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Meta Quest 3S is a disappointing half-step to Carmack’s low-cost VR vision
Significant visual and comfort compromises make last year’s Quest 3 a better VR investment.
It’s been just over two years now since soon-to-depart CTO John Carmack told a Meta Connect audience about his vision for a super low-end VR headset that came in at $250 and 250 grams. “We’re not building that headset today, but I keep trying,” Carmack said at the time with some exasperation.
On the pricing half of the equation, the recently released Quest 3S headset is nearly on target for Carmack’s hopes and dreams. Meta’s new $299 headset is a significant drop from the $499 Quest 3 and the cheapest price point for a Meta VR headset since the company raised the price of the aging Quest 2 to $400 back in the summer of 2022. When you account for a few years of inflation in there, the Quest 3S is close to the $250 headset Carmack envisioned.
Unfortunately, Meta must still seriously tackle the “250 grams” part of Carmack’s vision. The 514g Quest 3S feels at least as unwieldy on your face as the 515g Quest 3, and both are still quite far from the “super light comforts” Carmack envisioned. Add in all the compromises Meta made so the Quest 3S could hit that lower price point, and you have a cheap, half-measure headset that we can only really recommend to the most price-conscious of VR consumers.
Mercedes patent may finally solve numb steering problem of new cars
It describes a way of generating feedback for the driver through the steering.
New cars really are better than they used to be. They last longer, they’re more efficient, and they’re safer for the occupants in a crash. But it’s not entirely a one-way street. If the last time you bought a car was more than a decade ago, you’re probably shocked at the cumulative effect of inflation since then. But even ignoring sticker shock, there’s also the matter of cars (almost) all having lifeless steering. But a patent filed last year by Mercedes-Benz might have the answer.
Regular readers will have read me complain about the death of steering feedback more than once. And that’s a bad thing if you care about driving, or even if you don’t. The late Richard Parry-Jones, an engineer whose career at Ford saw him rise to become CTO and head of global R&D, tracked customer satisfaction data and was able to prove to skeptical colleagues that good steering was highly correlated with customer satisfaction “because bad steering is tiring,” he wrote.
Mostly, it’s down to a switch from hydraulic to electric power-assisted steering—in many cases, the electric motor is placed on the steering column, which has the side effect of filtering out road forces from being transferred back up the column and to the driver’s hands via the steering wheel.
Dow Jones says Perplexity is “freeriding,” sues over copyright infringement
AI startup reportedly “did not bother to respond” to notice of infringement.
Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones and the New York Post have accused artificial intelligence start-up Perplexity of a “brazen scheme” to rip off their journalism for its AI-driven search engine in a lawsuit filed in New York on Monday.
The publishers, both subsidiaries of News Corp, alleged the AI start-up, which is seeking to raise up to $1 billion in a funding round that will value it at $8 billion, was “engaging in a massive amount of illegal copying” of their work.
The lawsuit said Perplexity is “diverting customers and critical revenues” away from the news publishers, whose titles include The Wall Street Journal, “freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce.”
Hands-on with the 2024 iPad mini: Spot the differences
A quick look at what’s new in Apple’s tiny tablet.
The iPad mini is a niche product, that much is clear. But for those who want an extra-small tablet, the launch of the sixth-generation iPad mini in 2021 was a red-letter day. For the first time in ages, the mini got close to the same kind of performance and features as its bigger brethren.
Then it didn’t get any updates for a couple of years. It was still a good tablet, but it wasn’t positioned to take advantage of new products or features on Apple’s docket like Apple Intelligence or the Apple Pencil Pro.
Enter the new 2024 refresh of the iPad mini, which releases October 23. For the most part, it’s the same as the previous generation—but Apple has laser-focused on a couple of tweaks to modernize the device just enough to keep it competitive in the company’s current ecosystem.
After seeing hundreds of launches, SpaceX’s rocket catch was a new thrill
For a few moments, my viewing angle made it look like the rocket was coming right at me.
BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—I’ve taken some time to process what happened on the mudflats of South Texas a little more than a week ago and relived the scene in my mind countless times.
With each replay, it’s still as astonishing as it was when I saw it on October 13, standing on an elevated platform less than 4 miles away. It was surreal watching SpaceX’s enormous 20-story-tall Super Heavy rocket booster plummeting through the sky before being caught back at its launch pad by giant mechanical arms.
This is the way, according to SpaceX, to enable a future where it’s possible to rapidly reuse rockets, not too different from the way airlines turn around their planes between flights. This is required for SpaceX to accomplish the company’s mission, set out by Elon Musk two decades ago, of building a settlement on Mars.
Basecamp-maker 37Signals says its “cloud exit” will save it $10M over 5 years
Co-founder thinks other companies should consider a “swim against the stream.”
