Prokofy Neva

January 13

On 1/11/2024 at 11:29 AM, Diablo Lioncourt said:

In his defense, most of the "land barons" who post on these forums are little guys like myself who serve one particular niche. Most of us do this for fun; it may pay for our SL, maybe our Internet & light bill, etc. It's a hobby we made into a side hustle.

Before my skybox business got so big that it financially made sense for me to buy my own sims - its actually cheaper to leverage someone else's buying power and sublet getting started - I personally spent most of my SL as a tenant. In some ways I think that helped me become a better landlord when I decided to get into it.

Anyway, most of the places I rented parcels from as a tenant were huge estate companies with hundreds of private sims managed by a skeleton staff of humans, with some scripted help to restart sims as needed, dynamically adjust asking tier in response to current demand similar to Amazon pricing bots, autoreturn abandoned objects, etc. They give you a covenant with some basic rules, instant access to your land as soon as you pay, and then they're as "hands off" as possible as long as you keep paying and follow the rules. Their game is all about serving a large volume of people with relatively thin margins; they don't typically have time or patience to explain anything to anyone or teach you how to use your land, and they sure don't have time to tell anyone their trade secrets here. There's too much work to be done when the sim to human ratio is 100 (or more) to 1; they may be incorporated in another country just to get around VAT, outsourcing Chinese staff, etc to turn a profit. It's ultra-competitive.

As a result of all that capitalism, unless you own a half sim or more, its often cheaper to rent from one of these big companies than it is to own land directly through LL as a premium member. This is more or less what the creators originally intended.

It makes absolutely no sense to rent land from somebody else to then run as a rentals business. There is no way that this is cheaper in the long run.

In fact, I forbid it in my rentals, because I don't see why I need to absorb all the business costs of purchase and tier for somebody else's business. It's always best to own your own land.

January 13

On 1/11/2024 at 5:19 AM, Love Zhaoying said:

Wait, that doesn't describe you?!

Nope, I'm a very small landlord, I have a total now of about 13 sims' worth of land, spread across about 55 sims.

January 13

https://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2024/01/this-is-what-midjourney-and-chatgpt-are-like-every-single-day.html

January 13

The AFK avatars *are* the newbies.

January 12

Tenants who send me a friendship request merely to see if I'm online, in order to make a request.

They haven't figured out that they can look in the group to see if I'm online, it's small enough.

I used to just accept them, but that spawns ANOTHER aggressive, obnoxious behaviour -- sending force-ports to their DJ session or event.

So now I reject them routinely.

And they also don't realize that contrary to what many evasive merchants say, my messages don't cap because I have tied them to an email, which I read.

January 12

On 1/10/2024 at 5:20 PM, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

A barrage of IM's arriving the second I log in.

Give a person few minutes to check the mail, set their keys down, and take off their coat before demanding their attention.

Yes! And...Give them another few minutes to find those keys they set down...some place...and put them back in their bag because they need them to unlock so many things in SL...

January 12

18 minutes ago, JUSTUS Palianta said:

Im still using flickr, I just had to pay 60 US bux so i can advertise and flash my boobies. I don't think it's as busy as it was but it's still useful as a merchant. I use the SL web feed too for lazy pics and for making my SL X Jealous. ♥♥ I also use wordpress so i have a back up of my store images should flickr die.

Yes, I'm glad you reminded me about your back-ups. I rue the day when I used to post SL photos on a service that died, leaving lots of holes in my blog. So now I save them on my hard drive when I do a post to my blog.

January 12

I post mine on Twitter/X much of the time -- very rarely on Facebook. I like to snap and post photos of my travels and purchases in SL and I miss the old system where you could easily do this with an inworld app, long since retired.

I let my paid account on Flickr go when I saw a lot of people file out of Flickr last year, when they began to enforce their rule that if you have adult content, you must have a paid account. I could see where they were going with this and it's their platform of course, but they also very vaguely defined it as "global norms" which can include...Iran.

I personally don't enjoy NSFW type SL photos in my face but for a lot of people, taking and displaying photos is central to their SL experience.

