Unfortunately the culture is adapting the other way and becoming about keeping everyone as online as possible because that maximises their exposure to advertising and commercial pressure.
The fact it exposes them to 24/7 predatory behaviour is... well, it is 24/7 predatory behaviour.
The damage being done here is significant.
But yes, there do need to be some modern folk tales told to kids, something like The Brothers Grimm but featuring discord groomers and furry pedophiles instead of trolls and orks.
Sure we do. We enforce it through the threat of warfare and subsequent prosecution, the same way we enforce the bans on chemical weapons and other war crimes.
We may lack the motivation and agreement to ban particular methods of warfare, but the means to enforce that ban exists, and drastically reduces their use.
"We enforce it through the threat of warfare and subsequent prosecution, the same way we enforce the bans on chemical weapons and other war crimes."
Do we, though? Sometimes, against smaller misbehaving players. Note that it doesn't necessarily stop them (Iran, North Korea), even though it makes their international position somewhat complicated.
Against the big players (the US, Russia, China), "threat of warfare and prosecution" does not really work to enforce anything. Russia rains death on Ukrainian cities every night, or attempts to do so while being stopped by AA. Meanwhile, Russian oil and gas are still being traded, including in EU.
This is literally the only thing that matters in this debate. Everything else is useless hand-wringing from people who don't want to be associated with the negative externalities of their work.
The second that this tech was developed it became literally impossible to stop this from happening. It was a totally foreseeable consequence, but the researchers involved didn't care because they wanted to be successful and figured they could just try to blame others for the consequences of their actions.
> the researchers involved didn't care because they wanted to be successful and figured they could just try to blame others for the consequences of their actions
Such an absurdly reductive take. Or how about just like nuclear energy and knives, they are incredibly useful, society advancing tools that can also be used to cause harm. It's not as if AI can only be used for warfare. And like pretty much every technology, it ends up being used 99.9% for good, and 0.1% for evil.
I think you're missing the point. I don't think we should have prevented the development of this tech. It's just absurd to complain about things that we always knew would happen as though they're some sort of great surprise.
If we cared about preventing LLMs from being used for violence, we would have poured more than a tiny fraction our resources into safety/alignment research. We did not. Ergo, we don't care, we just want people to think we care.
I don't have any real issue with using LLMs for military purposes. It was always going to happen.
You say ‘we’ as if everyone is the same. Some people care, some people don’t. It only takes a a few who don’t, or who feel the ends justify the means. Because those people exist, the people who do care are forced into a prisoners dilemma forcing them to develop the technology anyway.
Safe or alignment research isn't going to stop it from being used for military purposes. Once the tech is out there, it will be used for military purposes; there's just no getting around it.
People keep saying things like ‘affront to regulation’, but the regulation wasn’t written to make iOS more open. It was written to enable certain other middlemen more access to specific parts of iOS.
If the EU wanted to force iOS to be an open platform, they could have written a law to that effect.
I wish people would realize that just because the EU is regulating Apple and it’s fun to see power be brought to bear against Apple, it doesn’t mean the EU is actually competent to regulate the market.
> it doesn’t mean the EU is actually competent to regulate the market
The EU has done more to improve consumer choice in the mobile app industry than any other region in the world. They can go even further, but their progress so far certainly demonstrates competence.
You obviously don't remember the situation with mobile phone chargers before the EU mandated usb charging.
Every manufacturer had a prorietary connector, voltage etc. Even different models from the same manufacturer often had different charging standards. Complete wasteful mayhem.
You know as well as everyone else does that PWA’s require the browser to be able to integrate with the platform at the level of the OS which would break iOS’s security model.
You might want the EU to force iOS to be an open platform, but I don’t think that was their intent when they made the requirement to allow alternate browsers.
Preventing other browsers from implementing PWAs does not improve security in iOS. This is a self-serving restriction intended to discourage users from switching away from Safari.
With these changes, Safari is the only browser allowed by Apple to implement PWAs on iOS, which gives Safari an advantage over the other browsers that are not allowed to implement PWAs on iOS. Anyone who uses PWAs on iOS must do so via Safari. PWA users who prefer a non-Safari browser on iOS must switch between their preferred browser and Safari for their web browsing needs. The additional burden of maintaining two web browsers discourages these users from switching away from Safari, and the entire setup prevents these users from leaving Safari completely.
