[Thunes to acquire payments platform Tilia LLC]

8 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

Well you had to agree with the Tilia TOS in order to become premium

Thanks, yeah, that seems to seal off L$ sources. That being the case, I'm not sure there's much point in bypassing Tilia for sinks (such as the hypothetical L$-denominated tier payment).

I guess we don't really know how much Tilia takes from the US$ subscription fee. (Do we? It's sorta none of our business but might matter to the Lab going forward.)

[Thunes to acquire payments platform Tilia LLC]

21 minutes ago, aht1981 said:

such casual anti semitism. utterly disgusting

5 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

What do Israel and the Jewish people have to do with this? 

God help the moderator. The image is obviously ironic (I mean, "Aliens"?), poking fun at all the dopiest of conspiracy theories. But then there's Poe's Law.

 

[Thunes to acquire payments platform Tilia LLC]

29 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Well, I would hope that only LL can define the exchange rate for L$/USD!

Oh, I'd assume so, yeah. But that raises an interesting question: if the Lab sells L$s on the LindeX to maintain the exchange rate, do they use a Tilia account to receive the US$s, same as residents selling L$s? That seems insane but… hmm.

[Thunes to acquire payments platform Tilia LLC]

10 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

I am not seeing how that could work since you have to change your linden dollars into USD to pay your premium charge. At least that is how it used to work. Maybe I am missing something. 

For those starting out with L$s, sure. But the idea is to find a way for those without L$s to get L$s without buying them through a TIlia account. If US$ payment for a Premium subscription doesn't go through Tilia (and I'm not sure it doesn't), then this way the Lab could bypass Tilia.

And that all assumes it's in the Lab's interest to cut Tilia out of the loop. They created Tilia for a reason, so they wouldn't want to solve those problems again for subscription revenue unless that's already how it works.

[Thunes to acquire payments platform Tilia LLC]

4 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I assume LL will still own the "L$ Exchange", and Thune will only own the "Buy L$" and "Cash In L$" parts, like with Tilia.

Hmmm. LindeX buying and selling use the Tilia US$ account, so I'm not sure LL really "owns" the L$ Exchange.

But I think stipends are a way to obtain L$s from the Lab without going through Tilia. Might this motivate the Lab to define other products/subscriptions that do the same?

Every L$ source must have an offsetting sink, so if there are other stipend-like sources, might they consider L$-denominated tier payments as a sink?

[PSA for people looking for LockGuard scripts/info...]

I'd assume it's this page under discussion: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Protocol/LockGuard (so a Second Life wiki page, not Wikipedia)

[Edit: That's just what came up when I searched the wiki for "Lockguard", so I may well have misunderstood this thread.]

[Community Round Table?]

After Thunes' announcement, Inara Pey posted:

Quote

I reached out to Linden Lab on hearing the news, and was informed that although the company has nothing further to add to the Thunes press release at this time, those from the company who will be attending the forthcoming Community Round Table (informally announced during the April 19th Lab Gab session, and featured in my summary of that event) will be prepared to discuss the acquisition. I’ll have a post on the Round Table as soon as all information relating to it (where, time, how to attend / watch) is publicly released.

This Linden Lab post on the Forum thread sets the May 20th date for an "open meeting" where they'll be prepared to discuss the Thunes sale in detail.

[Thunes to acquire payments platform Tilia LLC]

41 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Occam's razor would suggest to me that a final agreement about the Tilia sale had yet to be reached by the time it came to record and broadcast the episode of Lab Gab.

Oh certainly. But at Lab Gab they announced this Community Round Table thing with no initial topic or timeframe, at the very time they were concluding that Tilia sale.

True, they may have spent the first Round Table on policy change fallout from the recent Medium-rare scandal. If so, I bet they're mighty glad to have another topic about which to engineer ambiguity.

[Thunes to acquire payments platform Tilia LLC]

15 hours ago, Ceka Cianci said:

Wonder why this wasn't in the recent lab gab?

I meant to mumble about this. What we're hearing now from the Lab must surely be communications carefully crafted by both (all?) parties to the sale. It's not only Lab's story to tell, and there may be ongoing obligations about how they tell it.

The Lab Gab connection here is interesting, though. They announced the new "Community Round Table" communications medium, and lo and behold, the first one will address this Tilia sale—a topic surely in the works at the time that Lab Gab was scripted. Coincidence?

(I can't claim that original thought. Credit where credit due, as usual Inara Pey with the scoop.)

[Thunes to acquire payments platform Tilia LLC]

3 minutes ago, JacksonBollock said:

As stated however, assuming a profit is made, only a proportion will be reinvested in SL. 

Agreed, re-investing some proceeds of sale into Second Life is up to whomever manages the Linden stake in Tilia.

