Elon Musk just _pretends_ to have Asperger's. I know plenty of people on the spectrum, they aren't assholes.
There's also the "Ye's bipolar disorder" effect. Its a challenge I'm sure to have it, but I also know people who are bipolar. Anti-semitism is _NOT_ on the list of symptoms. We can criticize Ye's anti-semetism without making fun of his bipolar / mental illness.
So even _IF_ Elon hada Asperger's (and I'm not convinced he does. I think its all pretend for more clicks / his public relations image), there's nothing about Asperger's that makes you a self-contradicting asshole.
I agree and not trying to typecast—but maybe their personality + Asperger’s = dubious people-oriented decisions? I’m not a doctor nor do I know anyone with Asperger’s but it is a variable at play.
But quickly looking it up it’s a social-oriented disorder. Elon is making dubious social-oriented decisions.
The entire field of psychology is about dubious social-oriented decisions and classifying them (hoping that by classifying them, we can gain insights into how to improve behavior).
The kinds of dubious social-oriented decisions associated with Asperger's does _NOT_ match what Elon Musk is doing. What he is doing is closer to narcissistic personality disorder and/or sociopathic personality disorder.
Being a dick doesn't disqualify you from being on the spectrum.
Anecdotally, from the Aspergous people I know, they and Elon share a certain kind of body language you pick up on over time. It's a slight fidgeting as if clothes are constantly uncomfortable (likely due to constant stimulation).
> but I also know people who are bipolar. Anti-semitism is _NOT_ on the list of symptoms.
Obsessing over some socially unacceptable idea absolutely can be a manifestation of bipolar disorder for some people. Especially when one considers that bipolar can sometimes be associated with psychosis, and obsessive antisemitic/racist/etc thoughts are not uncommon in people with psychosis (famous example: Terry Davis, who I think actually even had a bipolar diagnosis at one point - it is common for people to initially be diagnosed with bipolar before eventually getting a schizophrenia or schizoaffective diagnosis as the psychotic symptoms become more prominent and enduring).
Kanye’s antisemitism is wrong and reprehensible. I can’t tell to what extent it is a symptom of his mental health problems, and I don’t think you really can either: neither of us is a mental health professional, and he is not our patient/client. But simply looking at a list of symptoms, and saying “X is not on it”, is a very ignorant way to approach the topic. Even if his antisemitism is partially due to his bipolar, that doesn’t mean he should just be allowed to get away with it, just like how a bipolar person who commits a crime in a manic state (sometimes happens) doesn’t just get away with it, although it may be appropriate to take that into account as a mitigating factor (as opposed to a “get out of jail free” card)
Similarly, I have no idea whether Musk has ASD. But ASD absolutely can make some people behave in a way which others perceive as being an “asshole”, so if he does have it, those behaviours could well in part be contributed to by it. That’s not saying that everyone with ASD is an “asshole”, or that a person with ASD has no responsibility to try their best to adjust to meet society’s expectations - but isn’t it obvious that a disorder whose symptoms can include difficulty thinking about social situations or understanding social rules, obliviousness to the thoughts and feelings of others, unusual obsessions, etc, can sometimes lead people to behave in ways perceived by others as being an “asshole”, even a failure to adjust one’s behaviour in response to that feedback?
Thanks for your help correcting a really common misconception about bipolar disorder.
People want to whitewash mental illness because mental illness can be scary and uncomfortable. There’s this concept of destigmatizing mental illness by pretending all sorts of bad behavior are somehow not associated with mental illness. This is often done to make people with minor mental illness feel less stigmatized but ironically can increase the stigma around people with more severe mental illness since now it’s not mental illness, they’re just a terrible terrible person.
Yes, psychosis absolutely can cause people to be antisemitic, racist, violent, etc. This should almost be obvious. But because it opens up difficult conversations about accountability, and because people with minor mental illness want sympathy without stigma, people like to pretend otherwise.
> But ASD absolutely can make some people behave in a way which others perceive as being an “asshole”, so if he does have it, those behaviours could well in part be contributed to by it.
Autistic people do things because they don't understand social norms.
Sociopaths do things because they don't _care_ about social norms.
There's a difference, and I can tell the difference. It is in a sociopath's best interest to pretend that they're autistic by the way.
Sociopathy, is often pointed out as an advantage in that situation. You rise above others in the social ladder and punch down your competitors. And we're seeing this behavior right now as Elon Musk is utilizing his powers to try to silence his critics (Mastodon).
Autism on the other hand, is a disadvantage in most leadership roles.
When we consider Elon Musk's role in society (leading corporations), he is far more likely to be a sociopath, rather than autistic. When we look at his behavior (punching down on Mastodon), its closer to sociopathy.
When we consider Musk's behavior in the past few weeks, it has more similarities to Narcissistic collapse than anything else I've heard of.
That said, a person as successful as Musk is, is more likely to have BAP (broad autism phenotype, subclinical ASD) than clinical ASD. BAP means one has some degree of autistic traits, but is insufficiently disabled by them to warrant a psychiatric diagnosis
Sociopathy isn’t a DSM-5 diagnosis - antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is. Diagnostic criteria for ASPD include a history of criminally antisocial behaviour (animal abuse, vandalism, violence, theft, etc), evident by age of 15. It also requires evidence to support a retrospective conduct disorder diagnosis prior to 15. I see zero evidence that is true of Musk. When psychiatrists evaluate someone for ASPD, they aren’t looking for mere allegations of questionable business ethics, they expect to see a criminal record, history of school expulsion, imprisonment or juvenile detention, someone repeatedly being fired for proven serious workplace misconduct, someone who refuses to seek gainful employment despite being capable of it, dishonourable discharge from armed services, domestic violence, physical and emotional abuse of children, serious child neglect resulting in malnutrition, use of aliases or false identities to commit fraud, etc
If I open up my copy of the DSM-5, I find on page 659 the diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder (301.7, F60.2):
> A. A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three (or more) of the following: ...
