Notices by Danny O'B (danny@mastodon.spesh.com)

I guess setting up a "AI Plays Universal Paperclips" instance would be a bad idea, right?

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

ah; it was DNS

@evan Evan!!! I'm so sorry this happened, and so so happy you're recovering and being taken care of!

Take your time: we're all here to help and take on anything you might need!

@evan @genehack 1) it's period charm, 2) it's also good for checking for captive portals

@brainwane @doy oh hai! I missed this thing (I lurked a bit on the MeFI threads and enjoyed it, but didn't have much to add).

LJ was something I was thinking about at the time (I remember pestering bradfitz about what %age of LJ users posted /just to themselves/). Access controls only get you so far, you need strong social censure against cut-and-paste, screenshotting etc. LJ and Dreamwidth both have/had that, I recall. I don't know how that would have played out had they been the drivers

1) Quite a few people have been disappointed by the passthrough, eye-tracking and field-of-view, to the extent that big Apple fans are thinking of sending it back. I find them all fine, and I suspect this may be a combo of physiological variance or actual hardware issues/bugs. Some people say they can't see text in passthrough, for instance, and it seems fine to me.

2) The persona and eyesight (the googly eyes on the front) are clearly Not Very Good, but demos of things that /should/ be good in a version 2 or 3. The thing is clearly meant to be see-through glasses, with higher-res cameras, but they just didn't pull that off in the first gen. https://www.ifixit.com/News/90137/vision-pro-teardown-why-those-fake-eyes-look-so-weird goes into some of the tradeoffs that make the eyesight feature not quite come together.

3) I think the thing that may have made Apple pull the trigger on shipping is that the AVP v1.0 can throw around some emotional heft here: namely spatial videos and the 3D interactive elements. I jumped at the dinosaur, and spent far too long dreamily watching a 3D video I took of my family at Christmas. There's some cheesy humanity in this tech somewhere, and that's usually what Apple seizes on and tries to foster.

4) The UX feels work-y (or art-y or creative-y or do-something-that-isn't-just-computer-y). I am unsure if I could work for long *in it*, but it felt like a full-fledged user interface, in a way that the Quest/Steam UI doesn't really.

5) The main thing limiting it at the moment is that normal UI interactions can get a little ... intense. I brought up a Safari webpage and the combo of the bright colors, eye-tracking on lots of links, gave me real sensory overload. Maybe you adapt, but it felt like the rest of the interface -- which is quite muted and visually subtle, is toned down by comparison. We may think you want a million windows floating in 3D space, but I'm not sure that's tolerable, even for us.

6) I'm really fooling around with this to see what we need to gank for the Free and Open World. i don't think there's anything utterly unobtainable here, apart ofc from the hardware, but that will slowly trickle down into the open hardware land. I think it's noteworthy that Apple chose to go the iOS/iPadOS locked down app route, rather than making this a desktop Mac alternative. I think you could build a competive, unrestricted, seize-the-means-of-computation version of this someday.

7) My instinct, as ever, is to treat these initial forays by well-capitalized corps -- just like AT&T Unix, the early OS X laptops, the iphone, the ipad, the watch, GPT -- like palantirs. Good for seeing a little bit into the future to know where we're heading, but don't get too comfortable in the world they are building, and make sure you're not giving more info to it, than you are taking from it...

8) And yeah, @evan emacs was pretty good in it! I was typing on a bluetooth keyboard lying in bed, staring at a giant emacs frame on the ceiling!

Because I live in the strange intersectional space where I can simultaneously be pining for fosdem *and* willing to stay in the US and fork over for a Apple Vision Pro, here's my first weekend impressions of the latter: