I can’t tell if this is a good idea or a bad idea. Probably a bad idea at that price point with those specs, but this seems like a much more usable and useful form factor than a fully head mounted system when you factor in the weight of the thing on your head and the input method. Like, I might actually be able to do work on this thing unlike an apple vision pro.

So I have some experience with this and have a few things I want to tell you:

Consider a dedicated sleep study. If you have sleep apnea, medication will not fix your problem and some medications may actually make it worse.

Xanax (an anxiety medication) and Ambien (a sleep medication) are very similar drugs with respect to their mechanism of action. Xanax binds to a specific group of receptors to cause anxiolytic effects and happens to also make you sleepy. Ambien binds to a subset of those same receptors to make you sleepy, but don’t have the strong anxiety reducing effect. If Xanax works for you, Ambien should theoretically have a similar effect. In practice, it doesn’t tend to work as well because anxiety can keep you awake. If that has been your experience with Ambien, think about taking some steps to address anxiety even if you don’t think it’s that bad. Yoga, counseling, meditation, whatever. There are also guided breathing audio sessions designed to put you to sleep in apps like Fitbit and calm that may be helpful.

You can also supplement a prescription sleep aid with something non prescription, which is what I do. I take Ambien, and to keep my dose low I supplement with melatonin, tryptophan, and valerian root when I need an extra kick into sleepiness. I’ve heard CBD is also quite effective for this. Magnesium reportedly also helps with restful sleep, but get a sleep formulation because magnesium in the wrong form causes diarrhea.

Don’t underestimate sleep hygiene. For a long time I had the attitude of “I have real sleep problems, basic stuff like cutting back caffeine is not going to help.” The thing is, when taken together, that kind of stuff actually can help tremendously. I scheduled a month where I went hardcore on sleep hygiene. Strict caffeine limits, no late caffeine or exercise, don’t do anything on your bed but sleep and sex, wake up at the same early time every day even when you don’t have to, limit screens before, bed… I mean ALL of it. I found that it actually really helped. In combination with medication it might be a life saver. Might be worth doing your own experiment with it.

Good luck!

Incompatible taste in music. My taste is the benchmark they have to meet and I will not compromise, obviously.

A lot of telling us how good AI is and how Google is the best at it. I got a little excited when they said Gemini is going to change how we use our phones and I thought they might be announcing some big AI-forward redesign of Android, but it was just 3 things they’ve already launched, haha.

Context aware Gemini looks neat though.

Top sku iPad pros with the keyboard case cost more than some MacBooks and people try and use them like MacBooks, which is crazy to me given the severe limitations of iPadOS compared to macOS.

You can order that tablet with Ubuntu, mint, Manjaro, zorin, elementary, etc. There’s gotta be some kind of driver support to build on, no?

I agree, but to be fair the title was a little clickbaity and was seen by a whole lot of people who didn’t watch the video and just scrolled past it.

Chromebook makes sense. They could also do full on Linux. Star labs has a tablet coming out, so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel for software (I assume, I haven’t tried touchscreen Linux).

https://us.starlabs.systems/products/starlite

Surely they are aiming for a repairable and modular smartphone eventually. That’s going to be super hard to do. My guess is their next form factor will be a tablet.

More storage and AV1 hardware support are the most obvious things they could add. Personally I just want smooth, non-laggy UI navigation. Hopefully performance will increase just by virtue of it being a newer chip.

Not from a person. When I was younger I took an online personality test. Nothing from a reputable source, just some random pop psychology thing. The result was short and had a few things on it, but one line hit me like a ton of bricks: “You don’t like people who aren’t as smart as you.”

I was incredulous at first, but the more I thought about it the more I realized it was probably true at some level. I was pretty horrified by this realization, and I ended up thinking about it a lot and doing a ton of introspection. I knew I was smart, but I started acknowledging that there were also a ton of things I was terrible at. Whenever I had intrusive thoughts about a person I thought wasn’t very smart, I tried to think about things they were good at or at least acknowledge privileges I had that they didn’t.

We are a product of our experiences, and different people have different skills and aptitudes for things. All of that is ok and doesn’t make someone better than anyone else. I’m not perfect at it, but I found some value in confronting uncomfortable truths about myself.

Android detects air tags and notifies users. https://support.google.com/android/answer/13658562?hl=en#zippy=%2Ccompatible-trackers

This is not correct. Android devices can detect apple’s air tags and alert users when an unauthorized tag is nearby. Google delayed the launch of their network to wait for Apple to implement the same feature for Android compatible tags, which is finally coming in the next iOS update.

Intel certainly has a history of bad behavior, but I wish them luck with this pivot to chip fabrication.

Google doesn’t sell your data. They sure as hell collect it, but they sell targeted ads based on that data. Selling the data itself would undermine their ad platform.

Your position is otherwise fair. Some people (especially on Lemmy) value privacy over everything else. That doesn’t mean Apple isn’t guilty of a bunch of other anti consumer bullshit though.

I don’t understand why people are still buying Apple products.

That’s what the article and lawsuit are addressing. Apple deliberately uses tactics meant to lock users into the Apple ecosystem and create artificial barriers to switching to competing devices and services.

I think you’re farther down that slippery slope than you think you are. We have more access to foreign voices from outside the country than we’ve ever had in history. A lot of that is through social media owned by US companies who are not the target of this legislation.

Twitter has been pretty instrumental in swaying public favor to the Palestinians in Gaza despite Israel (a US ally) trying to paint a different narrative. Now imagine if Twitter was owned by an Israeli company. Would we see all those horrific pictures and videos in Gaza? Would we even know if we weren’t seeing them? Would we have any legal or legislative options if we did uncover feed manipulation?

I think maybe the reason you aren’t fully on board with this is that you seem to have a strong distrust of the US government. More than our foreign adversaries. That’s fair and you are entitled to that. The people on the other side of the issue trust the US government more than foreign adversaries and that changes the calculation.

Because China has interests that are in opposition to US interests, and they can sway US opinion any way they want by covertly manipulating the feed. They absolutely can do significant harm with this, including but not limited to selecting politicians, inciting chaos and political unrest, and even economic destabilization. I’m not sure that the US government actually has a much higher potential to do you harm than a foreign enemy of the US with a weapon like social media as you stated. You could make a strong argument that the political shitshow we are currently in is partially due to foreign interference through social media, and that is before they owned the actual platforms. The US government is not incentivized to destabilize itself at least.

Biden claimed in his State of the Union address that the 25 percent minimum tax on the ultra-rich will raise $500 billion over 10 years. “Imagine what that could do for America,” he said.

Maybe I’m not good at comprehending numbers at this scale but does this seem kind of low to anyone else? I mean, that’s a lot of money in absolute terms but the government spent $6.3 trillion in FY 2023 alone.

We should still do it obviously. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good and all that.

We’re in a weird spot. On the one hand, legitimate criticisms should always be welcome especially when directed at our elected officials. In a healthy democracy we would vote out people who disappoint or underperform. On the other hand, we don’t have a healthy democracy and one side is determined to vote for a man with the most extensive list of abhorrent behavior ever documented in the nation’s history. Criticizing Biden just makes it more likely that a super close race will go to Trump, who is unquestionably worse than Biden.

Part of me wants to say “let’s get the Trump threat behind us and THEN we can work on building a healthier democracy,” but that isn’t how a healthy democracy works! If we compromise on our values to get rid of someone we disagree with, are we the baddies? It’s a frustrating and scary place to be.