Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: New World Tech
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The Lensa app has gone viral in recent weeks, with much excitement over its new AI-driven “magic avatars” feature. Small problem: It's not exactly magic nor purely artificial intelligence. Instead, to create these avatars, the app is apparently scraping up artists' images without their consent. The image appropriation is so blatant in many cases, the…
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Game industry artist Martin Nebelong recently started experimenting with ChatGPT, and discovered he was able to quickly create an entire “choose your adventure”-style adventure game through the AI text generator. Taking that a step further, he then took the ChatGPT text and fed it into Midjourney, the AI image generator, which then created illustrations to…
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We saw Twitter employees' opinion of the company in the Elon Musk era last week, now here's a survey of Meta employees taken as the social media giant started laying off thousands of its own staff. Courtesy of Blind, the anonymous messaging app, this survey reflects the opinion of 1,179 verified Meta professionals in the…
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Just got some pretty amazing new data from Blind, the anonymous online community app for employees: In a survey of Twitter staff using the app conducted from November 7 to 10, a full 89% say they don't believe Twitter will succeed as the social network company's new CEO. (See image above.) Based on incessant reports…
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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…
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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…
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SL Redditor /RealEvilind recently posted this tantalizing image, showing Second Life running on Steam Deck, the handheld videogame console from Valve, and they report it gets pretty great performance: This is Firestorm running on the Steam Deck pretty well. It pulls off 30 – 40 FPS in a normal crowded area, on high, with ambient…
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The title of the study published in Nature is "Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation", but it's specifically referring to Zoom-style online video calls: In a laboratory study and a field experiment across five countries (in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia), we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas… Specifically, using…
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Update, October 18: Many more details from Thor in Comments below. Replying to our open forum call for tablets that can run Second Life, Andabata Thor sent along this screenshot with details: "I am often on SL by tablet CHUWI Hi10X 10.1 inch. 1200×1920 and Clear Linux OS. I think that for a senior like…
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As promised last week, here's the results of a survey conducted last weekend by staff at Blind, an anonymous messaging/virtual community app for employees, asking users their opinions on the recent whistleblower allegations made against Facebook. About 5,000 responded across many social media companies, with nearly 10% of them (482) staff members at Facebook itself.…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 