That’s the one I was thinking of.

I might be misremembering, but I think even the much maligned bump stock was created as an accessibility device originally. It might be another kind of similar stock that was victimized by the media, but IIRC the bump stock was designed as an aid for veterans who had lost a limb to allow them to use a pistol one-handed.

There’s a lot of stuff like that that has been fear mongered by the media. Like suppressors. Everybody has been told that they make a gun basically silent when what they actually do is reduce the sound of a gun from “permanent hearing damage” to “not permanent hearing loss.”

I’d say the Deck isn’t stealing customers from the Switch because they are filling different market niches. The Switch is a portable console with portable Nintendo games made for it. The Deck is a portable PC that gives you access to your entire Steam library on the go.

The GabeCube, however, could absolutely pull some customers of the PS5 and Xbox depending on the pricing - especially with Microsoft’s demands that every part of the Xbox division see a 30% profit margin. The Big Three isn’t going to become the Big Four, but I think it will make some ripples. Steam running in Big Screen mode is effectively a console interface, and it plays Call of Duty just like the consoles. And with Sony finally moving away from console exclusive games, it means that Steam has almost full parity with the libraries of both of the consoles going forward while also offering access to all kinds of indie games that the consoles don’t. The GabeCube can play Call of Duty and Ghost of Tsushima, but it can also play Ultrakill and Bloodborne Nightmare Kart, and neither Xbox nor Playstation can say that.

Edit: And this doesn’t even mention old games. The Steam library has access to all kinds of old games that never get ported to new consoles when a new generation releases, meaning that its library grows in step with the consoles but you can still play your old favorites without having to keep buying them again or keep your old consoles around.

So send their location then, since sounds have to be played from the player’s location in order to project from the right spot.

People think this is a crazy complaint because the controller has an estimated battery life of something like 30 hours and a wireless charger included. So as long as you remember to put it on the dock when you put the controller down once every couple of days, you shouldn’t have to worry about your battery’s charge.

I agree that being able to hot swap the battery would be nice, but this is closer to having to remember to charge your phone and being able to change the battery in a phone at all is a crazy concept in this day and age.

States can still set their own demands on what insurance companies are required to cover. The ACA was based on Romney-care, which Massachusetts has continued to use throughout the entire time the ACA has been in effect because the system was already set up and is in some ways better than the ACA ever was.

But if they’re not rendered, what about their sound effects like walking, or something like their bullets?

This is actually an issue in War Thunder, where if the server thinks you shouldn’t be able to see a tank, it won’t render it, but this also causes it fairly frequently to not play noises from the tank like the engine or shots, and to not render projectiles from them either. So a teammate can die right next to you and you won’t know how because the shot wasn’t rendered on your screen even though you were looking in the direction of the enemy when they fired it. Or a tank with an engine louder than a semi truck will sneak up and kill you because the game simply decided that you shouldn’t be able to hear them.

Important to note that the controller is designed to be serviceable and Valve is partnering with a company to provide replacement parts.

It sounds like it’ll be as hard to replace the battery as old smart phones were, which makes it very customer friendly.

I used my launch day PS4 controller up until last year without ever having to unlatch a cover or unscrew a screw. After more than a decade of use, I finally had to open the case and replace the USB port with a new board I bought for $2 by unscrewing and unplugging the old one and swapping it out with the new one.

Why are you acting like having to replace the battery is this super inconvenient thing that you’ll have to do frequently when the odds of having to do so more than once every 5-10 years is unlikely with proper care? I’d consider having to replace AA batteries more of a hassle than that. Especially if they go bad and leak all over the contacts or something. Crystalized battery acid is a pain in the ass to clean out.

Before my dad retired, he ran his own business. Nothing big, just him and a couple of others, but enough to afford a decent sized house, two cars, and a comfortable lifestyle.

A few years ago, he and I were talking about how the CoL has gone crazy since the early 2000s and he looked up the apartment he rented while he was in college in the 80s. It’s still there, a small studio apartment in the city near the college. In his own words, he said that the cost to rent that apartment a couple of years ago was more than he made running his own business.

What I was trying to say was that they were making two completely different points. When companies talk about “realistic” graphics in games, it’s always about the graphical fidelity, not about art style, direction, or aesthetic, and that steers the entire narrative of the conversation around “photo-realistic” games.