And without seeing numbers that I assume will never be public, we may be talking about pennies here. I've always thought Tilia rode the hype tide very well, but it's a tiny business and like any buyer, Thune didn't pay more than it had to for it.

Thing is, without knowing more than I do about both the sale and the terms of JPMorgan's and dunamu,'s investments, it's not clear to me that they sold their equity stakes. I'm first to admit that may be obvious, just not to me.

[Thunes to acquire payments platform Tilia LLC]

2 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

My guess is they don't care about SL at all. A company doesn't buy something like Tillia because they think it's nifty and they just gotta help LL and their customers. A company buys Tillia because they intend do something with it to make a profit from it.

Well yeah, Thune isn't a charity for wayward virtual worlds, but Tilia currently has only two customers, one of which matters to the business and holds a minority stake in the venture. Thune surely needs to keep that customer satisfied.

It would be enormously enlightening to see the terms of that five year "partnership" agreement.

[Thunes to acquire payments platform Tilia LLC]

3 minutes ago, JacksonBollock said:

Profit is what's left after you pay everyone you owe - which in the case of Tilia is quite a few people.

That's interesting. Are there employment terms contingent on Tilia not being sold? Or is this about the JPMorgan Chase stake, which presumably went along for the ride, right?

[Thunes to acquire payments platform Tilia LLC]

2 hours ago, JacksonBollock said:

With the tech landscape evolving rapidly, Second Life’s technology and user engagement models appear increasingly dated. Without significant reinvestment—a prospect made unlikely by the current strategic direction—Second Life might struggle to retain its relevance in the coming years.

Since the Waterfield / Oberwager purchase, LL has poured quite a lot of investment in the Mobile viewer and other platform updates (notably, viewer-side, glTF compliant "PBR" materials, and server-side, the most expansion to the scripting library since it started). These may make SL more saleable, or to keep it viable as an operating asset, but they'd be money wasted if the plan was to just milk the cash cow for a few more years.

(IIRC it started before the LL purchase, but they also invested a lot to migrate from data center hosting to AWS, necessary to keep the business viable, but also making it more saleable.)

2 hours ago, Nika Talaj said:

You could even say that the Tilia acquisition is part 2, with part one being the departure of LL's VP engineering and VP marketing in January.

Or cause-and-effect might be reversed. Prospects of some Tilia acquisition would have been in the C-suite aether for a while. Unlikely that pushed the VP's out the door but might well have delayed exec hiring until it was clear what's to become of Tilia. (Tilia currently has separate engineering and marketing, right? If Oberwager couldn't sell it off, they'd be pretty much forced to streamline it to legal and operations only, so LL engineering and marketing would need to absorb it.)

4 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Thanks to SL's unique economy, for some, this isn't a novelty or escape. This is their place of work.

This is tragedy waiting to happen. Anybody with options to diversify should be exercising those options. Even in the best of times it's just crazy risky to stake one's livelihood on a single game. But now, never mind this Tilia kerfuffle, anybody in any kind of game development must be hunting for AI-immune niches—which will be few and far between in that industry. SL may remain fun for artisanal mesh hobbyists, for example, but what do you really think is going to be producing those fancy future glTF scenes? Will you be prepared to paint with those AI brushes?

All about sex

To organize some tunes for the paranoia bandwagon, yeah, LL's owners must surely be weighing the future of Adult content in SL because:

• Payment processing may get marginally messier with only a minority stake in Tilia, unspecified (to us) contractual obligations, and no readily available alternative.
• Mobile is a dead letter without listing in Apple Store and Google Play Store. I've heard rumors that Apple may admit pr0n, but it's another hurdle to clear. If it's Mobile or Adult, one or the other, that's a hard call.
• That absurd Medium piece got the gullible so riled up that the Lab is forced to concoct some policy response. What we've heard so far is sleight-of-hand about child avatars—the usual suspects and always a crowd pleaser—so response to any real issues is still vague.

So yeah, if I were Oberwager, I'd be considering whether Adult is really worth it. In that position, wouldn't you?

On the other hand, Adult content is important as an ongoing market differentiator for SL. It's not something an owner would just abandon without serious analysis.

[Thunes to acquire payments platform Tilia LLC]

1 hour ago, Alwin Alcott said:

weird thing is that Thunes and others speak about "aquire" ... not partnership.. that are two very different meanings.

I think "partnership" is what you call it when you become a customer of your former subsidiary (that you still hold a minority stake in).

Honestly, I think they did well to find a buyer for this turkey. It's not worthless like Sansar was, but if Oberwager can dine out on this for a while, good for him.