> B. The individual is at least age 18 years.
> C. There is evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years.
> D. The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Now, to be diagnosed with ASPD, a person must meet all of A, B, C and D. You seem to be focusing on criterion A. Even supposing you are right that he meets criterion A – where is the evidence for him meeting criterion C? You can't diagnose someone with ASPD without evidence for the onset of a diagnosis of conduct disorder (CD) as a child/adolescent. It isn't necessary that they be diagnosed with CD contemporaneously, it is acceptable to have retrospective evidence for it based on school records, parent interviews, their own recollections, etc – but, without evidence for onset of a CD diagnosis in childhood/adolescence, you cannot have an ASPD diagnosis in adulthood. Do we have any evidence that Musk met the diagnostic criteria for conduct disorder in childhood/adolescence?
Is there any good evidence that Musk exhibited at least three of the following behaviours (conduct disorder criterion A, pages 469-470) prior to age 15?
Aggression to People and Animals
1. Often bullies, threatens, or intimidates others.
2. Often initiates physical fights.
3. Has used a weapon that can cause serious physical harm to others (e.g., a bat, brick, broken bottle, knife, gun).
4. Has been physically cruel to people.
5. Has been physically cruel to animals.
6. Has stolen while confronting a victim (e.g., mugging, purse snatching, extortion, armed robbery).
7. Has forced someone into sexual activity.
Destruction of Property
8. Has deliberately engaged in fire setting with the intention of causing serious damage.
9. Has deliberately destroyed others’ property (other than by fire setting).
Deceitfulness or Theft
10. Has broken into someone else’s house, building, or car.
11. Often lies to obtain goods or favors or to avoid obligations (i.e., “cons” others).
12. Has stolen items of nontrivial value without confronting a victim (e.g., shoplifting, but without breaking and entering: forgery).
Serious Violations of Rules
13. Often stays out at night despite parental prohibitions, beginning before age 13 years.
14. Has run away from home overnight at least twice while living in the parental or parental surrogate home, or once without returning for a lengthy period.
15. Is often truant from school, beginning before age 13 years
Musk doesn't fit the usual clinical picture of someone with ASPD. ASPD is usually encountered in a forensic setting – someone in prison, currently going through a criminal trial, child welfare cases.
I really doubt any actual psychiatrist or psychologist would diagnose Musk with ASPD in a clinical setting. Psychiatric diagnoses aren't just about reading a list of symptoms and matching them – you need to understand how professionals interpret that list in practice (the "clinical gestalt", as it is sometimes called). If you actually study the literature on ASPD, you'll find people like Musk are not the targets of the diagnosis. Indeed, the DSM-5 says (p. 662):
> Antisocial personality disorder appears to be associated with low socioeconomic status and urban settings
Musk is not now and has never been a person of "low socioeconomic status", which is the group of people in which ASPD is usually diagnosed.
Here's some more traits of ASPD, according to the DSM-5 (p. 661):
> They may be irresponsible as parents, as evidenced by malnutrition of a child, an illness in the child resulting from a lack of minimal hygiene, a child's dependence on neighbors or nonresident relatives for food or shelter, a failure to arrange for a caretaker for a young child when the individual is away from home, or repeated squandering of money required for household necessities
Musk is no candidate for "Father of the Year", but there is zero evidence his children are malnourished, extremely unhygienic, lack appropriate adult supervision, lack sufficient financial support, etc. That is describing the behaviour of low socioeconomic status bad parents, high socioeconomic status individuals may often be bad parents, but rarely in such a grossly physical way.
> These individuals may receive dishonorable discharges from the armed services, may fail to be self-supporting, may become impoverished or even homeless, or may spend many years in penal institutions
That doesn't sound like Musk either.
Some other common traits of ASPD (back to page 660):
> Irresponsible work behavior may be indicated by significant periods of unemployment despite available job opportunities, or by abandonment of several jobs without a realistic plan for getting another job. There may also be a pattern of repeated absences from work that are not explained by illness either in themselves or in their family. Financial irresponsibility is indicated by acts such as defaulting on debts, failing to provide child support, or failing to support other dependents on a regular basis
When they said "financial irresponsibility", a centibillionaire wasting $44 billion on a whim is not what they had in mind. They mean the parent who can't afford food for their children because they spent all their money on some inessential goods. None of Musk's children are going to starve, even if he stupidly loses $100 billion more.
> Individuals with antisocial personality disorder tend to be irritable and aggressive and may repeatedly get into
physical fights or commit acts of physical assault (including spouse beating or child beating)
Haven't heard about Musk getting in to physical fights or committing physical assault.
Another thing to note is that in modern computing environments there’s infinite distractions. We’re always one click away from YouTube.
Back then, the screen was a playground one could poke and prod—without distraction, with a singular focus. This is especially important for children. Now we’re competing with the nearest iThing.
I always think of the parents who buy their children the latest-and-greatest toys, only to find their child is more interested in the box. Or perhaps a stick and some bugs in the back yard.