I've been amazed to find what seems to me self-evident -- that a lot of people left Flickr a year ago -- is challenged now. But maybe they crept back? Or maybe it's like this forums, a few vocal types get the mindshare?

I personally don't get that much out of Flickr and rarely go there except at times like Fantasy Faire. Some stores seem to have left but I still see some top SL merchants, only not with paid accounts.

Google Photos works fine to store a lot of SL photos if you are worried about losing them. But I guess I treat everything on the Internet as ephemeral.

I will say this: whenever I see a merchants' event that doesn't have the photos displayed on seraphimsl.com itself, but link you to their web page or to Facebook, their items automatically seem lower quality to me. Something about it...

January 11

19 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

I doubt what's posted on these forums has any real impact on prices/sales in-world. I don't believe most of the grid knows.

Note that not a single major land baron -- particularly the really big dogs with hundreds of islands -- ever post on the forums.

A few lesser breeds do read them as I have discovered, but they don't post. Some have sworn never to post because the Lindens used to have this mantra that if you were permabanned on the forums, you should be stripped of your land inworld and ejected from SL. But then they dropped that in later years, although one can never be entirely sure.

The forums do have an impact, but it is not always measurable.

It's not true that the rest of Belli would be abandoned if they made an adult Belli. For one, if you are up in a skybox, in mature, and you don't display yourself, the Lindens basically declare you as "safe" and won't prosecute you. It's more the public adult activity like clubs that they want in Zindra. Some of the extra cautious with enemies who spuriously AR them will also go to Zindra.

Again, as I know from my tenants, there is a sizeable contingent of SL users who do not engage in any form of adult activity. This may due to the fact that they "have lives" and RL partners who, at the end of the day, with all their human failings, may be "more fun" and more stable than the virtual types that can and do disappear at any minute -- and the beauty part is, they can't make alts in RL, at least not without a lot of trouble and expense.

More people prefer shopping and socializing -- which can consist of IMing people while they sit in their house alone -- than sex. True story.

If the Lindens saw Belli empty out into an adult Belli, all they'd have to do is allow commerce in the original Belli and they would stop that outflow. And by "commerce," I mean even tip jars in art galleries or at parties with DJs, which are not currently allowed.

January 10

5 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

Auctions are just one source.

My biggest source of good parcels is directly from the end users who want to move and don't want to abandon their long-loved Zindra City/Coast or Blake/Belli area parcel. They may have no recollection of what they paid for it 10 years ago, but they know its definitely still worth something. They often figure contacting land dealers directly & comparing offers is an easy, convenient way to get someone to come take it right away.

Then there's abandoned land. Some people just have "the eye". Most people I know like this also happen to have a lot of rentals and rental experience, and have lived or owned land many many different places. "Good land" (mainland that will keep residents long-term) is very complicated. Things like "protected roadside" and even "protected sailing" adjacent are only part of the story. Its as much an art as a science. Some people (especially those who sail/fly a lot, and have lots of sailing rentals in moderate) just seem "get lucky" with AL over and over.

Back to auctions: They're more important to land-flippers than they are to your average resident or even your average landlord. They appear to be implemented in their current form to "suggest" options to newbie land flippers and anyone else interested in some "high demand" access inventory (typically at a higher price than direct purchase, and with a limited selection compared to the "aftermarket") , but auction inventory appears to be scripted-process-selected, based largely on region avatar count. This is certainly one common-sense measure of" demand", but things like a club full of AFKs, sailing waterfront vs mountains in the same region, etc etc etc will fool it over and over.

The point isn't that they're "one source". Obviously there are far less parcels on the auction than inworld.

But they are a good indicator and an important one, and most of all, an easily visible one, because the map is sprawling, and you can be distracted by $50,000 1024 m2 lots that aren't reflective of the norm.

Sailing is overstated, and sailors have gotten a lot of Linden love that other groups have not. I find most people even on waterfront DO NOT sail. It is expensive, difficult, and boring. They'd rather fly or drive, if they have to have some kind of transportation.

