Rangers and Diamonbacks fans may be few and far between on Tildes, but I figured it's worth a shot!

Let's use this post to discuss the battle of the underdogs.

As for myself, I'm a lifelong Rangers fan, which is to say I'm used to misery. It's a bit surreal to be back in the WS after such a crazy end to the regular season AND postseason.

Just saw this other thread about the FNaF movie actually doing quite well at the box office, which apperently is much newsworthy and something I should care about. This here thing is popular, this and that is trending, read all about it. Yay. Well sure, it's quite nice they made their money back, but I felt it looked a bit overproduced and cookie-cutter like. Okay, haven't actually seen the blessed movie, but I've decided to hate it, so there!

I know about David Lynch, I know about Cronenberg, I know about J-horror, all that old stuff, but are there any contemporary horror movies which will screw me over? Something a bit more art-house and crazy? I've been a bit away from movie for the last decades, but I'm unsure if I'm out of the loop, or if there is anything to be out of the loop about.

Upcoming Dates:

• Timasomo Showcase Thread -- Sunday, November 5 (one week away!)

Technically all work should be finished before November 1st (but if you're running up on time, that's never really been a hard deadline 😉).

November 1-4 are for putting finishing touches on the project to ready it for the showcase.

If you need an idea of what the Showcase thread will look like, here's last year's.

Update us on your progress so far!

• What did/didn't you get done this week?

• Anything go according to plan?

• Anything go off the rails?

• Any successes or struggles to share?

• Do you need feedback or help on anything?

This is your topic to share anything and everything you want about what you’ve made so far.

The release of the Meta Quest 3 seems to have been slowplayed but my take is that Zuckerberg is still going full force ahead with MR but doesn't want to have a fiasco like the last round of publicity about "the metaverse” when people were mentioning it in the same sentence as blockchains and NFTs.

I read a lot of very positive reviews about the hardware

https://www.theverge.com/23906313/meta-quest-3-review-vr-mixed-reality-headset

https://www.reddit.com/r/QuestPro/comments/17631ja/24_hours_in_my_quest_3_review/

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/meta-quest-3

so I got one and I am really impressed. It comes with a very convincing demo where cracks appear in the ceiling and walls of your room opening views onto another planet and then aliens come into your room that you have to shoot with the controllers to stuff them into a tube. I am showing this demo to people on the hopes I can sell some kind of MR exhibit to a local museum.

Karl Guttag could show that the MR quality is "awful" from an eye chart perspective but the motion-to-photon is really excellent, you can throw and catch a ball just fine wearing it, and it is totally practical to walk around the house, interact with people, read (large) text to copy, use a touchscreen, etc.

I get the feeling too that they are doing many of the right things to market it, for instance, it comes with a license for a major game that comes out in two months which will might give people who don't click with it right away a chance to re-engage. There is intensive notification based marketing with discounts and stuff which is totally textbook for a new app store and that I like at the moment but it is possible it just won't connect if the product isn't up to snuff.

I tried Horizon Worlds and ran into the problem of not being able to succeed at the fishing minigame (in real life I've only been able to catch sunfish and smelt, but you really can fill up your freezer with zero skill with the later) and also the way it is weirdly empty. I have some content that I think could be put in there which I think is often a good idea on a new platform that is heavily promoted (e.g. easy to get free publicity and other benefits from the platform) but that emptiness might mean they don't feel pressure to get content. VRChat was more fun but showed me the challenge of onboarding people to that sort of thing, I got into an entrance room where I met one person who was actually attentive and trying to communicate and I think a lot of kids who were "doing their own thing", I figured out some of how to interact in that space but the problem of "getting gud" while sharing the space with other people who might be annoyed seems tough.

My take is that the software is not up to the hardware right now but as a software developer I think that’s a great problem to have.

If you're excited about Apple Vision I think you should be excited by this. Any thoughts? Anyone tried the MQ3? Anyone developing content for it?