Opiate crisis has less to do with people’s deaths and more about their addiction. The lengths they go to score another fix—stabbing people, robbing family members, selling themselves, etc.
It’s one thing to die from doing something stupid—it’s something else entirely to inflict pain and hardship on others.
> The lengths they go to score another fix—stabbing people, robbing family members, selling themselves, etc.
Would they do that if the government just gave them the drug they are addicted to for free? I don’t think so.
Is the real problem then the addiction, or the public policy context in which the addiction exists?
Of course, I wouldn’t want to be addicted to opioids, even if the government gave them to me for free, due to the potential negative long-term health consequences, and also potential negative impacts on cognitive functioning which may in turn limit one’s educational/career/life prospects. But I don’t know if being in such a scenario, even if millions were in such a scenario, would be a “crisis” in the same sense that opioids currently are
Methadone/Suboxone are opioids prescribed for addiction and are often free through low income programs. If they were made more accessible would that solve the crisis? I don’t think so. It’s hard to get to the stage where you accept them as a necessary solution and are still in the dangerous area of trying to taper with unknown quality substances. High quality government heroin/pills and supervised usage would likely work but it’s clear the US would never consider that an option.
> Methadone/Suboxone are opioids prescribed for addiction and are often free through low income programs. If they were made more accessible would that solve the crisis? I don’t think so.
It is unsurprising that if a person is addicted to substance A, trying to substitute it with substance B, which has different properties (even if chemically related to A), doesn't always work. The real solution is to supply them, legally, in pharmaceutical quality, and for consumption under trained supervision (whenever safety demands that), the actual drug they are addicted to, not some substitute.
> High quality government heroin/pills and supervised usage would likely work but it’s clear the US would never consider that an option.
Okay, but if you aren't willing to seriously consider every possible solution to a crisis, that makes your stubbornness a major part of its cause. Government drug policy is a huge contributor to the crisis, and if the government isn't willing to make major changes to its drug policies, the crisis is likely to continue, and the government deserves every blame for that.
All I need to do is provide a heroin user fentanyl. We have tried heroin from the government, but the users want fentanyl. And, of course, the "black market" will not limit the amount the user gets.
Now, if you provide a "safe injection/usage site", that attracts the "black market" dealers. Seemingly, that also attracts other "undesired". Take, for example, the problem of homelessness where I live. It is actually difficult to remain unhoused. But, the care demands "no alcohol", "no drugs", "no violence". And a lot of customers do not like those terms and rather live on the street.
Government to blame? Do we not live in a democracy?
Something that popped into my mind is the role of Linus in the Linux Kernel development. Imagine how things would be without him? Or if a bunch of business exec ran things?
A lot of millennials value freedom of choice and open collaboration ad nauseam, but this is the danger of too many voices—nothing gets done. No singular purpose. No authority—or rather, no respect for authority. The reality is: we are not all equal. Some people are just better at what they do than others. Perhaps we should listen to what they say?
But that’s how politics goes—some schmucks who have no idea nor vision, nor experience, nor know-how, rise up on the backs of engineers who do all the work. Typically out of insecurity or over-ambition they trample on-up.
And who would want to deal with the cutthroat bullshit of trying to deal with these people?
Go Carmack—create something amazing with your startup. Meta will rot away in the next ten years because someone else will invent a better VR headset. Just like Linus helped invent a better OS—free to use, open to collaborate, with vision and focus. With attention-to-detail and quality-engineering as a first-class citizen.
Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.
It’s cool in concept but whose going to shell out cash to be tethered to a machine wearing goggles sitting in a chair?
AR has potential but even that is marginally better than alternative solutions.
Also, I don’t know about y’all but I don’t trust Facebook so I don’t trust Meta. They are a data-leach.
We still probably have a decade or more to go with this technology it has to be affordable, lightweight, AR glasses not tied to a company that sells peoples data!
Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.
I feel like this is definitely the elephant in the room everybody is ignoring. Almost nobody gives a hoot about VR!
I'm a software engineer with a lot of (surprise, surprise) nerdy/geeky/whatever friends and interest in VR is close to zero. A few friends vouched for various games like Half-Life:Alyx and Beat Saber, but nobody was claiming it was a life altering experience and nobody is clamoring to live more of their lives in VR. VR definitely makes a great game controller for some kinds of games and there are even a few killer apps, but I mean like... Wii Sports was a "killer app" for motion controls and that doesn't mean it was a technology that shaped our lives in the long run.
And needless to say non-technical folks have less than zero interest in strapping a computer to their head and face.
God bless John Carmack, but it feels like he and FB are arguing about execution issues on a product nobody cared about in the first place.
I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve. It's a kind of gameplay that can't be repeated with 2d screens. I really do think it could be revolutionary, based on playing that game alone. If you can get ahold of a headset and a powerful gaming PC - I recommend giving it a try.
The problems right now are very fundamental. The quest 2 out of the box is supremely uncomfortable. Casual users will put it on and not want to use it due to VR nausea and the discomfort of the headset after wearing it for 20 minutes. The hardware is not powerful enough to create an experience like Alyx - all the headset games just have basic polygons and colors. Resolution is still poor, FOV is poor. We're still in the infancy of immersion/comfort/usability. I played Alyx on the Quest 1 which I actually think had better immersion due to the OLED screens.
IMO the trick is going to be whether Meta can pull off a usable, immersive device in the next 5 years without their revenues completely tanking. The problems to overcome are really hard and still at basic research level which takes years to develop. The other issue is the killer game or app that gets people into VR en-masse.
