@dubdub That might be accurate for a child, but for a product, especially a product that costs a lot of money, I am not really interested in people telling me how awesome it is because they used it for a bit 😛 I’ve already used AR/VR headsets and am interested in the product because I see the potential.

I want to know what can go wrong and what I should look out for so that I can make an initial assessment without having to plunk down the money.

If you want posts on how awesome the AVP is, I’m sure you can find them all over the place 🙂

In case you’re not aware - I’m working with the Mastodon team on #DevRel and community 🚀

If you’re building a client on the #MastodonAPI I would love to get connected and help you stay up-to-date. Drop me a line andy@joinmastodon.org and let me know what you’re working on! 🙏🏻

(pls boost for reach / tell the devs of your fave apps)

Part 2 of Karl Guttag’s series of articles on his thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro is now up on his site.

He discusses the possible issues with the AVP this time around from a hardware perspective. If you’d like to get a thoughtful perspective on all the various factors that you might want to consider when trying to decide if AVP is for you or not, you might want to give the articles a read and so that you can make your own mind up instead of relying purely on hype, or how excited others are about it 😛

https://kguttag.com/2023/06/16/apple-vision-pro-part-2-hardware-issues/

#Apple #VIsionPro #Dissection #Analysis #Hardware

@AngelaPreston Back in the late 90s and early oughts, I used to develop a lot of software. It was all distributed for free over the Internet since I actually believed in the concept of free software 🙂

I enjoyed talking to people about the software I developed and getting their feedback and had quite a community going around the stuff I developed. And as far as I can recall, I never felt as if people should pay me money for the work I did. I did it because I loved it and I continued to do it because people enjoyed it.

However, I must also add that back then it wasn’t as easy to sell stuff. No app stores were present and you had to jump through a lot of hoops to sell anything online — especially if you were not in the US (as I was for at least part of that time).

So yeah, there are some of us who do like just creating things. But the flip side of the coin is that these days, there also seems to be more of a sense of entitlement to people 🙂 Even if they get something for free, there seem to be more people who seem to feel that they are owed something just because they used the software. At least in my hazy recollections, that didn’t seem to be so much the case back then — people appreciated what somebody did for free and contributed in their own way, either as feedback, art, spreading the word, or simply talking to you.

So the current situation might be a mix of a bit of both — creators getting more money-concious as well as users getting more entitled? I don’t know if that is indeed the case, but just a possibility ….

@jknlsn Some more feedback in case it is helpful — just a caveat, I don’t know if the features I look for in a Mastadon client are the ones that other people are interested in 🙂

What I really liked about the app:

* The home feed filtering option to view just links, media etc.

* Multi-tags

* The threading — I like how your post thread view looks like. The client I’m using at the moment gives a way abbreviated thread of messages. I hadn’t looked into it till now since I didn’t notice that the threads were abbreviated 🙂 Will need to dig into it now ….

* Post scheduling

* The ability to create post threads

Things that didn’t work well or features I’d like to see:

* I get an “Error 404” whenever I restart the app. MIght be due to me being on Akkoma and some API endpoint being different.

* Remembering your last position on the feed so that you don’t have to scroll back each time you launch the app and try to find where you were ..

* The post editor does not appear to query the server to see what the character limit for a post is. My server has a character limit of 8000 but it shows 500 per post.

* The ability to filter out by followed hashtag and/or list members from the main timeline

* I can’t seem to create lists. Not sure if this is failing because I’m on Akkoma and the API endpoint might be different (in case you’re creating the list on server as well and not just locally) or something else but just letting you know.

* If I go to a user’s profile, I notice the menu has an option to add to a list, but the menu option does not seem to do anything when you click on it. But this might be related to me not being able to create lists in the first place.

@davemark I believe the Fediverse has Lemmy? Not sure how widely used it is …

https://join-lemmy.org/

I’ve seen some Reddit communities suggesting moving to Discord too …

I’ve never been one for role models — once you see your role model’s feet of clay, things change forever.

