Analog and gravity-based ones exist and only make you look slightly more like a tool than Smart Glasses

Lmao of course it’s plebbit/seedit/whatever else they tried to call it.

Anything to do with Brave is yikes, and any step towards “opt out” advertising is yikes. Firefox went from “no bullshit” to “one opt out setting” to “30 opt out settings”. There’s always a first step. The only real reason to use Waterfox over Firefox in the first place is because you don’t want to have to find and whack all the opt-outs - Firefox with the right config offers every advantage WF does.

Yikes. Hopefully moving from WF to Palemoon or otherwise is just as easy as moving from Moz to WF.

One thing I’d like to see from an app like this is “force the video into an arbitrary file size limit” with a list of priorities to do so defined by the user. Say I’ve got a video I want to send over Discord (10mb limit) but I’m not intending for the vid to be fullscreened by the recipient so scaling it down to like 480x480 would be fine.

yt-dlp, but most of the time you’ll use some form of front end. All the “youtube downloaders”, even the shady websites, are using yt-dlp. For selfhosted purposes, I like MeTube for individual downloads and Tubesync for keeping up with channels.

Valve could prevent this by doing it like the Steam Deck and requiring an x year old Steam account with at least y game purchases on it to be allowed to order one. Businesses aren’t going to grab secondhand consumer hardware to save a buck, and even if they are the majority of Machine buyers wouldn’t be looking to sell (and the margin necessary to get someone to effectively put the price of a Machine on layaway then ship it to some business and pay taxes twice will probably erase any gains the company would possibly see from using Steam Machines instead of Optiplexes)

Why do I see this comment when I have lemmy’s “hide bots” flag set?

“The cloud” is somebody else’s computer. Somebody else leases you the space and compute, somebody else can turn the physical machine off or terminate your access to their service. Self-hosting is about removing as many somebody-elses as possible (you’re still on the hook for stuff like power and an ISP, though a lot of self-hosted stuff is also designed to function purely offline so it’s just power for that stuff).

FUTO can go fuck itself.

This headline keeps being repeated by this one for profit CEO. Have you looked at the business model being “disrupted”? It’s ads and upsells for premade CSS widgets.

“I have an oculus account”

Same thing. Facebook = meta = oculus. The ability to even have something called an oculus account is purely grandfathered in, lucky you for getting one in the good ol days and only giving facebook money once to use your headset as a pc display, but nobody else can do that ever again. It’s a “meta account” now.

“We don’t require a facebook account, we require a meta account”

“We don’t eat dairy, we eat cheese”

Can you install software directly to the device without a Facebook account? Can you update the device firmware without a Facebook account? If you buy a new one right now, can you play games on it without a Facebook account? Can it serve as a display for your PC without a Facebook account? Can you modify or alter the games and software installed on the system with third-party tools? If you get account/IP banned from Facebook for not providing/verifying your real identity when making the account, does your headset become a paperweight?

That’s what the “meta ecosystem” means. If you can’t operate the device without signing into a Meta account in good standing, the ecosystem is locked down. A corporation can break your toy whenever they want to. The Quest’s price to specs ratio is fantastic specifically because Facebook knows they basically have to undercut their competitors to that level to sell people Facebook accounts and make those people use their own software store, even if one or two Enlightened Individuals can manage to only make a Facebook account and use their store to download the PC connect stuff.

I personally consider the Quest at $500 to be an $800 headset that pays me $300 to make a Facebook account and that deal isn’t good enough for me.

Yes, but that’s Facebook. What i said was “either deal with Facebook or pay $900+”. Neither option is worth it to me for the novelty that VR provides. A Quest 3 at $500 or $300 with a completely open source operating system would already be on my shelf, but it’s Facebookware.