[I made a TV for YouTube and I'm trying to make the media shared]

2 hours ago, sandi Mexicola said:

what about if you own a parcel, and you set the parcel media, either manually or with a script?

The problem is what the service is willing to stream, not so much how nicely the script asks for it. That's why the easy but expensive solution for syncing is to take a single feed from the service and multiplex it out as a live stream to as many viewers as want to be in sync.

For parcel media, the PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT and PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_TIME parameters are relevant here, but only for those rare services that expose compliant streams. But even before shared media, and even accessing video files, what you'd actually get would vary from file type to file type and even across different viewer OSs.

One can append a time code to YouTube video URIs but that service is wildly variable about when it will deign to stream what's requested.

[Blocked and derendered avatars showing up in local chat.]

I don't think it's what you want, but one way to find things without using Area Search is Build / Pathfinding / Region Objects and select the column by which the table is sorted and otherwise adjust the settings, although this doesn't list all objects, only the ones you're able to move. So that's sometimes very useful (and often surprising) but unlikely to reveal a chat extender.

But chat from an object should come labeled by the chatting object's name at the time it did the chatting. For a chat extender, it probably changed its name to that of the person doing the chatting, but unless they're doing something clever, you should still be able to right-click that label and get object-profile information about it, show its location on the map, etc.

(Maybe chat extenders do that "something clever" but I need to get in-world and fiddle a bit to see if "clever" is easy enough.)

[ETA: Nope, it's not as simple as renaming the object with the viewer URI for the agent whose chat is being extended. Not surprising when I think about it. So I bet you can click the chat-extended name and get all about the chat extender. I'm not sure that helps here though.]

[ETA 2: Oh. Well that's embarrassing. They could just set the object name to the empty string and do something like this:

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llSetObjectName("");
        llSay(0, "secondlife:///app/agent/"+(string)llGetOwner()+"/inspect says unspeakable things about your daffodil garden.");
    }
}

so then if you right-click on what looks like the speaker, instead of a menu for the chat extender object you get the menu for the agent—in this thread's case, the very agent you tried to block before. So yeah, that kinda sucks. It's not an exploit, it's just a chat extender being too "clever" for its own good.]]

[Premium membership land with no classifield and with search not allowed]

8 hours ago, diamond Marchant said:

I hate that. But...

There is a thing called the "borrowed tier loophole" that can be attempted. Say you are buying 1024sqm at auction and only have 950sqm of tier currently unallocated. You can borrow 74sqm of tier from group... make the purchase... deed the 1024 to group (getting 102sqm returned) and then reallocate the 74sqm back to group. This is possible ONLY if you have a group to borrow from. You could also borrow tier from another resident. Linden Lab lets you get away with borrowing for short periods of time without reclaiming your land. Your mileage may vary.

Unless that 74 m² was tier the account originally contributed to the group, I don't know mechanics for an individual account to do this borrowing, neither from group nor from another individual account.

It's certainly possible for an individual to withdraw enough of their own group contributions to put the group briefly underwater for tier to cover land holdings. (Some transactions are almost impossible without that ability.) But I don't know how one could withdraw more than one's total contribution, if that was the suggestion

[Lab Gab April 2024 - Comments? Discussion?]

17 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I'm not sure how a "community round table" can function with a community as large and diverse as Second Life's.

Betting that no more than 1% of the entire active userbase will even know it's happening and only a tiny fraction of that will ever attend. We've had specific subject user groups for years and they have been broadly one sided and poorly attended.

Yeah, this sounds the same but more like Philip's "town halls". They were scheduled at times convenient for San Francisco, and despite the world back then having only a fraction of SL's concurrency today, they filled a four-region corner to capacity (160, presumably), so they were also streamed (to Welcome Center parcel media, maybe?).

Anyway, the point is the upper ranks of the org chart seem to be showing some interest in connecting with their customer base through transparent, structured interactions.

May be all for show, but maybe they'll engage for real. Kinda depends on audience reaction, I suppose. Those town halls had some acrimony too. For whatever reason, eventually they stopped happening.

I'm sure we can kill these, too, if we put a mind to it.

[Premium membership land with no classifield and with search not allowed]

You can buy all 1400 m² individually as a unit and suffer the extra US$ 4 for the first month only during which time you divide the land between you and your friend. Or—and this is much better—you and your friend donate enough tier to the group first, then buy the land "for group" and you won't get dinged that extra four bucks.

But unfortunately I don't think you can do that with auction land. I believe they will immediately set the land to the winning bidder's account and, if necessary, increase the land fee level for that account. (This is one way buying abandoned land is easier than doing it at auction because abandoned land is set for sale to the requestor, and they can choose to buy it for group.)

