“We know some of you have concerns about whether these headsets will be supported long enough to justify the price. Allow us to set those concerns to rest: they won’t be.”

The “Scunthorpe Problem” strikes again!

ETA Prime tried running the 395 at lower TDPs, and the result was that it lost most of its performance advantage: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r8JpqfqBpvQ

Which really shouldn’t be too surprising, I guess–all those CUs need power.

I do think power requirements for this level of performance will keep dropping over the next several years, but it doesn’t seem like it’s quite within the necessary power envelope at this point.

I thought this for a long time. The AI 395, with a 40-CU GPU, seemed easily powerful enough. Unfortunately, that’s also the issue–it runs at 55W by default. That’s too much heat to strap to your face, and it’ll drain a 100Wh battery in less than two hours anyway. (That’s the maximum size of battery you can take on a plane in the US, so exceeding that would be a very bold choice.)

The Steam Deck gets away with less power (often 15W) because it’s running games at lower framerates and a lower resolution, but that’s not a good option for VR.

I’m definitely curious to see what they actually do with the Snapdragon, though. Maybe some kind of recompilation tech? Or maybe just partnerships with devs who have already released on Quest to start a new store for standalone stuff, along with the streaming tech they’ve already got. I really want it to be good.

You definitely can start this way. When I started, I got some help from a physical therapist–I had really messed up my back, and in addition to helping with the acute issue, they also selected a set of exercises and numbers of reps for me that I could do at home, and that was a great starting point for my exercise routine. It was pretty short and focused, so it was easy to find time to do it every day, and the practice of keeping at it was really helpful. My health insurance covered most of the cost of the physical therapist; I had to pay a copay, but even then it was just a couple times a week for maybe two months, so not exorbitant. Insurance is generally willing to help with this stuff for a little while because they know that if your health improves, it’s likely to reduce their future costs. So it’s worth looking in to whether yours would help with something like that just to get yourself going. I don’t think you need to have an acute problem to take advantage of that; I think having a specific goal for improvement is adequate. (They want measurable goals, like “I’d like to be able to jog five minutes without getting winded,” or that sort of thing. I believe mine was “I’d like to be able to spend a day out walking around a garden with my family without being laid up the next day by my back.” Which reflects where I was at the time. But, y’know, anything that reflects where you currently are, and something that you might be able to achieve in a six-to-eight-week timeframe, is probably a good goal.)

Doing that regularly also got me listening to my body, and that got me to gradually expand my routine–I eventually understood that some of my back issues were propagating up from hip issues, so now I work on those, and some of those are coming from limited ankle mobility, so I’m also working on that, and working on that has got me doing “goblin squats” that has gotten me to stop thinking of dumbbells as something to avoid. I’m also getting closer to being able to do pull-ups; I got a pull-up bar because just hanging from a bar sometimes can really help with a bad back, but at some point I started thinking about how much more I enjoyed moving when I was a kid and took gymnastics classes, and back then I actually had the strength to do things like pull-ups. So now I can do some resistance-band assisted pull-ups, and hopefully in a year or two I’ll be able to do the proper thing.

Picturing enjoying movement is something that really motivates me, actually. Like, I used to enjoy biking and ultimate frisbee. I don’t, now, but I think I might enjoy them again at some point. I think I might also enjoy parkour, if I can get into that kind of shape, but I recognize that may not be an achievable goal at this point. I had a kind of enthusiasm for brief bursts of very intense movement, like sprinting up a flight of stairs two at a time, or climbing up onto a loading dock in a single giant step.

At this point I do a basic set of dumbbell weight exercises, squats and lunges, push ups, a back stretching and exercises routine, assisted pull-ups, and a walking/running aerobics routine. It’s not a ton, but I’m really in vastly better shape than I was when I started a few years ago. I do have a handful of equipment–the dumbbells, a floor mat, a couple of foam rollers, an exercise ball (for trunk lifts, which are good for a weak lower back), a doorway pull-up bar, some resistance bands that I basically just use with the pull-up bar, and the biggest thing is an elliptical machine for when the weather is too bad to do the aerobics outside. There are ways to do it without a machine, like jogging in place or doing rapid shallow squats, but the machine is kind of nice–it’s hard to explain, but it really helps to have the exercise take place in its own little isolated space, or even just in its own mental space. I actually also have a little lighted sign that I made (it’s a recreation of the neon sign for an exterminator’s in my home town that always tickled my fancy back then–it’s got a giant neon rat in the middle) and I like to turn that on in my room specifically while I do my exercises there (everything other than the aerobics and pull ups), just because it kind of marks out the distinction of exercise time. It helps make it a ritual, and that helps make it a habit. As I say, hard to explain, but it feels like it matters.

I will say, this routine has also helped me lose some weight. I’m down about 45 lbs (~22kg) from this time last year. That’s mainly down to diet changes, but I did ramp up my exercising while doing this to be sure that I was losing fat rather than just losing muscle. I’m still a lot heavier than I’d like, but I’m definitely proud of how far I’ve come. I’m improving in other measures, too, like my resting heart rate is down from around 100 to around 80, which, again, is not where I’d like to be, but represents movement in the right direction.

So, I do think the physical therapist helped a lot with getting me started, but most of my work I’ve done at home, and without too much in the way of equipment.

Would I have done better, faster by going to a gym? I dunno. I definitely know that friction is a big factor. If it’s hard to actually go do the thing, then it’s easy to make excuses not to go do the thing; needing to actually travel to a gym definitely counts for that. There’s kind of a balancing act in making my routine easy enough and pleasant enough that I’ll actually do it, but also challenging enough that I’m still gradually improving. Sometimes I need to let myself slack off at something a little as an incentive do just do the thing. And sometimes once I’m actually doing the thing I don’t need the slack after all.

