Or we halt the research until computational models become viable. You make it seem like we have no choice but to test on animals. I’m sure that is how the researchers rationalize it to themselves.

We could do that, but the amount of preventable suffering that decision would cause, to me, makes that a bad decision.

I'm sure an argument to stop research in lifesaving medicine is easy to rationalize if you're in a privileged position where you don't have to deal with your children dying from malaria or being born with HIV, your elder family members slowly disappearing to Alzheimer's, or your partner's body withering away to cancer

I have had to deal with at least one of those things. It still doesn’t change my opinion.

I feel that it is ethically wrong to enslave and torture animals for humanities benefit. If that means that I will die from a disease that would have been prevented otherwise, I can accept that. I don’t feel it is right for me to impose suffering on another sentient being for my own incremental benefit.

And let people suffer for decades with much slower advancement in drug making and therapy development?

Perhaps you can sell it to patients and their families first before agitating it in the public sphere.

I guess I don’t understand why it is considered morally acceptable to torture countless animals for the benefit of humanity.

I understand it from a purely utilitarian standpoint, but it doesn’t sit well with me ethically.

I wouldn’t want an advanced alien species to enslave and torture me at their own benefit.

Interesting last thought. I have long wondered whether our brains are fully “deterministic”, but I assume that would be nearly impossible to verify for a device with such complex state and varied input.

That has literally nothing to do with it. What is the purpose of speculating here? It is because they needed a two seat aircraft for filming.

A pretentious naming convention that Apple uses to make their devices seem more important than they really are.

Leaving an unnecessary word out is not a "naming convention".

It's not an unnecessary word, though. To refer to "iPhone" without the article is grammatically nonsensical. It's a phone, not a person.

The fixed base station is a fundamentally different tradeoff for AR vs VR.

Base station for AR would be detrimental, as you inherently want to explore and interact with the world around you.

For most VR use cases that is not the case, and I can see the argument for the benefits of a base station (higher performance) outweighing the costs (limited movement).

One solution to this for AR is using "fog computing", where your AR device may offload its computation to a node on the local network that's more powerful but also not as far away (in terms of latency) as a cloud server. Perhaps with the continued adoption of UWB 5G, those AR basestations could exist at cell towers or in local establishments - think about a clothing store running fog nodes to allow AR users to visualize wearing different clothes as they see them in the store.

I haven't read more than the abstract, but it seems there is some good research going into this. It must be years off however, as we barely have LTE networks in some locations, let-alone UWB 5G to even begin supporting this type of architecture.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9103475

Streaming 4k video per eye per user? Can I get that kind of bandwidth for general wifi, please?

This kind of throughput is quite achievable if you get a high quality 6E router. Of course you need compatible client devices too, which is a bit of a challenge right now.

If the base station was wireless and doubled as a charger/stand it likely wouldn’t even be a noticeable drawback for most VR use-cases.

Quest 2 is already a stand alone device so the base station requirement has already partially gone away

Quest 1 was standalone too.

why do you need zero trust software for this?

everything else is already being handled by a centralized authority (twitter), why not let them also handle letting users post anonymously after having been verified?

Even with “hard” requirements in advance, things are always subject to change, or unforeseen requirements additions/modifications will be needed.

I don’t see why you can’t maintain the spirit of agile and develop iteratively while increasing fidelity, in order to learn out these things as early as possible.

> I don’t see why you can’t maintain the spirit of agile and develop iteratively

The question is not whether you can't. The question is whether it provides advantages. Agile comes with its own downsides compared to a waterfall. Note, that I've been working with agile methods most of my career and I don't want to change that.

it is something i have thought about occasionally. i don’t have a fully formed opinion, so am open to others challenging my logic here…

i have come to accept that a strong military power can serve as a deterrent to others, and ultimately lead to a more peaceful existence (in the aggregate). i don’t believe that human beings can co-exist peacefully, so this deterrent is necessary (until we have some other means to achieve peace).

i would use a similar thought process to morally justify work on a general AI. given enough time i believe that humanity will destroy ourselves and this planet. in lieu of another solution, we may need an AI to assert control to prevent this from happening (or backfire and bring us fully into a hollywood dystopian future).

at the risk of going on a rant now, i have often found it hard to morally justify working on space travel, as i don’t believe that humanity has demonstrated that it deserves to colonize beyond Earth. that would only enable us to consume and destroy more of the universe.

Why doesn't the universe have the right to "destroy" itself through its most sophisticated subset of matter-energy known to date?

I put "destroy" in quotes since I think that's ridiculously loaded. The biosphere itself is naturally unsustainable at its current complexity for more than 1 billion years from now[0], the Sun is going to go red giant past the next 5 billion years, and, as far as we know, the universe will end in heat death. Entropy and transformation is inevitable. Humans contribute to that, but doing it in the service of higher cognitive functions by which the universe can know itself should be the noblest reason for it to happen (from a human perspective), no?

Another counterpoint: what if humanity only becomes worthy of spreading itself in civilizations that can only form post-Earth (too far into the future to still be living on Earth)? Should those be condemned to non-existence because humanity's original nucleus didn't bootstrap itself impressively enough to earn a chance at outliving its planet?

0: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future and Ctrl+f "c4 photosynthesis"

thank you for the thoughtful reply. gives me something to think about.

i foresee this as the main problem with a distributed, hybrid workforce.

in my experience, you need to be all the way into one camp (remote) or the other (on-site) to reap the full benefits, otherwise you are just getting the downsides of both.

any best practices that others have found for dealing with a distributed, hybrid team? (assuming you don’t have the authority to make everyone onsite/remote)

I did the same exact thing (in many of the same cities as well). It was a blast.

I agree this is the best way to try out a new place to live. Need to stay at least one month, but ideally 2-3, to really get a feel for a place.

We made it around the entire country over the course of the pandemic (and eloped while we were at it), but ultimately stopped due to the work involved in finding a high quality rental at a reasonable price.

Airbnb fees are high, so even after negotiating (which is a must), it is still an expensive monthly rent. But I will admit I was staying in highly desirable areas, and you are paying a premium for the flexibility.

Ultimately my favorite spots were Boulder, Chicago, and Burlington Vermont (during ski season).