But… I'm looking at the current and scheduled auction listings and I don't see any 1400 m² parcels. Not only that, but there can be no parcel sized exactly 1400 m² because land comes in 16 m² quanta, so maybe the "1400" is just illustrative? But anyway, just wanted to be sure we're really talking about auction land here.

Auctions can be a cost-effective way to get land, but the price shown at any moment may be far below the price the land actually fetches during the last few seconds of the auction. Or not, but bid the amount you're willing to pay and it'll either win or you'll keep your money.

[as soon as i login i crash! can someone help me?]

Is it correct that Firestorm launches, but then crashes after you provide your name and password and try to login?

If so, you can (maybe) get a little more information to help figure out what's going wrong. Pull down the menubar "Help" menu, and choose "About Firestorm" which should show a window with a "Copy to Clipboard" button. Click that, then paste the results in a reply to this thread so readers can see more about your Firestorm installation and machine configuration and help hunt for clues.

It probably also generates a "Firestorm.log" file in your <home directory> AppData\Roaming\Firestorm_x64\logs directory. If you search that for "error" (and/or "warning") you might find some hints about where it's failing.

When it crashes it might generate a core dump (even if it never gets to the login screen). But that takes some special help to interpret, so let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Oh, just to be sure: you said you tried "older versions". Does that include using the standard Linden viewer instead of Firestorm? If you haven't done that, I'd very much recommend trying some other viewer. (Not that there's anything wrong with Firestorm, it's just good to know if a different kind of viewer behaves the same way.)

[Lab Gab April 2024 - Comments? Discussion?]

7 hours ago, Feorie Frimon said:

Tilia employees used my personal information to creep on my LinkedIn account. 

How naive can these Tiia people be? Everybody knows not to use their real LinkedIn account for stalking, duh.

(What? Did you think Tilia account statistics are based on real people? Somebody's gotta plumb the vast web of greedy minions of disgraced former presidents, you know.)

[Lab Gab April 2024 - Comments? Discussion?]

I haven't had a chance to watch a minute of it. Just caught this on Inara Pey's indispensable blog:

Quote

COMMUNITY ROUND TABLE

[Video: 24:14-25:17]

A new channel of communication to launch in May 2024.
Being seen as a more “general purpose” user group meeting type of forum where users can put forward their ideas on how to improve Second Life to executive members of Linden Lab’s leadership.
Details to be forthcoming soon.

Looks interesting

[Flying on Login...do we have a schedule for this to be fixed?]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Camming rows of booths only works until you get lost (forget where your cam is and have to start over).

An attachment can keep a history of your last many distinct cam position and focus pairs. That part is easy and good enough to get back to where you were looking, say, five minutes ago. It's not necessary to sample the cam all that often, and only need to record anything if the cam moves, so it's pretty negligible as a lag contributor.

It gets a little trickier (but still not very resource intensive) to use llCastRay to try to identify what the cam is looking at. That can provide a readout of stuff the script can find out about the object (or land, or avatar) in view, and to tag some stored cam positions with object name identifiers. I find it handy for personal use, but it also unveils the many frustrating ways llCastRay runs amok. As a product, it would deserve a crappy rating, there's no fixing it, and it's beyond anyone's patience to explain why it's so often so confused.

[What Justification Is There For No Mod Permissions?]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

THANK YOU! Seeing this more and more now. It's so mean spirited, AVSitter is a fantastic project and one we should be very appreciative of - both as users and creators - and yet I'm seeing this more and more now.

As you say it is a direct violation of the terms and arguably the products that are doing this should be removed from SL.

I suppose many of the creators just don't know any better, and have overgeneralized a rule that things they embed need to have permissions stripped (especially animations, for AVsitter users). But I'm at a loss for re-educating them that respecting intellectual property doesn't mean locking everything down. Sometimes I try to explain, but I'm not sure I've ever succeeded.

[Updater script using llRemoteLoadScriptPin]

17 hours ago, Quistess Alpha said:

Or, perhaps your updater could just rez an updated copy where the old version was and tell the old version to delete itself.

That sounds scary, though.

It wouldn't be an option at all if the objects were modifiable, so deleting one could destroy customer content it contains or links to or is painted on its side, all assuming the customer hadn't locked the thing, defeating the whole process.

But even no-mod, the object could be known by its UUID to other customer content, such as particle beams.

Then there's Land Impact: the replacement must have no greater LI than the one its replacing, and only rez after the old one is deleted, freeing-up the LI for that replacement. Even so, if I tried this, somebody would have a script rezzing up to parcel capacity the instant any becomes available.

The really sad part is that the other alternative, updating through remotely supplied object parameters, got significantly nerfed with mesh, whereas before a script could change any object into any other object of the same or fewer links (at least).