Evolution doesn’t demand anything, it’s literally about adaptation. The expectation of infinite growth inside an obviously finite system is the death cult.

“I’m a cat, I kill for fun.”

Dude, you are the greatest of all time. Thank you for posting this.

Edit: do/have you ever used sausage anywhere in there?

making a carbon copy

Is making it difficult?

“Do you have any bovine lactations?”

Brother, if you are having sleep issues and haven’t cut out caffeine yet, you owe it to yourself to start weaning off of it asap and see how that works for you. I can’t have any caffeine after noon, for instance, or else my sleep is fucked.

Other folks on here have already made the Xanax-anxiety connection for you, so I think it’s relevant to point out that in some people, caffeine is an anxiogenic, just saying.

I hope you find better sleep even if this is a dead end.

Interesting. I wonder how that compares to a similar Li-ion cell. Also it’s a shame there wasn’t a close-up on the markings of the battery in that video to know what it is exactly. I don’t imagine all cells are equal.

The battery packs from the article, for instance, are not constructed from cylindrical cells, but from large thin and flat square cells. The cathode material appears to be unique as well, as far as I can tell; who knows what’s in those blue cylindrical cells.

explosive hazard

Can you elaborate on that? I was just reading the data sheet for these batteries, and these are tested with a ballistic penetration test, resulting in no fire.

I’m presuming this concern is from watching videos of elemental sodium reacting with water, which stands to reason, but I’ve not heard of exploding batteries

you’re ignoring the root etymology of the word

Thousands of times a day for me, you don’t know the haff of it.

That’s like half a DeLorean!

Awwww, but I really wanted an [object Object]!

13 minutes by air, or 13 minutes by ground, out of curiosity?

The author knows this is true because that’s how their brain got removed. 🙄

I’d count on Apple making the RCS bubbles green too, just to sow further confusion.

It’s on Apple TV. They work okay. It’s family friendly without trying to be, so it’s not grossly saccharine like regular family friendly tv, IMO.

I guess now they are virtual assholes too.

Thank you for that info, now that I know that, I’m gonna switch to web only.

I feel like in the future this is going to get more intense. They will have facial+ear+gait recognition combined with AI so they can detect and combine literally every instance of shoplifting, intentional or not (to say nothing of footage that only coincidentally has the appearance of shoplifting but they retain it as “proof” anyway), over decades of visits to any of their locations, and once you’ve accumulated over $1000 combined in unpaid merchandise, hit you with a felony charge.

Or they just ban you after the first incident straight up, and electronically recognize you and kick you out for the rest of your life afterward.

And you would have no affordable recourse because they have all the footage and lawyer money to oppose fighting it.

No prob! I was curious how far I could get with a low-effort decoupling from Meta, and I’m sad it turns out that that’s not very far.

I updated my post a little with some more thoughts about the situation.

I think it would be cool to root it, but the hassle then to update it would be too much for me at least. And you would want the updates too because they are still adding improvements to things like controller motion tracking and whatnot.

I’m excited for what this quest version of Steam link can do for getting more VR content on Linux. Without the need for Linux drivers for the headset, it can just be streamed and the hardware work is done. Valve is clearly talented enough to get the software side working. It would be cool as hell to have a mode that turns the Steam Deck into a WAP (easy on Linux as you undoubtedly know) and you just connect your headset and start VR gaming from it.

Thank you for the discussion by the way. You’ve inspired me to drop my unit into its own SSID now, and log what it’s doing to keep an eye on it.

Okay, so I factory reset the thing, and to use the headset at all, the setup requires that you have to log in with at least a Meta account (only an email address needed, no Facebook), and you have to pair it with an app on your phone that controls things like developer mode. There’s no way around it, the first thing you are greeted with in the headset is a pairing code for the app, and you need the app to make the headset work afaict. I didn’t investigate if there’s a desktop app or web app.

Side note, apparently developer mode now requires a phone number or credit card attached to the account. Maybe a vanilla visa could work, not sure. I’ve already bought stuff through the quest store, so enabling developer mode was just a click for me. I used developer mode to install sidequest just now to see what it’s about, but neither it nor developer mode are needed for Steam link.

Mayyybe you could make a Meta account with an email address made just for the headset, maybe run the Android app in an emulator, but that would be a bit of a hassle imo. I suppose you could isolate the headset into a subnet, or it’s own SSID if you’ve got the gear for that, and keep it quarantined most of the time and just let it reach out here and there for updates, but who knows if it blurts out any collected telemetry while it gets the update. You may not have to let it out for updates at all however; when I booted into factory reset there was a “sideload updates” option, so maybe you could update it manually offline.

Honestly, as good as this headset is for the price, if I were concerned with absolute privacy, I would just cough up the dough for a competitors OLED unit. I could spend all of the hours I was frigging around with the headset doing OT at work instead, and just use that money to get something better without the pain and hassle. I get that’s not an option for everyone though.

Perhaps as an affordable compromise, if you don’t mind temporarily leaking a little data to Meta one time, you could do the normal setup but with an email just for the unit, install the app for 5 minutes on an old phone or tablet without a SIM for the setup, get Steam link on the headset, uninstall the app on the phone, and drop the headset into whatever Wi-Fi isolation you can conjure up. Maybe an isolated SSID or even easier, an affordable 5g router dedicated just to VR.

I don’t trust Meta either, but I gotta admit, it actually feels kinda neat to experience their $30 billion dollar metaverse disaster first hand while it’s still around to look at. For the record, the only protection I did was make a Meta account. I don’t use Facebook.