It always feels like some form of VR tech comes out with some sort of fanfare and with a promise it will take over the world, but it never does.

  • HypergolicRunoff@lemmy.org
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    6 days ago

    Pesticides.

    We came up with this brilliant idea of planting a single crop per field which creates the perfect environment for the things we call “pests”. We invented pesticides to kill the pests, which incidentally also kill their predators and competitors, making the environment even more favorable when the pest returns. So we started using more and stronger pesticides, creating a dependency cycle, with the added bonus of poisoning the ground, the water table, the oceans and ourselves.

        • agedcorn@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          Heh, ‘polyculture’ sounds like a word a friend would use when describing the new folk they’re hanging with after turning a 20-year monogamous marraige into an open relationship.

  • SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip
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    6 days ago

    Ground-rolling cars as mass transportation. The engineering superb, but the technology inherently can’t scale. The storage requirements alone push many cities past the limits financial sustainability, and the spatial requirements for operation lead to massive network congestion as a matter of course. And yet, we keep throwing good money after bad trying to make the system work.

  • JAWNEHBOY@reddthat.com
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    7 days ago

    Haha I feel like VR has already found it’s niche!

    Apple taking over an entire car with car play ultra or otherwise comes to mind. Latest Aston Martin model with car play ultra was atrociously laggy, ran instrument panel screen at like 12fps.

  • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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    7 days ago

    The big one would be viable nuclear fusion, we’ve been trying to figure it out and spending money on it for like 80 years now.

    That being said, there’s actually a lot of verified progress on it lately by reputable organizations and international teams.

    • cynar@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      In its defence, that assumed it was properly funded. Its actual funding was very limited.

      I believe most of the critical problems have been solved. The only major one left is keeping the reactor walls stable. They have a tendency to transmute, which causes multiple problems.

      • Ziggurat@jlai.lu
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        6 days ago

        I’ve seen a road map at the start of iter which was actually more. 30 years to get a stable exo energetic plasma, then 30 years to build a demonstrator able to produce electricity, and then 30 years to have industrialised fusion plant.

    • ClassifiedPancake@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 days ago

      If you mean flying cars that will replace regular cars, I don’t think anyone ever tried it really. There have been prototype cars with wings but no one took that seriously. More recently what everyone keeps trying is drones as taxis but I hope that fails because I don’t want that noise pollution.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      5 days ago

      pretty much, we will never make it like CYLon level, or skynet level intelligent. the former requires a human mind in a convoluted process, which is probably more realistic than skynet/kaylon.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    7 days ago

    Flying cars. The idea has intuitive appeal — just drive like normal, but most congestion problems go away!

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

    We’ve made them, but the tradeoffs that you have to make to get a good road vehicle that is also a good aircraft are very large. The benefits of having a dual-mode vehicle are comparatively limited. I think that absent some kind of dramatic technological revolution, like, I don’t know, making the things out of nanites, we’ll just always be better off with dedicated vehicles of the first sort or the second.

    Maybe we could have call-on-demand aircraft that could air-ferry ground vehicles, but I think that with something on the order of current technology, that’s probably as close as we’ll get.

    • flabbergast@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I don’t think any government will ever allow flying cars.
      Too prone for accidents, and way too much freedom.

    • Limerance@piefed.social
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      6 days ago

      There are many models of flying cars. They usually are bad cars and bad planes and very expensive. Only good for niche wealthy enthusiasts.

    • Ziggurat@jlai.lu
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      6 days ago

      The thing is how is a flying car different from a aircraft?

      We have (ultra) light aircraft not much more expensive than a good car, we have helicopter with vtol abilities. Licencing isn’t that more complex than for a car.

      The problem are the maintenance cost as a failure would be dramatic, and the noise meaning people don’t want them over their bacxyard/balcony

      • ageedizzle@piefed.ca
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        6 days ago

        how is a flying car different from a aircraft?

        If we had as many aircraft in the sky as we do cars on the road, the changes of deadly collisions in the air would go up by a lot. It would become crowded up there, with a lot of potential obstacles to bump into.

    • bob_lemon@feddit.org
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      7 days ago

      Flying cars lose al appeal the moment you encounter other drivers on the road. Just imagine that, but flying.

