Some humans are much better at writing. Most humans are not. If you think they are, you are luckier than I am when it comes to the humans you need to communicate with.
As a non-native English speaker, I think the current LLMs write better English than me. I still write better than them in my native language (Norwegian), but the same cannot be said about most of my compatriots.
Many people are terrible at writing. LLMs write better than them.
However, many more people are "OK" at writing. But what their writing conveys is personality. Every comment here is written by someone who may not have grammatically perfect writing, but their writing conveys how they talk and think. It conveys what they think is important, and what they brush over. It conveys how much they care about the topic being discussed. Behind each comment is a person. Online forums and discussions are, at their heart, a shared experience of humanity.
LLMs write consistently in the same personality. If your writing is filtered through an LLM, your personality is stripped out. Unless the idea being conveyed is particularly novel or interesting, you might as well not have bothered. Imagine a niche forum where everyone discussing things was speaking through an LLM. It would be BORING.
This work is motivated for my lifelong love for chess, my passion for Apple hardware and software (not as much as before, sadly), and my frustration of not having an Apple-native app comparable to ChessBase. My disappointment with the trend of recent macOS apps using Electron or other cross-platform frameworks instead of the native toolkits is also a factor. I miss the days when Apple users demanded more from macOS apps.
My aim with MBCA is to create a serious chess app that satisfies the needs of everyone from club players to professionals, with a native Apple look and feel and iCloud sync. Currently the app supports the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. I hope to make a visionOS port later. There is still a lot of work to do, but I’m having a lot of fun developing it, and I already find the current version very useful for my chess training.
The name, in case you wonder, is from a short story by Gene Wolfe, my favorite science fiction author.
> The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about
I care about native macOS look and feel. Sadly the entire industry has pretty much decided that this is no longer worth the effort. I miss the days when Mac users demanded more from their apps, even if it meant that some apps were not available for the platform.
Not really. The problem with the names in Dostoyevsky (and Russian literature more generally) isn’t that the names on their own are difficult to remember, it is that all names also have familiar forms, which are sometimes very different from the formal name. On page you get introduced to a character named Alexander, a few pages later the text talks about Sasha. For non-native speakers, it’s hard to guess that it’s the same person. An e-reader’s search function isn’t going to make this problem disappear.
I think Robert and Bob are better examples. Native English speakers of all ages today are going to know that they're the same person, but someone in Russia might have trouble with those names if they were to read a Russian translation of an English novel.
(My first grade teacher in the 80s was named Margaret, but went by Peg with her students' parents, so I know this one. I wouldn't fault most native English speakers under the age of 35 or so if they didn't know it.)
More like “Richard” and “Dick.” You have to be explicitly told that Dick is a nickname for Richard at some point in your life or you’d likely never figure it out.
My own experience from elementary school was that teachers being wrong was shockingly common. There is no subject in which I would trust any of my elementary school teachers more than a state of the art LLM. This was in Norway. I’m guessing you were privileged to grow up in a place with better quality elementary education.
At least for now, no, it is not possible. I agree that what you describe is how it ought to work in an ideal world, but it would probably require some serious rethinking of macOS UI/UX in order to make it work. For instance, it is not obvious what’s the best way to transfer the dock and the menu bar to a screen-less environment.
A hybrid solution I would love to see would be to have the current virtual screen, but with the option of dragging individual windows out of the screen.
Yes. I spend maybe half of the year (on average) away from home, traveling with my MacBook. I bought the Vision Pro to use as a portable display, and I’ve been extremely happy with it. I work in it about 8 hours per day whenever I’m away from my home office setup, and quite often even when I’m at home.
Having an enormous virtual screen is not the only benefit, I also feel that the immersion helps my focus. It’s easier to get into the zone than ever before. I remember someone describing the Vision Pro as the equivalent of noise-canceling headphones for the eyes, which is spot on. I suppose I am lucky that I don’t have any problems with the weight of the comfort, except on hot days.