I have no idea what this gobblede***** is supposed to mean: "but auction inventory appears to be scripted-process-selected, based largely on region avatar count.

Supposedly land barons have scripts to determine which parcels on the auction come from sims with low avatar count? By what definition and time slice? The reality is, there are few enough auctions that a land baron can tell at a glance using his own experience and common sense what is worth it, based on rating, waterfront and protected status, etc. The end users and sometimes even the barons will go in real time to look at a lot and see claim dates, FPS etc. I don't see evidence that this is done by bots, or that it would be easy to script and interpret if it were.

January 10

6 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Ah, so all of those people selling land don't count..? Only auctions..?

They're selling it for lower prices AND abandoning it, duh.

They're not selling it for higher prices.

Don't be fooled by the outliers of $50,000 for a 1024 m2 sailing lot not even in the Blake Sea. Look around what even good land is going for.

I'm beginning to think this thread is a troll to drive prices up to the benefit of the few...or something.

January 9

On 1/7/2024 at 6:27 PM, Garnet Psaltery said:

I'd been looking for Vogon poetry (as in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) but went down a rabbit hole and found this.

There are dozens of those, it's like space prog banjo rock Muzak.

Subscribe to 666MrDoom and you will get a ton of similar types of bands, usually prog rock or space rock.

January 9

January 9

22 hours ago, elleevelyn said:

i agree. Random, meaning uniform distribution, is not fair in some use cases. The allocation of Linden Homes is one of those cases

as you say with uniform distribution is possible to always get the same number. When so we can say that this is a catatonic state for the user on the receiving end. Is not enough for the implementer to say: is random so is fair. Is not fair at all for the individual receiving. Linden Homes should not be a roulette game

with serial distribution of a set of ordinal numbers [1,2,3,4,5, etc] where the last abandoned home is added to the end of the list then when there are say 100 homes available then at 5 pulls a day will take 20 days for that last home to show up. Which is fine when the home is a undesirable, but not so fine when is a desirable. (Desirable being subjective to the individual)

In 1971 Horst Feistel invented a block cipher algorithm (feistel network), which is pretty much used in most encryption methods in some modification or other. The purpose of a block cipher is that the output can be decoded to get back the original value. it follows that when we encode all inputs/values of a set then no two outputs will be the same, and they can be decoded back to the inputs without loss

given this then a feistel network can produce a "random" arrangement (permutation) of a set of ordinal numbers. So with [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] there are 120 arrangements: 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 120. Which can all be produced given a "seed' in the range [1 .. 120]

taking the cookie idea mentioned earlier then it need only contain the set id (type of home), seed (arrangement id) and the serial index number. Incrementing the index by 1 to produce the next home

looks random to the user but it isn't - is deterministically biased compared to uniform distribution. A thing is that many people like bias when it comes to 'random' meaning that they like it when it comes out [3,1,5,4,2] . Much more than they like [1,5,1,3,3] or [2,2,1,1,2]. And when it comes to Linden Homes then many means most if not all people

has been about 53 years since Horst Feistel invented this algorithm, so is not like is still waiting to be discovered. When a SL resident can implement a arithmetic feistel network in LSL then this is not something beyond the ability of a Linden professional programmer to do

for sure the programmer (more the product manager) has to decide what happens on change

Like when the next available home has been taken by another person. The most common method is to increment the index til it matches a available home. Understanding that when the index exceeds the magnitude, the index rolls over to 1 and starts over

the other change happens when the seed is changed. Which requires a reset. On reset is when the homes abandoned since last reset can be added to the available list, homes claimed removed. Which gives a new magnitude (number of available homes)

ps add. Alternatively to do the same thing then create an index list and do a Knuth shuffle on it (similar to llListRandomize). A feistel network doesn't require a pre-shuffled index list, which is the only difference in effect

pps add. For those still reading who maybe into this kind of thing

yourNewHome = llFrand(llGetListLength(AvailableHomes));

this is pretty much how it works now. llFrand (equivalent) produces a uniform distribution (like a roulette wheel)

if as a Product Manager, my programmer offered this as a solution for my Linden Homes paying customers then I would give them my stoneface and say "Really!"

