These guys run a bot that indexes all of the Threadiverse.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

It’s not made obvious to new users, but it’s generally a considerably-better option than simply looking at anything local to your Lemmy instance (including All) if you’re trying to find new stuff for a number of reasons, most-importantly the fact that your home instance will only ever see posts from a community on a remote instance if at least one other user on your home instance has subscribed to that community.

Just grab the community there (!communityname@instancename, which it will copy if you click on the community name) and search for it on your home instance. Your home instance will contact the remote instance and learn about the community if it’s never heard of it before. At that point, you can subscribe to the remote community, and if you’re the first user on your home instance, it will start getting posts for that community.

This is less-critical on large instances, like lemmy.world, because you’ve got better odds that someone else with the same home instance has subscribed to a given community, but even there, if if you use All to find new communities, there are going to be remote communities that you just won’t ever see. The only way to get a complete list is to do what the lemmyverse.net guys do, to index all instances on the whole Threadiverse.

Plus, this is searchable, sortable, you get a single entry per community so you don’t have to crawl through all the — potentially offensive to you — posts to find a community, you can see communities that are rarely active without waiting for someone to post, etc.

While I agree with your broad point and have made the same point myself – it is just wildly impractical for people to try getting the whole network to blacklist everything globally to fit their exact set of tastes – I will grant that there’s probably room for user-curated whitelists or something. I understand that Bluesky does something like this. That way, instead of having to discover each individual community, you can subscribe to someone’s list of recommended communities and have them “auto added” to your subscriptions or something like that.

bad at doing things trucks do

I mean, it’s a blingy vehicle that you wouldn’t want to scratch up that you use to show off. But…

Most modern pickup trucks in the US are also not all that great at being a bare-bones, knock-around utility vehicle, which is what trucks were historically used for. The modern pickup is mostly more-or-less a luxury vehicle, not a workhorse. I’d say that it’s actually not all that out of line with what’s happened to trucks more-broadly.

https://smartautotips.com/the-rise-of-luxury-amenities-in-modern-pickup-trucks/

Once upon a time, pickup trucks were all about utility and practicality. They were designed for hard work on the farm or construction site, and the interior amenities were basic at best. However, in recent years there has been a shift in the pickup truck market towards luxury and comfort. Many modern pickup trucks now come with a range of high-end amenities that you would expect to find in a luxury sedan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siKi79rwnYY

The Death of the Small Affordable Pickup

I think that the lion’s share of that is a broader change. The Cybertruck is just a particularly flagrant example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AccuWeather

On October 12, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated AccuWeather CEO Barry Lee Myers, the younger brother of the company’s founder, to head the National Weather Service’s parent administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was noted that unlike 11 of the previous 12 NOAA administrators, Myers lacks an advanced scientific degree, instead holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business and law.[37] Barry Myers stepped down as CEO of AccuWeather on January 1, 2019, and completely divested himself of any ownership of AccuWeather in accordance with his pledge to the Office of Government Ethics and the U.S. Senate. After two years of inaction on the nomination, Myers withdrew his consideration for nomination on November 12, 2019, due to ill health,[38] though allegations of a hostile workplace and pervasive sexual harassment while Myers was at AccuWeather are rumored to have stalled it.[39][40] Myers sent a letter to The Washington Post in 2019 to address these allegations.

Huh.

Setting aside any issues with Amazon themselves running these…

I suspect that there is, at some point, going to be one almighty privacy clusterfuck when someone manages to mass-compromise Internet-connected speech-recognizing microphones.

I’m not saying that Alexa devices are even the worst here. I’d be more-worried about stuff like inexpensive security cameras out of China from some random company that promptly goes under and doesn’t provide any security updates.

But I really think that people don’t stop and consider “am I really prepared to put a sensor in my house that may have some random party on the Internet in control of it at some point in the future?”

My own take is that if you have a boycott, to have political impact, it needs to have concrete goals and agreed-upon-in-advance, well-defined termination conditions.

Without that, you’re flailing around angrily. Doesn’t actually do anything, since it’s not as if any one party can do anything you want that has an effect in response.

