I wonder what we're learning from the unfolding crisis in the Ukraine. Russia today is potentially a model for the US in 10-20 more years. Both states have lost a lot of the first/bestest/mostest superlatives that made them admired world leaders. Among the major ones remaining for both nations is their military strength.
There are plenty of ways to read the Russian rationale for the Ukraine conflict-- supporting the Russian-language community, de-Nazification, securing territorial and economic needs, red-lining NATO, but there's definitely an subtext of projecting power and relevance, re-establishing a sphere of influence. They have to say to the West that it can't spend 30 years poking the bear and expect to not get swatted at.
I could see America moving similarly if conditions continue to falter; with their economic dominance being lapped, how much of their self-perceived legitimacy revolves around "we have nukes and Marvel movies" (military power and cultural dominance). Would they similarly lean into the military and antagonize over Taiwan to remind the world of their importance? (Given current educational standards, they would likely end up nuking a poor Chinese takeaway because it happened to be called "Beijing Palace")
I wonder if there are ways where China can help get the US to a "soft landing"-- a setup where the they can still consider itself a major power, while having to acknowlege a global order where it can no longer act unilaterally without consequence. Steer their attention to
I also wonder if failure in the Ukraine itself could accelerate the emotional-breakdown process. Is it really a powerful military if it can invoke WWIII on demand, but lacks the finesse to win a proxied regional war? Or is it just an expensive, narrow-use tool that will inevitably demand to be misused?
While there may be good apps, I tend to define "Killer App" as a specific program that people not already in the ecosystem will explicitly buy into a hardware platform to run. The classic being VisiCalc for the Apple II and Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC. On the gaming side, think about how many millions of Game Boys were sold so people could play Tetris; one suspects a significant number never saw another cartridge in their life. Or, perhaps less hyperbolically, Halo got a lot of people onto the Xbox platform, and FF7 did the same for the Playstation.
Does any VR title have the same degree of wide awareness and demand those programs had at their peak?
I could imagine someone trying to force the hand by moving a beloved franchise into VR-- imagine if the next Dragon Quest was VR-only, for example, and people who buy everything with that cute blue slime on it would also buy cute-blue-slime shape headsets. Meta has the resources to buy such a situation into existence, but it might not be what they're after because it's likely to still be only a narrow draw-- they're used to building a platform for All The People, not just the audience who followed a single beloved franchise over.
The big lesson from Second Life to me is that it's a novelty for 95% of potential users, and a fixation for a few true believers.
VR and AR are in that era of radio in the 1920s, or personal computers in 1977. They're interesting, people might gawk at one for a little while if given access to it, but right now, the long-term audience is going to be primarily enthusiasts who are passionate about the technology for its own sake.
We're still waiting for a lot of details to snap into place to make it broadly appealing:
The hardware and setup needs to be turnkey. Newer kit is getting a lot closer, but I think it's going to be hard because you have to factor in things like "setting up a wide enough floor space to avoid injuring yourself when using it" and "we haven't really resolved that this gives a fair number of people violent sickness"
There need to be killer apps. Some of the VR experiences seem like they'd be fun, but eventually exhausting. It's sort of like the motion control (Wii/Kinect/PSMove) trend-- people enjoyed them, but it seemed like it burnt through quickly, rather than becoming a core part of new gaming experiences going forward.
AR likely has an easier road to "killer app" because it can be applied to a bunch of vertical use cases; I'm picturing a fry-cook with a heads-up display that tracks how long each patty has been on the grille and its internal temperature, for example. Even if mainstream consumers never buy AR gear, there might be a million devices sold to businesses. Makes me think of Windows CE; the consumer launch was muted, but it was on a billion scanner-oriented devices for years.
Well, they already have the "Rules-Based International Order", how about the "Kicks Ass-Based International Order?", or the "Totally Shreds-Based International Order".
Symbolic representation matters, especially if the bloc continues to grow. I wonder if there will be a legitimate desire for a name that goes beyond an acronym. The nice thing about something like "Warsaw Pact" was that it could be used for any number of participants.
I'm curious if we have a detailed historic analysis of the origin of the term.
I always figured it came form the "rice burner" mocking for Japanese motorbikes and cars. I figured this was mostly a pick about their relatively low performance. Aside from the "Asians eat rice" source material, is that intended as an insult to Asians in general, or more directed to the design committees at Toyota and Honda-- that they couldn't design a car capable of burning petrol?
To try a parallel concept: If an x86-64 enthusiast made fun of an ARM chip by saying it was "manufactured on a crumpet substrate" would that be an insult against the British, or more using that it comes from a British firm to provide vocabulary for a product-related insult?
OTOH, I never really saw the term widely used to describe a desktop configuration before here, and it feels weird because of that more than anything else. I'm trying to remember if it was seen in the "PC Case Mod" community circa 2000, because they actually used a fair number of techniques and ideas from the car tuning scene that also used the "ricing" term (lots of cold-cathode lighting and weird 12v accessories)
I thought they'd also test the moulds with clear plastic so it was obvious if there were internal defects due to things like poor flow into part of the mould
The reassuring factor is that the nuclear arsenal was built by firms that specialized in contract and bid engineering, not weapons engineering.
