New World Notes

Best Laptops For Second Life: Recent MacBook Air Model Runs SL Surprisingly Well (With Some Graphics Settings Tweaked)

Thanks to reader "dkronfeld" for sending this photo which effectively demonstrates a pretty surprising point he made in a recent open forum: With the right settings, Second Life runs pretty damn well on a recent model MacBook Air! Pictured above is his 2020 MacBook Air with an M1 processor, 16GB RAM, and the 8 core GPU. (This one here, with a starting price of $999.)

Emphasis on "right settings", though, as dkronfeld explains:

Best Laptops For Running Second Life: ASUS - ROG Zephyrus Recommended for Great Graphics & Power, MacBook Air for Lightweight Access

Above: Whiskey's laptop running SL  -- photo courtesy Whiskey Monday

If you're looking for a new PC gamer laptop that runs Second Life well, acclaimed metaverse artist Whiskey Monday recommends the ASUS - ROG Zephyrus 16":

"This is my new laptop and it's light and ridiculously powerful in Second Life," she writes in Comments. "I can run Second Life and Photoshop at the same time and while the fans are loud, it runs like a champ."

It's currently selling for under $2000 on both Amazon and Best Buy so definitely worth a look. As for the loud fans, that's a frequently reported side effect of the Firestorm viewer grunting and groaning to process all those high end graphics. (For what it's worth, my Dell G5 15 gamer laptop runs the official SL browser pretty well without heavy fan action, but then again, I generally don't run it on maximum graphic settings.)

Above: High-res image created on Whiskey's Zephyrus laptop (via her Flickr)

"Light" by the way, might be a relative term, because (as reader Mondy notes), the Zephyrus is just over 4 pounds. That plus the AC adapter may get you in 5-7 pound range. Which might not seem heavy, but if you're planning on taking it many places, I'd definitely recommend a good backpack that distributes that weight well.

Speaking of weight, longtime reader "dkronfeld" recommends (somewhat surprisingly) the MacBook Air, which weighs in at under 3 pounds. However, that comes with a graphics hit and settings to adjust:

Here's Why Midjourney-Generated AI Images Can Be Called Art

Really smart points by reader "Liv", on whether AI generated images like Dr. Nettrice Gaskins' Midjourney-based works can be called art:

Like all artforms new technology comes along, and equivalent debates arise in different fields. “Is electronic music really music?” Same question.

Some people will always value craft (or instrumentalism, in the music case) and so for them no it won't be art. And that’s fine.

For the rest of us art is about ideas. Brian Eno talks at length about how he allows machines (or software) to create sounds. and how his role becomes that of a curator. When the pseudo-random oscillators create a pleasing result only then does he mark that recording as one to keep. And what order does he edit and present them in? That is the art that makes his ambient music interesting.

Or consider another form of art where it's also possible to cheaply and quickly generate many, many digital images:

No, Virtual Reality is Not In Its "Early Days" (Comment of the Week)

Above: Nintendo's consumer VR launch in 1994 

Is the market for VR headsets small and active usage apparently low (especially among Gen Z) because virtual reality is still in "early days"? Reader Nadeja thinks otherwise:

I don't think we are in the early days of VR. The earliest HMD were made in the 1960s. NASA worked with HMD in the 1980s, Nintendo had something too. [See above - WJA] Then there were several commercial releases in the 1990s. Now we are in the 2020s.

I rather think that VR headsets aren't so practical and human-friendly. I'm not talking about the technical limitations, the lack of peripheral vision, nausea, the risk of hitting or stumbling on anything as you have essentially a blindfold... but about the HMD device itself.

You could say that someone can wear a HMD for hours, but in general sunglasses and eyeglasses are probably about as much as one can take, and some people still prefer contact lenses.

We need a paradigm shift around HMDs. When VR will be as widespread as smartphones, we would likely not use HMDs, but something else.

Fun fact: In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that VR HMDs would replace the smartphone by 2025. With the smartphone market currently at about 6.5 billion, compared to VR's total install base of maybe (and at most) 30 million, I'm sort of guessing that's not going to happen.

The categorical mistake, I think, is not realizing that unlike VR, mobile phones had an immediate and obvious broadly valuable use case from the very beginning:

Since Only 5% of Gen Z Uses VR Every Day, is Meta Wrong to Promote Virtual Reality Like a Mainstream Technology? (Comment of the Week)

Responding to our question on how many active users on the Quest VR headset there are, a reader points us to a recent market survey which suggests that use is quite tiny, especially among Gen Z:

Piper Sandler completes 43rd semi-annual Generation Z survey of 7,100 U.S. teens...

While 26% of teens own a VR device, just 5% use it daily. 48% of teens are either unsure or not interested in the Metaverse

This prompts reader "lieisacake" (LOL) to observe:

In Praise of Rec Room's Live Creation & Teaching Features -- and a Defense of Its Cartoonish Graphics (Comment of the Week)

Many interesting comments in last week's post about Philip Rosedale's desire to bring back in-world, collaborative creation as the gold standard, including this one by Martin K., going into detail about how many resources it has for that feature.

