Wow I disagree with this. Even with Quest 2 the hardware was powerful enough to create interesting VR experiences. I think a bigger limiting factor is the comfort of the headsets and the quality of the source material (in the case of streaming).
Driving sims may not be peak running on a Quest, but I think that is a different realm from what I am talking about. There is plenty to do and see without photorealistic 3D graphics.
Like that would help. The rest of the world plain refuses to engage with the arguments they've been consistently presenting for decades.
What changed is that they can no longer be dismissed as bunch of loonies who confuse cheap science fiction with reality, because that "cheap science fiction" became the actual reality. So obviously, instead of considering the arguments, the next step is to try and paint them as loony sex cult, because this lets people continue to do the stupid thing and then act surprised, and proclaim no one could have predicted this (and the "sex cult" obviously does not count because it was a "sex cult").
I don't think that's true. It's hard to argue that Elon Musk, the richest person and spokesperson of tech for a lot of people, never participated in SV sex parties or had weird sex behaviors. Or Trump, the president of the USA, has a clean history of standard sex as well. Or Bill Gates, the nice philanthropist, never engaged in weird sex circles. But that doesn't make them lose their leadership positions or status.
Falun Gong is a cult that claims following its tenets can cure any disease, so you don't need doctors (and that high level Falun Gong members are so perfectly healthy that they are hunted by CCP members for their perfect organs). The founder claims to have magical powers, like clairvoyance, levitation, walking through walls, omnipresence, the ability to cure diseases - at least some of which anyone who follows his teachings could reach. Extraterrestrials, higher dimensions, and other such are also part of it. Also, on the evil cult front, Falun Gong is a supporter of right wing extremists in both the USA and Europe.
So no, I don't agree there is much fundamental difference from Scientology.
Oh my, where did you get this from? I happen to know both. The founder of Scientology was a scientist who started with a somewhat decent idea, got popular in the US, but his fame passed quickly. He really craved for that fame, though, so he changed his teaching into some cultist stuff, paired with some sketchy lord and proceeded with demon invocations. His main book is Dianetics, and his followers are very vindictive to those who leave the cult.
Falun Dafa, on the other hand, is more like a Buddhist discipline. You are free to meditate in a park if you feel like it, you are free to go if you don't. There is no organisation, no one will know your name. Its main book is Zhuan Falun, which you could read to make your own opinion, rather than repeating someone's talking points. CCP hunts Falun Gong because its founder refused to become a part of CCP. You can read this story on Wikipedia. The situation is similar to the early days of Christianity when Nero burned christians alive and wanted to eradicate their faith. The irony is that today the Roman Empire has reduced to the city of Vatican which is the temple of Christianity. CCP will fall similarly.
As for organs extraction... well, read about the Sujiatun Concentration Camp. CCP sends there young Falun Gong followers and sells their organs to high rank officials. Demonic creativity. But what did you expect from a communist regime?
I checked Wikipedia, it says in the first paragraph that there's a 427 acre compound in upstate New York. Not bad for "no organisation". (It also contradicts your narrative about why CCP doesn't like them)
I don't like most religions, personally. But there is a significant difference between a regular religious community, that has its own shared beliefs but doesn't completely exclude those who don't share them (e.g. by forbidding members to even become friends with people outside the community), or demand the community members completely dedicate a majority of their time to the religion; and a cult, which does do all of these things.
Note that there exist cults within many major religions. There exist for example extremist Catholic groups that would fit the definition of a cult. But that doesn't mean that all Catholics are a cult.
"AI safety" is not a cult by that definition any more than Christianity or Islam. There's some subgroups that are a bit more cultist, and that's the same in Christianity etc
Same with Falun Dafa, have a friend who is a practitioner, it's completely normal to have friends outside of community (tons of his friends are), no one tries to convert anyone, and between his business and other stuff the time he spends on the practice is really not that much
As someone who has watched a team battle Xamarin and now Maui, and all the painful upgrades in between, I agree with you. Sure they never had the pain of supporting two separate codebases, but they also never had the luxury of doing anything the easy way.
> The law has been unable to keep up with tech changes.
Nah, for the most part the law has been unable to keep up with (or choose to oppose) corporate power, and new ways it's being used. Usually there's no magic quantum doohickey which demands fundamentally new legal theory.
For example, take this TV spyware thing, and rewind to the year 1986, and imagine RCA started selling televisions with microphones in them that recorded what was in your room and radioed it back to headquarters for some reason.
Obviously the costs wouldn't have worked at the time, but is there anything that was missing in our ability to describe the risks and wrongness? The concepts of privacy and consent, contracts and monopolies, ownership and licensing... They were all there 40 years ago.
In other words, the bee in my bonnet involves how the phrase "keeping up with the technology" sometimes becomes way to shift blame and a false target. It distracts us from the immediate political alignment problem towards a nebulous future technological one, which is so ill-defined it can never arrive. ("Once technology finally stops changing, then we'll legislate for our individual constituents' rights.")
> imagine RCA started selling televisions with microphones in them that recorded what was in your room and radioed it back to headquarters for some reason
The problem is that there are real use cases (whether you want them yourself or not) for having an always-on microphone that phones home. The discussion for regulators and lawmakers then becomes about how the data is handled, and that is where they get left in the dust.
Not a valid critique when dealing with an oligopoly (YT, Tik Tok, Insta, etc.). You use the platform or you get ignored. Using the platform to criticize the platform or other platforms like it is possibly the best use of the platform.
What has this got to do with an operating system? Unwelcome commentary.
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