bemusedthrow75

I am sure it's quite a high figure (I don't know how high; I suspect not as outrageously high as it might seem).

But your reply was not any more of a practical solution. I was trying to centre it on a more realistic observation that money outgoings are connected to much less easily fixable lifestyle circumstances.

Of course there isn’t. But you understand that wasn’t my point, yes?

> There are people with kids living in the jungle on tubers and pigs.

Famously easy to switch to this when you live in an HMO in Statesville, State USA or a housing development in Suburbiton, Townshire UK.

I don't really want to have kids.

I am not an "antinatalist" because of this.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with comfort (or the environment or climate).

I note that the "unto" here is a very interesting word choice that hints at an underlying belief structure that drives your opinion.

"Our very survival" is not threatened and you know it. Pretty sure no wealth-controlling multi-billionaires look like indigenous Bolivians.

Because it's not the high-water mark of childless existence?

Your main point is, to be clear, inherently discriminatory on a basis that looks a lot like a shallow proxy for race.

> Look at yourself and be clear about this: we're thinning, the typical white middle-class couple is facing extinction.

> Society needs fixing, not having less kids. Smart people need to have kids too.

Society needs fixing to preserve the place of the white middle class?

I am, to be clear, a well-educated white single man over 40 (who has enough to do without this restaurant-based existence you think is the apotheosis of childlessness). But I think society needs fixing so that I am not in a class protected by privilege. So far I think the threat of extinction is having no meaningful impact either way.

Nice little straw man.

I tell you who should feel entitled to someone's attention: the kid in the Apple Vision Pro launch video whose dad plays with them while wearing an enormous eye mask that has fake digital eyes.

That was such an appallingly dystopian marketing message it made me physically nauseous.

Oh wow, there’s an annoyance I had not even considered. The passenger in the seat next to you endlessly jerking their head around with a big headset in your peripheral vision while you’re trying to relax or work or read a book.

Infuriating.

Oh gosh. You are entirely right :-) If that is why I was downvoted then I'd go along with it for sure.

> The lesson from Google Glass is that people didn't like not knowing what was happening.

I think that is at least in part a highbrow post-justification, though I accept it's going to be more common among Apple pundits who need the Vision Pro to be a success but spent time deriding Google Glass.

The instinctive reason is quite different; it was about inattention and rudeness. Google "google glass rude" and you will see _plenty_ of coverage about it at the time. People don't like this stuff on other people.

I certainly reserve the right to dislike these things on a purely instinctive level. Whether or not they have to choose to take a photograph of me or not.

I would be a little surprised if they weren't PMMA or something like it. It's such a useful material for complex applications like this.

I personally think these things are much worse, at this point, because ubiquitous recording is now an old concept, and these things are a literal eye mask with faked attention. There is something so broken about it.

But I do take your point, and don't think you deserved a downvote for it. So much downvoting going on.

It is just unavoidably creepy, and yet it was excitably launched with a video that was the most dystopian, unsettling portrayal of the target consumer's life.

It so profoundly undermines what Apple is; no other Apple product has ever been remotely "hell is other people", especially not "hell is other people who are in the room with you".

I think there's a lot more than just the airpods comparison that i've seen elsewhere, too. Because the people with the Apple eyes are using fake eyes; it is not filtered attention, it is actual misdirection.

Though I personally find having a conversation with people who won't take their airpods out is a sign that I am having a conversation with someone who devalues interacting with humans.

I know this won't be iFixit's answer but maybe we should converge on the idea that it's because faking someone's eyes on a screen when their real eyes are just behind it is a genuinely sick, actively dystopian idea that is intended to offset the sense that they've developed a piece of technology that allows people to selectively pay attention to a human in the same room, even though they are marketing it to people who spent all that energy amplifying the idea of the "glasshole"?

I think the balance will shift here a little, now that the RP2040 has made PIO a rather more mainstream concept. Access to really very high-speed, narrowly-focussed reliable IO timing in the context of an interpreted language seems to me to be a good plan.

I gather other microcontrollers have had programmable I/O state machine cores in the past but I'd expect to see a lot more of them (or more documentation and coverage of the ones that exist)

We've had enough of chipper clips to last a lifetime!

