https://hypebeast.com/2026/1/razer-project-ava-ai-companion-3d-hologram-kira-zane-faker-sao-release-info

Razer has officially pulled the curtain back on Project AVA, a “Friend for Life” AI desk companion featuring a 5.5-inch 3D holographic display. Moving beyond simple voice assistants, AVA utilizes human-like vision and audio sensing to provide full contextual awareness, acting as a real-time gaming wingman, professional consultant, and personal organizer.

The hardware is a sleek cylindrical unit equipped with a dual far-field mic array, an HD camera with ambient light sensors, and Razer’s signature Chroma RGB. At its core, the device currently leverages xAI’s Grok engine to power its “PC Vision Mode,” allowing it to analyze on-screen gameplay or complex documents via a high-bandwidth USB-C connection to a Windows PC.

For some time, man had suffered in a world lacking a smart speaker with a camera, tits, short skirt, and ability to monitor everything he did on his computer. That world was about to end.

Web devs need hardware integration support too.

They said they thought they were within Github’s acceptable use guidelines; even though they make mods for hentai games and things like interactive vibrator plugins, they took care to not host anything explicit directly in their repositories.

A developer who goes by Sauceke, who Github suspended in mid-November without explanation, said their open-source adult toy mod users are now encountering broken links or simply can’t find any of their work.

Hmm. Buttplug.io’s GitHub repositories are still up, and I’d think that that’d be rather-more-prominent if the issue is sex toy code.

considers

You know, not really a problem that I’ve thought about, but outerwear is gonna limit what people can show from a fashion standpoint.

I’m not aware of any effort by clothing designers to really work on the problem, but I wonder if it’s possible to make outerwear that thermally-insulates, but is transparent.

I don’t know if it would run into problems like fogging up on the inner surface and that messing with transparency. If so, it might be possible to mitigate that via use of forced ventilation coupled with an inverse-flow heat exchanger, or maybe using some kind of hydrophilic insert to absorb moisture.

goes searching

What I get for “transparent jackets” is mostly raincoat-type things, thin sheet of plastic.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/661392917/long-womans-transparent-trench-coat

The problem with those is that those can’t do much to insulate.

There’s also this:

https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2024/10/transparent-down-jacket-keeps-you-warm-sans-feathers-uses-near-infrared-rays-from-sunlight-to-do-so/Transparent-down-jacket-by-Kosuke-Tsumura-2.jpg

Which probably will do something to insulate, since air insulates pretty well, but the bending plastic on the sides of the air pockets are going to do a number on the aesthetic, since one can’t see clearly through it.

What I guess one would want would be a substance that thermally-insulates, is transparent, and also doesn’t act like a lens to distort what’s on the other side.

Aerogel is one of the best thermal insulators we have, so you’d need very little thickness to provide a very great amount of thermal insulation.

It can be at least somewhat-transparent; most shots I’ve seen look kind of like a cloud:

And it looks like people are looking into using a thin layer on windows, as effectively-transparent insulation:

https://tokyo-smes.com/en/productservice/transparent-glass-film/

It’s also extremely strong.

However:

• It’s rigid, which isn’t ideal for clothing; the human body moves, and if you want it to fit to form, it has to be able to contour to it. That being said, we have made human clothing out of rigid substances before, like chain mail — you just need to segment the stuff into small pieces. To some extent, outerwear doesn’t need to contour to form; hoop skirts, for example, didn’t. We have made clothing out of joined, rigid metal plates before; it’s clearly at least possible, though outside of armor and sheer novelty of aesthetic, I don’t think that we’ve ever really had a practical reason to actually do so:

  

• I understand that it’s also damaged by contact with water. This can be dealt with by coating it with something that protects against water, but that stuff has to be able to resist being punctured. Need a transparent coating, maybe some kind of plastic, maybe Gorilla Glass or something.

• It’s presently (relatively) expensive to make. My guess is that that can probably be overcome; industrial diamonds used to once be pretty expensive too.

  searches

  It looks like these people have a flexible, composite blanket partly made out of aerogel and billed for use in apparel, though they’re not trying to make something that’s transparent (and their composite is even more expensive).

US midterm elections: November 3, 2026. The most-likely outcome is that the Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives, though they won’t actually take office until January 3, 2027.

According to ShinyHunters, the records contain extensive data on Premium members including email addresses, activity type, location, video URL, video name, keywords associated with the video and the time the event occurred. Activity types include whether the subscriber watched or downloaded a video, or viewed a channel and events include search histories.

This sort of thing is one of those examples why “no log, no profile” service is probably a good idea. The service could have offered the option to charge a fee for access, but not retain customer activity data. They didn’t do that. At some point down the line, someone got ahold of the data, which I imagine that their customers are not really super keen on having floating around attached to their identities.

Probably a lot of companies out there that log and retain a lot of data about their customers.

It’s not, and I think that Excel is often used where other tools would be more-appropriate because of existing expertise with Excel, but you don’t necessarily need to use a database for all tasks where a bunch of data gets stored.

I have plenty of scripts that deal with large amount of schlorped up data that just leave it in a text file, and Unix has a long and rich tradition and toolset for using text files for data storage and processing data in them in bulk.

