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VRChat is less LARP-heavy than SL. VRChat is more proprietary than SL. VRChat is more custom than SL in some ways and less in others. The SL people tried to make a VRChat clone. They sold it off, and now an EDM label uses it for virtual raves.

VRChat is significantly more voice-heavy than SL, which is better or worse depending on your use-case.

The best thing about VRChat is that you get to wear a toaster on your face and get physical interaction with people. If you want to take a dancing course in VRChat, you can. Buy a few gadgets to track your limbs, and it'll be shown accurately.

VRChat is essentially the next step in the user-programmable social video game, and the community seems more ambitious. The platform is so open that they've ran emulated Linux on user avatars.


That the EU's overreach has made a product worse for the majority of its users.

As a technical user, it doesn't bother me. When I consider many of my friends, it does bother me—most of them I know with non-iOS devices have complained about their devices moving slowly due to the junkware and the third-party app stores they've acquired (never F-Droid, always something sketchy). When I think about family members, I think about how web push notifications have rendered two of their phones borderline unusable.

Most "consumer-friendly" choices the EU makes are actually about developer & manufacturer profit. This isn't consumer-aligned. It eliminates the profit motive that's left iOS devices as more or less the only LTS phones on the market.

I don't like Apple products that much—I use Linux on my cell phone, but at the same time I refuse to adopt cheap rhetorical tactics to make app developers wealthier.

If they really wanted things to be consumer-friendly, they'd ban proprietary software. Instead, they make it easier for proprietary software developers to make profit off of users.


From their perspective:

Worker cost 50 money. How company get 50 money? Worker not work so much, maybe? How to quantify? What if spy? Company tell IT monkey to give developer monkey spy. Our computer, company can do a little spy. Company catch smoke break. Company catch walk break. Company give worker "performance improvement plan." Company fire worker. Company now have 100 money. Company smart. Company efficient. Company legally protected from retaliation. Company give executive monkey 30 money as reward for small overhead. Company offer manager monkey 7 money. Company offer IT monkey 3 money. Company brag about in annual report.


Counterpoint: A paperclip maximizer is a good thing. Paperclips are very useful.

In conjunction with most surfaces, they can be used as musical instruments, akin to drumsticks or fingerpicks. Being much cheaper than recorders, they would serve as an excellent way to instill a sense of rhythm into children.

If you bend them in a certain way, they make quite satisfying and very stable hangers. Who among us has not needed to hang something in place before?

If you put one in the back of a TV, you can pick up plenty of ASTV channels, most likely including your local news. This is deeply good for public education and awareness.

If you put one in a radio, you can pick up radio channels. Without too much effort, they could also be used to replace the tuners and volume knobs on one.

They work very well as stands for all sorts of things if slightly deformed, which can be deeply useful.

You can use sufficiently large ones (known in most markets by the affectionate moniker of "jumbo" paper clips) to teach people how to tie knots, in a manner that requires less mechanical dexterity than most rope.

If you peel the end of one out, it makes a delightful pinhole puncher, which is very useful for certain styles of photography.

This isn't even getting into all of the remarkable ways you can use them with paper!

And if you're paperless, it would be hard to think of a more efficient way of making the perfect-sized USB stick keychain for precisely your amount of USB sticks.

Please do not slander paperclips; we need a paperclip maximizer for the good of society, and little would be a better short-term goal for AI research.


> But, Mr. Rector said, previous experiments in cash assistance, like a “negative income tax” program for the poor in the 1970s, showed ... negative impacts on marriage that lasted long after the efforts ended.

It feels like using marriage volume or divorce volume as a negative signal is a terrible idea.

People not feeling forced into marriage because it's more or less necessary to get by or progress in a post-suffrage economy for the working class is probably a good thing.

The couple who raised me each noted it had been at least partially rooted in economics, and if they had more time to figure things out, they probably wouldn't have gotten married. It worked out to a degree for them, they have some degree of happiness, some of the time; they love one another. It also has caused immense harm: They share nothing in common, they fight all the time due to fundamentally different styles of communication and relatively different belief systems.

If an increase in the divorce rate happens due to better economic conditions, this probably signals there were a lot of couplings that were not really good for the participants, but necessary to maintain a certain quality of life. It also could signal people leaving abusers. Is keeping "zombie relationships" worth it?


I'm no fan of marriage the institution but the results are clear. Policies that incentivize couples who would be married to not marry leads to worse outcomes for both parties at scale as well as any kids. It is regrettable that some may feel trapped in marriages that aren't working but the numbers don't lie. I don't want to make this a race thing because it's not but look at what happened to the urban blacks who had this kind of policy peddled hard at them starting in the 1960s. They regressed on tons of metrics that are closely tied to and both predict and are predicted by household stability. Your advocating for something that has been tried and failed.

(That said, perhaps the above would not be the case, or at least not to the same degree if women and men weren't treated differently with regard to child custody and men had the option of being single fathers)


What numbers are you referring to?


The well-known numbers that have been known since the Moynihan Report.


Come on, give its full title...


I didn't know what it was either. OP is likely referring to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For...

Commonly known as the Moynihan Report. It has its supporters and its detractors. I have no opinion on it since this is the first I'm hearing of it.


At the time, the title was the opposite of a slur. Now, it would paint the report in a different light.


[flagged]


Not so much chaff as a point that the thing itself is so outdated our very language has had time to radically change.


I will assume you've read the full document and are fine with the things it says, since you're so confident it's a well written/thought-out piece that just accidentally has an extremely outdated name.

I think it's a tough argument to make that single-mothers lead to resentful anti-social children, but, hey, maybe I should be more open-minded.

>...The primary unit may again become mother and child, the biologically given, and the special conditions under which man has held his social traditions in trust are violated and distorted.

E. Franklin Frazier makes clear that at the time of emancipation Negro women were already “accustomed to playing the dominant role in family and marriage relations” and that this role persisted in the decades of rural life that followed...

...Although the families studied were white, the pattern would clearly seem to be a general one, and apply to Negro families as well.

The first two stages end with the exhaustion of credit and the entry of the wife into the labor force. The father is no longer the provider and the elder children become resentful.

The third stage is the critical one of commencing a new day-to-day existence. At this point two women are in charge:

“Consider the fact that relief investigators or case workers are normally women and deal with the housewife. Already suffering a loss in prestige and authority in the family because of his failure to be the chief bread winner, the male head of the family feels deeply this obvious transfer of planning for the family’s well-being to two women, one of them an outsider. His role is reduced to that of errand boy to and from the relief office.”


>They regressed on tons of metrics that are closely tied to and both predict and are predicted by household stability.

Sure, Black people are also living a lot longer which seems like a good outcome in terms of quality of life. [1]

[1]https://spia.princeton.edu/news/life-expectancy-gap-between-...


is there data viewable online that you refer to?


Was there anything else happening to black americans in the second half of the 20th century?


Anything worse than the first half of the 20th century, when nuclear families were in tact?


More granular targeting of black communities by federal and state governments through the massive shift in economic policies perhaps.


Can/has been done before. To make VRDs safe, they need to be dimmed with a filter, but it's achievable.


A bunch of research at the University of Washington in the mid to late 90s. Has a working display. http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/vrd.html


It already can be and has been done. Look at Mann's Thermocam EyeTap, or half of his other papers. He revisits mediating human vision with extrasensory overlays often.


I'll never forget seeing Steve Mann roaming the halls and conferences at ACM '97 in his full gear [0], antenna rising above the crowd. I remember thinking, this guy might be on to something here...

[0] http://cyborganthropology.com/File:Steve-mann-evolution-of-w...


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