    • gabelstapler@feddit.org
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      6 days ago

      Please don’t mix AI with LLMs. LLMs are surely overhyped and I guess they will never reach the quality they promise. AI on the other hand is used in many aspects, successfully. For many years protein folding was extremely difficult. Google threw AI at it, now it can be regarded as a solved problem.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        I think there’s a pretty major failure in overall AI/Machine learning as well. Elsewhere on Lemmy I saw someone talking about how the neural processor built into their laptop essentially doesn’t function. Like there isn’t and will never be any software that runs on it because it’s badly implemented and badly or not at all documented.

      • Perspectivist@feddit.uk
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        6 days ago

        LLM is an AI, but the terms aren’t synonymous. AI describes a broad field - LLM is only one subcategory of it.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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          6 days ago

          AI is essentially a useless term because it has been used to describe everything from an LLM to a single if statement in the code of a video game.

          • Perspectivist@feddit.uk
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            6 days ago

            “Plant” can describe anything from grass to giant redwoods, but it’s not a useless term. We have more specific names for all the subspecies of plants - and the same goes for AI.

  • timestatic@feddit.org
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    6 days ago

    Maybe like super-thin phones and foldables/rollable phones. Most people have no need or use for them tbh

    • early_riser@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I don’t want a phone so thin and slippery I can’t hold it in my hand. I want a phone as thicc as an old gray brick Game Boy. When I drop it on the floor I want to have to replace the floor. I want a battery that will outlast the lifespan of the sun.

  • unknown1234_5@kbin.earth
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    6 days ago

    vr is useful but its too wrapped up in corporate bs to really take off for now. its dominated by companies obsessed with ai and by pathetic startups that never finish a product. it just needs meta to be less dominant.

    • lucullus@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 days ago

      I sometimes wonder what would happen to VR, if it would get the same situation as 3D printing. That took of, because some patents where expiring and it was then easy to build up your own version. We had/have many open source/FOSS printers and nearly all the companies currently in this space wouldn’t exist, if it werent for the many open source developments and the extention of the market, that they created. I know this is highly unprobable for VR, but one should be allowed to dream

      • unknown1234_5@kbin.earth
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        6 days ago

        well most (tech-related) industries dont really get much traction when its just private companies. generally a private company starts something and then open-source projects keep the underlying tech working while major companies rebrand stuff every year.

        thats part of why I’m so excited for the steam frame. it’ll finally give a vr platform that doesnt rely on proprietary stuff, freeing people up to do stupid things with it and accidentally make something really cool. what we really needed is for the bubble it was in to burst so the companies that had it in a chokehold would let go, but it just got smaller and they held on. its a lot like the ai situation right now where there are useful and sustainable use cases, but its too wrapped up in shareholder circlejerks for anyone to get the chance to set it up right.

        also, I need to get my ender v3 working again. that thing was fun.

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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        6 days ago

        I think that you always run into the issue that you look like an idiot using it and you need to do something special to use it.

        • lucullus@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 days ago

          Though that is mostly a problem for big techs vision of VR, where we use it everyday allday (like all the shit with business meetings in VR). It was always a niche technology. But 3D printing is also a niche. But it got to be a big niche. And with even the current developments we got quite a reduction in size (thus better wearing comfort). I think an open hardware and software system would quite help the whole VR industry to get better, though still being a niche.

          • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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            5 days ago

            3D printing has found its niche in being able to create custom plastic models at a cost far lower than injection molding. That’s been big for RPG and wargaming as a way to create better boards at an acceptable cost. I’ve also seen some toys sold that are obviously 3D prints, which shows the technology’s viability as a part of a commercial production line. These are use cases where 3D printing is the best option available, so the technology gets used.

            I don’t see that equivalent for consumer scale VR/AR. The state of the industry for VR tech seems be to sell rented experiences where the VR tech is integrated into an experience with other equipment or defined spaces. Thats an equivalent to when computer games were rented in arcades.

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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      6 days ago

      The flying car,

      Those are called helicopters. They’re literally just cars but every advantage and every downside is amplified.

      They’re amazing for taking a small number of people somewhere, at massive cost to the surroundings. They’re noisy, take up a lot of space, require lots of specialized Infrastructure just for them and they are incredibly dangerous to their surroundings.

      cold fusion

      That’s not a technology, it’s a scam. Regular fusion is absolutely real, it’s just super complicated and hugely underfunded.