You’re going to have to race me to order one. I’ll bet you I’ll be able to give my credit card number to Gabe first.

🐿️

Both. But the Meta Quest(s) in their various guises have still been the best selling VR hardware in the time span which they existed. Instead, this is the tacit admission from Zuck Zuck that we’ve all been waiting for, which is that his plan to dominate the VR market by burning absurd amounts of cash and moving hardware at a loss to squeeze out other competitors did not work. The overwhelming response (among nerds, anyway) to the Steam Frame is likely to have had something to do with this.

More or less, yes. That’s also why it appears more red/orange as it gets closer to the horizon from your perspective, since at that oblique angle the light has to pass through more of the atmosphere to get to you and more of it gets scattered or absorbed by particulates in the air.

Yes, I was waiting for someone to notice that.

From TFA:

Manufacturers may comply through three methods specified in Section 6(2) of the bill: integration of the algorithm in the printer’s firmware, integration in preprint software, or a handshake authentication design between software and printer.

Nobody’s going to do this in the printer itself; the spyware will be built into the slicer.

Ultimately this will be trivially easy to defeat no matter what moronic legislators who possess no technical knowledge think. The real dangers are more subtle, not least of which being the chilling effect if this passes effectively instructing all 3D printer manufacturers not to sell anything in Washington state since total compliance as the bill proposes is indeed effectively impossible, and the penalties for presumed lack of compliance are high. The most realistic outcome for a private individual vis-a-vis potentially printing a ghost gun is not necessarily having their printer tattle on them, but the state having yet another byzantine felony they can charge people with if they get caught after the fact with whatever-it-is they have. Never mind the 1st and 2nd amendments, the only realistic avenue for enforcement of this on private individuals will run afoul of the 4th.

VR never needed Meta. Us nerds have been trumpeting this fact since before the first Quest even launched and for some reason everyone insisted on relentlessly bickering with us about it tooth-and-nail rather than accepting the simple reality that Zuck Zuck would continue to burn money on his silly venture with creepy knockoff Miis that nobody wants until he finally lost interest and gave up. And no part of that process would result in Meta becoming the “savior” that revolutionizes VR.

Well, here we are. Where’s my fucking gold star already? My message has been consistent on this since about 2016.

The question is how gradually. Over the span of 10,000 years, probably not. Over the span of a month, absolutely. Remember that the hue of sunlight already changes significantly throughout the day based mostly on the sun’s proximity to the horizon (and thus how much thickness of crap in the atmosphere it has to plow through to get to your location) and we can definitely detect that easily.

I employed the super secure expedient of never exporting my keys. I have no idea what they are, I never did, and I never will.

There’s really no irreplaceable data on my Windows machine. If I have to reformat it some day A) that’s no big deal, and B) it’s Windows, what else is new.

I’m in agreement with the others. This is a printer issue, not a model design issue. Any current printer in good working order and running non-insane settings should be able to print a 90 degree inside corner like that with no problem.

Some possibilities:

Your Z offset may be set too high, so that your first layer height is too tall. This will result in the first layer’s extrusions not sticking to the bed and each other, peeling off in strings like you see here.

Flip this over and show us the bottom of it. The effects of a too-high first layer should be readily apparent. That’s where my money is.

Your printer may also be attempting to round the corners too fast. You could slow down your print speed, or adjust your linear advance settings. If you are using Prusaslicer or a derivative thereof (Orca, Qidi, etc.) there are built-in calibration prints you can run that will provide you a range of values to inspect my physically printing them, and allowing you to choose from the value that produces the best looking result. Ideally your linear advance/pressure advance setting should be tuned for each spool of filament, but in reality most people (myself included) don’t bother until they observe an issue. I use the same settings for all PLA, and a different set of settings for all PETG, and another for ABS, etc.

Using Rufus still works. I did it as recently as a couple of days ago.

If you sign in with a Microsoft account at all I don’t believe there’s the capability to opt out.

I only use local accounts. I have never had a Microsoft account. I never will.

They don’t have a copy of every single Bitlocker key. They do have a copy of your Bitlocker key if you are dumb enough to allow it to sync with your Microsoft account, you know, “for convenience.”

Don’t use a Microsoft account with Windows, even if you are forced to use Windows.

We perceive the sun as white. That’s a fairly important distinction.

The reason we perceive the sun as white is surely because the sun has output basically the same spectrum as long as humanity (and a great deal of humanity’s precursors) has existed. We evolved with our eyes considering the spectrum the sun kicks out as fully white light, comprised of the sum total of electromagnetic frequencies we’re able to receive with our eyeballs.

There is no such thing as objective color of any light. Our understanding of color is completely based on our perception of it. If the sun’s peak output were in the 590–625nm range (what we currently perceive as orange) for all that time rather than in the green part of the spectrum it is in reality (500–565nm), we undoubtedly would have evolved to see that particular spectrum combination as white light instead.

All of the above notwithstanding, if the spectrum output of the sun changed overnight like OP’s idiot friend is suggesting, it would be immediately apparent to everyone who isn’t literally blind.

Android XR is dead on arrival. Either someone at Lynx knows this and asked Google one of the hard questions, or Google knows this and they’re chickening out already while preparing to disappear as they leave their hardware partners holding the bag as usual.

I would advise that no one buy an Android XR device under any circumstances, for any purpose. Otherwise you’re likely to be left holding the bag, or rather a funny shaped expensive brick, as well.

Isn’t GIMP explicitly a GTK app?

People do understand what the midterms are, right?

…Right?

Neither Trump nor Vance are up for election in 2026. But quite a few of their GOP cronies are, in the house and senate. All of the house is up for election and roughly one third of the senate. This will most likely be our last chance to oust at least some of Trump’s enablers in congress.

The intent of the Steam Frame was never to compete with a PCVR rig in standalone mode and don’t recall anybody ever saying it was. Valve explicitly stated that it was to be a “streaming first headset.”

The Frame technically has a slightly more powerful chip in it than the Quest 3 so should outperform the latter by a small margin in theory. The Frame also has eye tracking whereas the Quests do not (except the Quest Pro, which is NLA and was ~$1,500 even when it was) so the potential is there for foveated rendering to enhance framerates if developers actually bother to support it in the future. For pure standalone VR performance with native games, the Frame should outperform the Quest 3. PC games run on the headset in standalone mode will have to be done through a compatibility layer, which is probably not 100% optimal for performance. But for what it’s worth, the various Quests can’t play PC content at all so I’m not sure what the complaint is there.

Hey, I like my 3D TV. Every once in a while I manage to find a pirated video that’s in 3D and it’s pretty neat. And unlike the current avalanche of generative/LLM bullshit, I can turn the 3D off, and when I do it works just fine as a perfectly ordinary TV, and in no way does it nag me incessantly to turn it back on.

?

In the Enterprise editions of Windows, you can already uninstall it. Maybe not via group policy, but you can just find it in the Apps > Installed Apps list and right click to uninstall it. On the various home user editions of Windows, this is probably not the case. (I have zero systems running those, so I can’t check.)

The Enterprise LTSC IoT version of Windows 10 doesn’t even come with Copilot, nor have any updates for it thus far installed it on any of the systems I administer, either. Apparently only 11 does.

What’s new here is apparently being able to trigger this via group policy, but for anyone in the here and now you can already disable Copilot via group policy as well, even on your local system, even on Windows 11.