crashingintoyou

> I think solar flare risk is overblown though.

What you'll find on the insurance side of thing is this sort of claim from Lloyds of London (https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the...):

> A Carrington-level, extreme geomagnetic storm is almost inevitable in the future. While the probability of an extreme storm occurring is relatively low at any given time, it is almost inevitable that one will occur eventually. Historical auroral records suggest a return period of 50 years for Quebec-level storms and 150 years for very extreme storms, such as the Carrington Event that occurred 154 years ago.

If anything I think the solar flare risk is understated.

Why I've generally liked substack: they export RSS feeds (https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038239391-...). Thus far I have little to no interest in getting substack content through anything other than a feed reader though.

Tried switching countries around. For their "free" shipping, if I switch countries from mine to the US the cost of the book drops to a third of what I was originally seeing. Goes from quite expensive to fairly cheap.

When shipping internationally, you need to declare the cost of goods shipped for customs purposes - but do you need to include in that the cost of the shipping? If not - I suspect not but am not 100% sure - this approach of building shipping costs into book price may result in a massive increases in costs paid to import the books in question.

Yup. I think that omni-directional treadmills are what's needed to make a lot of possible games feel great, but I'm not very optimistic that they'll become commonplace anytime soon.

2m x 2m is probably an overestimate (https://omni.virtuix.com/ is selling the Omni One which seems to require 4ft x 4ft), but even then this is still much larger than existing gaming gear requires. That said, people do buy things like treadmills, exercise bikes, and ellipticals - but still I think it'd be extremely tough to make these mass-market.

> the most obvious target audience to drive meaningful usage is harcore gamers. And the novelty of Beat Saber will only go so far; you really need AAA titles and publishers.

I really feel like what you need is omni-directional treadmills. I really like VR rhythm games, but for most other games beyond that feel like you really need some more natural way of moving around. The only exception to that would be things where you'd naturally be playing sitting (in a cockpit, in a car, etc).

> The launch of Meta Quest Pro was abysmal

As far as Meta being out of touch goes, the Quest Pro not shipping with a total light blocker seems pretty indicative. i.e. you need to spend 50USD on https://www.meta.com/quest/accessories/quest-pro-full-light-... if you really want to properly game on it, on top of the $$$ you already need to fork out for the headset.

> I received the PSVR2 last week, but didn't have time to unbox yet. Really hoping it gives Meta a run for their money, and sets the bar high (despite being tethered).

If I compare the PC, Quest, and PS versions of a game like Beat Saber the PC version is moddable and a vastly better game for it with loads of custom contents, the Quest version is semi-moddable but cranky about it, and the PS version AFAIK isn't moddable. Even for games with official custom song support (e.g. Synth Riders), the PS version doesn't support any of those.

Even if technically superior in some ways I'd consider PSVR2 mostly an expensive paperweight unless they were to release PC drivers for it (which they won't). Only seemingly decent piece of exclusive content for it seems to be Horizon: Call of the Mountain, but that's only 10 hours or so.

It might seems pretty American, but if you want the Canadian version you can find it here: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/only-white-people-can-b...

see, e.g., "Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture" docs around 50-60 pages into the document dump at https://www.scribd.com/document/501975490/Government-of-Cana...

And https://darcy.is/code-of-conduct/ makes it sound like their moderation would likely result in an environmental something along the lines of LinkedIn as far as the range of conversation goes.

I'll admit to having a soft spot for Russ George's work re: iron fertilization: https://russgeorge.net/2022/10/02/open-letter-to-academia-an...

It seems to have in earlier stage testing helped reinvigorate salmon populations in earlier testing around Alaska while simultaneously seeming like a cheap way to capture CO2. I wonder if something similar might also help here.

The quality of regulation seems extremely negligent - e.g. https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-eco...

I'm an aeropress fan, but that hasn't stopped me from pairing it with a grinder and a milk frother. Still a lot more space-compact than a full-blown espresso machine though.

Best news for me is that based on https://uploadvr.com/quest-touch-pro-controllers-quest-2/ it looks like the controllers are Quest-2 compatible and will be sold separately.

I'd consider the Quest Pro too expensive but as someone who plays a lot of rhythm games where those controllers seem to be the weak point I'm strongly considering upgrading my Quest 2 controllers.

Mine came from https://www.geewiz.co.za/ups/124927-acconet-poe-48v-24v-smar... Looks like this may be a South African domestic brand though (and you probably don't want to order from a South African site unless you're living in the country to be honest).

If it's just PoE you're looking for there are other options available - e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Battery-Uninterruptible-Security-1000...

One thing to be wary about though is max power if you're trying to run a raspberry pi with hard drive attached off one of these devices. A lot of these devices cap output on the USB ports at ~5V/2A (which I think was the USB2 max whereas USB3 allows for more). If you're running off an SD-card or SSD you should be fine, but 2A isn't enough to start a pi from an attached 2.5" HDD in my experience.

Sure the "DC UPS" are basically "simple dumb batteries", but the sort of loads that you'd probably run off them and the expected runtime of each tends to be quite different.

Guessing the average AC UPS that someone might back a desktop with might last 5 minutes (or in a data centre long enough for the generators to kick in). A "DC UPS" running a router or a raspberry pi likely has a runtime measured in hours. Still would be nice to have monitoring info available, but more time for human intervention to shut down if need be.

"you might as well roll your own for less cost and much more runtime..."

Depends on how much gear you want to power. If you just want to keep a raspberry pi online a few hours I doubt you'd save much money (if any) rolling your own. Could be fun as a project though.

Not really a market gap.

Hit Amazon.com and search for "raspberry pi UPS" and you'll find plenty of options. Or more generically try search terms like "mini ups" or "router ups" or "dc ups" - loads of options at places like Aliexpress as well.

Here in South Africa with rolling blackouts happening fairly regularly these days a lot of homes have something similar to keep internet connectivity live when it happens, with a lot of those options having USB outputs as well.

I'm currently using one of these to keep my pi 4 + hdd setup online: https://acconet.net/product/ups-rp7500a/

"Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman -He is the only psychologist ever to recieve the Nobel Prize if I remember correctly. This book scientifically digests human biases and errors and how they influence our every day lives and decision making. Sometimes it a bit too technical for my taste and I like mostly the first part. (its not an easy read) I rarely had so many Aha-moments."

This one seems to have gotten caught up a bit in psych's reproducibility crisis - e.g. https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...

> I'm not aware yet of any way of capturing facial expressions, like a video chat would.

I haven't personally used it but https://www.vive.com/us/accessory/facial-tracker/ is already available. Leaks also suggest that support for facial and eye tracking will likely be integrated in Meta's pro headset as well.

> It also sounds like it would make me less active...

The funny thing here is that my typical cardio workout for the past year or two has involved VR, and I've found that it's been great for getting the heart rate up.

That said, I'm a heavy VR user who also finds the metaverse talk a bit silly. Will see if my mind changes over the next 5-10 years.

> Also it will hopefully support at least some extensions.

Does it not already? Pretty sure that I had a bunch of extensions installed before on my Firefox Reality install and, if this is just a fork of that I'd guess it also would.

(Annoyingly I recently removed Firefox Reality from my Quest due to space constraints, which have also kept me from testing Wolvic thus far).

> Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel

No they wouldn't. To quote https://globalroadtechnology.com/uranium-mining-australia-hi...

> Australia is home to 31% of the world’s recoverable uranium. Australian uranium is exported and consists about one-quarter of its energy exports. Australia uses no nuclear power and depends on coal. The uranium mining industry is a billion dollar industry in Australian dollar ... In 2019, Australia produced 7790 tonnes of uranium and was ranked the world’s third best producer behind Kazakhstan and Canada.

Some other Dunning-Kruger critiques aggregated by Andrew Gelman: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/10/12/can-the-du...

Going to assume that your use of "briefly" there is preceding your attempt at a short synopsis, rather than that your views have shifted again.

Personally I'm depressingly cynical when it comes to Pinker's views, looking at, e.g., https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1496685550241292293 and then thinking about how now, given modern weaponry one man's decision could basically destroy all life on earth. A few billion dead in a single conflict would be all it'd take to really mess up Pinker's trend line.

What worked for me to avoid fogging is to wear the headset kind of like a visor for a few minutes before starting your workout, which warms it such that I haven't worried about fogging much since (which initially was a problem).

There is, e.g, the BOBOVR F2 which will add a battery-powered fan to your Quest 2 to add some venting, but I haven't personally tried it.