Bit of a rant, I guess. Sorry, it feels like so much of this stuff is, like, techniques for outwitting part of my own brain, and it feels like those are things other people might be able to use, but I’m not sure how transferable they really are. Hope it helps.

Good luck with your journey! I know I’ll need luck on mine.

Citizens United would be a decent candidate. Once it was established that donations were protected political speech, it effectively legalized bribery, and made oligarchy essentially inevitable. Most of the missteps since then have been motivated by folks trying to simultaneously play to populist talking points but also placate billionaire donors. The left needed an actual positive message, like the kind Bernie Sanders was pushing, that would energize folks and unite the overeducated with the working class, but that was never going to be acceptable to the donor class, and so candidates like him always had to be shoved aside for someone who would clearly cater to corporate needs. And someone who would clearly cater to corporate needs was always going to be a really tough sell and not really a solution to the needs of the moment.

That doesn’t really account for the rise of the tech bro fascist accelerationists like Mencius Moldbug and the Dark Enlightenment, which is a big part of the current moment and accounts for how the far right was able to hoodwink some billionaires into voting for a social collapse that seems very likely to hurt them also. But Citizens United still seems like a fair candidate for a point at which some of the last paths away from this outcome were foreclosed.

I think there are a bunch of things at play here. The whole pricing structure of this generation is kind of problematic; the 3 is a little too expensive for the mass market, and the 3S is supposed to be an answer for that, but the discount below the 3 isn’t large enough to make it seem like a good deal given the visual and comfort downgrades involved. Meanwhile family budgets are pretty tight, and folks are feeling really uncertain about the future, so big-ticket items that are purely for escapism seem like something you can postpone.

There’s also some crossover with folks who do have the money, but may be saving it for a Switch 2 next year, or one of the Steam devices (Steam Deck 2, Deckard, Steam OS consoles) if any of those ever actually turn up. (Not holding my breath on them, but hey, Brad has been saying…) I think there’s also some degree of fatigue over the cadence of device replacements in so many categories these days (phone, console, handheld, headset…) that may be inclining people to wait and see a bit more. Some folks are probably also saving for a computer replacement, thanks to Microsoft’s strict requirements for Windows 11 and next year’s End Of Support for Windows 10.

TL;DR: I would expect most niche luxury goods to have decreased sales this holiday season over last year’s.

I definitely considered FFmpeg (I mean, it does everything, and pretty much as fast as possible), but the sense I had was that people were mostly posting about tools that were reasonably accessible to novice users, with nice-ish interfaces. FFmpeg is pretty daunting to newcomers.

OpenSCAD (CAD, but with a programming language-style interface) is kind of in a similar category. It’s pretty powerful, and for someone who thinks like a programmer it can be relatively easy to learn, but if you don’t already understand 3d transformations on a pretty intuitive level, the program doesn’t have a lot of features to ease you into that.

Adding on:

Inkscape - vector graphics program

Meshrom - photogrammetry

Handbrake - video transcoding

MakeMKV - rips DVDs and Blu Ray into video files

7zip - file compression and decompression

Droid48 - Truly excellent HP48 emulator for android

LibreOffice - free word processor & office suite (not without some recent drama though, I guess)

I’m sure I’m forgetting plenty, but hey, more for additional commenters to name.

Edit: Removed Audacity, apparently I’d missed privatization drama around that one too

Because they didn’t turn on federation until last year, and at that point it was still limited to fewer than ten users per alternate server, and you had to manually request federation through a Discord server from an actual human. This year they’ve automated the federation process, but you still have to start with a tiny server, and they claim they’re going to raise the user limit gradually as new servers remain federated with the main server.

But yeah, the upshot is bsky.social has 13 million users, and there are no other servers with notable numbers of users. That’s a pretty notable difference from ActivityPub.

Kinda feels like moving out of America ought to be covered by my health insurance, really

Yeah, I’ve thought about this, but I think you need more than one degree of freedom for the chair to help with motion sickness. Like, if your character is in a car and accelerates, you need to tilt (pitch) backwards a bit, to emulate the way the acceleration pushes you back into your seat on the car (well, really it’s the corresponding motion in the inner ear we need to worry about, but a tilt is the correct solution for both). When you go around a corner, it needs to tilt (roll) sideways a bit, to match the feeling of being pulled to the outside of the turn by centrifugal force. Etc. Those are the forces our inner ears are expecting, and without those, there’s still a mismatch. And even with the hardware to do those movements, you need software to calculate the right motions ahead of time so you can reach the right positions in time to match the visuals, which is also quite difficult, and makes it pretty hard to picture doing this as a peripheral rather than as an integrated system. And the cost would be prohibitive.

Honestly I think we may not get this until we can fake it all with electrical signals to the brain, which is quite a long way off.

I’m kind of reluctant to buy a headset with Google’s new VR OS on it. Cardboard was kind of fun until they cancelled it. Daydream wasn’t very good because they gave it a 2dof controller, but then they finally added 6dof head tracking–but then they cancelled the project before the headset actually came out (the one with 6dof tracking, I know the 3dof daydream headset exists, I have one. I think the 6dof one did come out [Lenovo Mirage] but the project was already dead at that point). So that was a bust. They also had project Tango for AR, but then they cancelled that right around the time an actually decent phone with support for it came out. And there was the VR180 video format, where they teamed up a bunch of hardware manufacturers, but then most of those never actually made it to market either and they dropped all the language about the project from their website. They also had that lightfield video project that allowed you to move around within a small volume, but they cancelled that project too.

Google’s attention span with VR projects just seems to average about a year, and I don’t want to shell out high-end headset money for something that might get bricked in an year.