It seems like the antivaxxers, and many people in general, seem to just think that whatever they hear from their friends and family and favorite TV talking heads, whether it has any research behind it or not, is automatically and magically true. So that even if the only real research that exists contradicts it, they just assume that the research must be the result of some kind of error or conspiracy.
I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.
> POTS = Plain Old Telephony System
I worked for NY Telephone for years in the '80s, and it was referred to there as "Plain Old Telephone Service" not System. Not that it's a big deal at this point!
If you try 2N times to succeed in ventures which each have a 1/N chance of success, as N increases the probability of such as success quickly converges on about 86.5%.
(The limit is 1-e^(-2).)
So, if you have a LOT of chances to try things that are highly improbable but high upside, your odds are quite good.
> So, if you have a LOT of chances to try things that are highly improbable but high upside, your odds are quite good.
But that perfectly highlights why the "startup gamble" is a great bet for VCs but a horrible bet for most employees. Let's say N is, generously, 50 (i.e. 1 in 50 startups are a resounding success, which seems probably a bit over-optimistic but reasonable). VCs can easily spread investment around to 100 startups, but employees get a few swings at bat at most when it comes to where they work.
For most things in life, you often just don't have that many chances. E.g. most people don't date a hundred people before finding their spouse.
As someone born in 1956, I and everyone I knew were great enjoyers of Peanuts, and I still appreciate those strips when I see them.
There's a combination of solace in the face of cruelty, humor, gentleness and truthfulness there that unique. Certainly, when I was older, I came to also love Watterson's and Larson's work. They have an edge that Shulz's work didn't. But his work had something theirs didn't.
I can understand how it could be hard for people who didn't grow up with Peanuts make their way into it. For people used to an edginess that Peanuts doesn't have, it looks merely cute. But it really isn't. There is a depth to the feelings Schulz portrayed.
Perhaps to really enjoy Peanuts, one had to have experienced the new strips coming out each day, which added a depth of knowledge about the relationships between the characters which was an essential background that is just not there when one sees a couple of strips now.
Watterson wrote:
> “The wonder of ‘Peanuts’ is that it worked on so many levels simultaneously.… Children could enjoy the silly drawings … while adults could see the bleak undercurrent of cruelty, loneliness and failure, or the perpetual theme of unrequited love, or the strip’s stark visual beauty.
(Regarding that last, Peanuts was displayed at the Louvre....)
Here, here! I was born in 1951 - read Peanuts everyday as a kid, still read Peanuts everyday as an adult. It has great humor and insight into relationships.
> There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.
I expect that's exactly what they have in mind. If they're successful, Meta's project will be to Apple's what early MP3 players were to the original iPod.
It's more likely than not that they will, in my opinion. As an owner of both an AVP and Quest 2, the former is a lot nicer to use than the latter with the exception of VR games, and my hunch is that Valve is going to eat Meta's lunch for gaming with Deckard (which will be at least as good as the Quest 3, but much more open, paired with a vastly more populated and popular marketplace, probably won't treat PCVR as an afterthought, and won't be saddled with the Quest's somewhat painful sideloading experience).
The main hurdle Apple faces is bringing costs down and improving the AVP's form factor, both of which are well within their capabilities.
Having experienced the Quest Pro I can say that Apple has absolutely no clue what the focus should be on.
Hint: being able to grab a well balanced headset that is so easy to put on as a cap. This makes you not think if you are going to watch or play in VR, you just do it.
I think Apple knows exactly what they're doing, but was forced to choose between making the product more about demonstrating their tech and end goals or being mass market mediocre and chose the former. Nobody would've cared about what amounted to a Quest wrapped in a Cupertino design with similar performance, specs, etc. It's very much in line with the original iPod and iPhone, both of which took a few iterations before becoming category-defining hits. It'll probably be the second or third-gen Vision device that'll fix the AVP's nits while also keeping or improving upon its strong points.
Of course the AVP is much nicer than the Quest 2. For more than 10 times the price it had better be.
It doesn't really describe the companies' different abilities but the design goals. The quest 2 was clearly 'make it as cheap as possible so lots of people can buy it' and the AVP's was 'make it as good as it can be, price is not a factor'
Still though, both products eventually get stuck at the same point: a killer usecase. Neither has a compelling reason to actually want to put it on. There's very few things that are better in VR and the ones that are are really niche. I personally love VR gaming and stimulations. I love VR for it and I use it a ton. But those are pretty niche.
But socialising in VR is not really a great user experience despite most of meta's focus going there. And Apple? They don't really have any usecase that shines. Maybe watching movies but even that works better on an actual TV as you can share the experience with others.
My take on VR/AR socialization is that it can work, but only if it's as low-friction as picking up a phone and doing a video call is today, which isn't achievable so long as we're still stuck on headsets as the primary form factor.
That's why they bought up Luxotica shares. Because scuba gear is for scuba diving. Even if it's white, it's still scuba gear. Remember the PDAs with resitive screens and styluses? They were a lot more convenient than scuba gear.
I get those "math processing errors" in Firefox, after some time. Some of the error messages, which appear right before those:
GET https://www.quantamagazine.org/wp-content/themes/quanta2024/frontend/js/mathjax/fonts/HTML-CSS/TeX/png/imagedata.js?V=2.7.0 NS_ERROR_CORRUPTED_CONTENT
The resource from “https://www.quantamagazine.org/wp-content/themes/quanta2024/frontend/js/mathjax/fonts/HTML-CSS/TeX/png/imagedata.js?V=2.7.0” was blocked due to MIME type (“text/html”) mismatch (X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff).
Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://www.quantamagazine.org/wp-content/themes/quanta2024/frontend/js/mathjax/fonts/HTML-CSS/TeX/png/imagedata.js?V=2.7.0”. how-isaac-newton-discovered-the-binomial-power-series-20220831:1:1
Uncaught TypeError: c.FONTDATA.FONTS.MathJax_Main[8212][5] is undefined
The editor, JOE, has a WordStar mode that you bring up with jstar. I programmed in WordStar in the 80's, and it's fun to bring it back to life that way!
It appears that Cal Newport has decided to be the one to most publicly initiate the inevitable Trough Of Disillusionment stage of the Hype Cycle. I'm not sure it'll last very long, though, considering (for starters) Google DeepMind's gold medal at the recent International Math Olympiad. Also, while he criticizes the cost-cutting measure which is ChatGPT 5, he doesn't even mention ChatGPT 5 Pro, which is performing excellently.
I don't know. What if there happened to me some unimaginable pathogen that Earth animal life had no way of resisting, and that multiplied rapidly in the presence of our kind of life?
Extremely improbable. Astronomically improbable. Virtually impossible. All that is absolutely, 100% true.
But given the stakes, similarly astronomically high, I'm not sure it didn't actually make sense to do a quarantine for a few weeks. Yes, I know the indium seals didn't work. But the fact that we failed to create a quarantine doesn't mean it was worthless to at least make an attempt. It cost us virtually nothing in comparison to the stakes.
That's my personal response, anyway, and reflects the opinion I would have expressed at the time if I happened to have been involved in the project.
I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.
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