The closest I’ve come to a role model is probably Terry Pratchett — from all accounts, he was a good person as well as a great writer. I’ve never met him, but in all my online interactions with him, that’s the impression that I got.

But before PTerry, one of my favourite writers (if not the most favourite) was Isaac Asimov.

I started reading Asimov in my teens. He wrote on a huge array of subjects, across multiple genres, and always spoke about himself in his writing in a way that made me think that I knew him.

It was only in the last 10 years or so that I learnt that I didn’t know him at all, and that he might have been *all* clay feet 😕 Apparently, Asimov was somebody who harassed women, a lot.

He appeared to have thought that this was part of his charm — or, his admirers/supports/apologists made that out to be the case. I don’t know. But what was evident was that he did harass women and seemed to think that it was fine — that it was all fun. I suppose for him it was.

Interestingly, I found out recently that Alfred Bester, another great from the golden age of science fiction, would effusively kiss Asimov on his cheeks and pinch his bottom whenever they met — somewhat similar to Asimov's behaviour with the women he harassed. Apparently, Bester did not do this with anyone else, and so one has to wonder if he was trying to make Asimov realize the error of his ways.

Asimov seems to have almost come to a self-realisation since he writes that this made him feel uncomfortable and he even wonders about the women he treated the same way. But that’s about where the self-realisation ends since he ends with “It took the joy out of my interactions” or something similar. Basically, going back to me-me and not worrying about his victims and how *his* behaviour affected *them*.

I was thinking about all of this a couple of days ago because I came to realize that I don’t trust anything I hear/read any longer, and I used to. I used to think that the impressions that I got from reading somebody’s writing defined that person. Alas, no more …

But in this day and age, where people believe that artificial intelligence exists and are happy to believe anything that is churned out by a glorified random word generator, can we afford to believe everything we read?

I wonder …

#Reflections #IsaacAsimov #AlfredBester #Harassment #RoleModels #Trust

Karl Guttag always has very detailed, technical, and thorough write ups about AR/VR headsets. I love reading his analyses because I come away learning something new 🙂

He’s done a write-up on his thoughts about Apple Vision Pro and while I have not read all of it yet, it already sounds like something which asks the hard questions, unlike any of the thoughts/discussions I’ve read yet from people who did get to spend some time with the headset.

Or, as Karl says in his article: “Unfortunately, I didn’t see a lot of “critical thinking” or understanding of the technical issues rather than having “blown minds.”” 😛

If you are interested in a technical and critical look at Apple Vision Pro, you’re probably not going to go wrong reading Karl’s post.

https://kguttag.com/2023/06/13/apple-vision-pro-part-1-what-apple-got-right-compared-to-the-meta-quest-pro/

#Apple #VisionPro #AR #TechnicalDissection

@AngelaPreston Ah 🙂 Thank you for the confirmation. At least, I know now that it’s legit. It’s gotten to such a state these days that you can’t really be sure of anything unless you’ve verified it yourself a few different ways …

In fact, I was thinking about this most of yesterday about how suspicious I had become, after writing about the Amazon incident. I intended to make a post about how I used to believe in people that I’d never met (like Isaac Asimov) till I started learning about them through the Internet and how that shattered my image of them.

It’s all still very incoherent in my head though and so I’m not sure if I will make that post or not 😛

@jknlsn Sure thing 🙂 I took several open source Mastodon clients when I started on Mastodon and converted them to work on Akkoma and I can tell you that the feed parsing failed on most of them since there were subtle differences in the data received from a Mastodon server vs. Akkoma.

So either the Akkoma side improved (which I don’t think it did) or your code handles the parsing of the data much better than most of the other apps I’d looked at.

Will send more feedback once I’ve had a chance to play around with it. I’m always looking for the perfect Mastodon app. So far, I’ve had to add the features I want to existing open source apps but I’d much rather not have to do all the maintenances myself 😛

@AngelaPreston I’m willing to bet that whole billion dollars that you are more of a genius than he is — he’s just an idiot who lucked out. Once you make enough money, everybody is willing to believe that you have to be smart, otherwise how’d you get that rich?

