder if they just looked at how much effort it would have been to upgrade the assets and just figured it wouldn't be a big enough upgrade to justify the work. Whatever the case, I'll probably catch up on this next year before the season 2, and I'll happily pay the $10.
  12. I agree that they had to go into China. It's too big a market to ignore, and likely the most mature EV market in the world. Their problem is they went into the Chinese market and sold the exact same cars that they sell in the rest of the world. BYD sells something like 10 different models (not trims, models) that undercut the 3 and Y. In general it seems like Tesla has a real problem with developing and iterating on vehicles. In the US and Europe, where big brands have been so slow to put out competitive EVs that hasn't been a huge problem, but in China it seems like a big liability. On another topic, this is a pretty bad look for Elon: Elon Musk tries to explain his ask for more control over Tesla, but TSLA not buying it | Electrek ELECTREK.CO Elon Musk tried to explain his strange ask for more control over Tesla, which seemingly came with a threat to... I don't know what the legal implications are for running a private company that competes with the public company you're CEO of, but threatening to not develop products at Tesla unless you give him more control seems like a pretty questionable spot. It also seems like a lazy excuse. He's probably going to build all the AI stuff over at xAI no matter what. He has full control over there, and if there are synergistic opportunities, he's leveraged them cross companies many times. Trying to dupe/blackmail TSLA shareholders into giving an increasingly unhinged Musk double his voting power doesn't seem like a great play.
  13. So is she just going to stay in the race just in case Trump gets convicted or somehow gets disqualified?
  14. I'm kinda shocked that they have had such a hard time figuring out a long term host for this show. They have plenty of qualified candidates, I wonder why they couldn't pick one? I'm happy to see Stewart back, especially since Apple killed his show.
  15. If the runtime is similar, I don't see why too much needs to be cut out. I'm sure there will be cuts, but just from that trailer I saw plenty that I might have expected to get cut. Tales of Ba Sing Se would work fine in live action. If anything, it's exactly the kind of thing that could be easily expanded if they need some more run time. Some of the stories from that episode, or at least elements of them, could also be put elsewhere in the show. I don't know if we'll get an episode formatted like that, but I'd be shocked if they skip out on some of those stories. This might be a bit pedantic, but I disagree with the notion of it being "filler." Maybe there are different definitions, but character development isn't the same as wasting time, which is what I think of as filler. Just because they don't actively engage on the "main quest" doesn't make it filler, and there's definitively character development going on in that episode.
  16. Here's a fun one. A Texas school district superintendent has taken out a full page newspaper ad defending the suspension of a black student over his hair, despite the CROWN act becoming law in Texas. Honestly, how could this battle possibly be worth the effort to this guy? Calling long hair unamerican? Dude, chill out. In another story, Oklahoma is applying the Texas abortion bounty model to an an extreme new anti-pornography bill. The bill would make simply viewing porn a felony and defines "unlawful pornography" in a way so broad that viewing basically anything unlawful. There's no chance it stands up to constitutional scrutiny, but it's a window into what some in the GOP would like to pass.
  17. That's a surprise, but I guess that means they won't be cutting anything.
  18. I hope they make an example out of whoever is behind this, but man it just makes me wish that the FCC would get their act together and fix the robocalling nightmare. STIR/SHAKEN was supposed to help them crack down and at least stop number spoofing. My personal impression is that it hasn't made much of a dent.
  19. Maybe this is expected coming from someone who sells consoles largely based on single player games, but I'll raise my hand and say that's mostly me. I get way less value out of Gamepass than I might because I'm usually focused on one game at a time, with maybe a bit on the side.
  20. I think it has the looks, but I'm still uneasy about this adaptation. The thing that actually gives me hope is One Piece. I'm not aware of the productions having anything in common beyond Netflix, but it did show that a goofy animated show can make a successful transition. However, One Piece had the benefit of being a pretty messy story that they were able to edit down and improve pretty significantly (IMO). Avatar is already paced pretty well, so I can imagine it feeling a bit more rushed. Guess we'll find out soon enough.
  21. I really need to watch Anatomy of a Fall. I'm rooting for Oppenheimer. Nolan deserves to have a Best Pic and a Best Director statue and Oppenheimer is as deserving as any chance to give those to him. I'd also be happy to see Yorgos win for Poor Things. A surprise to see Past Lives show up in this category. Not that it's undeserving, but still a surprise. I'm very surprised that Margot didn't get a nomination for Actress given who else in the film did. I felt like either the Academy decides that Barbie doesn't deserve acting nominations or Margot is at the top of the list. The movie doesn't work without her. I'm even more surprised that Greta Gerwig didn't get a directing nom. Easy choice over Zone of Interest for my money. Lead Actor is a really stacked category without a wrong choice. I didn't realize at all that Bradley Cooper doesn't have an Oscar. I would have guessed off the top of my head that he had at least two. Slate has a great piece on Paul Giamatti being the best Actor to never have been nominated for best Actor, which functions as both a reminder that he should have one and that the Holdovers is as deserving a performance as he's given. I absolutely loved American Fiction and Jeffery Wright in it. Colman Domingo delivers exactly the kind of biopic recreation that the Academy often loves to reward (though he's competing with Cooper for that turf). I do kind of feel like of them, this might be Cillian Murphy's only real chance to win and Oppenheimer's other successes may well lift him here. Certainly not a bad pick in the lot. A bit surprised not to see Leo in the mix given how much the Academy liked Flower Moon, but again, the category is just stacked this year. Supporting actor is an interesting mix of actors and roles, from the colorful and wacky worlds of Barbie and Poor things, to the dour Killers of the Flower Moon and colorless RDJ in Oppie. Again, not really a bad pick in the mix. Actress should have been a three way between Lily Gladstone, Emma Stone, and Margot Robbie, but for my money now it's down to two (again, haven't seen Fall). I'm expecting Da'Vine Joy Randolph to easily walk away with supporting Actress. Kinda bummed Turtles didn't get a Animated Film nod, though I'm not sure if I'm rooting for Spider-Verse or Boy and the Heron. I enjoyed Spider-Verse more, but you could never give Miyazaki enough awards to credit him for his career. I was surprised to see Godzilla Minus One up for visual effects. I think if you grade on a cost curve, it'd be an easy winner over second place Creator, but if you're not I don't think it's quite seamless all the way through. Still, all the credit in the world to that team for making that movie. Interestingly Netflix comes out of this as the distributor with the most nominations, though I think it's going to be another year where they walk away with little to show for it.
  22. Probably unnecessary to break out the tin foil for a show that has had production problems since it started.
  23. Finally was able to catch up with this series and this season didn't disappoint. Really enjoyable all the way through with plenty of classic Fargo shenanigans. I didn't love Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance, though I think much of the fault lies with the writing for her character. Juno Temple impressed as Dot and Sam Spruell is so much fun as Ole. There were times that Wayne was maybe a bit too slow, but in a scene with an immortal killer probably not a tipping point. One tiny question for those who watched the finale: what was the deal with the constant fades to black? It was a stylistic choice that I didn't get and was actually kind of annoying for the first act of the episode.
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