I guess my point is I think writing VR off completely is a mistake - like someone saying what is the point of a cell phone in the 1980s when they were giant bricks and cost a fortune. VR will get good enough at some point that it's like putting on a pair of glasses and stepping into another world without any friction. It's just a question of how long until we get there and who will bring it to us.
Disney World's Animal Kingdom has an Avatar-themed "ride" where you are linked to a banshee rider. And they make you wear these silly glasses, with thick, bulbous lenses.
So I'm there, mounted on a plastic motorbike, staring down in disbelief at the smaller-than-iPad display where the tachymeter and gauges would be. In front of me, in front of everyone to my left and right, is just plastic nothing. Plastic. And I think aloud, "Okay, are we gonna look down at this little screen the whole time?" The guy next to grins too: Where's the screen?
Then it starts. Holy crap. My entire field of vision is Pandora--up, down, left, right, everywhere.
And we are flying on banshees! I feel a moment of weightlessness as we careen down a canyon at the speed of gravity. I want to hoot and holler. It's pure joy, and my heart sings.
Absolutely—it’s also imagineering! Disney has done that for almost a century. But they make money because that’s their bread-and-butter. You’re buying an amazing experience at Disney, VR or otherwise.
Meta’s bread-and-butter is selling peoples data, irrespective of whether teens are committing suicide on their platforms.
You’re definitely right the technology has tons of potential. Lots of applications in, for instance, content-creation space as well.
The problem Meta ran into is that it’s difficult/impossible to make money on it. It’s a niche market at best, and it’s much more difficult to prove the value when compared to something like Facebook. Facebook is easy to use and provides social value to everyone on the planet. And I say that not using it myself but I live in a small town and all business here rely on Facebook; the municipalities use it to communicate; elderly use it… it’s accessible.
I’m sure the wall Carmack ran into was the shareholders. To shareholders it’s more often than not about profits. To Carmack it’s probably about the product he envisions, not the profits. But you can’t have both sustainably when folks can live without VR.
I would jump on the bandwagon if my VR headset was mine: like a computer I can install whatever I want there—not in a walled garden owned by Evil Corp.
The proper VR solution needs to be open source hardware and software. By the people, for the people. Reduce the barrier to entry and people will use it.
One more thing: those virtual avatars are impossible to take seriously. If I’m in a virtual boardroom filled with those, I might as well be playing Minecraft.
> I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve. It's a kind of gameplay that can't be repeated with 2d screens.
Every time I read something like this about VR I hear the same stuff I hear from like, audiophiles talking about gold plated cables and shit. I have a Rift, and I get a lot of use out of it for Beat Saber and VTOL VR, but there's no reason the latter can't be non-VR and I would categorize nearly everything I've ever played with it as a gimmick.
The experience is a little more immersive than a screen, but in my opinion not that significantly so especially considering all the drawbacks.
My experience is completely different. I haven't tried the oculus but I did play around with game development with the Vive 2 at university about 4(?) years ago. Maybe because it was room scale VR (eg you were physically walking around) but it was extremely good at immersing me to the point where memories of being inside (our rudimentary) game feel like memories of being in a space rather than memories of playing a game.
I think it's dumb to compare this to audiophile stuff with no proven benefit, it is a fundamentally different way of experiencing. The feeling of presence (as it is called in VR terms) is something that was really noticeable for me.
I suspect that maybe the immersion/presence just doesn't stick for certain people? I do know that I'm unusually good(?) at suspending disbelief and getting totally absorbed in media.
> Maybe because it was room scale VR (eg you were physically walking around) but it was extremely good at immersing me to the point where memories of being inside (our rudimentary) game feel like memories of being in a space rather than memories of playing a game.
Two things: One, room scale is extremely problematic for most people because they simply don't have an empty room to do it in. I own my own home and have a room free of obstacles to play VR stuff in, and yet I still occasionally hit walls with my fist and once slammed my head and shoulders into one pretty hard. Frequently in-game objects seem to be placed physically out of reach.
Second, I get that "I remember it like I was really there" feeling from a lot of 2D games I've spent significant amounts of time in. Recently while playing Scavenger SV-4 I felt distinctly unsafe during a certain in-game event despite being aware on some level that I wasn't actually in that situation in real life. Maybe there's only a certain kind of mind that can get that immersed on a screen though.
Yeah, physical movement is a big advantage. Gorn and Creed were also fun, but most of my time was spent with Beat Saber. Never tried Kinect / PS Move, but i doubt it's even close.
> a little more immersive
I wouldn't say a little... 10% to 20% maybe. That can be quite a nice bump for stuff counting on immersion. But again, the software has to properly use the system... my neck really hurt after playing Subnatica, and the play-through pretty much ended anyway due to Cyclops being pretty much uncontrollable.
I don't know about your friends, but playing Alyx
opened my eyes to the level of immersion VR can achieve.
I've had a lot of friends who liked a few VR games like Alyx but never really touched their headsets after that.
My feeling is less "VR stinks" and more "yes, it can be a really nifty gaming controller/display but there's a big gap between 'nifty gaming thing' and Zuckerberg's opium dream of a fulltime VR revolution."
The other issue is the killer game or app that gets people into VR en-masse.
We've already had a few five star VR games, so I don't think that's sufficient.
Maybe the "killer app" is more of a paradigm or framework. Like how we didn't have killer GUI applications until Xerox/Apple/Microsoft created the environment in which those apps could be created.
But, I don't know. Fundamentally I just don't think people want to strap these things to their heads.