> Safari is the only browser allowed by Apple to implement PWAs on iOS, which gives Safari an advantage over the other browsers that are not allowed to implement PWAs on iOS
Thank you for explaining so succinctly why Apple is compelled by regulation to remove the PWA feature from Safari.
To do otherwise would be anticompetitive and risk the wrath of the EC.
Apple is not compelled to remove PWAs from Safari in the EU, because Apple has the option of allowing non-Safari browsers to implement PWAs. Apple chose to remove a PWA feature from Safari and prevent non-Safari browsers from adding PWA icons to home screens, which degrades functionality for all iOS users in the EU while still granting Safari an anticompetitive advantage.
As the article says, Apple is changing iOS in the EU to prevent non-Safari browsers from adding PWA icon links to the home screen, making this feature exclusive to Safari (and granting Safari an anticompetitive advantage). Apple did not remove PWAs in Safari, but they removed the ability for PWAs to be displayed full-screen in Safari in the EU.
Nothing in the article says that new PWA links can't be created in Safari. Read carefully:
> PWAs can’t be linked to alternative browsers.
If the situation that you think is happening were true, the article would simply say that Apple removed PWA links from iOS, instead of specifically saying that the removal applies to alternative (non-Safari) browsers on iOS.
According to the article, the latest iOS beta prevents non-Safari browsers from adding PWA icons to the home screen. These changes retain iOS's favoritism of Safari.
> PWAs can’t be linked to alternative browsers. Apple simply doesn’t allow it anymore at the operating system or launcher level. Users in the EU are forced to open them in Safari, if they want to open them at all.
Read it more carefully. PWAs are no longer supported, even in safari. Any old PWAs that were already in the launcher just become web links. They happen to open in safari, but they are not PWAs, and no new such links can be created.
This is just a way to not delete the old links from the user's launcher until they have had time to create new bookmarks in the browser of their choice.
If you are going to argue the this somehow advantages Safari, you aren't being serious.
The article doesn't say that. It says that Apple is changing iOS in the EU so that PWAs can't be linked to alternative (non-Safari) browsers.
The article doesn't mention any changes to other PWA features like notifications for PWAs/links added to the home screen via Safari. It only says that, in the EU, Apple removed full-screen mode for PWAs from Safari while restricting non-Safari browsers from adding PWA icons to the home screen.
> Now, when a user in Europe taps a web app icon, they will see a system message asking if they wish to open it in Safari or cancel. The message adds that the web app "will open in your default browser from now on." When opened in Safari, the web app opens like a bookmark, with no dedicated windowing, notifications, or long-term local storage. Users have seen issues with existing web apps such as data loss, since the Safari version can no longer access local data, as well as broken notifications.
> Progressive Web Apps are designed to offer a user experience comparable to that of native apps using web technologies, with the potential for users to add them directly to their home screen with no need for an app store. The latest change is particularly controversial because historically Apple has suggested that developers who are unwilling to comply with its App Store guidelines could instead focus on web apps. Now, the company's recent adjustments appear to contradict this stance by limiting the capabilities of PWAs and their ability to compete with native applications in iOS, raising questions about its commitment to supporting web technologies as a viable alternative to the App Store.
Based on media reports like this one, assuming that the website links do open in the default browser selected by the user and not just Safari, it looks like TFA's sentence "PWAs can’t be linked to alternative browsers" is incorrect or at least imprecise.
It remains to be seen whether iOS browsers using non-WebKit browser engines in the EU can implement PWAs independently and make use of PWA links on the home screen. I'll wait and see when the iOS update is released.
And how is that exactly? Can you please elaborate?
It's all so familiar: just a year ago Apple would have had us believe that "You know as well as everyone else does that third party browser engines must integrate with the platform at the level of the OS which would break iOS’s security model."
Well, that obviously wasn't true, but there's still sheeple who will take the bait again and again :-)
We're all waiting for your technical arguments on the point, but it doesn't sound like you are actually interested in having a conversation that could be called intellectual in some way.
Have you tried both? I have and they are definitely comparable if you factor in one being 7x the cost of the other.
You can pretty much do everything you can with the Quest 3 that you can with the Vision Pro with limitations but again one is 7x more than the other.
An example is the video quality is very similar between them, but the limitation with the Quest 3 is you can only have a certain amount of screens open and you don't have as much freedom to move them around.
I wouldn't be worried one bit if I was Mark, because his target market is massive compared to the current market of the Vision Pro and the next Quest will probably be on closer on par with the Vision Pro for way cheaper.
