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Spiffy Voxel

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    Friendly Neighbourhood Big Blue Rainbow-Marked Alien

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  1. Spiffy Voxel started following Neromancer, Snow Crash and Second Life , What is the cost of the computer you use to run Second Life? , People that like exploring? and 7 others
  2. Spiffy Voxel
    I have a 2017 iMac 27-inch machine, which cost £1749 as a basic spec (8GB RAM, 1TB Fusion Drive, 3.5Ghz Intel Core i5, Radeon Pro 575 4GB) when I bought it in early 2018 to replace my previous 2011 iMac 27-inch. I subsequently spent in the region of £300 to upgrade the RAM to 24GB (2018) and later 48GB (2020), and more recently spent about £100 for a new external SSD to run macOS from. Those upgrades have removed most of the bottlenecks on my machine, and it runs pretty darn snappy! As far as Second Life goes, performance has increased immensely over the last few years thanks to viewer improvements, and if anything it's even better running the latest Alchemy Viewer or the official Linden Lab viewer. The remaining constraints on this rig are down to Apple: it will be stuck at macOS Ventura now (unless I take a chance with OCLP) and OpenGL has been deprecated for several years now in macOS. I'm considering getting a MacBook Air at some point for my non-Second Life workload, and installing Linux on this machine to hopefully make it a better performer for Second Life.
  3. Spiffy Voxel
    First off, happy burpday Love! 🎂 I have a fairly thick skin when it comes to dealing with others online, partly because I've been doing it for a long time, going back to the early 1990s, online services like CompuServe, and the pre-Web Internet including IRC and Usenet. 👴 Most of the folks I've encountered over the years have been pleasant to deal with, and the few exceptions were easy to avoid or block from view. Sadly, politics has always been an area of potential conflict — I started running into people who took against me simply for not sharing their worldview back in the 2000s on Slashdot. 🤷‍♂️ Social media, and virtual worlds like Second Life, have just multiplied the ways in which people can express and propagate their tribal loyalties (and get in the face of those they perceive as the 'enemy'). 😒 That is one reason why I came off all the major social media platforms completely back in 2019, along with fatigue from trying to keep the flow of the Firehose at a manageable rate. (I've tried Mastodon a few times, but it suffers from the same issue of Too Much Stuff.) As a rule, I don't block people in Second Life — that is reserved solely for spammers. There are a few people who I no longer deal with in-world, for various reasons around trust, but I simply avoid them rather than block. Thankfully, I rarely encounter anyone who wants to try and rile me up, and I respond by ignoring them and not giving them the attention they crave. I don't judge people on their in-world appearance — as someone who uses their avatar as a canvas, I totally get others using theirs as dress-up dolls, and more power to them. Their chat or their profile will usually tip me off early if they're liable to rub me up the wrong way, so I just sail on by.
  4. Spiffy Voxel
  5. Spiffy Voxel
    It wasn't me! 😆
  6. Spiffy Voxel
    You are correct that Meta could do that — but I suspect that AI model generation would make the current performance issues that Second Life has with unoptimised or poorly optimised mesh content look positively minor by comparison.
  7. Spiffy Voxel
    From experience of hearing the output of current AI tools for commercials, they still struggle with conveying emotion or even conversational intonation. Much like text-to-speech, the result can easily slide into the robotic or the Uncanny Valley unless it's manually tweaked or refined. But yes, that is probably the future trajectory. Which sucks, especially for those doing that kind of work.
  8. Spiffy Voxel
    Talking about movies reminds me that I started watching "Idiocracy" last year, but had to stop after the first 40 minutes because it was reminding me too much of the state of the world now, never mind in 2050. 🤦‍♂️
  9. Spiffy Voxel
    PBR IS AWESOME! (Ducks incoming projectiles)
  10. Spiffy Voxel
    Not a Peeve, but a Celebration because this topic has reached its 900th page! 🎉 That's a LOT of Peeving! Well done, guys & gals (& others)! 🥳
  11. Spiffy Voxel
    Minor Peeve: Having store credit but only being able to use it if there's enough to cover the price of the item you want to purchase — no partial funding allowed.
  12. Spiffy Voxel
    I feel ya. Time zone differences mean that lots of RP areas are empty when I do visit them. And many of those places don't really cater for or seem to want non-humans. This is why I don't do any RP these days.
  13. Spiffy Voxel
    I'm tempted to say, based on a sample of the various avatars I see at shopping events, that the majority are either 'freak-show' or 'uncanny valley'. 🤣 Yes, they might pass as 'human' if you squint, but I think that's being generous. has been proudly non-human since 2017.
  14. Spiffy Voxel
    Peeve: the iPhone XS is considered 'old' now.
  15. Spiffy Voxel
    Wow! I've not touched a floppy disk in a long time! Fun fact: there are a few stockpiles of them out there, because some machines still need floppy disks for updates. And when I left my former full-time employer in 2012 they were still doing diskette duplication orders occasionally. I recall finding some old ZIP disks many years ago, and managing to get hold of both a ZIP drive and the software to retrieve the data I'd backed up to them in the early 2000s. Those were neat, except for the dreaded Click Of Death. 😱 I keep a portable CD/DVD writer around for the occasional music CD that I'll purchase second-hand from time to time, so I can rip them into my music library. (Yes, I still have one of those. Streaming music services are great for convenience, but lousy for actually holding onto stuff you like.)
  16. Spiffy Voxel
    From what I can tell, AMD don't appear to have much input (pun intended) into the display driver system on macOS — it's mostly Apple's stuff, so any performance issues are most likely on them.
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