Have a look at this page, it links to Discord servers of dozens of classes that are taught live in VR. (Discord is typically used for scheduling classes and other asynchronous communication.) These are not videos but live classes in VR. 

How many such live classes about creating worlds are there in VRChat? In Second Life? Supporting a culture of live teaching is probably reason enough to support live collaboration.

Rec Room the company also has a very active YouTube channel devoted to in-world creating and scripting (see above).

Writing further, Martin somewhat objects to my comment that Rec Room's cartoonish, blocky graphics may not be broadly appealing: 

Linden Lab Should Offer Per Country Pricing for the Estimated 1 in 3 Users Not In Wealthy Nations (Comments of the Week)

Very good point from reader "Alelangel Verenova", responding to my survey on interest in Second Life's new Premium+ account offering, which will costs up to $25 USD a month:

Here in Latin America there will be a major NO answer, basically because the exchange to our local money. It's an important amount per month, even per year to consider only for a "game". Maybe it could be worth it if you are a creator and you earn good money on Second Life, but besides that, for this side of the world, it's expensive and useless.

It's a very valid point! Based on recent user data, roughly 1 in 3 visitors to SecondLife.com are from Latin America and countries across Asia and Europe (see the full below) outside the wealthy G7 nations, where $25 a month is pretty modest fee for many hours of online entertainment. Here in Los Angeles, for instance, 25 bucks will pretty much get you just two (2) movie tickets, i.e. 3 hours of entertainment. In most other parts of the world, however, $25 is enough to buy a week or two of groceries. 

To reader Luther Weymann, a retired tech exec who now enjoys Second Life in his free time, the solution is obvious:

Second Life's New Premium Plus Not Always a Good Deal -- But Could Be Made Better (Reader Comments of the Week)

Lots of good reader feedback around the just-announced Premium Plus offering for Second Life. According to  Luther Weymann, getting a Premium Plus in his specific scenario would not be a very good deal:

I have a free account.
I have a 2048 store in a private region for monthly rent.
I have product development that I upload textures at L$10 each.

Suppose I buy the $249/yr premium plus, move my 2048 store to the mainland, get the weekly stipend and sign-up bonus, and stop paying for texture upload. In that case, I spend about $100 a year for the premium. I already pay about $100 a year for the SL Market sales commission. So I would go from paying SL $100 a year to $200 a year, and I only gain more groups.

Yikes. I imagine many SLers are in a situation like his. Speaking of product development, Dee has a very good idea of improving Premium Plus for content creators:

There's Not Enough Computing Power in the World for a Fully Sentient, Independent AI (Reader Opinion of the Week)

Smart thoughts from reader and tech exec veteran Luther Weymann, reflecting on the questions of AI sentience brought up by a recent Washington Post story on the Google developer who believes the company's chat bot has already achieved it:

Artificial intelligence programs running on machines use databases on computer systems to receive instruction for action and sound. These databases can deliver information from dedicated databases. Still, more likely for more human-like interaction, the data comes from many types of databases into a central repository and then to the machine.

The ability to have anything even approaching what we socially call “sentient AI” will require mainframe processing and a massive database repository at the ready. Conventional servers process about 300 million operations a second. To truly power AI into a world where the AI machine will be really human-like is going to take mainframe power into the 300 billion operations a second capacity. Mainframe databases, when appropriately distributed, can meet that challenge.

But now comes the exciting part:

Is It Fair to Analyze Blockchain-Based Metaverse Platforms Based on Their User Numbers, Not Potential?

Valid question from reader "Mitch", responding to my post last week pointing out the tiny weekly active users of blockchain-based metaverse platforms:

What qualifies an active weekly user in this chart? The Sandbox is still in Alpha. I joined to check it out, I thought it had potential, and then I uninstalled it and I'm waiting for the launch date... Do I count as a lost user, or are you making that assumption? I don't think low user count in this case necessarily correlates with low interest, but it does certainly correlate with the development stage and the lack of open market, at least for the Sandbox. In order to see the value that investors see in these platforms, you can't just look at the platforms themselves. These guys are banking on broader, long-term trends in the development of the web3 space.

To understand any species we need to consider its place in its environment, and the same principal can be applied here. Decentraland is being built in expectation of future demand, and I see it being a powerful tool for venture DAOs the future who need collective work and social spaces. If you don't know what web3 means or what a venture DAO is then you don't have enough context to make any claims about the future of these platforms. The web3 space is exploding with nascent possibility for large scale changes, and those take time. I wouldn't be concerning myself with these user numbers for at least another two or three years. This is a huge structural shift and onboarding people to that takes time as well; I think the "hype" was really just a prep course for society on the upcoming paradigm shift.

I do work with some colleagues in the web3 space, and they make a pretty good case that the technology is worth experimenting with. But it is still very unclear how much of the promises being made by web3 advocates can or will be fulfilled.

And as I can say from painful personal experience, this is a key reason why it's so important not to only follow the potential or possibility of a technology, but actual consumer adoption of it: