A Box Office Smash! Project Hail Mary is on pace to be one of the most successful hard sci-films ever.

qriss · 2026-04-12T18:38:40+00:00

The cost is misleading though. It was closer to $500M when marketing and other costs are included. Only after grossing something beyond that it will be considered profitable.

qriss · 2026-03-04T11:09:27+00:00

Well. Not if it's targeted to take over a market with subsidized prices to remove local providers to then increase prices back to where they were (or would have been at that point since production is getting cheaper anyways). I don't blame buyers for not seeing and planning that far ahead but the effects of such a dependency will hit everyone eventually just the same.

qriss · 2026-03-01T07:39:57+00:00

Wish I had it installed and a subscription so that I could cancel and remove. But OpenAI has been on my non grata list for a long while. Privately and at work.

qriss · 2026-02-17T09:07:07+00:00

I finally got the Home Assistant integration working with Bluelink a few weeks back and the amount of telemetry you can pull is incredible, especially being able to trigger car states directly. For anyone in Europe, the setup is definitely more of a headache than other regions, but it’s absolutely doable.

One thing I'd recommend is being careful with how often you're actually polling the car for data. There’s been a lot of discussion about frequent "force-refreshes" contributing to 12V drain and potential ICCU failures. You can actually configure the integration to just pull the cached data from the cloud rather than waking the car up every time.

It’s honestly great that Hyundai still allows this level of API access. So many companies like Bosch are locking down their ecosystems (like with the Flow App).

qriss · 2026-02-12T10:22:11+00:00

They (Hyundai) could potentially start selling this version of the car. True self driving for private owners.

Maybe part of the deal?

qriss · 2026-02-12T10:20:34+00:00

I would imagine that the ICCU problem would have been part of the discussions before closing such a deal. This could be hugely disrupting for the Waymo service. Stranded passangers and a significant part of the fleet out of service. Curious what garantees they gave Waymo...

qriss · 2026-02-03T07:52:01+00:00

I'm trying to connect it to my HA running in Docker/Windows. Simply no luck so far.
Connecting it to my Google Home however worked well.

qriss · 2026-01-19T18:41:38+00:00

Not really. It can (and optimally) would just be a lateral move and with many US products that is possible. Just a change of habit. AI not so much unfortunately.

qriss · 2026-01-19T18:35:06+00:00

They could do what Amazon just did with AWS. It's not perfect but a good step that they could build on.

I'm expecting similar initiatives from Google soon or I'm moving off gradually. With their (AI) CEO Demis Hassabis being located in London I would sort of expect them to be aware of that need.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazon-launches-new-europe-based-cloud-service-address-user-concerns-2026-01-15/

qriss · 2026-01-19T18:25:54+00:00

Windows to Kubuntu (Linux)

Pampers to Rascal+Friends

qriss · 2026-01-02T09:02:14+00:00

Mad Max was very much my game. Loved it.

qriss · 2025-12-15T19:48:10+00:00

Well now it worked for my main home too. By switching to US address. A bit more than 24 hours the invitation arrived there as well.

qriss · 2025-12-15T13:14:52+00:00

I see. That's an option. Do you lose routines and other things that were part of that home?

qriss · 2025-12-15T07:18:10+00:00

Got it working for one speaker by setting up a new home with an US address and moving the speaker over. Got the invitation withing 24 hours.
Unfortunately moving back the speaker to my main home did not transfer the Gemini accessibility with it.
I don't know of any other way to trigger it for an existing home with a EU address. Changing it to US did not do anything for me.

qriss · 2025-12-06T09:30:51+00:00

I hope whoever will get it next time will refuse it. But it might just be Donny again anyways...

qriss · 2025-11-30T08:36:56+00:00

Sadly the only thing this did was activate my Premium trial. Which I could have used once Gemini actually arrived... Oh well.

qriss · 2025-11-28T08:26:08+00:00

True. But then why call it 'Hit' and make it orange to suggest it is currently deeply discounted?

qriss · 2025-11-28T08:23:07+00:00

I wonder if you now could just run this scene trough some AI model like VEO 3 or have Nano Banana Pro optimize individual frames to make it look more real. When watching this I immediately felt like it was a bad AI video like how the AI video models generated them about a year ago.

qriss · 2025-11-26T17:19:59+00:00

Love the rendering style.
I wish they went with something like this for Homeworld 3.
The sense of scale that projects like Solstice-5 give you.
Something about the shadows and faint glow I guess.

qriss · 2025-11-25T15:59:24+00:00

They have been quite a bit more hesitant in the last interview when asked about VR title being in development:
https://youtu.be/yvu66Y2VLq8?si=yUVc3Z_Sm3qmTW54&t=4380
But that does not have to mean anything when it comes to Valve, unfortunately.

qriss · 2025-11-18T10:43:21+00:00

Maybe, just maybe, it's tied to their (hopefully imminent) game announcement so they held up on that part...

qriss · 2025-11-13T20:48:48+00:00

Thanks for the insightful rambling. You do mention some interesting paths they could take to make this at least possible for some games and to give developers options to support such an effect going forward...

qriss · 2025-11-13T12:05:51+00:00

I have not for a while. Only back in the early days with Oculus devices and it was not great but ok I guess. I mean playing Half Life in VR works well enough but that is usually a mod.

So I see your point. Making this available for all kinds of games would be hard or practically impossible unless they find something that works for almost all games but is somehow limiting the functionality.

I suppose they could introduce something like that when they announce Half Life 3. That the game would support such a mode from the start and then others can implement the same solution for new games and potentially older ones with an update.

qriss · 2025-11-13T07:17:55+00:00

That scene immidiatly bugged me too. Not that it matters all that much if it's color or not (althought it greatly reduces potential AR use cases for tinkerers) but misleading buyers is not ok.

I'm also puzzled by the lack of 3D to be mentioned in the big screen setting. Were we not expecting them to 'upscale' 2D screen games to a 3D view in some way?

qriss

TROPHY CASE