I’ve been an Apple enthusiast since the 1980s, but I can’t even remember the last time I was as excited about an Apple product as I am about the Vision Pro. I hope it will survive, come down in price, and launch in more countries.
I’ve worked in VR for a long time (including visionPro) and my eyesight definitely got worse. The most ironic thing to me is how iPhone has this screen distance warning telling you to move the screen further from your face while Vision Pro is literally an iPhone strapped to your face.
I was told the issue isn’t the physical distance of the screen to your eyes, but the distance of where your eyes are focusing? So in VR if you focus on an object a meter away it shouldn’t strain your eyes as much as a phone screen 10cm away? No idea if this is scientifically proven.
Your eyes are still looking at an object (roughly?) 10cm away from your face: the screens. Your eyes are not adjusting focus. Any focus (or blur) you see in VR is simulated depth.
So yes, the issue is indeed the distance where your eyes are focussing, caused by the fact that they're constantly focussing on something very close to your face.
My optician told me its like stretching your arm while holding something heavy. At first that's no problem. But eventually your muscles will start burning and you can't hold it and even when you relax your arm it still hurts if you held it for too long.
As far as I'm aware there are no VR headsets yet that adjust the live generated depth vision based on the diaphragm of your eyes. That would be wild.
> Your eyes are still looking at an object (roughly?) 10cm away from your face: the screens. Your eyes are not adjusting focus
Technically you can absolutely have something close to your face but focus your eyes far away. If you wear glasses you do that all the time. Just imagine that your glasses are like screens that reproject what's behind them.
You're not totally wrong because there are two components to focusing, one is rotating eyes according to how far is the object and another adjusting each eye's lens. AR/VR can cause them to mismatch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence%E2%80%93accommodation...
However the screen imitates focal plane a bit in the distance and THAT's where your eyes are focusing. There's still can be a mismatch because it's a fixed distance, but your eyes are NOT focusing like you strapped a phone to your head which is what you are implying.
(Actually I heard AVP dev guidelines recommend to avoid putting objects too far and too close to keep everything near focal plane probably to miminize the mismatch.)
This is exactly my experience. I love my AVP, travel a lot, it’s awesome on the road and I enjoy using it at home as well. The last time I was this excited by a computer was the NeXT. No other device has fostered feelings of awe as the AVP.
Virtual Desktop is the only app which makes Quest 3 usable for work. And it is bad thing because it is available only on Win and Mac. Unfortunately, Linux alternatives' video encoding/postprocessing is inferior. Judging by my WiVRn experience. Hopefully that changes
My room gets pretty bright in the afternoon and my screen sucks in that environment. I’ve been using the quest 3 and while I don’t think it’s perfect from a software point of view (like why do the windows snap at x distances? Why can’t I pick?) it’s pretty good. It lets me have a smallish display on my desk and when I need it, I have 3 displays in VR.
Compared to the cost of the apple device, you can upgrade 3 times before you get to the cost of the apple vision.
Quest3 simply don’t have resolution required for the qualitative jump to have displays in VR. when you can have same experience on a regular MacBook display, then better to use MacBook.
It's not a matter of "can" you do it, it's a matter of needing to do it. Do you make a habit of carrying a gallon of water on your head? You probably don't need to. I don't need to either. I certainly don't need to spend $3500 for the privilege of carrying a gallon of water on my head. Doing so is not necessary or beneficial to my life in any way. I could do it if my life depended on it, but it doesn't.
If the Vision Pro was balanced on top of the head, it would definitely be easier to sustain for a longer period of time, but the weight is attached to the front. That means you're holding it up with your neck muscles instead of straight down your spine.
Posts like this makes me feel like I’m using a different World Wide Web than everybody else. Where are all these pages that don’t work in WebKit browsers?
I use Safari as my main browser, I open Chrome only when I encounter a web site that doesn’t work in Safari. It happens maybe once or twice per year, and half of the time, it turns out that it doesn’t work in Chrome either.
As a non-native English speaker, I think the current LLMs write better English than me. I still write better than them in my native language (Norwegian), but the same cannot be said about most of my compatriots.
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