For those of us who can’t afford a Vision Pro try the Reality Composer app for iOS. You can create a scene and place 3D models on walls or the floor and then navigate in AR.
It’s useful for placing furniture in your home. The IKEA app used to offer something similar.
Technically there’s no reason you couldn’t do something like a full house too.
We don’t have smart appliances but I’ve recently switched to an electricity plan with a really cheap night rate for charging my EV (1 cent per km!). We often fill and then schedule our Bosch washing machine and dryer to come on at 2am. No app required.
Like enforcing mandatory bicycle helmets in Australia, this law is either massively misguided or serves another purpose. While politicians are often stupid, they can’t think we’re that stupid?
If you don’t want your kids accessing certain websites then the onus is on parents to control access. I do. If you want to do this structurally do it with ISPs and mobile carriers with router and SIM level filtering.
Put age limits on the ability to buy a device, SIM or internet package like we do for so many other things. It would be trivial to restrict access (and just as easy for smart kids to bypass as the current system).
Don’t use an iPad to babysit your child. Let them discover technology in an environment you’re confident and comfortable with. But it’s your job as a parent.
Or is all this really just about more mass surveillance under the guise of protecting the children?
The plan to stop under 16 kids along with issues stemming from it in Australia from accessing social media areas that were using algorithms to target kids has been coveted by a couple if not more camps of thought.
The two mains ones I see are:
There are those who see making it against the law as a simple means to:
fundamentally resolve legal issues stemming from any serious incident that plays out, fights, stabbings, abductions etc.
Either gives parents of less than obedient kids the necessary excuse to, by whatever reasonable means, to stop their children wasting the mornings, school time, afternoons and nights, on social media OR a necessary impetus on parents to ensure their kids are / know how to be safe online.
The algorithms that social media refused to remove from the last few years are reduced to being meaningless apart from being the same means to identify youngsters ... so instead of being referred to some other diet or BS area, the account can be flagged to be locked with a show cause.
There are those who see it as a means to an end to require real identity for any social media, landing eventually needing extra personal verification details - age, living address etc.
There was already a camp which wanted [1] to bring in verification for social media accounts, especially after a prominent incident in the US involving a somewhat anonymous user ...
(iirc) the person the govt at the time 2021 early 2022 brought in to work on bringing ID required for social media use ... is the same who was asked / tasked to bring in the under 16 legislation.
Believe that just like google couldn't tell a completely obvious spam site back in the 10's, social media can't use those concerning or problematic algorithms to deduce an account in Australia might be a youngster.
Most phone plans in Australia require a form of identification which typically only adults have like a drivers licence, their own Australian medical card number, etc, so it's something parents themselves set up or crafty young kids work around it by gaining access to the relevant details.
Dude, what? You’re upset about mandatory helmet laws?
What next? Are you going to complain about seatbelts?
Being a libertarian is one thing, but acting like there is no good justification from those whom you oppose, is just… dishonest.
Bike helmet laws enjoy very widespread support nationwide and nobody is under any illusion as to their posed vs actual societal benefit. You’ve made up some boogeyman.
King County (where Seattle is located) repealed its mandatory helmet law in 2022, not because anybody has changed their mind about bike helmets being a good idea, but because the law primarily served as a discretionary-enforcement tool for harassment of homeless people and racial minorities. The law had no measurable impact on helmet-wearing rates or rates of brain injury, because people who can afford helmets generally choose to wear them. The city of Tacoma had repealed its mandatory helmet law two years prior, for similar reasons.
Homeless people don't buy many things. If they have something, it's probably one of the few things they owned and were able to keep when they became homeless.
I’m not a libertarian. I’m not opposed to helmets and I and my family wear helmets while cycling. I fully support vaccines.
Mandatory helmet laws have the consequence of reducing the amount of people cycling. There’s no justification for them when compared to international practices.
Many of those who support mandatory helmet laws do not understand what the purpose of a helmet is and that it will not protect you from a collision with a vehicle.
On the contrary I fully support vaccines and I wear a helmet while cycling. The mandatory helmet law in Australia backfired pretty badly by reducing the numbers of people cycling. Those who promise mandatory laws for bicycle helmets tend to be anti-cycling and also tend to support notions that cyclists pay “road tax”.
Seen that you take a dig at anti-vaxxers... To be fair there's also a high correlation between the pro-vaxxers and those who believed the virus couldn't have possibly escaped from a lab.