There's a critical faulty assumption in your logic above ... we are on the verge of seeing multiple simultaneous technical barriers fall that will seriously alter your equation around comfort and immersion. micro-OLED screens are shipping this year which enable full immersion with pancake lenses at half the weight and greatly improved FOV. The next gen of chipsets will support resolutions and frame rates that eliminate screen door effect and nausea for a wide swathe of people.
Within 2 years we'll be looking at very different landscape for VR hardware. This is why people like Zuckerberg and companies like Apple are excited about it - they can see where the puck will be and they are skating to it, ignoring the critics operating on obsolete assumptions.
Nausea issue is not solvable by any standalone device. We'll either have direct brain jack-in that can override full range of sensory input (so there will be no dissonance between your sense of balance and vision) or we're stuck with mostly static experiences (teleporting point-to-point instead of moving etc.) which are not immersive.
Not seeing the first one delivered within 5 years for sure and probably not within 50.
Do you have numbers of the percentage of people who do get motion sickness from vr? Perhaps 50% of the population not going vomity is a large enough market? Perhaps 10%? As devices get better the market will grow. I can definitely feel off at 60Hz, but no problem so far at 120 if the latency is kept to a minimum.
Plenty of people get seasick, but there are still quite a few of us who enjoy sailing a day through a proper October Storm.
I don't have an exact number, but let me answer your question with another question — why else are the most popular VR games (Beatsaber, Alyx etc.) either completely static or move-by-teleport? My suspicion is that they were playtested _ad nauseam_ and this showed significant portion of the players to be affected.
> I can definitely feel off at 60Hz, but no problem so far at 120 if the latency is kept to a minimum.
This is a common misconception and the type of nausea I'm talking about has nothing to do with the screen update latency or head tracking latency. Strongest effect happens when you're mostly stationary in the real world (sitting or standing on the floor) but moving in VR (let's say riding a rollercoaster). In this case, your vision tells your body that you should feel acceleration/deceleration, but your inner ear tells your body you're completely stationary. This is a contradiction commonly associated with intoxication and body deals with it accordingly.
I accept that strength of the effect is different for everyone, for me personally when I tried the rollercoaster demo on Quest 1 nausea lasted for 2 hours (!) despite the fact that I was never seasick in my life before.
I am starting to think that Alyx is VR high tide point. It was either going to be the thing that makes folks and developers run to VR or just stand out there is a neat proof of concept that gets ignored. Alyx is now 2 years old, there hasnt been a rush towards the space yet...
Offload to local device with, yes. Offload to server farm elsewhere ... naaah. You have at most a few ms to compress - stream - decompress - refresh. Any latency, jitter, stutter, etc has a very negative impact in vr. Much more so than on a regular monitor.
> Wii Sports was a "killer app" for motion controls and that doesn't mean it was a technology that shaped our lives in the long run.
Perhaps it could have been different if companies didn’t just focus on using these technologies as leverage to increase their profits at “unicorn” levels and for unimaginative reasons. Carmack should have known better than to expect a huge, boring company like Facebook to be a good place for a maverick to make a major breakthrough.
> Honestly no one really cares about VR that’s the problem.
For some values of "no one". VR has been hanging on quite nicely despite repeated reports of it's demise. The problem is that some industry people keep expecting it to be iPhone huge and it's never going to be iPhone huge.
So - the truth is somewhere inbetween "no one" and "every one". Something above "niche" but below "mass market".
Virtual reality has been too abused. Is introduced typically a humorous home video when people is startled, hits some furniture with their fists or jumps over it, and unavoidably broke the very expensive TV in the wall.
Is shown as a room disaster, much more funny for the people watching the player than for the player itself.
And the people still wonder why people is not playing it in mass when you are mocking your own target? This is not how you sell a product.
Maybe stopping the "need for jumpscare to show how awesome is our game" would help. Dunno. Maybe just making the game aware of he surrounding would help (This big square is the limit, if the player walks next the frontier show a warning or made it take one step back).
VR and AR have essentially merged at this point. Nobody is releasing VR headsets without passthrough (and non-passthrough VR still isn't viable tech yet. cost, brightness and poor FOV are holding it back).
Passthrough AR inherently has the same FoV as VR so I'm having trouble interpreting your comment. I also don't see how brightness would be an issue for non-passthrough VR. Did you mean "non-passthrough AR", like the HoloLens?
Honestly I’m not a fan of VSCode as a user. It’s too generic and lacks identity (too powerful to edit simple configs); it auto-updates every time I start it; it’s too complicated to configure; JSON is ugly and it’s 2022, why not favor GUI configurations?
If my goal is to program in language X then I should be able to grab a product and get started without fuss. VSCode is a whole lot of fussing about.
That being said, it’s very stable and performs well—I will give the devs a massive kudos for that. Also if I did a lot of NodeJS dev work it would probably classify as a proper IDE for that.
But all-in-all I would prefer something purpose-built with minimal configuration out the gate for development workloads (C/C++, Java, C#) and a more minimal editor (nano, vim, eMacs, notepad++, geany, etc) for editing configs.
These seems impression by somebody who's not a VSC user at all. Specifically:
> it’s 2022, why not favor GUI configurations?
VSC provides, at all the (four) levels, both GUI and text-based configuration editing.
> JSON is ugly
You can't get any simpler than JSON. The VSC designers have actually been admirably pragmatic, and opted for JSON5-ish, which supports comments and terminal commas (in arrays).