But as we’ve seen with other billionaires, having money doesn’t necessarily make you smart 😛

Hello I'm a storyteller, that is I literally tell people stories for money. My special interests are: #walking #trees #london unique human beings and their stories, #wonder #enchantment #esoteric #occult and the #unusual I work with myths legends folktales and fiction. I run workshops and training, I tell stories in #schools #festivals #universities #museums and #weirdplaces #introduction #MeetMe

Plugging myself extremely hard bc I like to work and if I don't remind everyone if that I might miss out on some really great projects.

I want to publish amazing work this year and connect with really commited and driven individuals.

I'm going hard across all socials so everyone knows.

I make websites for creatives and small biz broads www.nineke.net

@AngelaPreston I think the issue here is that you think that there’s anybody capable of rational thought in charge over there 😀

I really wouldn’t be surprised to learn that systems are just shutting down and nobody is even monitoring things. And as users leave, they’ll have less notice of things failing since less and less people will be left to alert them of issues …

@chrisoffner3d I have this (process taking up a lot of CPU) happen with some file manager/browser apps once in a while. Generally, killing the process and re-launching seems to fix it. So I assumed that each time that there was a deadlock for a file or something …

But if “bird” does this often, then that would be concerning. Do you by chance have something like anti-virus installed which might be stalling file access? That might be something to investigate if you want to identify the culprit?

The other possible thing to try is to turn off iCloud access on a per-app basis via Settings and see if turning off a particular app fixes the issue.

If you can identify the culprit, then you can at least let the developer know and see if perhaps they can fix the issue, right?

@jefframes I guess all of us have our blindspots? 🙂

@chrisoffner3d Disabling iCloud first and then getting Xcode to run might possibly fix whatever deadlock that is happening? That’s one thing I would try.

My guess is that if this always happens, then there’s some file which both processes are trying to access/read and aren’t able to. That’s where looking at the accessed/open files by the process in Activity Monitor might come in handy. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what to look for exactly. My usual instinct would be to get a list of files accessed by both processes, see if any user files are in there and see what happens if you make a change based on what those files are ….

@chrisoffner3d Hand’t run into that before, but it appears that “bird” is for iCloud syncing … Do you have anything related to iCloud syncing which might start acting up when an Xcode project is changed perhaps?

Or, I guess you could try stopping Xcode, disabling iCloud syncing, and then restoring Xcode to see if that stops the “bird” process acting up. Maybe that might give you a clue as to where to go next?

The other thing I can think of is to see what files accessed by the “bird” process when it’s running and see if that gives you a clue. I believe you can do this via the context menu in Activity Monitor after selecting the process …

I haven’t read the article yet, but in case you hadn’t come across it yet, this might (possibly) help too:

https://iboysoft.com/news/mac-process-bird-high-cpu.html#:~:text=bird%20cache%3F-,What%20is%20the%20Bird%20process%20running%20on%20Mac%3F,your%20Mac%20to%20iCloud%20Drive.

@trode You’re probably right about tuning out the noise at some scale 🙂 Fortunately, I’m not at that scale and so only have to deal with one or two responses in maybe months. So, I’m actually glad about that since I tend to think way too much about how my responses might affect others …

According to the story linked below, an Amazon Fire Kids tablet was apparently used to spy on somebody, to listen in on Alexa devices in the house, and possibly access other personal information.

Since Amazon says that the device in question was deregistered and they don’t know how it could have gotten access, and since I haven’t done a any digging into the story myself, I don’t know if all the claims in the post are correct/accurate.

But still, it does bring home the fact that what you see in spy/thriller movies theses days might not all be fiction and that we have to be very careful about what we connect to our network of devices and how we dispose of old devices …

https://practical-tech.com/2023/06/13/how-an-amazon-fire-kids-tablet-was-allegedly-used-to-stalk-a-security-pro/

#Amazon #Security #Spying