  It looks like you're writing an article about encryption. Would you like help?

  (o) Insert a joke about Apple forcing a U2 album on us

  (o) Let me write the joke myself

  [x] Don't show me this tip again

> If you can get the resources you need in a microcontroller you can afford, and you prefer programming in Python... why not?

Particularly when you consider that the "bloat" here has no secondary side-effects: it doesn't waste resources that other software could be using, because no other software is running.

I am a long-time web developer who has always intellectually understood the interest in microcontrollers but never had much of the need. I do now.

I'm not even a fan of Python but MicroPython is a surprisingly productive development experience and I've learned a lot in a very short time with a Pico W.

I will probably use TinyGo at some point in the future, particularly as I try to use smaller devices, and I'm not averse to porting to C, but I really rate the MicroPython ecosystem highly in terms of actual coverage, though mainly just the intent of it, which is unimpeachable IMO.

Quick honourable mention for Pimoroni's similar tiny framework, phew:

https://github.com/pimoroni/phew

and this rather clever start-as-access-point-to-join-network scheme implemented on it:

https://github.com/simonprickett/phewap

which works a treat!

It's fine until something floods your kitchen, and then it is the second worst stuff ever.

(Worst stuff being any mid-twentieth-century alternative containing literal asbestos)

Oh, we are definitely in that punditry window where journalists write about an Apple product as if literally none of the precursor products matter at all, clambering over all the weaknesses and shortfalls as if they were the prone bodies of regular tech journalists who — perhaps distracted by their need for a long or wider perspective - fell on the ground on the way to be one of Cupertino’s chosen few.

Also the window where wealthy early adopters confuse their ability to spend ridiculous money on a beta product with actual possession of insight or wisdom; this is the Z-tier of access journalism.

Apart from your (judging by your comment history apparently quite typical) insulting snide bullshit reading of my comment, for which go fuck yourself:

Yes. I know of a school locally to me that is rated inadequate that the parents adore, that I would choose over the next nearest independent day school which turns out weird aloof little Stepford children.

As for the snarky intentional bullshit misreading: “recently left school” in the UK means “completed school” as well, as in “recently left school for university” or “recently left school for college”. Engage your brain when I am talking about young adults and it should be clear I was talking about school leavers. They are the right people to ask if a school is good or not, because they are the ones most recently impacted by its actual performance.

By the way, well done for being able to tell I am not a parent. Perhaps you deduced that from the opening sentence where I said “I am not a parent”? That was a tricky one, so clever you :-)

Yes. They need less oversight, more training (particularly in tech and tech-adjacent issues) and more power over curriculum.

I am not a parent.

If I were a parent, I would assume Ofsted scores to be useless. Why? Because I know teachers and what they experience about the Ofsted process, which is Kafkaesque and officious.

It is much easier to look at the exam results, visit the school, ask people in an area what the kids are like at the bus stop —- are they well-behaved or are they scary? —- and ask young adults who recently left school what the teachers are like.

FWIW, journalists literally don’t write their own headlines.

That’s an editor or sub-editor’s domain.

Yes. But bad box model is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- compared to where we would be if JSSS had become a de facto standard. It was a total mess, and an arrogant one at that.

> It's of interest that you personally chose a limited reading of "skeptical examination", whether that's due to limited experience or an innate tendancy to only imagine the best behaviour in people I wouldn't speculate.

OK, now you're being a bit silly.

I assume error over malice. It's not only imagining the best, it's also statistically and ethically a better way.

Oh... what I mean is, one of the things that is interesting about the gap between the two sleeps is that your brain is awash with prolactin.

So some tasks you do in that period of time are done with a kind of lower level of objection, easier "starting", and in a contemplative start, and you're not actually tired.

Which is what also gives this "cleaning fairy" sense that nobody in particular did it.

There's definitely a late adopter/early adopter divide here.

I have found myself wondering what good examples there are of successful (Ready Fire Aim) early-draft-standard adoption on the web. CSS in early Internet Explorer is one of them -- that was a choice that ended a ridiculous, unworkable not-invented-here adventure at Netscape.

But on the flip side, I am reminded of (Google) Gears, which was promoted as a solution but was really only a technology demonstrator for the idea that ultimately surfaced as Web Workers.