and if they stoneface me back I would say "REALLY!" and not give them any cream cake for afternoon tea. Til they come back from reading up on Knuth, Feistel, Galois, Margolis, et al. and go to me "Oh! yeah"

and I will say "Yeah!" and off they will scurry on the promise they will get two cream cakes next afternoon tea. Seeing as how I ate their other cream cake myself due to all the agony I was feeling when I had to say "REALLY!" 😻

annnd if I was the programmer and my product manager said we going with the one liner solution then I put in for a transfer to another team. There are somethings that all the cream cakes in the world can't compensate for

I don't think you're admitting my point, which is that in a very finite world like Second Life, serial processing in a line, with first available coming up, then next available etc. is more productive and fair than any form of randomizing whatsoever.

The 5 pulls are not in isolation. For one, people use 5 pulls per account, and they may have dozens of alts. For two, lots of people are pulling, so it's not in isolation. That's why there are scarcities. But the Lindens can't afford to add more sims that will be empty when the fad dies out.

January 9

1 hour ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

I believe you're quite correct.

Having said that, both auction and retail sale prices have gone down significantly over the past year. In Zindra, for instance, the supply of land that's sold in a "retail" setting by land companies mostly comes from auctions and existing landowners who want to move.

People who really want to move are seeing the prices and undercutting their neighbors, and/or reaching out to land flippers asking them to buy their parcels even cheaper. "Hi I have a 1024 3x protected plot in Kama City I've been trying to sell for 25k... would you wanna take it off my hands for 10-15K?" kinda stuff.

The "teaser" announcement about something "spicy" and "adult" doesn't necessarily mean what everyone seems to think it does. If I was the Lindens, my first priority would probably be adding adult Linden home neighborhoods. Why? Because SL's most loyal and profitable long-term users will feel more free there. You just don't get 60 year old HOA Karen berating you to close your windows or take down your "offensive" artwork in adult. The small number of vocal superprudes who monopolize the welcome areas of SL has always emboldened people like that to invent rules like "no nudity in moderate" and "sex whips are weapons" in the vanilla mainland.

We aren't segregated into the effective ghetto of Zindra and isolated private islands because we asked to be. We're there to keep a bigger group of less profitable users every mainstream "square" business leader still perceives as more lucrative comfortable. Money talks, however, and the new owners of LL have been following it in a way the old owners simply didn't. The notion that SL would replace mainstream social media is now laughable, so appealing to theoretical mainstream later adapters is no longer a concern.

I've never had any neighbour ask me to take any art work involving nudes down in Mature -- only in General.

As for welcome areas, they are filled with working girls holding up signs, not "superprudes". I don't know where you got that crazy idea.

You must be in the wrong line of work.

The Lindens will dilute what little value Zindra has left with "adult" by adding Bellisseria adult regions, but I can see why that is in their interest.

January 9

5 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Right, so with all that, I submit the theory that "auction prices" are not necessarily a good metric for land prices overall. Just for auction prices themselves.

No, auctions are a Linden's judgement that what was abandoned will likely sell on the auction, and not be left to sit there and be requested for only $1/m. So indeed they are a reflection of the market, a very powerful one, since this is a CONTROLLED market.

AND they reflect the willingness -- or not -- of land barons to use their trading tier to pick up land they can flip or sell long term if they pay a lot.

So of course it's a reflection of the land market. It IS the land market.

January 9

9 hours ago, Clem Marques said:

The auction results reflect the poor performance of the land sale market quite clearly. Zindra seems to fetch lower prices than it used to a few years ago, and the land sales have apparently slowed down at the moment. That's the impression I get. Believe it or not, it was a struggle to sell protected roadside parcels in Kama City for as little as 9 L$/m2 last month. I know I am not the only one who has had a hard time with that, as there are currently similar cases in the Donathan and Strute regions of Kama City. I have seen others in the past few months. Can't sell parcels even if you price them at a loss. Go figure.