He also working on the end game form factor for these products which are glasses.
Thanks for your post. I have purchased the Go, Quest, and the Quest 2, but not the Quest 3. I didn’t think I needed the newest model, but I would like to try the AR support in Quest 3.
I have never been a fan or Facebook/Meta, but I love what they have done in VR. I co-founded the SAIC VR Lab and a year later worked on a VR project for Disney - this was in the late 1990s. I always dreamed of good commodity VR gear, not having to use a quarter of a million dollar SGI Reality Engine. Very happy Meta VR customer. BTW, I work a lot with open LLM models, so thanks also to Meta for releasing open weight models!
I have tried them side by side. It’s complete and utter bullshit to say that the video quality is comparable. Price doesn’t change the fact that the quality is a lot lower.
If you want to say Quest is better for most people because it’s cheap enough to still be worth it, I won’t argue with that.
But that’s not what Mark said, and he’s flat out lying.
To some extent yes. The hardware has simply not been good enough. What’s changed is that Vision Pro crosses the threshold.
Vision Pro is obviously too expensive for anyone who isn’t an early adopter, but it’s the first consumer headset that is good enough to even consider for anything other than games, and frankly even then it is only just good enough.
Well, here's to the crazy ones. I haven't tried the Vision Pro yet, but I think the whole "target more affluent customers" shtick is what usually kills VR. It's what killed Windows Mixed Reality, it's what killed Magic Leap, and I wouldn't be surprised if it comes for Apple's headset too.
Then again, it's Apple we're talking about. They could release a commemorative hole-punch and it would sell out before the price was announced. It'll be a while before we see the lasting impact of this thing.
Well they obviously don’t expect to sell it to everyone at the current price. For what it’s worth, it costs about the same as the MacBook Air with SSD did when introduced without even factoring in inflation. Today that product is the world’s best selling laptop.
Regulation 2018/1971 limits the price for outgoing calls within the EEA to 0.19 ct/minute (excl. VAT). Interestingly enough, there doesn't seem to be a limit on incoming calls, though most providers don't charge for incoming calls.
There's no charge for incoming calls from abroad while at home: All EU countries use "caller pays" billing (unlike the US, which historically has used shared cost for mobile phones).
That's why there are prepaid SIMs without a monthly fee and unlimited incoming calls: The caller's operator pays the called operator a termination charge by the minute.
There is an incoming call charge while roaming, the rationale being that the caller doesn't know where you are and needs predictability in pricing (so the called party pays for the leg from their home country to where they are), but the EU has capped that to zero within the EEA.
It’s obviously not going to appeal to most people because of the price. Apple isn’t stupid and knows this. Reviewers complaining that it’s too expensive for the mainstream are being stupid when they say this.
Also, if what someone wants, is lots of monitors for their Mac. Why not buy a bunch of monitors? It seems also stupid that people harp on this point. It’s good that you can bring your Mac screen into Vision Pro, but that’s clearly meant so you can use the two devices together.
The big problem for reviewers is the lack of native apps, especially those that take advantage of volumetric windows and immersive spaces.
I say it’s a problem for reviewers rather than Apple, because it’s so compelling to develop for this platform that I have no concern about what we’re going to see over time. People complain that there aren’t more apps at launch, which is a valid complaint, but there isn’t much Apple could do about it because you need experience with the device to know how to design for it. People rushing to get things ready for launch day haven’t had that even if they had access to the hardware.
I agree with a lot of the points. Especially on the complaints on cost. It is clear in Apple's forecasting that they rolled this would knowing they were not gonna sell a lot of these. They know it is too expensive for most users. They probably have a plan for a future non-pro cheaper version. But to some extent, there is only one way to get the iteration cycle going full force and that is to get it into user hands. Even if it is a smaller number of hands starting off.
Exactly. I think they knew what they were doing. If you have the disposable income, it’s worth it for the movie experience alone.
For me, as someone who can code, it’s a no-brainer. It’s definitely a serious purchase, but having a computer that makes it this easy to create immersive 3D experiences is well worth it.
I think that’s all Apple had in mind for this 1.0.
This - they should just mandate RCS, or maybe actually invest in developing a modern European standard and then mandate that. It’s not like they don’t have research universities with CS departments who could be part of a standards body.
I don’t mean they should limit alternatives - just that they should require a modern, E2EE standard on all phones, and then we can all just shut up about this.
