You're not my real dad!
GlitterInfection
joined 1 year ago
Has GIMP improved much in the last five years?
My partner uses Adobe products for one of his jobs, and he had installed their cloud software on one of my laptops on his user account. Which forced it on all other user accounts, too.
I found that it installed horribly challenging to kill or remove daemons that would relaunch and reinstall their spyware bullshit if you didn't kill all of them in the right way, and it was spamming me a pop-up asking for my password to install other things, which I couldn't prevent.
I was able to stop it after many attempts and then got my partner to uninstall that junk from my laptop.
That was all still more user-friendly than the last time I tried to use GIMP.
Are there viable alternatives for their products?
If I haven't seen the first 9, will I understand the plot of ROG Ally X?
I have used and worked on/with/owned quite a few VR headsets, yeah. Not a comprehensive reviewer-worthy amount, but I've been working on, or playing with, a VR headset since 2015, and I do consider myself to be an enthusiast.
Currently I own a Valve Index and a PSVR 2 along with my Vision Pro. Those two haven't gotten use in a long while, whereas I use my Vision Pro a lot every day.
I don't have a lot of experience with Quest 2, 3, or Pro, because Meta's whole account debacle caused me to give my original quest away to a homeless friend of mine, which he sold for child support money, I think. Not a fan or Meta as a company in general.
I am a slight fan of Apple as a company, and by lemmy standards, I qualify as a rabid lunatic fanboy of Apple, so take it with a grain of salt, but...
The Vision Pro is a lot more of a comprehensive product than any of the other devices I've used, in ways that probably don't matter to most VR enthusiasts. The surprisingly gripping features of it have nothing to do with gaming whatsoever, and everything to do with art, content, media, and productivity.
The main hobby I've been using it for daily is learning how to create 3D videos using Stable Diffusion. The huge bonus for this is all of the iPad apps that mostly just work without issue out of the box sprinkled with some Vision Pro specific apps.
Without leaving the headset or relying on an external device, I can use Draw Things to generate a high resolution image, generate up to 25 frames of video with that image as a starting point, save the image sequence out to a directory, where I can use LumaFusion to combine sequences into a video. If I need to I can use waifu2x to uprez, but that takes forever, so I usually don't.
I can export the video and drag and drop it into Spatial Media Toolkit, futz with the depth setting, and output an AI generated spatial video. I can use Spatialify to output a SBS video if I want to at that point, but usually just keep them as spatial videos.
Aside from that specific workflow, It's also the best 2D and 3D video watching headset experience. Being able to dial my environment in to drown out a the rest of a cross-country flight and watch Mad Max: Fury Road in 3D while it reflects on a lake in front of me, the size of a cinema screen, is both magical, and something that I hope even Quest users get to experience in some capacity on their platform.
It comes in handy, too, when I want to watch or do something different than the bf is watching on the tv.
I also am benefiting from the Apple ecosystem, since I own an m1 macbook and an iPhone 15 pro.
I love being able to capture spatial videos and panoramas and then experience them in headset later. Airdropping files between devices also lets me offload longer video processing to them, since waifu2x and handbrake on the mac work better for uprezzing and Spatial Media Toolkit has a native-ish Mac release.
For generative AI Draw Things is also on the mac and iPhone, but I'm learning ComfyUI since it seems way more powerful. And I use Screens 5 to vnc from my headset or phone, or I use the native virtual display if I'm by the mac itself.
My only experience using a Quest 2 was recently when a friend came over and we spent an hour trying to get it to work, resetting and rebooting over and over, before finally just giving up on pairing one of the two controllers, and we used the ios app to launch the browser to watch some 180 stereo videos. It wasn't a good experience, but I'm sure it would be once it's setup.
But I can't really knock it too much, since trying to share the Vision Pro is the worst part of the device. The best option is to SharePlay to a mac or Apple TV, since the whole guest mode thing takes too long. And while I won't fly without my Vision Pro again, I wouldn't feel comfortable bringing it to a friend's place. That thing's expensive as hell, and I don't want someone to drop it or for it to get stolen.
I canceled my Disney+ sub due to the price increase during the great enshitification race to the bottom, but their support for VisionOS and immersive content is making me rethink that.
Watching the 3D version of Mad Max: Fury Road with it reflecting off the lake in the Mount Hood environment while flying cross country sold me on never flying without a VR headset again. It was one of the most comfortable flights I've had and one of the more enjoyable and memorable movie watching experiences despite having seen the movie before.
On the way back I was able to play the inflight entertainment in headset, and the wifi was good enough to stream video so I watched RuPaul content on youtube and Wow Presents Plus while texting friends. It was also a solid experience.
No motion sickness in either case, but also I didn't play any games or anything that usually makes someone motion sick in VR. This was all on my Vision Pro, so hopefully it works as well on the Quest headsets.
Gavin killed all the good will he once had with me during that veto in 2023. This is disappointing but not surprising.
I only wear ultraviolet because I am ultra spiritual.
In many specific applications current AI algorithms already exceed human capabilities. That's been the case for much longer than the LLM craze. And as new AI algorithms are developed it becomes more and more likely that even without Artificial General Intelligence, the category of computing known as AI could reach a point that it exceeds human capabilities in all possible applications.
But even with that fact it's true that we shouldn't treat the current implementations of AI as if it were human.
If we ever develop an actual AGI and it is ad capable as a human, then we should reconsider, but nothing we have now seems to imply we are close to that.