What memes like this are trying to say is that having a good style and strong art direction trumps pure graphical fidelity every time. Whether your game looks like Crysis or Super Metroid doesn’t matter as much as having clear design direction, and conversely, slapping 4k textures on everything won’t matter if your game has no design direction.

Many years ago, I worked at a fish market and one of the guys who sold us fish during the summer won a big fishing tournament one year where he got a brand new truck and a bunch of money. When they asked him what he was going to do with the money, he said, “Keep fishing until it’s all gone.”

What they’re talking about is what I call “The Wind Waker Effect.” When the GameCube was first announced, they showed off a trailer that included a realistic looking Link fighting Ganondorf to show off the power of the system. When the Wind Waker was announced and shown to the public, fans were furious. They didn’t want some cartoony Zelda game, they wanted that photo-realistic Zelda game that they had been teased with years before! When Wind Waker came out, it was universally criticized for its graphics. Today, it’s considered one of the best looking Zelda games of all time and was the main inspiration for the art direction of almost every Zelda game after it - including Breath of the Wild.

If Nintendo had made that “photo-realistic” Zelda game, it would look nowhere near as good nor be as fondly remembered today, because “photo-realistic” in terms of video game graphics is an obsession with graphical fidelity, not artistic quality. That’s why photo-realistic games from the same era are remembered as the “real = brown” era of games. It’s a technical or hardware question of “how many polygons can we fit in this character’s facial pores”, not taking something fake and making it seem real through art direction.

It has been proven over and over that this is exactly what happens. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but ChatGPT was strictly limited to training data from before a certain date because the amount of AI content after that date had negative effects on the output.

This is very easy to see because an AI is simply regurgitating algorithms created based on its training data. Any biases or flaws in that data become ingrained into the AI, causing it to output more flawed data, which is then used to train more AI, which further exacerbates the issues as they become even more ingrained in those AI who then output even more flawed data, and so on until the outputs are bad enough that nobody wants to use it.

Did you ever hear that story about the researchers who had 2 LLMs talk to each other and they eventually began speaking in a language that nobody else could understand? What really happened was that their conversation started to turn more and more into gibberish until they were just passing random letters and numbers back and forth. That’s exactly what happens when you train AI on the output of AI. The “AI created their own language” thing was just marketing.

I was hoping for a direct Index replacement, but there are definite advantages to making a headset capable of both - especially one that also seems like it can compete with Meta as a standalone system.

My two hopes are that the one with the smaller storage will be cheap enough to compete with other PC VR headsets (which does seem like the plan), and that using it plugged in is viable. It’s built to be modular, so there’s plenty of room for modding later like adding features, so the price will be the make or break, I think.

I’ve been waiting for Valve to release their new headset before I jump back into VR and decide what I get to replace my original Vive. I still have a few questions as well, like the price, but it basically looks like everything that I want in a headset.

It has eye tracking since it uses foveated rendering, the new pancake lenses that have made a huge splash in recent years, better resolution than the Index, and they’ve said that it’s built to be modular so that there’s the possibility of adding new features down the line - including stuff like a port on the face plate that allows for high speed camera info as well as data, so stuff like face tracking should be as easy as plug and play once people get to tinker with it. No need to pull off face plates or solder wires like people were doing with their Index.

The biggest question I have left besides the price is the battery life and the feasibility of having it plugged in and charging while you’re using it.

110% The pain is the point. Anything else is secondary to the sadism.

I remember many years ago reading the findings of a study done by the US military about the info that they got out of people at Guantanamo Bay, and basically running out into a field and shouting “Are there any terrorists here??” was more or less as useful, and any field info -regardless of how much or how little - was way more accurate and useful. By the time you even get somebody in front of the torturers, what they know is probably outdated, and you’re more likely to get false info than anything true anyway because people will tell you whatever you want to hear to make it stop, even if they have to make shit up right then and there.

They’re not evil and old like Trump They’re just old and unable to fight a post-truth populist like Trump

They don’t understand how important it is to never show capitulation

You’re basing your beliefs on tribalism to justify their actions.

Do better. Show evidence.

Approach Moshe Safdie’s company about building Habitat 2027, 60 years after the scaled down compromise was built:

Habitat 67