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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Considering Microsoft is dropping support for Windows Mixed Reality devices with Windows 11 24H2, effectively sending millions of otherwise perfectly fine VR headsets to landfill with no recourse. I can see them releasing a handheld with a “custom” version of Windows that allows users to install Steam, GOG, Epic, etc… then bait and switch with a future “feature update” that makes compatibility “too hard” to support or a “security risk”. Maybe the desktop mode is a “developer only” option that gets disabled, or you have to enable third party apps like in windows 10 S and that ability gets taken away. I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft.

    Maybe I’m just peeved at Microsoft for deciding that my VR headset will be E-waste even though the hardware is fine, or ignoring the concept of user consent by enabling OneDrive cloud backups for local folders by default while basically forcing you to create a Microsoft account to install Windows if you don’t know the right sequence of arcane f-ing rituals to create a local account. But I don’t trust them…













  • I mean if you pay attention most social media inundated with influencers and companies is basically:

    “Buy this, no buy this, buy this instead, spend your money here!” It even leeches into everyday conversations outside of social media.

    Pay attention to how often people talk about buying things and newly released products. Hell, I’ve caught myself contributing to it. It’s kind of gross when you realize how steeped in consumerism nearly everything has become.


  • This is a list of all the open source software I have come across and use frequently to semi frequently. There will likely be some overlap with stuff everyone has already posted.

    Photography and Image manipulation

    • Darktable → RAW photo processing
    • GIMP→ Photoshop alternative
    • Krita → Digital painting (have only used it a bit, but I hear it’s good)
    • Inkscape → Vector Graphics
    • Automatic1111 → Diffusion model AI toolkit (mostly Stable Diffusion but also has extensions for other diffusion based models like OpenAI’s Shap-E)

    3D modeling and Printing

    • Blender → 3D Modeling, sculpting, 2D animation, compositing all rolled together (simply one of the best examples of FOSS)
    • Meshroom → Photogrammetry
    • PrusaSlicer → 3D printing slicer based on Slic3r

    Video editing and Processing

    • Kdenlive → Genuinely good video editor
    • FFMPEG → Command line media toolkit (very complex but also works on android through Termux)
    • Instant NeRF → Neural Radiance Fields, think photoscan to a 3D representation (not meant to make 3D meshes unfortunately)

    Misc

    • Calibre → E-book management
    • Serge → Self hosted Local LLM’s made a bit easier to deal with
    • Firefox → Web browser

    FOSS I’m excited for

    • DragGAN → Manipulate images by intuitively dragging, more on this here and here (official code being released this month but there are already projects based on the paper with working examples)
    • CoDi → “Composable Diffusion” Any2Any conversion Txt2Vid, Vid2Audio, Audio+Txt2Img, whatever
    • Neuralangelo → Promises to be NeRF’s for 3D models (don’t know if it will be FOSS but I’m hopeful)