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If the research about it making people reliant and dumber is true, then they can probably do some serious price increases before people actually consider stopping to use them, but of course that would be in the future when the entire market in general stops subsidizing the cost.
That is when the conspiracies start popping up, because a lot of people agree with you, me included.
However, you cannot make parents actually use such systems, so ignoring the obvious control this gives nation states, giving states this power might help the children of those irresponsible parents, which is the only real argument I have heard, since the effects of it are the same if the child simply had responsible parents.
In practically every benchmark the Linux Nvidia drivers notably underperform compared to the windows driver.
Until we reach the point where outside becomes ruined and hostile I do not think a metaverse has much attraction to your average person, I see that as the main reason as for why VR became MR and then just AR.
Also you missed furries from your audience group, there is overlap but it is a pretty distinctive group that is actively drawn towards VR for creative expression.
The SteamDB player number for VRChat is kind of underselling its size since half the player base is on other platforms, primarily running it standalone on Meta Quest. A few days ago it reached 156k across all platforms because of some event that is outside my sphere of interest. And VRChat is generally above 100k per day peak nowadays. https://metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=n...
But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.
Going by how little it is spoken on here I assume it is a localized phenomena, but the word of Fluxer.app is spreading among my spaces and it is open source and selfhostable and federation in the future.
The official instance and full time dev is funded by a cheaper discord nitro like premium sub.
It very recently became public and since that makes people think it is vibe coded I recommend reading the making off blog post https://blog.fluxer.app/
It isn't yet 1:1 with discord, no phone app yet, but it is by far the most discord like discord alternative (closer than Stoat), but open source and selfhostable.
If you are worried about that then I can highly recommend https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy
I keep that running on a VPS, but with with proper firewalling you could probably run it on the same machine.
My google photos doesn't even seem to support facial recognition, maybe I turned it off somehow at some point, but it doesn't seem like google photos supports manually selecting a face (a face that isn't detected), which is something I use a ton with Immich, it is very convenient, even if a bit tedious if going through a backlog.
Annoyingly you can't create a person that way yet with immich, but that's where digikam helps.
Never used Alexa to buy something (not even sure that was supported here) but it not showing you what you are buying, which I feel like it must have on some devices, just sounds like a design mistake, ChatGPT and all other LLMs will be the same if just spoken to.
Also, I would never discuss something I am buying with an LLM, the moment advertising starts being used to influence its output it will be the same as discussing the product with the product page (which of course is only positive) and ignoring negative reviews.
I guess that doesn't matter in games where the world ultimately doesn't matter, it will be better procedural generation, but personally I adore games where the developers actually put effort into designing a world that is interesting to explore, where things are deliberately placed for story or gameplay mechanics reasons.
But I suppose AI could in theory reach the point where it understand the story/theme and gameplay of a game while designing a world.
But when anyone can generate a huge open world, who really cares, is the same as it is now, gotta make something that sticks out from the crowd, something notable.
Because that would likely be confused with compute shaders, which are not accessible in VRChat, we still regularly use geometry shaders, which as far as I know are just terrible compared to the alternatives.
The closest to compute shaders we have are camera loops using render textures and AsyncGPUReadback which has been limited to only handle inputs and outputs in the form of textures.
Also the reason why it is even done in shader is because the scripting language in VRChat is 200X-1000X slower than normal Unity scripting, with no async or way to do threads.
There are two things holding back mini games and special worlds, inexperience and Udon.
The more technically impressive worlds don't just use the VRChat provided object syncing or interactions, they create their own systems tailored to the world, but Udon, the world scripting language, is sluggishly slow, 200X-1000X slower (according to VRC themselves and I know is true from experience), compared to ordinary scripting inside Unity, which means the only ones able to make their own systems are not only good at coding, they are really good at optimizing, on a generally amateur creation platform like VRC those people are very few.
They are trying to recreate Udon to be more performant, but small company and their first attempt was discarded after the sole employee working on it was let go.
Network delay could be considered another thing holding back mini game creation, but even if the network stack was better, you have people all over the world, latency will always be an issue.
So with every prompt you are expected to wait that long? I highly doubt general people will be willing to wait, it also doesn't seem entirely viable if you want to do it locally, less bandwidth and no caching akin to what a literal search engine of data can do.
The US is simply too polarized, and clearly has been intentionally made so, and it has spread over here, but thankfully not to the same extreme.
