Another caveat: many of that same group seem to have a shared delusion that they’re birthing a super intelligence, and those are the same ones claiming the vertical curve.

> and those are the same ones claiming the vertical curve.

Do you still write code by hand?

I don’t think Zitron is recommending anyone short anything. That’s carries a ton of risk.

What you consider “losing money” I might consider “choosing not to participate in an ongoing global financial scam at the cost of my retirement growing slightly slower for a while”.

If you choose to believe that, then you pretty well can’t have your money anywhere near the market at any time ever.

It's 14GB of something I don't want, need, nor have any use for, on a machine that is notorious for making storage upgrades difficult.

I've been running a latest-1 version of a few of their products on silicon Macs since M1 w/ 8GB RAM without issue. I use minimal plugins and work on medium-sized codebases and their IDEs are some of the most reliable software I use.

Everyone is missing maybe the biggest point - this isn't just a VR device. You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment, which makes this much more like a SteamDeck with a giant private screen for a lot of people.

This machine runs Linux, it comes with KDE. This is the open Apple Vision Pro alternative that you can use as a real computer.

It comes with a black and white passthrough camera but you can add on a 5K color one.

There's ongoing work for a full Plasma XR mode, so you aren't restricted to a "virtual desktop" experience: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/8671

This is one of the main selling points for me. I threw my CV1 in the trash when facebook required a login. I want to see what OpenXR apps are like. Is freecad and blender usable? I want to tinker with gaussian splatting. When finger tracking starts to develop can I reasonably use it for input without controllers? Could this ever be a practical replacement for a six monitor desk?

Also, my simracing seat has been very lonely. I'm so happy that there is an HMD running arch that gives the user root.

> Is freecad and blender usable?

Blender works in VR (using any OpenXR compatible headset). To view scenes in VR, you can use the free built-in VR Scene Inspector addon. To edit and create scenes in VR, you can use the Freebird XR addon for Blender (https://freebirdxr.com/).

Fingers crossed for OpenXR working properly in Steam Frame! In which case Blender and other OpenXR-compatible apps will work too.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of Freebird XR, a VR editing addon for Blender.

DRM isn't really the story with Valve. Their business model is offer good service. Part of that is not being hostile to users. Users don't want to be spied on and have their data sold, so Valve doesn't do that. People want autonomy over their hardware, so they give them that. It's even in their marketing material for the steam machine. The frame is a computer running arch. If you want to 100% opt out of Steam and write your own driver stack, they're not standing in your way. That is uniquely pro-user and freedom in the tech industry. Also, their open source initiatives with proton and fex should not be discounted.

If there's a morally grey stone to turn over then imo it's the not-gambling-wink-microtransactions and even then it's no more predatory than what is common in the gaming industry.

I'll bite. Things we had in December 2024 that we no longer have today, all of which contribute to the success or failure of major initiatives:

- 2.9% inflation - Billions of dollars of grants for state-run energy projects - NATCAST - Healthy & stable funding for the sciences - Competent leaders at the federal and military levels to oversee large complex projects - Healthy partnerships with allies

Specific actions that have been taken by Trump (backed by Musk) that caused us to lose the above:

- Starting an unnecessary war with Iran - Cancelling grants for energy projects specifically in blue states - Imposing nonsensical tariffs on trade partners - Starting a full-blown trade war with Canada - Alienating other allies, ex. starting a middle-east conflict without any alliances (excl. Israel) - Specifically closing NATCAST because "illegal" - Gutting of science funding by DOGE & others - Removal of competent leaders & prioritization of loyalty over competence when choosing staff

I have a hard time taking anyone seriously when they bring up anything about Trump having a positive impact on manufacturing in America. For 4+ years he's been lying to the American public about how tariffs work and claiming that US consumers paying more taxes to the US gov't in the form of tariffs is going to 'return' manufacturing to the US. We have almost half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the US - explain to me again why this is a capacity problem?

Let's add Palantir to the list while we're at it.

Agnostic, but I'll throw my prayers in for this one

We once interviewed a candidate for a senior engineering position and when asked what his primary role was at his current job, he said "I mostly make sure that nobody changes the software".

He wasn't wrong, and his role was still valuable to the company.

A better way to frame this might be that Apple tried VR and quickly realized the market wasn't there and moved on.

Compare that to Meta, who went all-in (so much so that they changed the company name) despite apparent overwhelming user apathy toward the product.

The estimates I've seen say that Apple spent ~$10b on their VR program, whereas Meta is in for about $80b.

The Apple Vision is at least two or three generations away hardware wise, it not only has to be several times faster (M8, M9 with a R2 or R3 processors) than what it is. The battery life needs to be better a lot better and it has to be half its current size weight wise.

And the price has to be half as much with all of those improvements. And last but not least the software needs to get even better all of that sounds like iteration over what? 3-4 years.

Fortunate for Apple, the competition is even further away…

Meta had more than 10x the install base of Apple's headset. And they shipped real VR that was compatible day-1 with standards like OpenXR; Apple didn't.

If we're being actually honest with ourselves, Apple did not even try to make a VR headset. They tried to carve out a nonexistent niche with AR, and bashfully wrote it off as a Tim Cook folly like the Apple Car or Airpower.

you saying Vision Pro is dead?

It would be a better way to frame it if we were strictly talking about VR. But my point was to show Apple is not some infallible genius company, they make plenty of mistakes. Why are we assuming being behind on AI is not a mistake but rather amazing foresight is the issue? We are only considering yeah the bubble bursts and apple is like oh yeah dude we told you hahahaha, but what if the bubble doesn't burst? What if there isn't a bubble and it just evolves naturally into something less exciting and fundamentally useful? Wouldn't it be fair to say Apple was wrong in that case? Why are we congragulating them for a hypothetical right and not worried about the hypothetical wrong, both of which are possibilities.

Yes Meta spent 80 billion sure, but did you know Meta never had a loss-making quarter in their entire history as a public company?

My overall point is that its not as clear cut as Apple is smart for willingly not being good at AI and they will win in the end.