nickwitha_k (he/him)
There’s really not much to know nor is it a complex conflict. Just like The Troubles, it’s a colonial conflict pretending to be sectarian/religious in nature.
ETA: And it should be clear that supporting people who want to support more and greater heights of violence isn’t going to help.
Not my cup o’ tea but, they seem to have their hearts and facial recognition thwarting make-up in the right place.
Finland was no NATO and not even the USSR touch it.
If you omit the middle of the 20th century, sure. The Finns declared independence from the Russian Empire in 1917, under the approval of the Bolsheviks’ Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia. In 1934, Finland and the USSR reaffirmed a non-aggression pact for 10 years. In 1939, after penning a deal with Hitler to carve up Europe between the Nazis and the USSR, Stalin demanded that Finland, who had maintained a stance of neutrality, cede territory for military use and, when they refused, ordered shelling and invasion.
Neutrality or even open trade did not prevent the USSR from invading then, not did handing over nukes save Ukraine from invasion in 2014.
As for useful implementation, my cousin is an orthopedic surgeon and they use VR headset and 3D x-ray scanner, 3d printers and a whole bunch of sci-fi stuff to prep for operation, but they are not using a meta quest2, we’re talking 50k headset and million dollar equipment. None of that does anything to the gaming market.
That’s really awesome and I love seeing that the tech is actually seeing good uses.
Yeah. A lot of what you’re saying parallels my thoughts. The PC and console gaming market didn’t exist until there were more practical, non-specialty uses for computing and, importantly, affordability. To me, it seems that the manufacturers are trying to skip that and just try to get to the lucrative software part, while also skipping the part where you pay people fair wages to develop (the games industry is super exploitative of devs) or, like The Company Formerly-known as Facebook, use VR devices as another tool to harvest personal information for profit (head tracking data can be used to identify people, similar to gait analysis), rather than having interest in actually developing VR long-term.
Much as I’m not a fan of Apple or the departed sociopath that headed it, a similar company to its early years is probably what’s needed; people willing to actually take on some risk for the long-haul to develop the hardware and base software to make a practical “personal computer” of VR.
When I can code in one 10 hours a day without fucking up my eyes, vomiting myself, sweating like a pig and getting neck strain it will have the possibility to take over the computer market, until then, it’s a gimmick.
Absolutely agreed. Though, I’d note that there is tech available for this use case. I’ve been using Xreal Airs for several years now as a full monitor replacement (Viture is more FOSS friendly at this time). Bird bath optics are superior for productivity uses, compared to waveguides and lensed optics used in VR. In order to have readable text that doesn’t strain the eyes, higher pixels-per-degree are needed, not higher FOV.
The isolation of VR is also a negative in many cases as interacting and being aware of the real world is frequently necessary in productivity uses (both for interacting with people and mitigating eye strain). Apple was ALMOST there with their Vision Pro but tried to be clever, rather than practical. They should not have bothered with the camera and just let the real world in, unfiltered.
I’ll pass.