I'm seeing a lot of news in my feed about Qualcomm chips approaching laptop performance, such as

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-looks-like-the-windows-worlds-answer-to-apple-silicon/

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21105/qualcomm-previews-snapdragon-x-elite-soc-oryon-cpu-starts-in-laptops-

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/qualcomm_x_elite/

Will this turn out any better than the last few times Microsoft tried to break away from Intel? Would you want such a laptop? Will it wake Intel out of its complacency?

Every few months I get the itch to support journalism and expand my news from the low quality high fluff news sources that tend to be free and subscribe to some long-form sources of news, opinion, and investigative journalism, but every time I go through the same process of pricing subscriptions, struggling to decide which one, and then finally just giving up and not subscribing to any of them.

If money was no object I'd probably subscribe right now to:

• The Atlantic
• The New Yorker
• Harpers
• The Economist
• National Review
• WSJ
• NYT

(trying to focus on a variety of political leanings, but mostly from generally high-factuality sources)

I like Apple News+ in concept, and the price is decent, but after a trial subscription I felt like the UI was difficult to navigate, difficult to search and filter, and the news sources were still a subset of the entire publications. I also have to wonder whether the journalists are sufficiently compensated by Apple or whether they get pennies compared to a direct subscription.

So, I come here seeking recommendations -- perhaps somebody here has found a good solution to this problem?

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

I saw people talking about YubiKey here a few weeks ago so I got curious. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing a lot of helpful reviews for it.

I’m personally getting tired of having to take my phone anytime I need 2FA for Okta but I don’t have a lot of super important accounts to secure so I’m going back and forth in deciding whether the 100+ euro investment (to get two so that there’s a duplicate) would be worth it.

How do you use your YubiKey in your personal life and do you think it’s worth your use case ?

I've just come from my latest rewatch of Blade Runner and its sequel. Two of my favourite films ever. I always find myself totally engrossed in the atmosphere of the films, and I often crave more of it.

Update (Nov 1, 2023)

The app is now available for alpha testing on TestFlight: https://tildes.net/~tildes/1bt0/three_cheers_for_tildes_ios_version_is_open_for_alpha_testing_on_testflight

Original post

Hey Tildes, I failed to account for certain time-consuming parts of the TestFlight submission process, and so the first iOS alpha of Three Cheers will be delayed at least a few days. I'm disappointed I won't meet the promised October deadline due to this oversight. Sorry to anyone who's been eagerly waiting on the edge of their seat (@cfabbro). I've been working hard on the app though, and excited to release my first ever iOS app soon.

It's in approximately the same state as the Android alpha version, which is to say, it's functional and pretty stable bugs-wise (fingers crossed), but missing a lot of features you'd expect from a Tildes app.

For example, you currently can't: apply comment labels; see reply notifications; submit new topics; change sort options.

The plan is to get this released and then go back and add new features to both the Android and iOS apps.

If you're an iPhone user and looking for more features right away, check out Backtick and Surfboard, two great apps by talented developers.

For Three Cheers, I've made a point of supporting iOS versions back to version 12.4, which includes iPhone 5s and iPad Air 1st generation. So if you're using an older iPhone/iPad that doesn't run the other apps, you might want to give Three Cheers a shot when it's ready.

Thanks for bearing with me! I'll post another topic when the TestFlight link is ready. (And maybe request for this topic to be locked if needed.)

I'm on the search for a good, over-the-ear headphones that actually blocks out background voices (not just noise). My wife and I share a home office and she is on a lot of calls. I'm looking for headphones that are comfortable to listen to for long periods of time and really muffle the outside world. I have two headphones I've been using, Sony MDR-7506 and Bose QC45. The Bose does great with blocking out ambient background noise like fan hum. However this has the effect of accentuating my wife's voice. Her voice is tinny but more clear even when listening to music. The Sony does a better job of blocking all noise and attenuating her voice, but I can still hear it.

Wired is better since I run multiple computer through a mixer so I can hear all the computers at once when I have the headphones on.