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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I guess you could also code by voice, per the video.

The reason people don't code by voice is that it sucks so many levels of hell. Siri (and other voice recognition agents) can't even get normal text 100% correct right now, what makes them think that shitty voice recognition is going to work properly when I tell it to open and close 5 levels of brackets, use a bunch of non-words like 'var', 'const', 'LazyVStack', 'NSString', and expressions that have non-letter characters in them like '@escaping' and '$0'? Imagine trying to make a regular expression in that and trying to read in "^(+\d{1,2}\s)?(?\d{3})?[\s.-]\d{3}[\s.-]\d{4}$" over voice, or trying to browse the method names in a file like you do with the arrow keys when you briefly forgot what that call and its arguments were (again). Fuck no.

Even that Talon example sounds as incomprehensible as the mouth noises a Vim user emits when they try to describe how having to make 10 different keystrokes is clearly better and so much faster than just selecting the text with the mouse.

Now, this isn't to say that you couldn't do an IDE in VR- in fact, having infinite screen real estate means that you can more easily trace a program's logic down 5 levels where with standard monitors you can only fit 2 or 3 at the same time and the Vision Pro's ability to actually display readable text (I still question that they've actually succeeded- all other headsets except maybe the PiMax just don't have the resolution to do this because a combination of head tilt + low resolution per eye means that text is fundamentally unreadable unless it's so large as to be pointless- so I'd have to see a physical demo of it to fully understand its liimtations).

But considering just how much Vision Pro depends on being a bigger screen with a couple of interesting telepresence applications baked in I really don't think this is going to be as transformative as some might otherwise think, but industry and military applications where you need to keep track of a bunch of interacting systems at once are going to be interested in where this goes since this is kind of just a better Hololens (and those customers are who MS was actually marketing that thing to). I could see a store using these things for "where's this item on the shelf?", an factory providing an auditable inspection pipeline for guaranteeing the condition of a product before it leaves (provided they're dirt cheap to make and replace), and so on and so forth.

Humorously, this is also going to be a test of how well AI does when it comes to adopting a new language- yeah, Swift has some existing support, but the toolkits for visionOS and its UI/UX paradigms sure don't! I guess developers will be learning this one the old fashioned way.