One thing I observed recently are all of the boarded up garage attendant offices/booths.
I suppose automated ticket kiosks, and security cameras have made that job redundant.
But I wonder where did those employees wind up? Amazon warehouse picker? Delivery driver? The replacement job needs to be of commensurate skill and intellectual level.
I’m not a believer of up skilling. Quite the contrary, it seems that education is going in the opposite direction.
IME here in Colorado, a lot of them pay as well, or better, than run of the mill tech companies. I suspect the AI and "FAANG" companies may pay more, but I personally wouldn't work for any of those. In any case, I'd take $160k in Colorado over $240k in California any day.
And the problems are definitely a lot more interesting.
"Need" might be strong, but I am okay with music players. My ADHD self is able to focus many times better if I have certain kinds of music playing to block out nearly talking and other distracting sounds.
I gave my 16yo ADHD kid an mp3 player with hours of “ADHD focus” music on it.
It’s proven very useful a few times where a few ND-unaware teachers have confiscated phones that the ND kids use to help them focus.
They don’t get it to use it whenever they want but there are some situations where they are allowed to use it and where having a phone is tricky given the lack of trust some teachers have.
Old school technology fallbacks are sometimes useful. Who knew.
Having all been in high school, I think we can all agree that lack of trust is warranted. Not for every kid, but for enough of them that blanket rules make sense. We also don’t allow students to use the calculator app on their phone for tests, and instead make them buy the “old school technology fallback” version.
An MP3 player seems like a good compromise, and far cheaper than the phone they’re replacing.
I mostly just listened during homeroom and lunch period. But once I was sent to in-schoool-suspension in high school in the early 2000s for listening to my mp3 player (Diamond Rio PMP300) after I finished taking the yearly standardized tests the state used to judge schools.
For ~$60 you get a device that can play every type of audio file and has better sound quality than your cellphone + streamer combo.
I've been reading more about Chinese hardware and if you've been sleeping on it there are a lot of great Chinese consumer products that are both extremely high quality + very cheap.
Turns out when you have tens of millions of engineers they pump out banger after banger. Also always hilarious, in an enduring way, finding the factory engineers engaging with consumers on random forums that take their feedback seriously.
Note that in this case, you are getting what you pay for: I had a FIIO DAC that sounded amazing but was really bad about full-scale turn-on, sync and desync pops to the extent that it damaged my speakers. Yes, perfect power sequence hygiene would have prevented the problem, but one can't always be ready with the amplifier volume knob when their playback system crashes.
ah good to know. Outside of having a very basic dac for my cans on my desktop, I wouldn't think of any serious equipment failures could happen. Probably wrong to assume that these things are engineered to be safe/redundant.
This is going to be my first DAP in like 15 years, zune being the last one I had. Pretty excited to rock it out for a bit.
There's a current fad out there to move to more single-service type of devices rather than using a phone for everything. Want to try it out myself to be more intentional with my digital actions and ween myself away from corporate social media.
If they're allowed and help where phones wouldn't or don't there are still lots of options for stand alone MP3 players with minimal or no connectivity. They still exist as a market because they're dirt cheap to make.
not all classes are 100% lectures. many of my kids classes have 15-30 minutes of "work time". sometimes entire periods are "work periods" when they have a big project or whatever.
Considering other mega corps would either hoard the cash or increase dividends, the fact that any money went to engineers is a win. Saying the money would be better spent funding startups does not reflect any real possibility.
It is really amazing how bloated the reality labs division is. Triple layers of directors and VPs. They have been running this grift for years.
When interacting with them I was left wondering whether they were delusional.
But the explanation is simpler: they were just lying through their teeth to empire build.
Can you believe they even built their own game engine to replace Unity? So may layers of principal engineers, directors, etc. I’m sure it will be cancelled if it hasn’t been already.
> By March 31, 2026, Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer appear in the Store on Quest. Also, Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay worlds will no longer be available in VR. You can still jump into your other favorite worlds in VR until June 15, 2026, after which the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from Quest, and Worlds will no longer be available in VR.
I don't think that's entirely it, they don't want the product facebook is selling. VR Chat is massively more popular than Facebooks offerings.
Though Facebook had impossible goals, they didn't want to make a gaming device, they wanted to make the next smartphone, that everyday people and office workers would use. Which was just unrealistic.
VRChat is just plain better. It doesn't look like a Nintendo 64 game and it doesn't have the rubber tile children-first moderation constantly looking over your shoulder. It's more gritty like adults want.
But I wonder where did those employees wind up? Amazon warehouse picker? Delivery driver? The replacement job needs to be of commensurate skill and intellectual level.
I’m not a believer of up skilling. Quite the contrary, it seems that education is going in the opposite direction.
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