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Qie Niangao

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  1. Love this. Turn AI James Madison loose on AI Antonin Scalia and see what becomes of the "originalism" conceit. Just don't give them pistols.
  2. I mean, yeah, they're both payments that go mostly to the Lab, but they're buying different things, which I took you to deny by claiming it was delusional to pay for mainland. They'd only be buying (almost) the same thing if mainland couldn't be resold, which is how it works for estates, Linden Homes, and the hypothetical Mainland 2.0. As long as there's reasonable prospect of selling the mainland one buys, it's simply a different commodity. It's not that I'm arguing it's a good "investment" or anything—in one of these threads I recently called Mainland an anachronism—but it's still not delusional to pay for it. Also, at least for some Mainland, there's a reason for that "reasonable prospect" of somebody buying the land on resale: it's not as interchangeable as a parcel on Belli or a typical residential estate. Some folks want the predictability that comes with that kind of uniformity—Belli is a huge success because it offers just the right amount of customization for many (many) SL residents. But the "sense of place" of a Belli parcel is very attenuated compared to much Mainland where one parcel is remarkably distinct from all others; not surprisingly, those parts best retained value through Belli's growth (so far). I don't think anybody knows how much distinctiveness a Mainland 2.0 should have, at the cost of less predictability. Would that market want to bring their own structures as on mainland, where the neighbor's choice might be a little too "distinctive"?
  3. Apparently, unless the account has already pre-approved the necessary tier on the Land Use Fees dashboard page, they won't be able to proceed past the confirmation page (e.g., https://secondlife.com/land/lindenhomes/confirm/Fantasy_1024), with the warning:
  4. I guess they're the same the way buying a chicken is like buying a domain name: they both involve paying somebody for something. I thought the whole point of Mainland 2.0 was to make it different from Mainland by getting rid of that up-front charge and removing the ability to resell the land, as with Linden Homes and Estates, so I don't understand how it advances that argument by claiming that there's already no difference. If the idea is that the market should not value Mainland at all, there should be nobody willing to pay up-front for it with the expectation they may be able to recover some of that cost at resale, that's just denying the existence of a market that still exists despite competition from the Belli model now and earlier from Estates. I agree there's currently way too much Mainland supply for that market, so repurposing some of it for a new model is an interesting prospect, but doing away with the buy-to-resell model wouldn't come close to satisfying all customers of SL's Land product.
  5. Okay, but estates have almost universally charged only rent for as long at there have been estates. I mean, it's not surprising we don't have to buy hotel rooms even though folks still buy homes. Or maybe more directly, people still buy condos that are very similar to rental apartments that only charge maybe first and last month deposits up front. That's not to say rentals and condos don't compete, and estate rentals compete with mainland purchases, too, but they're very different business arrangements for the resident.
  6. Am I missing the joke here? Estates haven't stopped charging rent have they?
  7. If you're still using a viewer without Advanced Lighting Model (so it's doing forward rendering), I think it will still have a nearest single-digit limit on light sources (like six or something). If so, you can stack a bunch of lights along the border, all emitting black, so avatars on your side of those emitters won't see lights emitted on the other side. It's been years since I've actually done that, but back then "nearest" was based on distance from the avatar, not the cam; that would be good in this case, if it still works that way.
  8. Be that as it may, it's no accident that Belli parcels are sized to the bonus tier of the subscription levels eligible for them. (Well, I'm not sure who the 512 Belli trailers are supposed to target. I don't think they're particularly successful anyway, but it's weird that they apparently aren't available to Plus members, a subscription level I don't really understand either.)
  9. I don't recall saying that, although I'm not entirely sold on the idea. And I suppose I do think technically "many people" would refuse this opportunity because not everybody is ever going to go Premium at all, or tier-up to the level needed to support a 4096. What I tried to explain before is that 4096 is a particularly difficult size for Premium subscribers with the standard 1024 m² bonus tier. It may be a popular size on Estates, but I assume most Mainland and Belli owners are at the 1024 level, many with no other holdings. Tiering up from 1024 to 4096 leaves that whole 1024 "left over" in the current tier structure. Crap. So now I need to break out the spreadsheet to see if this makes Premium Plus super attractive: Well, sort of, I guess, so maybe the Lab could market these 4096s as an incentive for stepping up to Premium Plus, maybe offer some special pricing for Premium Plus tiers in general. (E.g., if Premium Plus got that extra 2048 for $9.50 per month instead of $13, they'd pay $363 per year for 4096, same as Premium, with all PP's extra benefits instead of the spare 1024.)
  10. Yeah, but before Belli, many folks who were sick of Mainland anarchy abandoned their Premium subscriptions and moved to Estates. Now many of them have another option. Any Estate owner who serves the lower end of residential cannot possibly miss the competition from Belli.
  11. Have you looked at the map? That space between the old Mainland continents, remember that? It's full of Bellisseria. Private Mainland is an anachronism. Residential Estates are next. Ideally there'd be so much expanded demand that it would fill all that new capacity with enough to spare to still fill the old Mainland and Estate models. But that would be asking an awful lot. Really, just look at all that added land. Maybe eventually the Mobile Viewer will fill the obvious gap. Or maybe not, but that viewer doesn't exist yet, so yeah: obvious gap. Why does Bellisseria trounce the older SL Mainland product, and why are Estates less affected? Gosh, what could they have in common?
  12. Rose Courteau, in "Our Anesthetized Culture: Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld", The Rumpus, January 30 2024 following up "How to save culture from the algorithms", Decoder, March 11 2024
  13. Sorry, I'm a little busy in RL right now so I can't respond as efficiently as I'd like, and you raise good practical considerations. The way I see it, experience permissions granted in an attachment should apply (almost) exactly the same as how all existing attachment-enabled permissions are handled, so if detached, they just don't apply to the avatar session unless/until reattached. The big difference is that existing attachment permissions are for the scripts inside the attachment, whereas the experience attachment permissions would be obtained by other scripts (attached or not) based on the fact the experience permission-granting attachment is being worn and the land doesn't disable it, in contrast to how land-scope experience permissions require the land to have it enabled and the avatar account to have it approved. It doesn't seem that much different, but I'm sure there are details to be designed. For example, I don't know how it works now if I use the viewer UI to "forget" a land-scope experience that a script is using; however that works might be what happens when an experience attachment is detached. I guess I have been tacitly assuming that the "experience permission-granting attachment" holds that permission in an Experience script, but a developer might prefer to use some other authorization token instead. I'd expect that most experience permissions would just naturally be associated with pre-existing HUDs. I do see, however, some utility in being able to combine more general purpose experience permissions in a single attachment, to store those we want to use grid-wide even though they're not grid-scope experiences for everyone. Right now, the only one of those I know I'd want is, indeed, AVsitter, but other attachment-scope experiences might emerge if the feature were available. Anyway, yeah, managing combined experience permission tokens/scripts in a single attachment might need some design work to keep it simple.
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