What problem does it solve? I see a bunch of potential uses but I don’t see any problems looking to be solved.

Will I like gaming better if I control the games with my hands instead of a controller?

Will I like working in my glasses better than my laptop screen? Or even a dual laptop screen like a ZenBook Duo? Or a cheap second portable display? Do these glasses fit better in a backpack than a laptop and a second portable screen? They can’t collapse flat.

Are these glasses more portable and convenient than a smartphone? What are the benefits to watching an NBA game on this compared to a phone or my TV screen at home?

I can’t believe Meta is blowing their money on this stuff still.

The geometric waveguide technology used in the Display glasses is quite complicated and costly, the birdbath optic that Xreal uses is stupid, so to speak, and various holographic solutions used by Even Realities and likes is not so spectacular in light loss(IIUC the fancy term is "quantum efficiency"), as well as multi color feasibility(needs 3 layers with separate image sources).

Prior to now we didn't know if Meta will be doing a Display 2 or Quest 4, or if they plan to do something else. This is that something else.

I agree that these seem like a stopgap short of the thing everyone wants - Vision Pro specs (ahaha) in a pair of regular glasses.

Personally, as a glasses-wearer, I'm not quite convinced it's the right target though - even my 20 gram glasses are uncomfortable to wear all day and I take them off whenever they're not needed. I'd rather have a ski-goggle device (similarly light, but with the weight more evenly distributed, and still with optical see-through) with fewer performance compromises. Of course that wouldn't let the manufacturer dominate "the next form of personal computing" or whatever.

(I have a fairly strong prescription, so the literal glass in my glasses does weigh a fair bit more than for most people. Yay modern optional media! It's so much nicer than it used to be)

https://us.shop.xreal.com/products/xreal-xbx-a01

I’ve always wanted it to be better, but it’s just terrible. It’s like working on a projector screen where the pixels never line up.

I've a pair of Nreal Air glasses (before the rebrand) and a pair of Xreal Ones. I have found the latter remarkably comfortable and sharp enough for coding, reading text, playing games, etc. for extended periods of time.

The new widescreen modes are a real treat too. Still waiting for Real 3D to get upgraded to 60FPS though.

So: no problems solved.

It's essentially the xr-glasses /vr glasses category. Plenty of options around on stores

That’s why the compressor answers to software. How else would I change the temperature remotely if it didn‘t?

I find that the anti-smart device brigade among tech enthusiasts is very detached from the reality of what consumers want. The general public does demand smart features and they want them to work well.

The sin here isn’t that the fridge is smart, the sin is that bad software was pushed out.

My particular refrigerator also has a purposefully limited set of features. You’ll notice that real luxury brands like Sub-Zero don’t pack their refrigerators with crazy feature lists and touch screens. Their smart apps are basic and focus on essentials like “door left open” or “change filter” notifications and remote temperature adjustment. They don’t have complicated features like craft cocktail ice and even basic stuff like water dispensing is an optional extra (since it’s assumed that luxury clients may have a separate dedicated reverse osmosis and sparkling water machine for that). They don’t push out frequent updates and they keep their smart functions as modular components since it’s assumed that the refrigerator will remain installed permanently for decades (e.g., you can add a newer control system with touch screen and WiFi to your older Sub-Zero fridge).

It would be nice if non-luxury brands followed some of these philosophies a little more.

I can't tell if you're serious or sarcastic, so I'll bite: why on Earth would you ever want to change the temperature settings of your fridge?

I think if you are the type who is interested in digging up comment history you’ll find plenty of comments from me that show that I’m pretty much a regular person who has respectful conversations.

I apologize if I didn’t follow the popular “corporation bad” narrative. Like, I do recognize that ink is grossly overpriced and all that. At the same time, I don’t really think we are held hostage by printer companies these days. I buy ink once a year or less and it’s not even a laser printer. It isn’t a significant expense or inconvenience.

...why do you need to change the fridge temperature remotely?

I could implement that in a weekend on an ESP board.

Kids/nanny/housekeeper changes the temperature against my wishes.

I’ve left the house for a long vacation with the fridge emptied and I’d like to change the temperature to consume less power while I’m gone, forgot to do it before I left.

And again it’s trivially simple functionality that costs almost no money or development effort to I implement.

The smart functions that have been very useful to me have been water filter reminders and door left open reminders.

In the case of one of the door open reminders the person who was at home didn’t realize the door was left open.

