MBW 941: Simply Unbelievable

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

It was great to see Rene back on the show, if only briefly.

The one big advantage that the Vision Pro has over the Meta glasses is that they would work at my house… I don’t have a Meta account and all Meta properties are DNS blocked on my wi-fi.

I saw the highlights of the Meta show and I wasn’t really that impressed. The new glasses look terrible. There is no way I’d walk down the street with either those or the Ray Bans, and the headset itself is, like the Vision Pro, not something you’d wear in public.

Of all the VR headsets I’ve seen over the years (I tried my first one in the mid 90s), the Vision Pro is the only one that even comes close to how I envisioned it working, when I tried the first one back then.

AR is really cool and I thought that we would get there with the Hololens, but it is still something that has a use in some specific verticals, but, like LLM AI, I still find it hard to see a use case for the average person. We want something like the Hololens for our production staff, so that if there is an issue at 2 in the morning, they can call the technician and they can go through the plant and look at the leaky valve or whatever and say that it is okay to continue, that they just need to tighten a nut or that they need to isolate the machine and he is on his way.

At the moment, the technicians have to go to the plant in the middle of the night to fix things that could have waited or that a monkey with a wrench could have fixed, they are upset because they were called out for nothing and their sleep was ruined and it is bad for the company, because they are then missing the next day, because they have to rest and recover the personal time lost driving to the plant, sorting out the problem and driving back again.

(If you are on call, travel time is legally included in the overtime worked and once they leave the site in the middle of the night, they cannot return for 11 hours.)

Hololens for Business would have been ideal. The silly experimental glasses that Meta showed off at the event might be of interest, if it isn’t locked to a Meta account…

1 Like

I agree strongly with the promotion of Veritasium YT videos. Derek is great and explains things very well, IMHO.

I also want to take a second to promote someone else who I think is equally great, in a different domain. Grady is a Civil Engineer and he does great examples and explanations about topics in that domain.

I go back and listen to older episodes of the shows. Namely Windows Weekly. But I go back to some MBWs I’ve never seen.

The episodes where there are no news are often the best episodes to look back on since it’s not news I’ve already heard.

Was nice to see & hear Rene Ritchie again

1 Like

Leo should put the After Dark flying toasters on that mac in the background.

2 Likes

Practical Engineering is a great site which can educate you on how costly infrastructure is.

I would greatly appreciate it if Andy could keep his personal politics out of a technology podcast.

I like to hear people’s personal politics. That’s part of having real people as hosts. They have real personal politics.

I was looking at your post history: you seem to have a real issue with people discussing politics. People are people, regardless of being on a tech podcast. If you can’t take people as they are, maybe you’re more equipped for a NotebookLM podcast where it’s no run by humans

2 Likes

Politics is relevant because, while technology itself may be neutral, the uses to which technology is put are not. Those uses are a reflection of the values we hold. Some tools and services come with an inherent risk, and when that risk is disregarded or only borne by certain categories of citizens - then that can be where we see abuse.

Like any tool, it behooves us to consider the ramifications of a given technology - which means that our viewpoints (shaped by politics, experience, religious persuasion, and so forth) cannot be disregarded.

2 Likes

If you think Andy can be controlled in any way, you haven’t been paying attention to this podcast through the years…

1 Like