> too powerful to edit simple configs
Editors are complex by nature; other editors are not different.
It is actually quite the opposite; one can edit a subset of options in the GUI, then observe the changed values only in the JSON editor.
> it auto-updates every time I start it
VSC updates once a month, plus once or twice for patch releases in-between. It auto-updates every time if one opens it two/three times per month.
Plugins do auto update, but one can disable this, if they want.
> I should be able to grab a product and get started without fuss. VSCode is a whole lot of fussing about
There is no default configuration that satisfies all the users; this is not specific to VSC.
Actually, the extensions experience is probably the most polished out there, and this matters, because if one makes something easy to use, users will use that feature more.
JSON, as used in VSC, can be defined as "plain text file containing an object", as configuration files have a hash map as root-level object.
AFAIK the difference between JSON (as used in VSC) and a Javascript object are minimal (no quoting for keys, possibly minor other differences) and using a JS object should have significant advantages in order to replace a de-facto standard.
`Template literals ie- multiline strings without needing escape or newline characters is a signficant advantage of JS object over JSON`
some will argue that scripting would thus be possible if the config was simply JS but that is a rabbit hole both on the debate itself and then the potential compexlity of config; there are trade-offs for/against but not a settled matter IMO as there are major projects like neovim that support full fledged config scripting (in the case of neovim they allow use of Lua)
What I "like that much" is the pragmatism (which, again, I didn't write) of the choice to break the JSON standard and introduce features that are significant for configuration files (comments, essentially, and to a very minor extend, trailing newlines in arrays).
I've never seen Deco, but it's not an established standard. Based on the repository, it has no grammar and it even leaves details to the implementations (e.g. multi-line strings). The simplicity comes at a cost, for example, to represent leading whitespaces.
If one asks 10 developers which format they'd use, they'd choose 10 different ones, therefore a certain level of standardization is required.
As far as I know most configuration can be done through GUI. You have both JSON and GUI views of the preferences. It seems the GUI is automatically generated from the JSON-schema that validates and gives autocomplete to the JSON editor.
VS Code has the power of emacs and an autogenerating UI which maps to the configuration files. To me, that’s the easy way out—make the UI map one-to-one with the data underneath, obviating the burden of considering the UX of each configuration path, and missing out on the benefits of good UX.
It's sad that you were downvoted for this because you are not wrong at all. VS Code GUI config is a mess, and a lot of the settings are not available there. I just got used to messing with the JSON autocomplete.
> it’s too complicated to configure; JSON is ugly and it’s 2022, why not favor GUI configurations?
GUIs can change layout and users have to spend time learning where things are. Someone who is using a text editor is probably comfortable editing text.
Well unfortunately that’s a typical assumption developers make. “It’s an editor, Bob! The users ought to know how to read JSON!” Well thought-out UIs actually help the user find things and they don’t need to change all the time.
Unfortunately, even though we engineer with code, reading long streams of text is actually a terrible user experience by itself.
Good user experience should hold the user’s hand through the process so they don’t need to sift through a haystack of configurations.
VS Code has the power of emacs and an autogenerating UI which maps to the configuration files. To me, that’s the easy way out—make the UI map one-to-one with the data underneath, obviating the burden of considering the UX of each configuration path, and missing out on the benefits of good UX.
In this scenario you kinda just have to do what is best for you, and how you work. Don't get me wrong I'm glad to be better informed on this, but its not going to change that I prefer how dark mode looks overall
It does make a difference but doesn’t change the effect of Microsoft’s bad business decisions. There are no doubt many amazing individuals at the company, but the whole Windows ecosystem is polluted. It has lacked identity for the past decade since cancelling Windows Phone.
Gamifying browsing habits, monetizing MSN celebrity gossip on stock widgets and built-in search capabilities… etc… how are we supposed to be productive with such childish garbage?
I like to go back to the basics. It irks me that folks don’t think HTML/CSS/JavaScript are good enough as-is—but nowadays the default browser capabilities are incredible compared to a decade ago. We basically have a full programming environment and add WASM to the mix! Back in the day the frameworks were first-and-foremost a platform compatibility solution.
People often have it ingrained in their psyche that reinventing the wheel is evil, but it’s not—we do it all the time when we write paragraphs.
It’s of course tempting to grab a library but there’s a learning curve and an often hidden long-term cost with using libraries.
I work at a place that is mostly like this, I can tell you that using html/css/javascript raw, with a bit of bootstrap is a nightmare with a SPA.
Menus are constantly broken, back button is a game of roulette, caching is constantly a problem showing stale data, xss and other vulnerabilities are ubiquitous.
There are modern affordances in many of these frameworks others take for granted.
The underlying issue with web applications is that it’s like a square peg going in a round hole. Remember, HTTP is designed traditionally as a stateless protocol delivering static web pages, more or less.
But here we are, with stacks-on-stacks-on-stacks of layers emulating what truly should be a native application. “Web Application” should not be a thing. HTML/CSS were supposed to be for content and presentation; JavaScript was for sprinkles of functionality.
So no matter how you spin it—each framework is a workaround making the browser do something it wasn’t designed for.
When I say that I don’t mean “abandon all APIs”—I’m just stating why things are so complicated in the web space.
Moral of the story—give us more static content please. “Dynamic” means ads and wasted CPU cycles.
Things change. Just because it was originally made for documents doesn’t mean that it hasn’t undergone such huge changes that it can literally drive FPS games at 60fps without a sweat. And I say that as someone who really doesn’t like many of the underlying abstractions, imo CSS+HTML are just thoroughly badly designed, none of them would be whole without the other resulting in extreme close coupling (layouting for example cannot be done without the other).