I’d also add that the broader a boycott, the harder it is to do, and the more-diffuse the effect. If you don’t buy anything, you’re affecting all sorts of people. Many of those have no impact on your particular concerns.

If I were going to participate in a boycott:

• It would not have termination condition defined by time, but in achieving political goals. Defining a termination in time specifically says “I’m not going to have an effect after this point”, which encourages ignoring the boycott, and and not having concrete political goals says “nothing you do for me is going to affect what I do anyway”, which also encourages ignoring the boycott.

• Those goals would be achievable, concrete, and announced in advance.

• It would identify specific parties who have the authority to produce the change I want and target those.

• It would be limited in scope to try to affect specifically the parties who I want to act differently. Anything else, and you’re expending will-to-act on impacting others and also antagonizing people whose actions you don’t care about.

EDIT: What would I consider to be a more-effective boycott? The article says that one thing that people are upset about is Target rolling back DEI policy. Okay. Say “we will boycott Target until it reinstates the DEI policy that existed prior to Date X” (or, hell, adopts some other policy, whatever). That is something that Target management can very clearly institute. It has concrete political goals. It does not announce in advance that it is going to terminate at a given time. It is not impacting other parties who have nothing to do with whatever someone is upset about. The impact of the boycott is focused on the party in question.

Then repeat that with other parties if you have other things you want to accomplish.

That’s also sustainable. It is very likely that you can keep doing that for a sustained period of time, because Target probably doesn’t have a monopoly as a provider of household goods. There, a boycotter actually has leverage. Trying to boycott…everything…is trying to start a fight with everyone. You can get something from a different store than Target for a lot longer than you can not get anything at all.

I think that just saying “I’m going to not buy anything from anyone for a day because I’m unhappy about various undefined things” is probably not going to accomplish a lot other than maybe letting people work off a little steam. I don’t expect that it will result in change.

My guess is that Medicaid cuts are the big one. Cutting Medicaid ain’t popular. It would probably be very much undesirable for Trump and more-generally the GOP if that were the major topic of discussion on social media.

What specifically do you want them to do?

They could sponsor a law, say, and then let it be shot down. That’s about as close as I could imagine to trying something and letting it fail.

They don’t have the power to initiate inquiries, not without a majority in at least one house.

I’m sure that there are members who have given speeches on C-SPAN, though I don’t watch that, or issued statements on their legislative websites. That doesn’t have an impact, though it’d let them put their position on record.

Their goal is going to just be doing whatever is most likely to politically benefit them in the midterms so that they can get majority control of at least one house in the legislature. At that point, they do have real power to affect things. My guess is that they probably have poll data on that, a lot of campaigners working on it, and a pretty good picture of what they believe is politically optimal to do there. If they thought doing symbolic political grandstanding of a particular form would help achieve that, I expect that they’d already know about it and be doing that. Like, this is their business. I’m probably not gonna be able to side-seat drive it better than they can.

How does this help anyone?

It scores political points with The Base.

I doubt that Trump cares other than the extent to which it’s politically useful, though the Heritage Foundation might.

You could use a speech synth!

IIRC the FAA layoffs did not include air traffic controllers, so I don’t think that he was involved with that.

supposed opposition

The Democrats can’t do much unless they have a majority in at least one legislative house or unless some number of Republicans cross party lines. The great bulk of their ability to act comes from having that majority.

A lone legislator doesn’t have much by way of authority to block Presidential action, and 50%-1 have about that same level of authority.

The Republican Party – even though there are no doubt legislators that don’t agree much with Trump – probably doesn’t much want to start a fight with the President during a precious period when they hold a trifecta, because this is one of their rare opportunities to push through their agenda (which isn’t mostly spatting along Trump’s political grudges) without the Democrats having the ability to block it. Get in a fight with Trump and then he blocks something that the Republican legislators want, like tax policy or cutting Medicaid, and they miss their window.

If you want an in-car navigation system, that seems like a good application for touchscreens.

France is about to amend a bill against drug trafficking, the “Narcotrafic” law,

Oh, that’s original. In the US, the rationale has traditionally been child molesters and terrorists.