GNU R, a statistics package, has a lot of tools to schlorp up data from many sources, including scraping it from the web, and storing it large data frames to be processed and maybe visualized. It’s probably rather more performant than databases for some kinds of bulk data processing.

Okay, so…is it appropriate here?

One thing that spreadsheets can be handy for is for making specialized calculators that plonk some data into some simple model and spit out a result. Having, say, the current temperature in a given city may be a perfectly reasonable input to make available to a spreadsheet, I think.

I really want to say Secret of NIMH but another company jumped on the coattails of the original and produced a terrible sequel.

I didn’t know that there was a movie, but if you haven’t read the books, there’s more story there.

The Matrix Resurrections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix_(franchise)

The Matrix is an American cyberpunk[2] media franchise consisting of four feature films, beginning with The Matrix (1999) and continuing with three sequels, The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), and The Matrix Resurrections (2021).

I’m not familiar with FreshRSS, but assuming that there’s something in the protocol that lets a reader push up a “read” bit on an per article basis — this page references a “GReader” API — I’d assume that that’d depend on the client, not the server.

If the client attempts an update and fails and that causes it to not retry again later, then I imagine that it wouldn’t work. If it does retry until it sets the bit, I’d imagine that it does work. The FreshRSS server can’t really be a factor, because it won’t know whether the client has tried to talk to it when it’s off.

EDIT: Some of the clients in the table on the page I linked to say that they “work offline”, so I assume that the developers at least have some level of disconnected operation in mind.

The RSS readers I’ve always used are strictly pull. They don’t set bits on the server, and any “read” flag lives only on the client.

If you mean Battle Angel Alita, wasn’t it based on a manga or something? That should have more story.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Angel_Alita

Battle Angel Alita, known in Japan as Gunnm (銃夢, Ganmu; lit. ‘gun dream’),[a] is a Japanese cyberpunk manga series created by Yukito Kishiro and originally published in Shueisha’s Business Jump magazine from 1990 to 1995. The second of the comic’s nine volumes were adapted in 1993 into a two-part anime original video animation titled Battle Angel for North American release by ADV Films and the UK and Australian release by Manga Entertainment.

looks further

Oh, you’re probably talking about the 2019 live-action movie. Didn’t even know that they’d done that. Huh. Kinda like Ghost in the Shell, I guess.

If you mean the faux-1940s air combat free-for-all stuff, you might like Crimson Skies, though it’s a bit long in the tooth now.

A second problem is that if a much beloved movie (or video game) comes out, there’s a window of time where you can make a sequel with the same team, actors that are about at the same age, and so forth.

But if you let 20 years go by, that team is gone. Some may be retired, some are doing other things and won’t come back, actors will have aged, etc. You’re going to have a hard time assembling a group with the same chemistry again.

I think that in many cases, it’s better to do a similar work. Like, okay, say you like a space opera like Battlestar Galactica or Firefly or something. I liked both. But…trying to do more of same is going to be a tall order. A lot of times a new team tries to get continuity by lots of in-jokes or allusions to the original that the original team probably wouldn’t have, and I think that that can be a negative. If it’s a live movie, it’s probably going to be hard to get ahold of props from the original and such any more. Like, I’d rather just have someone go do a new, good space opera in the same vein that tries to emulate the good bits of what I liked about the original. A spiritual successor rather than an actual one.

I’m not saying that it has never been the case that there have been good sequels done by other people. I like the Fallout video game series, and it’s had a variety of teams and companies that have done entries. But I think that there have been a large proportion of attempts to build on past IP using a new team that just don’t work out.

I haven’t seen the fourth, but I don’t think that the second and third movies were that bad. It wasn’t Phantom Menace for Star Wars, where the movie just targeted a completely different demographic.

Honestly, while there are a number of areas where I’m kind of irritated about shrinkflation, restaurant portions in the US are very large and have gotten much larger over the years. I’m not entirely sold that it’d be all that harmful for them to be smaller; they were considerably smaller for a long time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqI4rR6lXU0

Secondly, is there a benefit to creating an LVM volume with a btrfs filesystem vs just letting btrfs handle it?

Like, btrfs on top of LVM versus btrfs? Well, the latter gives you access to LVM features. If you want to use lvmcache or something, you’d want it on LVM.

Yeah, I get where people on both sides are coming from.

On one hand, writing up documentation in a wiki or something is work, and if someone has answered a question, then one can just search for it. And people have used mailing list archives like this successfully.

But on the other hand, nobody just tells someone to go dig through IRC logs as a knowledge store for a project, and my limited experience has been that Discord is closer to that. Reddit is okay as a knowledge source, close enough to the mailing list archives.

So, what I mean by that, is that forum posts had signatures, big profile pictures, as well as typically some additional information about the user, like “Rank: Lord Supreme – Joined: March 2005 – Posts: 3 trillion”.

Oh, the decline of signatures is a good one. Those were definitely a thing in a number of environments.

Recommendation systems showed up. Historically, there wasn’t much by way of the system trying to order or find content that a particular user might want. They haven’t played a major role in the systems I’ve used, but they’re certainly out there.

In retrospect, asking a question that intrinsically depended upon English’s many terms of venery on the furry-dense Threadiverse had been kind of lobbing a softball.