  - Albert Einstein

Bullshit. The ideal refrigerator temperature is already close enough to freezing that any small adjustment you could make is unlikely to do any good. If this was actually a good idea then by your logic (similar to odd love for printer manufacturers) the all wise manufacturers would have already incorporated this into their “smart” fridges.

That you can remotely control something isn’t “smart”

Do you think a $50,000 car that doesn’t have air conditioning is a good value?

I expect the printer to use whatever inks it has on hand to print in the best quality it can.

The use of ink is an inevitability.

It always struck me as one of those things analogous to “I don’t understand why my car needs oil when I already put gas in it.”

Just give the machine the stuff it requires to operate.

Humans have historically been able to decide when quality is low enough that replacement/repair is necessary in these situations. This goes for almost anything: appliances, farming equipment, clothing, etc.

Having a device/appliance/tool that decides for you that “it’s time”, especially when the manufacturer has a vested interest in coercing you into a buying a replacement right away, takes away that owner agency.

Your unpreparedness on your kids’ homework isn’t the fault of the manufacturer. I can’t blame Ticonderoga if I run out of pencils.

If you ran out of black ink you’d be similarly in trouble.

That analogy doesn’t hold up. You have other colour pencils at hand, but you can’t use them because the blue pencil is worn down. Let me use my goshdarn pencils.

Let’s make another analogy: two wheels fall off my car. You tell me “hey, motorcycles exist, you can still use that car!!”

But my car isn’t a motorcycle, it’s a car.

If you buy a printer that requires two cartridges to function then you keep both cartridges filled to keep it functioning.

I’ve always felt like this whole discussion has mostly surrounded people who are penny pinching to an extreme level that doesn’t make sense. You didn’t run out of color ink because you never printed in color. And if you never printed in color you wouldn’t have bought a color printer. You’ve gotta refill your color ink eventually.

This is the same thing as people who add water to their liquid hand soap to try and make it last longer. It just makes the soap gross and saves 10 cents at best.

I can find some Brother monochrome laser printers for $70 on eBay.

There are 0 other reasons, you being ignorant of basic facts and repeating your weird mantra doesn't change that.

In consumer models it is security theater for politicians to claim prints can be tracked and for the consumers to use/waste more ink and buy more.

A printer can still print black when color ink is gone

Do you?

Monotone printers are a thing and have been since the 60's.

If you want a monotone printer, buy one. I just have a little bit of confusion around the situation where people who bought color inkjet printers aren’t willing to put color ink in the printer.

I’m pretty sure the reasoning for color ink cartridges relying on both sets of cartridges is that the “black” cartridge is no longer perfectly black in that configuration.

I bought a color laser in 2004 and I’ve never replaced the C M or Y toner because I almost never print color. Miraculously, it is still happy to print “imperfect” black and white, which is exactly what I want.

I think that this definition of “user-hostile” depends on a deliberate misinterpretation of the requirements of running the device.

If we just change our frame of reference to hold the expectation that “all ink supplies supplies must be sufficient for it to operate” it seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I dunno, maybe I just have an aversion to broken shit being in my house. Maybe you’re right, maybe it would be better to have some kind of “emergency” functionality for the times when I forget to refill ink. I also just keep spare ink cartridges so I’m never rushing out to buy another one. This is, to me, part of being a functioning adult.

I wouldn’t really allow the things I own to be broken or out of supplies if they’re things I rely on.

These are $30-50 ink cartridges, and many inkjet printers have cheaper refill supplies with the popularity of ink tank designs where you can refill them yourself including third party ink without the need to buy new ink cartridges.

There’s just so much outrage around this subject for no reason if you ask me. People barely print anymore anyway, I think it’s time we get over it.

You don't, either.

Black ink is all that's required to print B&W documents. Period. No one designs a black ink to be supplemented by another color before it achieves "full blackness". That's literally the entire point of black ink.

It doesn't need that to operate, except in certain situations. The odds of being hit by a windshield-high wave of mud by a passing truck, when the sky is clear, are very low.

If I recall correctly the clinical studies put it at 50% success rate or higher depending on how many weeks you continue the regiment.

From the outside looking in it looked like it was way less effort and mental strain than other forms of quitting. They basically started taking the drug and by the end they just didn’t want cigarettes anymore.

For those of you looking to quit nicotine, I think looking toward medical solutions is the way to go. It’s too bad our medical system has incentivized shyness around finding medical solutions.