Well, genetic engineering is advancing at a good clip.

I understand the convention is that the wolf is really a thousand-year-old polymorphed dragon, regardless of physical appearance.

I mean, Jon Stewart and maybe some of the writers are the value there. Even if you imagined that happening, he can just go do a new show.

Something like Twitter takes a lot of doing to build; network effect favors incumbents.

for tech I may not use enough

Yeah, that’s kind of my take as well.

If HMDs get to the point where they can replace laptop screens, then manufacturers can just exclude the laptop screen from portable computers and ship an HMD, so that’ll offset some of the cost.

I also don’t care too much about the price if it’s honestly something that I’d use day in and day out. If a manufacturer could give me a display that is equivalent to my existing, traditional monitor but perfectly fills my visual arc and gives me a private view of the screen, I’d be willing to spend $1000 or more; I use my monitor all the time, and in the past, I’ve kept monitors for many years before they get thrown out; they have a lot more longevity than, say, a GPU. My problem is just that, as I mention in my comment, my experience is that HMDs just aren’t a reasonable replacement for displays today, as they come with too many drawbacks. Even if the thing cost nothing, I’d still mainly use my laptop’s display. So at best, an HMD is a device that I’d use occasionally, for special-purpose cases. And that dramatically reduces what I’d be willing to to spend.

There are HMDs that do win in their own niches. VR displays like the Index are better than traditional monitors for playing VR games. The Royole Moon I have is better for watching movies on the go than a laptop screen. AR glasses like like XREALs are the only way to do AR; can’t really do it with a traditional display. There are probably some people out there who really, really want to do these specific things a lot, and for them, that might be worthwhile.

I’d still lug out my Moon if I knew in advance that I was going to be viewing sensitive stuff in a public environment. With video cameras and stuff all over in today’s world, I’m a little uncomfortable having passwords flash on the screen, for example.

But there isn’t any HMD that I’d use in preference to my computer’s screen for general use. And that makes the thing a toy or a specialized tool that I’m not getting use out of most of the time.

The firm’s software also eliminates background noise — like crowing roosters, ambulance sirens and office chatter

I mean, I’d hope that a call center would…have the kind of sound isolation, workplace policy, and audio setup to more-or-less deal with that in the first place.

1920 x 1080, 120Hz

My desktop and laptop monitors have a higher resolution/refresh rate and don’t require me to have glasses on my face.

But I do like the idea of being able to haul goggles around for use with a laptop, and I tried it with a Royole Moon (unlike VR goggles that spend some of the resolution on peripheral vision to give you an immersive view oriented at games, this sticks the pixels where you’d view a screen) a while back. I didn’t think it was worthwhile compared to a laptop screen. Here was my take:

• Tend to fog up. Probably not an issue for XREAL glasses; the Moon has shields to try to block out surrounding light that reduce ventilation, and the XREALs don’t have this.

• Annoying to not be able to see what one is doing occasionally without lifting glasses. Probably not as much of an issue with the XREALs; IIRC, the XREAL glasses are not fully-opaque in display and the highest-end XREAL glasses have a button that flips between three levels of opacity. The flip side of that is that I don’t know to what degree having a partially-transparent display is annoying when trying to make out details on a monitor-replacement display; I’d guess that it is at least somewhat of a factor.

• Pressure on nose began to get annoying after longer sessions. Probably could do better with better design, lighter weight; I could believe that XREAL glasses do better.

• Unless glasses are situated just right for any given eye, slightly blurry. This was obnoxious, and I expect a fundamental issue for any binocular HMD, absent the introduction of some kind of motorized mount for the screens to detect and slightly auto-adjust screen distance from eye as one shifts around. Edges also slightly blurry, probably require some kind of fancier optics to solve; users also report this on the XREAL glasses. The Moon was really aimed at movie viewing, for which a bit of blurriness is ignorable, but for reading text, it’s annoying. You may have also experienced this if you’ve used a projector as display; for movie viewing, it doesn’t really need to be in perfect focus, but it’s much-more-noticeable when dealing with text.

