TwinIon

In April 2023 in a deposition for the rape trial Trump said that he had $400M in cash. I can't seem to find a great primary source for that, but the number is referenced in a few articles on the topic. Not that I'm willing to take Trump's word for it. Still, it could make it slightly harder to get out of paying these fines when they have him telling a court that he has the funds.

Being a sizeable jump from Control is a good sign for them. They deserve all the success in the world.

Growing up in a suburb I didn't have the ability to get to a store very easily, so the first time I'm certain I bought a game with my own money on launch day was 9-9-99, for the Dreamcast launch.

I went and did the in store demo for the Vision Pro, and it largely confirmed my expectations. Unfortunately my demo got cut short because they took 10 minutes to find the correct light shield size. It was also very overly controlled. The first thing I was told to do was open the Photos app. After doing so I started looking through photos and it seemed to really fluster my "guide." She wanted to specify every single action. Open this photo. Zoom this one. Look at this panorama, not the other one. Make this window bigger and that one smaller. Put this window to the right, not the left. It was irritating and overbearing to be so overly directed with every action and made it harder to get a good feel for the thing. That said, it was still very nice to actually get a chance to use the device. I used the solo knit band and it was comfortable enough for my short demo, but the headset was noticeably heavier than the Quest. Impossible to say after 20 minutes how comfortable it would be to use for hours, but I had no complaints during my demo. The screens are super impressive and really the highlight of the whole thing. The clarity is really excellent, especially with text. It really is a significant step up from my Quest 2 and the other headsets I've tried out. There are still issues like lens glare and some fringing on the edges, but overall it was by far the best I've ever seen. Video looked good enough that I might actually want to watch a movie with this thing, which is not the case for the Quest. Looking at photos was pretty cool, but I wish I could have seen some photos and panoramas that were not shot on an iPhone. iPhone photos look great on an iPhone, but this is an instance where more resolution probably would have helped. The spatial video shot with the vision pro was pretty impressive with excellent depth, but the video from an iPhone was a let down with minimal 3D effect. Apple's own 180 video was also less than impressive to someone who has seen a lot before. It's been true forever that immersive video is a lower quality than flat video, but through the relatively poor screens of past headsets, it was easy to let go. With the clarity of the vision pro, the lacking resolution was far more noticeable. Apple really didn't sell me on the need for their proprietary format. The UX is very well polished and responsive. The eye tracking is excellent, but I found it to be both most natural thing in the world while also being supremely unnatural. When you're doing major actions, like opening an app, eye tracking is great. I'm looking for a specific icon, I find it, and with a tap of my fingers I'm in. Really an excellent way to navigate a UI. When you have smaller actions, even in my short demo, it was easy to see where eye tracking could get cumbersome. With nearly all my other computing devices, I'm not intently watching my every input. I might push a mouse cursor up to a corner or swipe around my phone without necessarily looking at my input. For example, when I open Twitter, I know the home button is in the bottom left. I'll instinctively double tap it so I will go to the top, and once I am I might pull down to refresh. I'm not intently looking at the home button or looking anywhere in particular when doing this, I'm hardly even looking at my phone until the refresh is complete. With the Vision Pro, you need to look at that you're doing until the input is complete. The UI is so intuitive that it's easy to try and fly around it right away, but you really do need to take a beat and make sure you're still looking at the button you want to press when you press it. I think I kept looking at a button, starting the hand gesture, and looking away before I finished, forcing me to do it again. I also had a few times where it seemed to miss what I was looking at. I quickly got used to the idea that whenever I'd touch my fingers together, the vision would register it, but then I'd forget to keep my hands visible to my face. I was sitting at a table and just trying to get comfortable I put my hands in my lap under the table, which obviously meant my inputs were not registering. It all makes me feel like eye tracking is a great input for basic tasks, but very quickly I'd want something more. I would love to use a vision pro with both eye tracking and that wrist controller Meta showed off so long ago. Even if not that, I think having a controller of some kind, maybe even just a mouse, would make it feel much more complete. As impressive as the UI, eye tracking, and screen quality are, my concerns about use case remain. It just seems like a terribly cumbersome way to actually do work or use all the time. It feels most at home doing simple computing tasks that I might use my iPad for, but most of the time I'd probably rather have my iPad. It does seem like a nice media player, but it's so overkill for that and so much of my media consumption is with other people that buying one for plane rides would be a dramatic waste of money. I'm not convinced that this is a thing that needs to exist, but it is a great gadget. If it was $1000 I might have even bought one just to see what it's like to live with one. Priced as it is, it's very hard to imagine being worthwhile unless you have a very specific use case. I hope I'm wrong about how long it will take for something of this quality to get to $1000, but even at that price I wouldn't recommend it to anyone I know. TLDR: Amazing screens, excellent UX, but I have input concerns and don't see a clear use case, certainly nothing that justifies the price.