VR also isn’t worth “tradeoffs” like installing a proprietary streaming tool to kludge the Facebook thing into pretending to be a “standard VR” display. What Valve’s offering is something I can completely trust to:

A: not require any hoops to jump through to use with VR-capable software on my computer

B: work with any of that VR-capable PC software instead of requiring one locked down storefront (and the storefront it’ll be most compatible with is Steam)

C: work with any Android APK software on device, for the lower intensity VR toys like Beat Saber

D: be compatible with a variety of controllers and peripherals

E: not be connected to Facebook in any way

F: maintain an open source OS so that a community can fully maintain the software even if the original manufacturer abandons support for the device

For those promises, I’d buy in at up to ~$700. No other headset on the market currently fulfills this list for less than $1000.

The main (and big) reason to not touch Quest is Facebook. It’s Facebook hardware running Facebook software and everything you do is tied to a Facebook account. VR is a novelty, I don’t think it’s a novelty worth using Facebook or buying a $900+ piece of hardware for (and most non Quests have their own restrictions).

Plus as far as I know, Quest doesn’t work very well as a PCVR headset. So instead of my $2000 gaming PC, I’d be playing these ultra high resolution high refresh rate games on what’s functionally a phone. Frame is designed as PCVR-first.

I’ll stick with “just a browser”, specifically one derived directly from Firefox (FF being free software is the only good thing about FF that Mozilla won’t revoke or change). Mozilla lost my custom and I’m not responsible for cheerleading for them.

Check out the reply to this from the lead of the Waterfox project. Would I rather use a browser by the guy promising to turn my browser into an “ecosystem” of tools, or the one saying:

“Waterfox will not include LLMs. Full stop.”

“The browser’s job is to serve you, not to think for you. That core Waterfox principle hasn’t changed, and it won’t.”

“If AI browsers dominate and then falter, if users discover they want something simpler and more trustworthy, Waterfox will still be here, marching patiently along. We’ve been here before. When Firefox abandoned XUL extensions, Waterfox Classic preserved them. When Mozilla started adding telemetry and Pocket and sponsored content, Waterfox stripped it out. I like to think that where there is want for a browser that simply respects you, Waterfox has delivered.”

“Waterfox exists because some users want a browser that simply works well at being a browser. The UI is mature - arguably, it has been a solved for problem for years. The customisation features are available and apparent. The focus is on performance and web standards.”

And hey, because Waterfox is a Firefox fork, that oh so precious user agent data people love to bring up to dissuade people from leaving poor Mozilla to shrivel up is still telling websites ‘yep, this is a Gecko engine browser’.

Ignore all the AI stuff. I do not want my web browser to ever “evolve” into “more than a web browser”. I want it to be a web browser. I do not want an “ecosystem” of related products. I want a web browser.

They loophole it by not “hosting” anything other than text. Link to something and someone else is accountable right? Just ignore that data is data and any image or video can be expressed as a sequence of “text” :)

“it’s easier than you think” is one thing that’s very helpful to show to people that don’t already know about using free software without tracking and such, but when it’s “it’s easier than you think, just spend hundreds of dollars and replace your device” I’d say the barrier to entry is the cost more than the skill.

Aren’t there phones like the Nothing that already have fully FOSS android implementations pre-installed? That’s the peak “easy” - just buy a new product! So saying installing Lineage is “easy” to someone who very likely can only do so after buying a new product is burying the lede.

If you’re buying a new one, whatever fits your budget and is compatible with Lineage/Graphene.

The only times I’ve personally been forced off of a Samsung phone (though I’ve mostly had flagships) wasn’t due to any day-to-day degradation in user experience. It was stuff like switching USA carriers or my carrier blacklisting devices with 3g. My current S22 Ultra is three years old, going on four, and aside from needing to use adb and shizuku to have a semblance of control I once had with root there’s nothing wrong with it. My previous phone was only replaced because it became incompatible with my ATT phone service in the US. The Note 9, which was four years-ish old when ATT decided 3g+4g wasn’t good enough and deactivated any SIM i put in the thing. If not for that arbitrary carrier-made decision, I can’t think of many things that 9 couldn’t do that the S22U can.

My next phone won’t be a purchase I make until I absolutely need to make it, and at that point it’ll exclusively be a pick from degooglable unlockable models. I’ll probably choose based on hardware like an SD slot, removable battery, and stylus if any of those are available. Or maybe linux phones will be a thing at that point and I’ll be looking at those.