Which was the official tune of the media, all synched, hammered for years. Now that tune has changed but that's another story.
I love that Blender can be a powerful scientific tool. Unlike a lot of software build for research, Blender is fast and user friendly, even if it has a learning curve. The addition of geometry nodes adds so much more capability too.
I’ve used it to help students visualise topologies for meshing in command line CFD tools. It’s also great for motion tracking objects in video footage. I’ve even used it to simulate various camera systems.
Unfortunately the videos aren’t working on my iPhone. I’ll try on desktop later.
Totally agree with you. But there is still a steep learning curve with Blender. when 3d tools can become truly “user friendly“ the sky is no longer the limit.
What would you want for user friendly? Anything powerful will have a learning curve, that is a fact. The basics of blender usage, i.e. the mechanical aspects of the modeling components minus geonodes, are learned in an afternoon.
Everything else is an understanding of what you, the user, wants. Translating what you want into thing you see on the computer is something that can't be learned quickly.
I excluded geonodes because geonodes are best thought of as just a (simple?) programming language with all the faults and foibles of a programming language.
Some of the scenes from the video remind me of Manifold Garden [1] - only 3D but a 3-torus [2] and you can change the direction of gravity, i.e. what is up and down. And also visually beautiful.
The additional code he wrote to make a 4d game work in the Unity game engine is available on github and MIT licensed: https://github.com/HackerPoet/Engine4D
When I first saw the title, I assumed this game was implemented in the same engine. I believe there are a few already.
Interesting, on desktop Firefox I can barely zoom in past the point that the object fills the FOV.
I want to be permitted to navigate up close to a point where I can see the pixels and triangle meshes, as if I was a millimeter away from some brush stroke or chisel mark, and then back out just a bit.
For anyone wondering, you can access this by tapping the button showing a 3D cube at the bottom left of the 3D viewer. The button may be cut off if you're viewing in a web view in another app like I was.
The AR viewer runs with a much higher frame rate and you can get closer to the model. However the lighting is significantly worse, which ruins the appeal. The in-browser viewer is choppy and I can feel my phone getting a little warm, but it looks a lot more like viewing the real artifacts.
The AR viewer is using ARKit on iOS which is a default system “app”. I don’t believe Google provides the same kind of built in viewer experience with AR Core being surfaced as an app.
I feel like a bit of a failure when it comes to transport. I tried for many years to cycle to work in Dublin covering 25km on an ebike, but gave up after several nasty incidents that almost resulted in serious injury (for example my head almost going under the wheel of a van). I've experienced so much hatred, verbal and physical violence from drivers — and I'm the kind of cyclist that is fully lit, clad in high-vis and stopping at all traffic lights.
About a year ago I started to take the bus. My commute went from an hour on the bike to over two hours. Spending four hours a day on a bus to travel such a short distance is not a fun experience. The bus meanders through a city choked with traffic. It's often faster if I get off and walk that part of the journey (I've checked). I enjoyed cycling for the most part. It was great for fitness and clearing my head. The parts of my commute away from cars were beautiful but there was a significant risk of death or serious injury every time I got on the bike. More and more drivers are buried in their phones. Cycle or bus and you'll see this.
The bus was slowly killing me. It was hard to work as the crowded bus wobbled around narrow Dublin streets along with various degrees of anti-social behaviour. I got off the bus angry and frustrated and groggy.
I've just bought a small little electric car and I can get to work in around 40 minutes. I don't have to listen to other people's loud voice calls or TikToks that are so loud they penetrate through ANC. I don't have to ask someone to make space on the seat they are occupying all by themselves and their bag and endure the dirty looks for it. I don't have to wait and wait for buses that never show up. I hate the bus. I hate that I hate the bus. I feel like a failure for having to buy a second car but I fucking tried!
I'm happy in my car. It's fun to drive and it makes me happy and guilty. I feel like I have so much more freedom. I'm not tied to the bus schedule which placed very tight limits on my time, and the bus frequently didn't show. Otherwise it would take much longer to get home. I can stop by somewhere on the way home and pick something up. Like the bike, I am by myself in the car and I can decompress. I can sing if I want.
It makes no sense for a 25km commute to take two hours. Its madness. By travelling from one suburb to another via the city centre the bus becomes wholly impractical. A public transport system has to work so that people leave their car at home. London worked for me, I got the tube everywhere. Valencia has an amazing public transport system. Dublin is completely broken.
