No discredit to R.E.M. but my world’s been ending for over a decade and I feel like dogshit constantly. Nobody told me the apocalypse would be heralded by the dumbest fucking cryptobros and AI prompters the world’s ever seen.

Meta acquiring Oculus

As someone with industry experience working with VR, I can tell you it’s a mixed bag. I think there’s certainly no way Oculus (and consumer VR in general) takes off the way it did without Facebook’s dollars behind it, and it’s certainly paved the way to the outstanding quality of standalone HMDs that are on offer today. However, it killed the initiative for PCVR hardware with the non-consolation that Meta, Pico, and HTC offer “Link mode” on all their headsets and it’s iffy on good days, which makes B2B PCVR very difficult to facilitate without some serious legwork on lowering latency over the air connections. Would that we could revive the Rift S, that headset was perfect for our needs.

I mean, everything has tripled in price and the reason is corporate greed.

I like it, thank you!

Oh man, where to begin? So there was an event advertised as an ‘immersive Willy Wonka’s Wonderland experience’ with all sorts of AI art and marketing:

https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/27/glasgow-willy-wonka-experience-slammed-as-farce-as-tickets-refunded

The long and short of it was that the event, not officially licensed by WB (quelle fucking suprise) hosted in a dirty warehouse with little more than cheap props, tacky holiday ornaments and shower curtains, ended up being a complete shitshow. They gave each child, I shit you not, a couple (literally 0-3, dependent on how early your time slot was) jellybeans and half a cup of Tesco lemonade. No actual chocolate to be found in the entire chocolate-factory-themed event. The actors, including this poor woman, were hired and briefed literally the day before the event, handed 15 page AI-generated scripts that, predictably, made no fucking sense, including original characters like “the unknown,” and basically had to just wing it in poundland costumes. And like, in spite of it all, they really did give it their best effort, and from what I understand still haven’t been paid for their work.

Predictably, the event organizers ended up having to refund people for this sham of an event that they claim “failed to materialize.” Well of course it did, the people who were responsible for putting it together cooked up a dozen AI images and shat out a “legally distinct” script and thought it would all come together. Much like Fyre Festival, it’s another failure on the part of hucksters who do not understand that events require planning and don’t care to understand because they’re just trying to make a buck.

Thank you. I really hope the other photo of her gets some traction because it seems much more indicative of her experience working these sorts of functions:

I feel like I should point out, this woman did not lie on the resume. She teaches yoga to kids and does events for schools, she would absolutely have been qualified had this event not been the shitshow it was.

I’m glad someone else said it.

Worth noting this is all a byproduct of capitalism as it exists today. Not nearly enough competition or regulation means every major change these days is really just “How can we put more ads in people’s devices? How can we instill FOMO? How can we charge more money for less service?”

Look at how bad mainstream UX/UI has become, even on the biggest platforms with the most industry experience. Windows 11 is a fucking joke and everyone is certain the next one will be worse. We know Microsoft can design a good UI, but they choose not to because they don’t care about the consumer except as it pertains to getting clicks and ad revenue. They shove Edge back in your taskbar after every update, they make finding your own shit on your computer impossible so you’ll use Cortana. Who asked for icons to be centered by default? Who asked for them to fuck around with the start menu for at least the fifth time in two decades? Nobody. But everything they do is for the benefit of the shareholders.

“Now what?”

https://youtu.be/2q35PgSXhKg?si=y50akSSlbmjnSrmG

I just want to return to a time before the technocracy, and the metricization of everything, before we started caring about clicks and views and the algorithm, for the sake of squeezing every last bit of monetization and efficiency out of everything and everyone.

Throw it on the pile of solutions we’ll never have because the treatment is more profitable than the cure.

I dunno, but they better watch out if they don’t want Seegson eating their lunch.

We attempted to use the Reverb G2 for a training sim but their equivalent of ASW wasn’t up to snuff. Lots of jumping around between frames. Shame, because the display was really sharp, a good answer to the short-lived Rift S.

Like, could I just have the aux jack back please? I can frig with my phone before I put the car in drive and just push audio through the speakers, I don’t need to be able to sort through my playlists or make calls from the steering wheel, I’m distracted enough by billboards, for chrissakes. The only thing I like about my phone being connected to my car is that I can skip forward and back, that’s it.

Yeah, it’s happened to me a couple times and I hate it so much when I finally wrest myself out, on top of the anti-adblock shit, that I’ve basically stopped browsing YT altogether. If I get a link I’ll watch a video but the quality of the experience has dropped so drastically since the early days. I actually lament the fact that because of how the algorithms are tuned, it is impossible to get to the weird part of YouTube organically - You have to already know about the weird shit in order to see it.

Not 100% related, but Chrome is crashing my computer. Started happening like a month ago, I would be dinking around on the net and everything would suddenly become unresponsive, can’t even open task manager, have to power cycle. This would happen anywhere between three days or thirty minutes apart. Nothing shows up in the event viewer before any of the crashes, all the hardware I can test comes back clean. I have a friend who said he was having the same issue, he switched to Firefox, hasn’t had it since. I’ve had a week of uptime now since I did the same. I’m beginning to think Alphabet just makes bad products now.

I mean I’ve had my Brother long before I knew about Lemmy. I have never had it not print the thing I wanted it to print. Before that I had about half a dozen inkjet printers that worked maybe 40% of the time in the first few months and then dropped steeply when the print heads got gummed up, or the feed got jammed. But the Brother has been working a treat for five years and counting.

Because the U.S. has been letting its mental health issues fester under a veneer of American Exceptionalism for the better part of a century in order to squeeze every last drop of labor surplus out of its citizens.

It’s a weird dichotomy, where capitalism breeds and enshrines these people who need to be told no at critical junctures in order to ensure the health of the product, but absolutely nobody can or will without risking their livelihood, so the mania goes unchecked.

I definitely thought they were talking about Amazon the company and not The Amazon.