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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Apple is great at polishing and packaging things that already exist. The iPhone was a better Blackberry, the iPod a better MP3 player, the iMac a better all-in-one PC… I have a hard time thinking of stuff they truly pioneered. The Newton maybe? That did not end well for them.

    If I had to bet, the Vision Pro will turn out to be a burnt pancake, but long term I have no doubt that something like it — something that augments reality one way or another — will become a thing. And in the meantime Apple has pockets more than deep enough to survive a failed Vision Pro.

    The backlash against them trying to innovate is kind of dumb though. They aimed high for a change, and taking risks like this should be lauded not laughed at.



  • I won’t argue about whether this is dystopian, but the practical reason for the face projection is that they wanted to make this not just something you wear sitting alone in your basement, like most other VR headsets. They wanted it to be usable around other people, at a workplace, with family, etc.

    Interacting with someone wearing a full face blind is just weird, so they thought that making the eyes visible would help make this a bit more socially usable.

    I’m not sure that’s really going to work out — seems at least as awkward as Google’s failed Glass project — but Apple’s design decision has some merit.




  • Termination with “cause” has special meaning in employment law. It usually means getting fired for theft, fraud, harassment, causing irreparable harm to the company, etc.

    One consequence of getting fired with cause is you don’t get severance or most other protections you’re normally entitled to by law. So, the bar for this kind of termination is (rightfully) very high.

    Poor performance or even not showing up for work at all generally don’t meet the requirements for “cause”, so I dunno if making it illegal to let people go for anything other than straight up committing illegal or harmful acts makes sense.