I kind of understand why Texas is being singled out here, but I'd rather see them work on a larger scale plan to better connect the entire nation's grid. My understanding is that the rest of the nation is kind of connected, but not very well. Sure, connect Texas so people don't die when there's a big storm, but make it part of a project to better connect all other regions as well.

I can't help but feel that, like the Transformers and Fast & Furious films before it, this film is heading into places I'm not willing to follow.

Ok, but how about compared to any other live action superhero movies? Or, if you insist upon a Sony comparison, include their Spider-man movies. I'm guessing it's no Spider-man 2, but how about the Amazing Spider-man films.

Combining the Steam Deck and the Index to make something cool almost makes sense, but I think we're at least a few years away from and AMD having a reasonable chip for this kind of application. I do love the idea of Valve taking their success with the Steam Deck and trying out more hardware.

Bummer not to have him around.

I got in to Blue Sky a few months back and it's been fine. A portion of my twitter follows had migrated over there and they make up most of my feed. Most of those were political reporters, so that's mostly what makes up my feed. I like that it defaults to your non-algorithmic following feed. Now I jump between Twitter, Threads, and Blue Sky. Threads still seems like it has the best chance to completely replace Twitter, but it's still a ways off.

I wonder if we'll see more and more creatives avoid working with WBD, or if they're just too big to really avoid. Obviously with a film like this one or Batgirl, it's not like you could make those exact films elsewhere. Is Nolan a canary in a coal mine, or is he just massively privileged in being able to choose which studios to work with?

I'm no legal scholar, but I'm a little bit dubious on the idea that a state shouldn't be able to bar a candidate from a federal office because doing so would "effectively determine who becomes the President of the United States." There are all sorts of measures that states currently undertake that push the needle in one direction or another. Heck, the existence of the electoral college seems to me nothing more than a way to make a federal election about a decision between states rather than the cumulative decision of voters. States run elections in any number of ways, from registration to primaries, to the collection and counting of ballots. We already have a situation where two states split their electoral votes. While not tested in court (to my knowledge), the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact seems to operate on the principle that states can decide how they want their votes cast regardless of how the people in those states voted. Personally, I think it might be a good idea for federal elections to be more handled by the federal government. Make everything consistent, from registration to primaries to voting machines, get rid of the electoral college and make presidential elections a popular vote. That isn't the way it works right now though, and telling Colorado they can't apply the constitution in this manner seems at odds with the current flexibility and relative independence that states currently have. Which is all to say that given the system we currently have, Colorado and other states probably should be able to block Trump from being on the ballot, but I'd rather we have a system were they shouldn't be able to.

I believe so. Jeremy Clarkson on ‘The Grand Tour’ Ending: I’m ‘Unfit and Fat and Old’ I've quite enjoyed The Grand Tour, even though I don't think it ever entirely captured the magic of Top Gear's glory days. It's a bid sad that the trio's days are over, but it's hard to say it hasn't been a good run.

I burned through the series and found a lot to like about it. It's far from perfect, but they do enough with the premise that it feels well used. Both Glover and Erskine are good in their roles as the consistently character focused nature of the show gives them plenty of time to shine. It hovers around a very John Wick 1 level of world building which is good without going overboard. I didn't find the action to be terribly impressive, but it was never sloppy. The ending does well to close out the series while leaving the door open for more.

Odd to bring back this 14 year old middling IP as a low budget direct to streaming film/TV show. NBCU is looking down their list of franchise IP and not finding what they're looking for.

I think it's worth remembering the two $1B investments Epic got from Sony and KIRKBI (Lego) in 2022 and resulted in Lego Fortnite. Disney's stated ambitions and their IP portfolio make this feel more important. It'll be interesting to see what game experiences actually come from this. Disney IP has already saturated Fortnite, and Lego's investment resulted in a minecraft mode, so it feels like it could be anything. I remain dubious as to continuing to use the term "metaverse." Having a bunch of games share an engine/launcher/social graph is not quite the same as what I think of as a metaverse, but that battle is probably long lost.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.