There currently is a very large 1x protected Kama City parcel in the auctions (https://places.secondlife.com/parcels/291508/baern-152-54-adult-8064m) and I am very curious about what the result will be on that one. My guess is that it won't be too expensive, especially considering the fact that it's a big parcel that can't be subdivided (covenant rules) and not everyone can afford a tier that high. But still... it's protected land in one of the best parts of Zindra.

I don't think the land market as a whole is crashing. The land sales seem to be struggling at the moment, but my guess is that it is due to a shift in the market trend instead of a crash. Zindra parcels in particular have gotten so expensive that many seem have given up on owning land in that continent, choosing to buy abandoned Moderate land for 1L$/m2 or cheaper Moderate protected parcels instead. That is the clever thing to do nowadays if one wants to own land for anything other than an adult business or club.

There seems to be a high demand for Linden Homes nowadays, particularly the 2048m premium plus ones, which is understandable because they are very nice. That might be one of the contributing factors in the drop in land sales. And of course, there is the option to rent land, which is definitely appealing considering that it's often way, way cheaper than buying the parcel and paying the monthly tier for it. There are some very affordable landlords out there providing a roof for those who are not so well off, and I appreciate that. Another important factor might be people's RL financial situation not being so good, which is unrelated to SL but does affect the amount of money people are willing to spend here. However, despite all of that, there are still people out there who buy land, so it can't be that bad.

The market varies a lot, this might just be a temporary issue. I love land in SL, and I hope things improve.

"Crash" was never the word to use -- "Crash" was Ryan Linden opening the old auctions at ridiculously low prices years ago, THAT was crash.

But downturn? Steady decline? Signs that virtual worlds tend towards entropy (my theory)? Indeed.

I feel it picked up a little bit latelyy, that's only because I sold a few parcels after lowering their price a bit -- they had long been sitting out there and baking in the sun. Fortunately, one is to an end user, I'd prefer them as neighbours. I just saw another neighbour who bought land I had sold to some flipper ABANDON rare 40+/- waterfront on deep sea. I thought of asking for it, but you know what? I am steadily tiering down and that's the right thing to do.

The other parcels sold went to flippers, and they've put these so-so Sansara waterfronts at ridiculously high prices, so now they can tier New England, which they've covered with sea-sand-fun junk which I think will actually harm their sales potential.

January 9

2 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I should hope you can change the color of the exterior, if you don't care for the blue!

No, that blue is the exact blue of Titania so I think I'll keep it.

January 9

These are dreadful, I love them : )

Managed to snag one, abandoned it, got it again, checked on another account whether there were any left and they weren't. Not too happy with the location but it will do now for...

THE HONORARY CONSULATE OF TITANIA

...which is on the run again after that unfortunate incident after the New Year's Eve party.

I think we managed to ditch M. Carter Blanc back at the fishing grounds of the last place but one, in any event he's ON HOLD FOR NON-PAYMENT and that's where we like him.

Carry on!

January 8

I'm starting a new thread as the "Mediterranean Theme" thread is more about house furnishings and landscaping.

As of 2:06 PM EST on January 8, 2024, there were NO AVAILABLE Mediterranean Theme homes randomly from the website.

I don't know if it makes sense to go inworld and look around for one to request via ticket.

I realize when they are first rolled out, new themes are in big demand, then people tire of them.

PS There were no available ranch homes or stilts on water, either, according to my view of the page.

So I will come back later.