Of course it is bad for the international community that all nation's people aren't connected but since the US really wants to become isolationist may as well look on the bright side.
And personally I don't consider the world exluding the US as an echo chamber, even just the EU is far from an echo chamber, it is a continent of many unique countries, US concerns are heard over here in the EU a lot even if a whole lot of it doesn't matter over here and just causes polarization.
If you have a developer who can code and isn't just vibe coding blindly, then that is an extra layer of security, sure it isn't amazingly more secure, but anyone that codes has at least some sense to not write in wildly insecure code like an LLM would, regardless of if it was tricked by things mentioned in the article or not.
It has simply been normalized and for a lot of smaller scale sites, that this was first made for, being a little less professional isn't a problem.
But for situations where a company simply won't use Anubis because of its branding then they do sell a unbranded version.
AI pins lack any well functioning usecase, if any at all in my opinion, phone or smart watch makes more sense.
VR and AR headsets on the other hand have several good usecases, they just aren't for everyone.
Social VR, more fun exercise and the media watching experience is quite nice, especially on planes and in general nice on the Apple Vision Pro.
And those videos were either not watched by anyone human or not truly watched by being part of an endless feed of similar slop.
Not entirely sure what they meant but chatgpt and the likes have forced schools to stop relying on homework for grades and are instead shifting over to assignments done more as an mini exam, more work for the school, but you can't substitute your knowledge for chatgpt in such cases, you actually need to know to succeed.
They don't host anything like that, DERP servers are, aside from Funnel, internal to the tailscale network.
But you can proxy traffic using a VPS really easily, which is basically the reverse of exit nodes.
It is the same info, you don't need to be logged in to see it (including comments) and can directly verify that it is someone with control over the domain who controls the account.
I think that sounds like a good source.
Reading the article it isn't just that though, privacy problematic as it is, troll accounts spreading misinformation is an issue, especially for elections, and real weird for one of the major parties to admit to employing against even their supposed allies.
And while that mask fell off, a similarly hard to argue against reason that they bring up is the russian state, which no one here likes, so it isn't like they actually pulled off the mask, just swapped it for something almost equal, assuming they stick to that reason.
VRChat is basically those potential idea for a metaverse, excluding the fact that you can't directly share photos (you'd need to use a youtube video).
It is certainly not "mainstream", but it is where you find enthusiasm for VR and the cutting edge of hardware in use.
It doesn't change your conclusion, but VRChat's Steam numbers are only about 40-50% of the entire population, however 50-60K peak per day is of course not massive, unless you are talking VR.
Even during the bussiest day of the year, new years, it is only close to around 100K total.
As someone enthusiastic about it, VR is unlikely to go fully mainstream, however it will definitely still exist, but AR is a completely different beast.
AR glasses could replace your phone, TV and computer monitors. Of course we are a bit away from that future but just replacing screens alone has the capability to shake up the world.
Almost all instances are run by volunteers, in this case you'd be using an instance you pay for, which should mean it will be more reliable and won't suddenly disappear.
But if it does then you can just migrate almost everything over (was something left behind that I cannot remember, but everything important is moved over).
Running your own instance works, as long as everyone else isn't.
I run my own and while my local feed is dead (even though I am not the only one on it), "home" and "federated" are fairly lively after following a few people.
Unfortunately the 3060ti, 3070 and 3070ti are limited to 8GiB, so it is certainly not common.
In the price range it is the only Nvidia card with 12GiB and the 3080 starts at 10GiB.
So you can certainly get a 12GiB card without spending 3080+ money, but if you want any more power than a 3060 and keep the 12GiB then you would need to spring for a 3080 12GiB which is a big jump in price.
I doubt anyone here would have any use to know about this, but Unity 2019 doesn't recognize the newer Let's encrypt certificates, or at least PC VRChat doesn't.
That is why you cannot use Let's encrypt certificates when serving any content to PC players with HTTPS.
What is really fun is that because of a certain type of content hosting world in VRChat, a lot of people have manually installed these old certificates in Windows which makes it incredibly annoying to troubleshoot unless you know about it.
While it sure wasn't fun to try and troubleshoot that, I still very much enjoyed what I was doing.
When you get into the creating side of VRChat you learn a ton of specific stuff and you are forced to work around some really narrow limitations and that is so fun.
https://docs.hetzner.com/konsoleh/storage-share/configuratio...
Seems like they do now, you just have to turn it on manually.