Interesting. Now that you mention it, i remember listening to a podcast that mentioned financing being a big obstacle for wind turbines, particularly the offshore projects, due to exactly that upfront cost. And i can imagine that for developing countries that is even worse.

Still i’d have thought that solar wouldn’t quite have this same kind of problem, but i guess as the article suggests fossil fuels were cheaper, there’s a political angle, and things are slowly improving.

Gas, oil and coal demand is reducing globally; however global investment in fossil fuels is increasing, albeit at a far lower rate than renewables.

For coal the summary definitely seems to support the reduction in themand, but at least for the next few years gas and oil still seem quite stable to me.

I suspect this is driven by third world countries, where the initial cost can put off investment in renewable infrastructure;

Shouldn’t it be the other way around, particularly for solar? Easy to set up, cheaper, flexible to scale, and the more decentralized setup might even help with poor electricity grid, since you can just set them up whereever needed and even have them work insular without connection the the network.

Also this report suggests that energy production from coal, gas, oil, hydro and nuclear have starting to plateau from 2021, with solar still showing an marginal increase alongside wind, bio energy and ‘other’: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked

Imo the recent events have made it a bit hard to judge trends just from a few years. 2021 you are right in the middle of covid screwing over global trade, following that you have russia invading ukraine and the subsequent shift in europe (will be interesting how that plays out once the conflict ends), and as the main article of this thread suggests hydro was heavily affected by recent droughts (although those might become the norm). Only nuclear might be somewhat easier to extrapolate, since new capacity doesn’t just magically appear, but involves long term planning.

One thing to keep mind is that while the percentage share of renewables is growing, in absolute terms electricity production from coal and gas still increased. Looking at this data, which I assume to be the base of this article.

HDR vs no HDR makes a big difference in colours to me. And if you compare compressed low Bitrate footage vs higher Bitrate there will often be artifacts or color banding, particularly in darker scenes or wherever you have gradients.

It ofc also depends on what device you are watching it on. But I would say that yes if you have a movie (made up example) that is compressed to 5gb total size vs 25gb vs 70gb for the uncompressed Blu-ray quality, then the first jump will be a very noticeable difference assuming you have capable hardware. Whereas the second one will be much much less noticeable and also come with other drawbacks that need to weighted off, e.g. storage requirements.

Is that actually the case? I was under the impression that at least under US teenagers the iPhone usage was insanely high. And those are far from cheap, so at least there parents seem fine in spending big.

Also the cited article mentions $250 for the se watch vs $200 for the Samsung (although I guess that one might have bigger discounts). $50 difference doesn’t seem large for the “Apple tax”.

To me the plastic part would just seem like a risky gamble. Apple has the premium image and it might cheapen it. Especially on a device that is constantly visible, has skin contact and isn’t used with any case.

Doesn’t look great:

• No progress with health features, which seem like the most exciting evolution.

• Who truly needs the larger screen and faster chip. Especially the former will presumably reduce battery life, something that very much matters with watches.

The company is also working on a new version of its lower-cost Apple Watch SE model, which it last updated in 2022. One idea the company has tested is swapping the aluminium shell for rigid plastic. It’s likely to lower the cost to something that could better rival Samsung’s cheapest watch, the $199 Galaxy Watch FE. The SE currently starts at $249.

That really doesn’t sound like Apple.

I’ll go based on letterboxd release year. Often times it’s hard for me to judge towards which year I should count a film that might have had a limited release in the previous year, but then a wider cinema run later.

So far I’ve enjoyed:

• Dune part 2: epic sci-fi and that is exactly my jam, so thus far my favorite movie of the year.

• Civil war: Imo flawed in some ways and not quite what I expected (expected it to be more social commentary and less about war photograpy), but overall still very much a recommendation and good movie. Alex Garland has made some of my favorite films of all times (ex machina and Dredd, also enjoyed annihilation), but it didn’t reach those heights, so I’d rank it below those.

• Exhuma: usually not a horror fan, but I guess I very much enjoy the Korean ones. More direct compared to “The wailing”, which it somewhat reminded me of, but that had more of a mystery aspect.

Movies that don’t yet have a wide release, but that I already saw at a film festival:

• Black box diaries: Documentary by the journalist Shiori Itō about her own sexual assault case and her battle against the outdated judicial system and social views in Japan. Sadly I missed the screening with q&a afterwards. I found it interesting and overall well made, definitely gets a recommendation for whenever it gets a wider release later this year.

• All we imagine as light: Drama set in india. Feels like comparatively I’ve seen less movies set in India, so it’s always nice to get a view into other cultures. Overall I enjoyed it and can also recommend it to people that like this type of movie.

Also watched “the substance” (body horror) during the festival, but while decent that just isn’t quite my cup of tea.

Some movies that I found “meh” so far include Furiosa and monkey man, but there is also a lot that I haven’t seen so far.

Yeah the cast looks pretty solid, my only uncertainty in that regard is to what degree Denzel/Pedro Pascal disappear into their respective role vs me seeing them as these familiar actors. But that might be a subjective problem

Besides that any mention of Aftersun automatically gets an upvote from me, such a great movie and performance by Paul Mescal.

the only way another candidate can be successful is if Biden himself drops out and endorses (and indeed continues to campaign for) them.