January 8

On 1/3/2024 at 7:27 AM, elleevelyn said:

the main issue is when the Random function has a uniform distribution. meaning any of the available Homes have as much chance of coming up on each roll as any other home. When so then is possible for any kind of Not-The-Same-As-The-Last function to go catatonic. "Catatonic" being a qualitative description

for example there are 10 homes available. We have 5 homes (we have seen and abandoned) Homes [1,2,3,4,5] on our Not-The-Same-As-The-Last list. We try for another home next day. The random method selects a home in the range [6..10]. Say is 6. We abandon the No. 6 Home as well. No. 1 home is added back into the available pool. We try again for homes [7,8,9,10,1] and get No. 1 Home again. Our Not-The-Same-As-The-Last list is now [3,4,5,,6,1] and the available homes are [7,8,9,10,2]. And we get No.2

whats the probability that we only get to see one different home each day that we have not already abandoned ? 5/5 * 1/5 * 1/5 * 1/5 * 1/5 = 5/3125 = 0.16%

and the probability to see all 5 available homes in 5 rolls, abandoning them all: 5/5 * 4/5 * 3/5 * 2/5 * 1/5 = 120/3125 = 3.84%

96% of the time we will see 2, 3 or 4 homes that we didn't see yesterday

we could extend the Not-The-Same-As-The-Last list to more than 5, but at some point we run into sizing issues. Like our Not-The-Same-As-The-Last list could be equal to the size of all available homes minus one

this all said. A way to do this is to not use a random uniform distribution function. To use a biased "random" function. And the most biased "random" function is an Arithmetic Feistel Network algorithm which will produce only one instance of each number in the range in some random-looking order. A LSL example of this is here:

with this algorithm then we get to see all 5 available homes in 5 rolls in some 'random' order

The Lindens put "randomizing" in various things -- not just Linden Homes. They used to randomize the infohubs on the Mainland to which newbies would be set.

There is a techie fascination with randomizing in the belief that it is "more fair" and "more democratic." But the obvious problem with it as I'm sure you know is that if you have a very finite set of elements to randomize -- and everything about Second Life is very finite -- it is not the Internet at large, it is not Google -- then you will randomly get the same items again and again, sometimes many times in a row, because it's random. That's what random does. It can randomly give you the same things again and again.

That's why I believe serial selection would be better for SL than random selection when it comes to these kinds of offering of available choices.

January 7

Internet sites of radios and media deliberately change the streams to drive people back to their site to click on the ads. They need to pay their bills.

It has become harder and harder in recent years to find the numbered URL you require to put into the SL land menu.

Some companies like Radionomy got fed up with SL users taking their streams and thus disabled them.

You can sometimes go to a site that converts lettered URLs to numbered IP addresses, but they don't always work.

You can buy radios from various SL merchants but the URLs inside them always go dead eventually and the creator may not bother to try to update them.

This site occasionally has some workable streams but less and less lately.

Take Ambient Sleeping Pill, for example. You can convert it on a domain-to-IP converter page but does it work? No.

January 6

The past auction wins are an instructive page to examine; these disappear nearly instantly on the official SL page (or are hard to find, and when you do pull them up, they only go back a week or two on the regular web page). So this is one thing that bonniebots does that is useful, although it comes at a cost, of course, of bots everywhere.

Note Zindra - $4+-$5/meter. Supposedly this "can't be". Yet there it is, again and again on the auctions -- or less.

Remember, as Qie pointed out, everything on the auction was once abandoned! Or, in far more rare cases, the owner died in RL or their land was seized for non-payment by the Lindens and then auctioned.

Note if something is $0 it's because it got no bids at all.

January 6

Only objects in "share" can be moved, but you don't want to put them in "share," at least for long, as then they can be jetted up to the sky by griefers or even stolen if on transfer.

The Lindens will not respond to a request of this nature unless the deceased left their land to you in their will. You can try, however, you never know.

January 4

Very helpful to understand how people come to take the Soviet/Russian view of history, economics, politics -- and of course the Holodomor, which Duranty reported falsely. (And this problem persists today with the war in Ukraine).

Interestingly, he reported the Volga Famine accurately, and his problem was not believing Bolshevik propaganda naively, but understanding it all too well, as he spent a lot of time foot-padding around places to be an eyewitness to traumatic historical events.

Rather, the issue was that he admired and approved of the Bolshevik methods of brutality, mass terror, disinformation and manipulation for the sake of building communism -- the end justifies the means. Not for the faint hearted.

https://www.amazon.com/write-please-Walter-Duranty/dp/B008GDH8F8

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