There are side effects; it can cause stomach bleeding if you don't carefully take it with meals, so if your breakfast is just a cup of coffee you'll need to adjust to consuming food; and it's associated with intensely vivid dreams which can disrupt your sleep. I experienced both but did not find it that bad, I blame myself for playing a bit fast and loose with the mealtime warnings. idk what it costs now but I paid $400 for the full course out of pocket, probably like $750 today with inflation. So, less than 6 months of moderate cigarette use.

It doesn't fix the psychological desire for a 'smoke break'; for about 6 months I chewed gum (ordinary gum, not nicotine) to get past the mental habit of wanting to consume something. Some people reported using a fidget toy to give their hands something to do. My theory is that if you have a severe smoking addition it is probably because nicotine slotted neatly into some pre-existing somatic need, so once you get past the cravings stage it's worth exploring why smoking or vaping became such a big deal for you in the first place.

What was really incredible though was right from the start I felt fantastic, like I spent all day in a flow state.

The doctor stopped the prescription after (I think) 8 weeks and I didn't start smoking again. Many years later I learned it is prescribed for ADHD and also as an antidepressant.

Worth keeping in mind as a generality that drugs disclose all their side effects even when those side effects are very rare or temporary.

We’ve been saying these things about Mastodon and Blue Sky for a long time but they’ve also remained niche.

Discord really isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Look at it from the perspective of a parent giving a device to a kid. Before, you’d have to deal with a maze of blocking content. You’d have to allow/blocklist a huge number of apps and services manually. If your kid discovers some new one you or your blocking service has never heard of, they’ve gotten around your parental control wishes.

With the age verification API, you just set the age in the OS (and lock it down with MDM or whatever) and now all the apps and websites have to respect it and act accordingly.

Your kid can’t just make a new account or download another browser or do some other crazy workaround to get around your restrictions. That setting is there at the OS level.

Fingerprinting, perhaps it is a higher risk, the age range is being more directly provided. However, once a user is under 18 they're already triggering more stringent privacy laws and rules, an inability to enter into contracts, etc, and then when you get to the "over 18" age range it all becomes rather vague.

Also, I highly doubt existing social media and Internet applications haven't already figured out most of their users' ages rather trivially using other means. Discord implicitly admits to this by saying that 90% of their users will not even be asked to verify their age. Discord already knows how old 90% of their users are with high confidence.

Of course when we talk about someone like Google or Discord we are talking about a privately operated service provider and business, which is a separate issue than the OS-level privacy flag and is worth separating as a distinctly different concept. Private businesses were always able to scan your identity documents or face pictures if they wanted to do that as a prerequisite to using their products or services regardless of the law. In almost all states, this practice was never banned, and even in states with more stringent biometrics collection requirements like Illinois you can still do this as long as it's implemented in a legally compliant way.

Go back to 1996 and tell someone that in 30 years the government will be legally able to look at everything they have written, taken pictures of, or recorded in the last 5 years in private and it use to retroactively punish them for any crime.

This is the law for cellphones and computers for anyone who lives within 100 miles of an ocean, border or airport.

The most draconian possible next steps we can imagine are far too Utopian for the world we live in.

As soon as it is established that you are not in the process of entering or leaving the country, what you are saying is not true.

E.g., A police officer in your city can't look through the contents of your phone without a warrant at a DUI stop just because you are within 100 miles of a border. The local police or TSA can't stop everyone in the airport and sift through their phones and documents on their person just because they are inside an airport. It must be in the context of a border crossing activity.

What you are saying about the government being legally able to look at everything you have written, taken pictures of, or recorded in the last 5 years in private to retroactively punish you for a crime is also broadly not true. The only thing that has truly changed is that it is far more difficult for average people to avoid leaking information through third parties.

If I take photos in private and keep them on my computer in my house, the government still needs a warrant to access those photos. The difference here is that entities like Meta could voluntarily give the government access to their data without a warrant if they chose to, and they may be more willing to divulge information via subpoenas. Also, a lot of people tend to just post information publicly that's easily accessed.

"Retroactively" punishing you for a crime is also a gross mischaracterization. For one thing, every crime you get punished for is "retroactive" in the sense of the crime having taken place in the past, so your use of the word is meaningless alarmism.

It was like 100 lines, a third of it is tests, and another third is a parse_calendar_date function.

What are you talking about, "infrastructure"? How complicated do you think storing a date is?

Do you have any basis for assuming that that users who are under 18 will have that information revealed to other users? That’s not what I read in this article.

I also think you’re being quite prescriptive about a private commercial service. You’re entitled to your opinion, of course, but companies enact restrictions to their products and services not required by law all the time.