Also, should I really download a random exe to order a pizza? Plus, especially because the protocol is stateless a web app makes so much more sense (then replicating the state at the backend side).
Ordering a pizza can be done with static pages and some forms.
You want to make photoshop or a CAD program? That is an app. You want to order a pizza? Just use html and forms, maybe javascript to reload the progress page once per minute. (You don't need websockets or SSE or anything to check pizza progress)
Not everyone is a fan of throwing away secure sandboxed environment easily accessible apps run on to native applications that might not even be built for your OS.
None of what you have outlined is actually a problem.
If your requirement is to deliver an application to users on multiple platforms then a web application is a great target.
People complain about HTML, mean while new platforms (Swift, MAUI, Flutter) still design tree like documents. It's insanely fast, optimised, accessible and the tools are fantastic.
Frameworks don't change browser behaviour, they allow you to go up a layer of abstraction. Static content is great for static content. It would be a terrible fit for a rich text editor, a dynamic chart or anything that requires interactivity.
The ecosystem is great. Native applications can get you a more optimised experience at a cost. That cost is not worth it for many solutions.
Ads are on native compiled apps too, it has nothing to do with HTTP/HTML.
I’ve always been in favor of an entirely different file type, specifically for applications. Imagine if we’d just had something like .aml (application markup language). Then html could have stayed as a document format and we could have avoided all this nonsense.
I liked that react/jsx was born out of the web, and then influenced swiftui, jetpack compose, and flutter for a new way of writing application markup. I wonder: if not for the web and its pain points, would we have landed on similar patterns? Maybe.
Yes! This is the core problem due to the historical trajectory (browser invented for static documents, now being used to build applications) -- one that's no longer possible to sidestep at this point.
I believe there is a phrase "path dependence" to describe such situations.
Many times when people try to forgo them, they end up making their own poorly specified and half-baked version of it that only some people (who may leave the company) understand.
I don’t think ORM is the same since it’s more of an API than a framework (in my mind). ORM also falls into the platform-abstraction arena because it typically has multiple backends which provides other benefits. It also is served as a wrapper library converting from one language to another (SQL).
Web frameworks are more like… clever hacks to HTML to wedge in a “new way to do it” more clever than the last attempt.
Game engines are also somewhat different because the level of abstracted complexity there is vast and heavily domain-specific. It targets multiple platforms like ORMS and multiple GPU backends as well. It provides physics APIs and other heavy maths capabilities too.
But the browser standards-bodies provide that for us now. HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript will run well across all modern browsers.
I've only used laraval and knexjs over the last 10 years and have no idea which ORMs people are complaining about because the ones I used do not have the issues they talk about.
I agree. I like pure JS, but it just does not scale by default. You need to have awesome architecture skills and you need to constantly observe your codebase, you need to write half of framework if you want to avoid frameworks. Of course it's possible, but it's not possible for vast majority of developers, including myself.
May be we need some education: how to write 100 kLoC pureJS WebApp and keep sanity. I didn't see that kind of articles. I know that my pureJS web apps can survive few hundreds LoC. Then it becomes a mess. With React it's much easier to structure an app so it's maintainable, different parts are separated, etc.
Yeah the frameworks do force a disciplined approach. It still boils down to separation of concerns like presentation from business logic etc. Historically the front-end computation existed on the backend but with NodeJS everything sort of mushed together (creating more complexity and possible architecture mistakes). Template libraries are great way to Split View from Model—but even that is taken care of in languages now like Golang templates and JavaScript template literals etc.
I suppose the question is: how much time does it take to master stock HTML5/CSS/JavaScript versus mastering a framework, through-and-through.
Frameworks are constantly in flux but the foundation they are built upon is a more lasting skill set. But the more we spend learning framework X we are spending time away from foundations.
> Menus are constantly broken, back button is a game of roulette, caching is constantly a problem showing stale data, xss and other vulnerabilities are ubiquitous.
So… what’s the difference between this and SPAs using frameworks again? Because it sure seems to me I see many of these in sites that are apparently using frameworks. Hell, Facebook — presumably the poster child for the react ecosystem and certainly with the resources to do everything right — is still introducing nav-state related bugs.
Frameworks might focus people’s attention on what needs to be done, but the fundamental capabilities aren’t in the framework, they’re in the browser and the heads of the devs.
And of course, the other possible point the parent is making is not that people should be doing SPAs from scratch (which probably wouldn’t be wise in many cases) but that it’s not wise to start from the assumption that you should be making an SPA.
> Hell, Facebook — presumably the poster child for the react ecosystem and certainly with the resources to do everything right — is still introducing nav-state related bugs.
This doesn't necessarily disprove the framework's value proposition. Bugs like this are hard to squash and at great scale (like Facebook) they're a huge challenge. Frameworks propose trade-offs to manage them, but can't eliminate all classes of bugs. We don't know how much worse it'd be without the framework approach.
If browsers could agree on a themable UI component framework - it would solve so many things for so many people. The jazzy designers can still have their complicated CSS/JS animations and cool layouts. But having a standard solution for normal developers would be so good.
As someone trying to create a frontend with plain HTML/CSS for quite a complex backend, I can attest to the fact that's impossible to maintain consistency between browsers.
It's not even about how each block's styling behaves, but how different combinations of tags, blocks and widgets are able to exhibit very specific issues in each one of the 3 main rendering engines around. In very different ways, that require incompatible solutions.
