I had a very interesting experience watching Network recently, a film from 1976 about the influence of television, and I had a strange realization that TV then was nearly as old as the internet is now. This just feels like a natural point in the history of a communications medium that people begin to think critically about its effect on people and the way we think.

I do think a split keyboard design would serve a slate like this a bit better though.

I’d been looking into building something like this out of a Raspberry Pi, very cool that this is open source.

It was the early days of a new technology and way of listening that was completely different compared to the past 60+ years of recorded audio. I guess as a more modern analogy it’s like those cheap 3D films at the height of the fad that felt the need to gratuitously shove objects directly in front of the camera to get the most out of the 3D effect.

Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, who produced Pet Sounds, was actually deaf in one ear. Despite that, he got along just fine in a monophonic world, but the switch to stereo completely left him behind. It was a huge change in how music was mixed.

You have to understand that mixing consoles from that era were supremely limited in channels (think four, eight, later sixteen), to the point where they would often have to mix one section (say, the drums) and then record that mix to tape so it would take up a single channel and then do the guitar, bass, and vocals on another channel. The idea of having two of the same thing going through two channels was an exorbitant luxury they couldn’t afford!

Why is that a problem?

That seems really exciting! But don’t services like Discord forbid third party clients?

Genuinely the only way I want to use my phone. Everything I use daily is on the home screen, everything else I have to go searching for. White background, black icons, all notifications turned off. Simple and easy!

Element, one of the few (only?) entirely open source, encrypted, and federated chat platforms out there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaGYXjMwS60

ngl I’ve honestly gotten very frustrated at some of my friends for being very unreceptive to even trying a fediverse site, saying they would rather just stop using social media, and then signing up for Bluesky the moment they got the opportunity.

Currently everyone is talking about reddit here, which really exposes why the recent wave of people is here. Prior to this it was mostly leftist shitposting mixed with general fediverse discussion. I think the Mastodon side of the fediverse likely experienced something similar in October last year, but I can’t really speak to the culture before that because that’s the wave that I came over in.

I will say that even though there’s a lot of reddit spam right now, this amount of content and discussion is still way more entertaining than it was before. And Lemmygrad is still hanging out in their own little corner. It’s just bigger than that now.

At $3500 the Meta Quest lineup of products immediately looks better in comparison.

I feel like so many of these companies doing XR are trying to lean out of the fact that wearing a headset like that is inherently isolating, all because they want to sell to anyone other than the market of people that created these devices in the first place and gave VR its initial groundswell in the early 2010s, people who want to play games alone in their rooms who are completely fine with that. If these XR companies just accepted that that’s a really great market for these devices and then actually focused on them being a gaming platform I feel like the XR market would be a lot healthier overall. But instead we have to swing for the fences because these tech companies want to compete with smartphones(?) instead of with the PlayStation 5.

These devices are made worse because of that.