If Discord wants to make their service require a mandatory declaration of allegiance to the Klingon empire, they’re allowed to do that.

So yes, it’s super easy for groomers to focus on children with this update.

It will be trivial for pedophiles to figure out which accounts aren't tagged as verified adults.

And knowing how these sorts of dynamics work - it'll largely be children in third world countries that will be the primary victims of pedophiles in this manner.

It’s even difficult to find CPU benchmarks that don’t overemphasize 1080p and eSports scenarios.

My upgrade from 5600x3D to 9850x3D felt kind of dumb at the time, but I decided to do it because Micro Center’s bundle deals are so far below market pricing.

I was shocked at how much better it is. Benchmarks and FPS don’t really show things like micro stutters and little performance wrinkles like that. I’m not even sure 1% low FPS counts capture it.

A great example game for this is Oblivion Remastered. Upgrading my CPU alone with the same GPU took away the environment loading slowdown almost entirely.

The benchmark will tell you that I didn’t gain any FPS during gameplay but every time I open a door into the new environment my CPU is positively impacting the experience.

I would have said the exact same thing you are saying until I actually experienced upgrading to the best on the market. For the record, this is the first time in my life I’ve actually owned the best CPU on the market for gaming.

My old advice would have been to buy one of those sweet spot cheaper mid-range gaming CPUs, but my newer advice is really if you’ve already spent all that you’re willing to spend on a GPU (I have a 9070XT, my only upgrade paths are insanely expensive), buy the highest gaming CPU on the list for gaming benchmarks (e.g., I wouldn’t go crazy with a 9950X3D2 since it doesn’t have any gaming improvements above the 9850X3D).

And the thing about CPUs is they’re not insanely expensive like GPUs. We are talking a price delta of $200 between this beast of a CPU and something way more middling.

Given the massive increase in hardware prices lately, we are going to have to get by with mid range or even low end hardware for a lot longer. Studios will be forced to actually optimise games to not run like shit on a sub $8000 PC.

Every game should be targeting the switch 2 and steam deck in terms of power.

Having a powerful rig is the brute force way around the game’s performance problems.

My PC wasn’t $8000. My 9850X3D, 32GB of RAM, and motherboard cost $800 in a bundle. Yes, purchased in 2026 during the RAM crisis. I was also able to sell my previous CPU, RAM, and board for around $500.

Obviously this is not a budget build but about half the cost is the graphics card. I would have saved minimal amount of money if I had gotten a worse CPU.

I think PS5 is a perfectly reasonable spec to be targeting, which was the higher end of mid range about 5 years ago, and still significantly out performs Switch 2 (which significantly out performs steam deck). I’m sure the GTA sales will demonstrate that the install base at this spec is wide enough for broad commercial success.

I grew up with gaming systems that got rapidly better and while it can be argued that we are at a diminishing returns plateau of gaming horsepower, I don’t think the solution is to never get hardware upgrades ever again, even in the current RAM-constrained environment.

GTA VI is coming out with FPS maximum of 30FPS on the PS5 including PS5 Pro. That’s a subpar experience that is limited by hardware.

We saw with much of the PS5’s lifespan that many of its cross-platform games came out on PS4 and original Switch with minimal compromise.

Not enough of the install base owns those higher end solutions, so for the most part someone with a better performing rig is getting better FPS, higher resolution, and not much else. Even gaining additional draw distance is rare these days, and higher resolution textures are basically impossible to see.

If the console is going to survive rather than decline as a whole I think that Microsoft and Sony will need to get more serious about innovation rather than just making a samey spec bump at a high price that doesn’t motivate their users to upgrade. Nintendo already proved that basic and rather mild level of innovation can excite the market (original Switch).

It's relatively easy to allow powerful hardware to just run the game at 4k 120fps highest settings while weaker hardware runs exactly the same game at lower graphic settings.

I think it's limited by their software. The hardware buys them flexibility. Nobody is pushing it like the ps2 days.

There are some incredibly good PC laptops out there with the same kinds of features of MacBook Pros and more: long battery life, haptic trackpad, aluminum CNC build, long sleep battery life, etc. Check out Intel core series 3.

I’m a very happy with my Framework 13 Pro.

I went to their server site and clicked “shop now.”

I picked a PowerEdge R360. It has the price right here at $5k and a big green “Add to Cart” button along with an incredibly long list of customization options just like I was buying a laptop or desktop. It doesn’t seem like I have to contact anyone to get an order in.

It says I can get it as soon as October 2.