I have an earlier version of this (got it on sale from Costco, and it was the highest-rated model by Consumer Reports at the time); I love it. It’s not great for carpets, but it’s fast and easy for hardwood floors.

Would I have bought it if it needed to connect to my cell phone? Absofuckinglutely not. Not in a million fucking years. It could have been the best goddamn vacuum in the world at sucking, powered by a miniature black hole, sucking dirt to the event horizon, and I still would have passed.

I need LESS connectivity in my life, not more.

That was a pretty roundly panned movie.

Oh, no disagreements with dilators; they’re essential for e.g., women with vaginismus that want to have ‘normal’ sexual relationships.

Oh my god, it’s so bad.

“Soft tissue lengthens, relaxing muscles and ligaments. As the tissue relaxes, the Neodymium magnets increase blood flow to the area calming nerves and promote relaxation. VuVa™ are the only patented sets available with Neodymium magnets.”

“Magnetic Therapy is based on the premise that all living organisms exist in a magnetic field, including the human body. The human body generates its own magnetic field. Therefore, the body can heal itself when electromagnetic energy is in balance.”

It’s like those stupid magnet bracelets and elbow wraps, only for your vagina. It’s all woo.

It sounds like potential guards have to have combat experience or significant police experience. So it’s probably not something the average person is going to be able to do.

OTOH, a single bodyguard mercing their protectee would nuke the whole company, which would be pretty funny.

…Or one of the guards has a family member kidnapped and held unless they oopsie, looked the wrong way.

The Nazis tried very hard to do that; they classified large amounts of modern (at the time) art as “entartete kunst”, or “degenerate art”. They insisted that classical realism was the only proper form for art to take. When we look back, Nazi-approved art was incredibly bland and boring.

It really depends on whether it can be made to meet all the other criteria required for armor. I think that it’s too early to make any good predictions.

I don’t know if this will actually pan out the way that they imply in the title; armor needs to have a lot of different characteristics in order to be practical. As in, resistance to heat and cold, resistance to acids, alkalines, petroleum distillates, salts, UV, and oxygen, and also resist deformation. Multiple materials have displays significant promise for armor, but had a very short lifespan in real-word conditions. For instance, there was a material trademarked as Zylon that was supposed to be better than Kevlar, and it was used extensively by Second Chance (a body armor company); several cops were killed when their armor failed, and the armor failed because of exposure to sweat and ambient heat.

Yeah, this is a super cool development, but remember that everything that comes out at this stage is hype.

I’ve already deleted as much of my FB history as I can (I’m getting error messages at this point), but I keep it active solely because Craigslist is effectively dead.

So, they’re only going to make games with no narrative complexity going forward. Got it.

I knew a guy–Ola Bini–that fled the US, and emigrated to Ecuador, because he was afraid that he was going to be targeted by the US gov’t. I think he made it less than two years in Ecuador before he was arrested for ‘hacking’ Ecuador gov’t computers; he was jailed during the entire judicial process, almost a decade, before all the charges were dropped, and he was released and deported to Sweden. Best guess is that despite not having a extradition treaty with the US, the US still put a ton of pressure on Ecuador to detain him. (Maybe he actually committed crimes? IDK, it’s possible, but all charges being dropped after all that time in jail without a trial seems iffy. )

Point is, there aren’t a lot of places you can go if the US wants to fuck your life. Russia and China are the best options, and both are not great.

Trains in the US are starting to have some of the same security measures as airlines… :(

I quit flying (domestically, at least) over the x-rays and TSA bullshit. I’m driving 13 hours today in order to avoid that particular security theater.

Agreed; Veilguard has pretty okay graphics. Not great, but acceptable - the high mark for me is BG3. But moving back to the earlier entries, they may have had stories that felt more ‘real’ (e.g., the setting felt more internally consistent) and gave more options, but the graphics and gameplay haven’t aged well.

Similarly, Fallout: New Vegas hasn’t aged so well. It was a great game, but it looks pretty rough now, unless you load it down with hi-res mods.

I don’t demand photorealism, but I’d like better visuals than PS3-level graphics.

It depends on what you’re doing with it.

I use it solely for Ace XR, which is a dry-fire simulator/tracker. Ace XR is available solely for Meta Quest (2 & 3), so I didn’t really have many options. Unfortunately, I’m currently rehabbing a serious injury, and I am unable to practice.

For gaming? Not really. I like the PSVR2 headset more for that; it’s a better headset overall. I’m still working on getting it set up to work with my PC though. As other people have said, getting corrective lenses for a headset really makes them more enjoyable if you need glasses; it’s a pain in the ass to have to put in contacts when I want to use VR. For the Meta Quest specifically, and upgraded head band and spare battery (that also acts like a counterweight) is very nice to have.

And what, exactly, is positive about it, that has no associated negative outcomes?

IMO, there’s no such thing as responsible AI use. All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human. Even worse, there’s zero accountability; when an AI makes a mistake and gets people killed, no executives or programmers will ever face any criminal charges because the blame will be too diffuse.

They seem to have a foregone conclusion that AI is a positive thing, rather than something that should be eradicated like smallpox or syphilis.

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