Cynetri (he/any)

For now

it’s ridiculous how easy it is to use now once you get the basics down. im a bad artist in general, so i mostly use it for editing existing models, but i can also whip up a simple prototyping model pretty quick too. awesome stuff

Wouldn’t be a proper week without a leak on a War Thunder forum

Video game assets/customizing :) I used VRChat as an excuse to design a persona (in my pfp) and I made a game prototype to pay homage to my first car. I wanna do way more stuff but I’m still learning

December of 2022. I was moving away from closed-source social media, and after Twitter -> Mastodon, Reddit was next. I didn’t become active til the whole API thing tho, because Lemmy didn’t have some communities that I liked. So I made one lol

Might be a controversial take, but I’m concerned about people letting themselves shape sweeping, negative views on things that are (keyword: relatively) minor or just don’t fully know the story behind. For example, EA was voted “Worst Company in America” multiple years in a row, when it’s really just a software company whose worst sins would probably amount to gross overworking/general poor treatment of their employees. That’s bad, but I feel like it’s pretty inarguably better than chocolate companies who use child labor to harvest cocoa beans.

It’s especially concerning when it extends to global/political issues (this is why I said this might be controversial). We don’t tend to realize that we share much more in common with people in other countries than we realize, probably helped by the fact that most news sites tend to leave out details or exaggerate bad parts when talking about governments other than their own (a notorious example is the reporting on North Korea . Here’s a good vid about it (CW: very graphic) Not saying it’s a wonderful place to live, just that it’s exaggerated.) Part of the reason political conversations feel so toxic is because so many of us just don’t know a lot of what’s going on or what each other is talking about, so we’re rarely on the same page. Reading a quick Wikipedia summary and/or article can go a long way

I don’t think it’s just Musk, there was a lot of pushback towards the moon landings in the 1960s-70s as well. People then felt that funds used in these programs would have been better spent on stuff like social programs and improving infrastructure, criticisms that fit pretty well today too. But we could probably have been to mars and back twice if NASA had like even a quarter of the military’s budget too 💀

My older brother used to have a Nissan Froniter, I can’t remember the year but it was the first year that backup cameras became mandatory. It had a screen but it didn’t have touch capability, it was pretty much as you described - only for song names, backup cam, and some other small things. As much as I hate screens in cars I thought that one made sense.

If it makes you feel any better, they spy on you too!

musk is really kinda doing the ADL’s job for them lmao

Programming is really not as hard as it looks to start, just don’t start with C++ for the love of god lmao

There’s a lot of projects working to make VR on Linux a reality, although SteamVR technically works on linux it’s really only if you have a Vive/Index or third-party drivers. That, and SteamVR on Linux is a buggy mess anyway lol. I’m definitely not an expert in any of this though, I’m only just now going into college to pursue this stuff further lmao. Here’s some projects I’ve been following if you wanna look further:

• Monado, an OpenXR runtime built to run on Linux natively, and it provides features like finger tracking using the cameras on an Index along with other headsets
• V-Sekai, a framework for building social VR games built on the Godot 4 game engine
• Godot itself, while not explicitly VR-focused I think it has great potential for making VR content in the near future, and it’s also where I want to focus my efforts (I already made my first game, sorta lol)
• Hearth, I don’t understand it fully but what I gather is that it aims to be a shared virtual space, kinda like those “3D” desktops from the 90s but with multiple people and super extendable
• SlimeVR, open-source full-body trackers for VR. Mostly used in VRChat lol
• Stardust XR, a VR display server for Linux that supports stuff like widgets and filters (I think)

There’s tons more but I can’t think of all of them lmao, but there’s definitely cool stuff going on in the space and worth checking out.

Open-source virtual reality, usually just any VR works too lmao but especially FOSS VR

Mississippi teen death at poultry plant, July 26th 2023, AP and New state laws are rolling back regulations on child labor, April 27, 2023, NPR

It sucks

It does go down if you pay things off early, though

Yes, I would want to resist it. Life is about ups and downs, and I think the better idea would be to have an open-source augmented reality, maybe through glasses that you wear or contacts on your eyes, that can project shared images, like virtual props that everyone else can see, or just act as a VR HMD and replace all your vision with a virtual world for a while.

But bodily autonomy is very important, give people a choice and let them be informed by publishing the source code, PCB diagrams and all that kinda stuff so they know how it works and that they’re not being controlled.

Got a long one. I’ve gone back and forth a few times (I’ve landed on a dual-boot Windows 10 and Arch setup, maining Arch) (btw) and my biggest takeaway is this:

Mainstream Linux distros, like Mint, do have admittedly very polished basic experiences. The problem is, though, is that it breaks down as soon as you introduce it to unique use-cases or hardware features.

Linux, specifically stable distros like Mint, are already ready for mainstream use for people who use it for basic stuff like email, web browsing, desktop social media like Facebook, and so on. It’s also very usable for gaming, as we saw with Steam Deck, but still has issues primarily with adoption.

But if you have for example, a 2-in-1 laptop or a VR setup, things break down very quick. I had to configure my 2-in-1 manually and not everything works still, and VR is a joke if you don’t have a Vive or Index, and even that’s iffy. SteamVR is still extremely buggy and missing features.

Linux is, by design, configurable and open. This is both its greatest strength and weakness, because it allows users to set up their systems how they want, but only if they know how to. A truly “user-friendly” distro is simply not possible if you retain the configurability, which Valve knows, and is why SteamOS is locked down the way it is. This model is growing in popularity but it’s not quite here yet.

At the end of the day, I still use it despite these shortcomings because I feel it’s important. I should be able to look at the code and know what my machine is doing, and trust that it respects my rights and freedoms. This is why Linux, and maybe BSD, have to win. But for now, I still have a drive with Windows 10 because it’s just simply not a full experience yet, and that’s okay. For now

I disagree, I think offering healthier alternatives is better than simply giving up junk food by itself

I don’t remember messing with the computers thenselves, but I do remember my friends and I finding the password to the public wifi and connecting to it for all of like a day (w/ a VPN so as to not get caught) before getting booted off and the password reset. Rinse and releat a couple times before we couldn’t crack it anymore

For everything but VR, Arch Linux with KDE Plasma. For VR, Windows 10

I’ve played VR on Linux before with my Vive but it’s definitely not feature complete yet. I just got Knuckles for it though so I’ve been using the Vive with them a lot recently, so I might start trying it more often. The lack of desktop view in SteamVR on Linux is really annoying though (I got it to work once, but that was the only thing that worked at the time lol)