• One more thing to carry with laptop and set up beyond just flipping open a lid, which is somewhat annoying.

• One more battery-powered device to charge, though one could feed off the laptop’s battery. Could also carry a power station.

• One more cable floating around.

• The Moon was intended to do movie playback rather than just act as a monitor, so took a few operations to get it into “monitor mode”. I can believe that other HMDs could work better.

• The Moon had its own boot time independent of the computer to which it was attached. I can believe that other HMDs could work better.

• Connection that didn’t like talking to my laptop’s external HDMI display ports and would sometimes lose connection. I can believe that other HMDs would work better.

• Some screen area not at optimal viewing arc. For me, the visual arc for the Moon was slightly too large and the edges were hard to see. I can believe that a different HMD might do better. I was able to use xrandr to just not use some of the screen space on Linux, create a smaller, virtual screen; I’d imagine that one could probably use a similar fix with another HMD with a viewing arc that is too large.

• Native resolution on HMDs not as high as that on laptop displays. Not the end of the world, but it’s rare for me to downgrade in resolution.

Some of those are not fundamental to HMDs, but they are things that I would consider on a new HMD, given my past experience.

The integrated headphones on the Moon were pretty good in passive isolation, though they didn’t support ANC. The XREAL glasses have built-in speakers and no cup over the ears to provide isolation. I don’t know how it feels to wear XREAL glasses with another set of headphones, but my guess is that you can’t get the same level of seal and thus sound isolation that circumaural, closed-back headphones can provide, so keep in mind that if you’re wearing an HMD, you may be somewhat committed to their integrated sound system unless you’re going to use earbuds (which for me are uncomfortable for long sessions). Also, when I do use earbuds, I prefer to use “sport” earbuds that have a hook around the ear to keep them secure, and if one were wearing XREAL glasses, that will collide with the glasses trying to do the same.

For these XREAL glasses, which I’ve looked at before, I believe at least one mode involves tracking head movement and creating a “virtual screen” that hovers in space to avoid having the screen move with your head. That sort of thing is necessary for AR functionality; the Moon doesn’t do that, since it doesn’t do AR. I don’t know whether this “floating screen” buys a user much if you’re not using the glasses as an AR device, just as a plain old display; it was billed as reducing disorientation or something. I would point out that if used in that mode, you’re going to spend some resolution on displaying a rendered image of a screen rather than a screen.

I liked the idea. I did not find the reality to be where I’d hoped for; they did not replace my laptop or desktop screen.

I can believe that there are specific limited use cases for which HMDs in their present state could legitimately replace a laptop screen, like where someone has to use a laptop in a public environment, like on an airplane, and is concerned about their seatmate being able to view their screen.

The Moons were intended to watch movies, and I think that a number of the issues (including blurriness and maybe session length if you’re just watching a single movie) aren’t as much of an issue if that’s one’s use case.

The XREALs are aimed at AR. If you want AR…well, you aren’t going to get that with a traditional monitor, so then they’re clearly the way to go. There’s a Threadiverse community at !augmented_reality@lemmy.world.

Some type of binocular HMD is necessary if you want to take advantage of stereoscopy for depth perception in VR games (though then you probably want a VR-oriented headset, not XREAL glasses) or 3D movies (though those have kind of died out, as I understand it).

But as a general “monitor replacement”…I think that that’s a tough nut to crack that probably takes more cracking. There’s a reason that laptop manufacturers are shipping computers in laptop form factor and not as a battery-powered mini-PC with an HMD.

One thing I have considered is portable, external monitors. If you have a way to suspend them, you can put them wherever you want relative to your face, which can make a physically-small monitor take up as much of your visual arc as you want (in fact, precisely the amount you want). End of the day, the setup and extra bulk isn’t presently worth it to me for cases where I use a laptop, and I already have my desktop using a VESA-mount monitor mounted on an arm for exactly this reason. But for others, a monitor suspended at just the right place may address some of the use cases where one might get an HMD, if one’s after a physically-smaller, less-power-hungry device that covers a larger portion of one’s visual arc than a traditional monitor.