I'm primarily a backend but I've dabbled in frontend at times where needed, and I've always kinda felt there's value in polyfills if nothing else. Maybe you don't go full Angular/React but JQuery adds a lot of value for not much effort.
I realize JQuery is terribly unfashionable these days and maybe people would rather use some smaller niche polyfill library, but with how quickly the javascript world churns and deprecates, that is kind of a virtue tbh. JQuery is 16 years old and that's ancient in the javascript world, the Lindy effect says it will likely continue to be a pillar going forward as well. You're probably just better off using the standard even if you're not using all its capabilities.
Precisely. There was someone here bemoaning how difficult it was to follow generic advice of using profilers to optimise hotspots in the application code.
He started off with something like: "Why don't you try your 'simple' techniques in a tangled web of hundreds of microservices written in different languages and running on different platforms?"
It's like some people can't see the forest for the trees.
In the last few years, I've come across about half a dozen existing web sites with hideous performance problems, all of which should have been vanilla HTML but were written as Angular monstrosities. The same teams -- against repeated advice -- have started new Angular projects for sites showing static data, anonymously, to the general public.
They start off conversations with "We'll need a web app, an API app, a mid-tier, a service bus, and then this, and then that..."
Choosing a framework for that is bad enough, but you could make the case depending on how complex the rendering is. Still…to go with Angular sounds like the literal worst choice. Like at least React is just a UI library and can just be used server side.
Unrelated to the debate at hand, my front-end team's junior members' only known design pattern is drop-all-state-on-refresh-driven-design and it pisses me off.
Basically every part of the website written before their time functions correctly.
I thought it's the other way 'round. Everyone loves their cool new reactive framework, until they have to tackle the state library/library helpers/library alternative/other library alternative/library helper maintainer social media posts.
Well, the thing is… for any non trivial web app, you do need a framework (spa or Unpoly like). The question here is if you use an existing one or end up writing your own.
I don’t buy the “just use html, js and css”… giving the same developer skills, without a framework that becomes a mess much sooner than with one.
As your code grows you end up creating your own libraries, and your own conventions, and as soon as you (the one with a vision and that knew how to do it) leaves the company and other team members come and go, it ends up being a disaster because there is no documentation, no maintenance, and as you reinvented the wheel nobody used your framework before, so everyone has to start from scratch with it.
Popular libraries and frameworks are popular for a reason. Business wise, it makes sense to not reinvent the wheel and rely on existing battle proven, secure and documented tools.
Just don’t reinvent the wheel. Web applications are not “paragraphs”.
> HTML/CSS/JavaScript are good enough as-is—but nowadays the default browser capabilities are incredible compared to a decade ago.
I'm not sure they remember a time when the choice wasn't "X Corporate Framework" vs "Y Corporate Framework" but "Native Desktop Application" vs. "Website Only Application."
I feel like I'm already accepting a huge set of "dependencies" by choosing to develop a web application, and I have a vast stack of technologies to draw upon in building my application already.
In a modern web framework you still have HTML and you still have CSS files.
The problem is JavaScript and in particular the way that you interact with the DOM: browsers use an imperative API, that this day is obsolete, and makes writing web applications a mess rapidly, and produce spaghetti code difficult to modify and isolate.
While practically all modern frameworks use a functional approach: you have the component, that has an internal state, a function to render DOM elements from that state, and if you need to update the view you don't directly manipulate the DOM elements, but update the component state, that causes the framework to call again the render function that updates the DOM elements as required. That is so much simpler, because you don't have to ensure that the state of the application is aligned with the state of what the user sees on the screen!
I definitely see the elegance of the modern reactive approach, but in practice I'm not sure how much better it really is. I still see spaghetti code, and I still see stupid bugs in production. Doesn't seem to matter whether it's JQuery or Vue. Right now I'd bet that careful architecture and thorough testing are still #1 for making good software.
It does often turn into a weird kind of spaghetti when it comes to things that are inherently imperative. Sometimes hooks make me feel like I’m trying to follow a Tarantino script.
What irks me is the javascript part. You dont need to run random scripts on my system, just send me some fucking text! Make it a touch prettier with css! The javascripts are so bloated, spy on you, are often a malware vector, and offer little real user benefit.
> It irks me that folks don’t think HTML/CSS/JavaScript are good enough as-is
I'm one of those folks. Allow me to explain.
I compare using HTML/ CSS/ JavaScript (or something that transpiles to JS/WASM) to making GUIs in Qt (C++) or with help of QML. I find the HTML/CSS/JS hopelessly complex compared to the Qt with-and-without QML.
Sting based binding of CSS to HTML classes/ids is super error prone. CSS is not really "connected" to the HTML as would be the case in style my QUI with Qt.
Also the widgets (dropdown, etc.) I get in HTML are often underpowered underfeatured, so I have to use widget libraries on top, or roll my own.
There is a reason why modern UI frameworks like SwiftUI or Jetpack Compose look more like React rather than pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript. And it is not because iOS and Android can’t run WASM.
And just think when you got the tech logo clothing you become a walking billboard. Are you getting paid to wear it?
But yeah most grandchildren auction off their parents belongings anyway. That’s why birds make nests and then they go somewhere else and maybe return, make a new nest.
People are fixated on permanence—perhaps that’s another way to build housing: design it so it is sustainable, then tear it down and recycle the materials every 10 years.
Not sure why no one mentions his asperger's syndrome because that’s an obvious mastodon in the room.