I feel like there's an interesting premise for a post-apocalyptic story; we find a missile base, fully intact, but it's obvious all the launch processes were attempted. As they explore further, we discover the missiles had been sabotaged by industrial incompetence and willful corner cutting. The crew is greeted by the attackers as heroic collaborators, and there's a comical "don't say anything" moment when someone starts to mention the truth.
I think I got that one; back then you could order cheap CDs of a bunch of different distributions from third-party vendors because most people didn't have broadband. Depressingly, it seems the firm I used (CheapBytes out of California) is gone now.
I had used Slackware before that since my 'learn you linux' book came with a Slackware disc set. I recall it being frustrating because I had actually bought WordPerfect for Linux, a libc5 product, and it didn't work right with the new glibc universe.
Paint him brown or black. Nobody will bother to look, and if someone finds him, odds are great that they'll find some gussied up excuse that he had it coming.
Supposedly they basically only sold them if you were buying another Aston Martin, since they existed solely to fix average fuel economy numbers for their usual boats
I think Fast Boot is more about screwing up anything third party.
If it's on, it bollixes up the wireless card if you reboot into Linux. But even without dual-booting, it seems to leave USB devices active that I don't want (specifically a USB->serial adaptor with a peripheral danging off of it)
At one point I had a weird printer which had sheets of wax that melted onto the page. It produced a very nifty "glossy magazine" feel when you printed full page, but I only used it like twice because I bought it at a jumble sale and discovered that it was only supported imperfectly by one ancient DOS application I had. I wonder if PLA printing would produce a similar feel.
I never understood why RJ-style connectors didn't take off in the computer space outside of Ethernet and modems, which tend to be the most telecom-adjacent parts of the business. NIH syndrome? Thicc cable connectors convince people your $5k IBM AT isn't a toy?
For low-voltage, low-speed stuff, it's an obvious choice. I think pre-ADB Macs (128/512/Plus) used it for the keyboard, but there's no reason we needed those awkward mini-DIN PS/2 and ADB cables that always involve fighting with orientation. Maybe even RJ-45 based serial ports.
Hell, why not design a RJ-style plug for USB instead of the joke that is full-size type B? It has an obvious orientation and a locking clip, and it's about the same size. Don't even get me started on SATA.
Most presidents have lived, at most, a few decades after the conclusion of their regime. I believe Carter is now the champion in that category, at 43 years. This is the upper bounds on their consequences. As far as we know about life after death, anything that jumps the track after that is no longer a problem for them. This creates a tunnel vision-- it's very hard for mortal leaders to consider "this has a payback or cost structure over 50, 100, 500 years."
On the other hand, an immortal is stuck here. He'll be the one with searing lung pain for millennia until the ecosystem heals from a fossil-fuel binge, he'll be watching any century-scale projects he invested in crumble as society destabilizes around him. This would impact his goals and decision making process-- his self interest would favour stewardship and long-term stability.
TBH, I really want to see some sort of take on "Vampire runs for President on a pro-ecology platform." It's no zanier than anything else in this season's Crunchyroll catalogue.
Sometimes there's a map, but I wish it had landmarks. Is that cluster of lights in the distance Chicago or Salt Lake? Sorry, the map only shows the origin and destination cities.
I wonder what we're learning from the unfolding crisis in the Ukraine. Russia today is potentially a model for the US in 10-20 more years. Both states have lost a lot of the first/bestest/mostest superlatives that made them admired world leaders. Among the major ones remaining for both nations is their military strength.
There are plenty of ways to read the Russian rationale for the Ukraine conflict-- supporting the Russian-language community, de-Nazification, securing territorial and economic needs, red-lining NATO, but there's definitely an subtext of projecting power and relevance, re-establishing a sphere of influence. They have to say to the West that it can't spend 30 years poking the bear and expect to not get swatted at.
I could see America moving similarly if conditions continue to falter; with their economic dominance being lapped, how much of their self-perceived legitimacy revolves around "we have nukes and Marvel movies" (military power and cultural dominance). Would they similarly lean into the military and antagonize over Taiwan to remind the world of their importance? (Given current educational standards, they would likely end up nuking a poor Chinese takeaway because it happened to be called "Beijing Palace")
I wonder if there are ways where China can help get the US to a "soft landing"-- a setup where the they can still consider itself a major power, while having to acknowlege a global order where it can no longer act unilaterally without consequence. Steer their attention to
I also wonder if failure in the Ukraine itself could accelerate the emotional-breakdown process. Is it really a powerful military if it can invoke WWIII on demand, but lacks the finesse to win a proxied regional war? Or is it just an expensive, narrow-use tool that will inevitably demand to be misused?