And he had 4 years to decide on and build up a successor, but chose to not do so. And neither did the democratic party.

His age and the related issues can’t be a surprise to anyone, so i really don’t see why there should be a sudden change in direction.

But are those notifications and pop ups directly saying something like “from now on we will start to train ai on your information”?

Or is is one of the hundredth change of terms and conditions that people usually just skip, which mentions the major change in some fine print. Or a pop up designed with dark patterns to influence people into just accepting without actual informed consent?

To be fair: from a financial perspective that sounds like the right call, even if the movie would have been interesting.

R rated horror movies just don’t bring in the amount of money to sustain high budgets like that. The exception being “It” (and the sequel), but that had more mainstream appeal and also only came out years later.

Although isn’t the break even number usually closer to double the budget?

I wonder if this method doesn’t overproportionally eliminates valuable workers, who can easily switch companies.

You are right, Apple also has some legit professional staff. And if the person using it gets paid a lot, then a one time hardware purchase becomes negligible.

Accurate fine motor control and even basic stuff like typing does seem not quite fleshed out, so that is indeed an issue. But I don’t think it’s a deal breaker that you can’t do long shifts with it, since you’d probably only use it for certain tasks.

Even more of a niche, but I could see it for something like architects. Both for work and to maybe even present to clients.

Performance and bettery is good, but they’re barely better than what Intel and AMD offer.

And both AMD and Intel have pretty exciting new architectures coming soon with zen5 and lunar lake.

Meanwhile, on Vive, you could stand up, walk around, and manipulate the world with two tracked remotes.

Issue is that if I remember correctly the vive was an outside-in concept that required base stations to be setup. So you lose the cable, but are still bound by location. And importantly also needs a pc aswell. So still far away from standalone.

I think the core issue is that every piece of new technology so far has helped us get lazier. People used to walk around an office, then they sat at a computer, now they carry their computer with them and do things from the couch.

Nobody wants to get up to do things if they can avoid it, and that’s the only real benefit VR/AR provides

But I think VR/AR could make us lazier:

For VR the promise is immersion. You get to experience a concert, sport event, unique experience or exotic place from your own living room. And for many of that it is just fine to sit on a couch and still have a benefit from the technology.

For AR i think it’s a bit more productivity focused. For example less need to train personel, if you can project every instruction into their field of view.

Ordinarily, Apple is good at throwing its weight (money) around to make things like this happen, but it seems like there weren’t many takers this go-round, so we just got an overpriced, beautiful and fascinating paperweight.

Yeah normally Apple is maybe the only company that has the scale and control over their ecosystem to force rapid adoption. But this was clearly not a consumer product aimed at capturing the masses, but more or less a dev kit sold to anyone willing to shell out the price.

The PS VR2 sounds nice, but feels like it is only aimed at the gaming market and even there sony only captures a fraction.

The Quest as a standalone device imo really would have the best shot at mass market adoption, but Facebook rightfully has an image problem. And despite spending so much on development doesn’t seem to create any content or incentivize others to do so.

Edit: actually kind of forgot “bigscreenVR”. I am somewhat surprised that the default is to cram all hardware into the headset making it much bulkier instead of a seperate piece on a belt, back, or maybe strap on your upper arm.

but it’s utterly useless.

That imo has been the issue with VR/AR for a while now. The Hardware as you said is pretty good by now and looking at something like the quest even afforable. What’s lacking is content and use cases.

Smartphones had an easier time being adopted, since it was just moving from a larger to a smaller screen. But VR/AR actually needs a new type of content to make use of it’s capabilities. And there you run into a chicken/egg problem, where no one is putting in the effort (and vr content is harder to produce) without a large user base.

Just games and some office stuff (that you can do just as well on a regular pc) aren’t cutting it. You’d need stuff like every major sport event being broadcast with unique content, e.g. formula one with the ability to put yourself into the driver seat of any car.

Sounds like what Apple is trying to do…

Yeah, although sadly Apple isn’t quite the good guy either. I feel like in a way instead of ads they use their walled garden approach to achieve a similar result.

They’ll make it really annoying or even impossible to use alternatives and mix things. This way they you are by design drawn to use their desired solutions.

Does make for a better user experience as long as you pay the price and play by their rules. And probably also better for privacy, because with the closed system approach they don’t need the data as much to target you.

But imo still problematic and Apple doesn’t want to just sell good Hardware, but also services.

Unfortunately I think without some kind of regulation that makes personal info a liability / hot potato, it will still be treated as an asset to be collected:(

Agreed, this is one of those problems where it is much easier to legislate from the top down, rather than trying to get each individual consumer to make fully conscious decisions.

Yeah, sadly from a economic perspective it is kind of obvious how a continuous source of revenue might be more appealing compared to a one time purchase. Especially with a product like TVs that usually have a pretty long lifetime before being replaced.

Although i would point out that (at least in our current society) privacy and an ad-free experience in many ways is treated as a luxury good. Persumably a TV with a better OS would be sold at a higher price, and confronted with this choice many consumers would likely choose the cheaper one.

For me in some ways it is even more telling how there seems to be no attempt towards a constructive solution with the West Bank. If anything they are making things worse with the illegal settlements.

That wouldn’t be an easy task either, but leagues easier compared to getting anything productive done in a hot conflict like what is currently happening in Gaza.