This is a problem when the public transport system isn't built with these exact issues in mind. You're right, it shouldn't take 2 hours for that commute, and all the other issues you pointed out are legitimate. The problem is that the infrastructure hasn't been adapted to make things better for the people using public transport.
As a comparison to the Netherlands, public transport always has right of way vs regular traffic, they have their own dedicated lanes that traffic isn't allowed into (this includes taxis! They can use the public transport lanes) and even their traffic signals treat them preferentially. I take a bus very often, and quite often it won't stop at a single red light because the traffic lights are programmed to help the flow of public transport, despite the street it travels on having 5 or 6 different traffic lights. In many cities, only public transport is allowed in some of the denser streets too, so they don't have to compete with other drivers on the road.
Trams, metros and trains are pretty obvious as to why they work so well.
Same with bike lanes. First of all, whenever they can be they are wholly separated from the main traffic and live in their own independent lanes. If a bike has to join regular streets, they have the right of way and these situations are kept at an absolute minimum. The streets and intersections themselves are also designed so that drivers are forced into driving safely via traffic easing measures and low speed limits. Plus, everyone here bikes, so there isn't the same type of animosity or stigma you see elsewhere because drivers understand what it's like to be a cyclist and view it as a normal thing.
So it's not your fault and you shouldn't feel bad, it's the fault of your government for not investing into proper public transport infrastructure. They are trying to squeeze in public transport infra into existing road infra, whereas what they should be doing is redesigning the current infra to make sure public transport is better integrated.
And, guess what, the roads here are still awesome for drivers! Other than the centers of the bigger cities, there isn't much congestion to speak of and the highways are of extremely high quality (to the point we have a billion memes about feeling the bumps of Belgium as soon as you cross the border). It's not like NL is a car-free utopia, something like 65% of people still have cars, the difference is that there are alternate options that are just as good, and often better than driving. That's the secret sauce to good public transport.
The Dutch model is frequently cited by campaigners here as how things should be done. Unfortunately, as you point out, our government doesn’t really care. Investment is a patchwork of half arsed attempts here and there depending on local pressure. There are only two tram lines in the country and people keep driving their cars into the trams. Bus lanes are clogged with taxis and the Gardai (police) are absent from our roads.
A recent local council attempt to remove a couple of parking spaces and install a shared space in the area I live was met with a wave of anger and vitriolic abuse. In a public consultation people were complaining about how it would prevent them bringing some elderly relative to the GP in the snow, while transporting a fridge. Meanwhile the area is permanently clogged with cars dodging a nearby toll making the place extremely unpleasant to use as an amenity.
It’s incredibly frustrating and saddening to contribute to the problems after trying so hard to do better.
Meanwhile here in Ireland the culture is going the opposite direction. There is a clear lack of roads policing here and a recent report has confirmed this[1] with many Gardai simply not interested in doing their job. Our police force is massively under resourced and moral is in the gutter.
Meanwhile we have endless PR events “pleading” and “urging” motorists to drive safely, many of which have photo ops with vehicles parked illegally on footpaths. All run by a Road Safety Authority government agency that is utterly incompetent and only seems interested in handing out high viz jackets to school kids and blaming them for being killed by motorists glued to their phones.
Which brings me to my pet hate, the utter contempt shown by Irish motorists for those around them, especially pedestrian and cyclist spaces. It’s extremely common for cars to be fully parked up on a footpath even if a parking space is in sight. I’ve had to dodge van drivers driving down the footpath on the Main Street of our capital city because they are too lazy to use the loading bay 50m down the street. This behaviour is accepted by almost everyone. Once a neighbour came around the corner with two wheels of her SUV on the footpath (presumably so she could mount the dipped kerb and park as close to her front door as possible). I had to jump back. I asked her, pleaded even, to not drive on the footpath. Apparently that was rude and she was highly offended.
Where I grew up in rural Ireland there was a haulage company based down a narrow single track road. You’d take your life in your hands going down that road at the best of times, never mind meeting a speeding articulated lorry. Eventually the county council made them build their own access to the main road.
The problem isn’t usually the narrow roads however, it’s the drivers everywhere who know there are no consequences for their behaviour.
It’s useful for placing furniture in your home. The IKEA app used to offer something similar.
Technically there’s no reason you couldn’t do something like a full house too.