37Signals is not a company that makes its policy or management decisions quietly.
The productivity software company was an avowedly Mac-centric shop until Apple’s move to kill home screen web apps (or Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) led the firm and its very-public-facing co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, to declare a “Return to Windows,” followed by a stew of Windows/Mac/Linux. The company waged a public battle with Apple over its App Store subscription policies, and the resulting outcry helped nudge Apple a bit. 37Signals has maintained an active blog for years, its co-founders and employees have written numerous business advice books, and its blog and social media posts regularly hit the front pages of Hacker News.
So when 37Signals decided to pull its seven cloud-based apps off Amazon Web Services in the fall of 2022, it didn’t do so quietly or without details. Back then, Hansson described his firm as paying “an at times almost absurd premium” for defense against “wild swings or towering peaks in usage.” In early 2023, Hansson wrote that 37Signals expected to save $7 million over five years by buying more than $600,000 worth of Dell server gear and hosting its own apps.
Studies of migraine’s many triggers offer paths to new therapies
One class of drugs has already found success in treating the painful, common attacks.
For Cherise Irons, chocolate, red wine, and aged cheeses are dangerous. So are certain sounds, perfumes and other strong scents, cold weather and thunderstorms. Stress and lack of sleep, too.
She suspects all of these things can trigger her migraine attacks, which manifest in a variety of ways: pounding pain in the back of her head, exquisite sensitivity to the slightest sound, even blackouts and partial paralysis.
Irons, 48, of Coral Springs, Florida, once worked as a school assistant principal. Now, she’s on disability due to her migraine. Irons has tried so many migraine medications she’s lost count—but none has helped for long. Even a few of the much-touted new drugs that have quelled episodes for many people with migraine have failed for Irons.
It’s the Enterprise vs. the Gorn in Strange New Worlds clip
Also: a new clip for Lower Decks and premiere date for Section 31 with Michelle Yeoh.
The Star Trek franchise made its presence known with a special panel during New York City Comic-Con this past weekend. Among the highlights: Paramount unveiled a three-minute preview clip from the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and a clip from the upcoming final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks.
In other news, while the first season of new series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is still in production, Paramount has already renewed it for a second season and revealed that Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany will be a recurring guest on the series. Tig Notaro, Oded Fehr, and Mary Wiseman will reprise their Discovery roles as Jett Reno, Admiral Vance, and Sylvia Tilly, respectively. And Robert Picardo of Star Trek: Voyager will be back as The Doctor—in a show set 900 years after the hologram physician first appeared.
The studio also announced an official premiere date and poster art for the Star Trek: Discovery spinoff film Section 31 starring Michelle Yeoh: January 24, 2025. Miku Martineau plays a young Phillipa Georgiou in the film, which will give us the backstory for Georgiou’s evil Mirror Universe counterpart, where she was a despotic emperor who murdered millions of her own people. Meanwhile, Yeoh’s older Georgiou is tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets as part of a black ops group called Section 31 while dealing with all the blood she’s spilled in her past.
Mercedes-Benz opens its own recycling facility for EV batteries
Making new EV batteries from old EV batteries is a no-brainer.
Today, Mercedes-Benz opened its first battery-recycling plant in Germany. The new plant will use an “integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical” approach to recycling electric vehicle batteries and expects to recover more than 96 percent of the valuable minerals and metals used in EV batteries.
“Mercedes-Benz has set itself the goal of building the most desirable cars in a sustainable way. As a pioneer in automotive engineering, Europe’s first integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical battery recycling factory marks a key milestone toward enhancing raw-materials sustainability,” said Ola Källenius, chairman of the board of management Mercedes-Benz Group. “Together with our partners from industry and science, we are sending a strong signal of innovative strength for sustainable electric mobility and value creation in Germany and Europe.”
The plant, which is located in Kuppenheim, Germany, shreds the battery modules then uses a mechanical process to separate plastics, copper, aluminum, and iron. The resulting “black mass” is then subjected to a hydrometallurgical process that extracts the cobalt, nickel, and lithium. The plant runs entirely on electricity generated by solar panels and has an annual capacity of 2,756 tons (2,500 tonnes). While this is not especially high, Mercedes says it will use the knowledge it gains to scale up volumes over time.
Squadron 42’s new 2026 launch date will miss its original target by 11 years
RSI said single-player Star Citizen campaign was “feature complete” a year ago.
It’s been almost exactly a year now since we reported on the announcement that Squadron 42—the single-player campaign portion of the now 12-year-old crowdfunding boondoggle Star Citizen—was “feature complete” and in the “polish phase.” Now, many years after the game’s original 2015 release target, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) says that, with just a year or two of additional “polish,” the game will finally launch sometime in 2026.
The announcement came during this weekend’s CitizenCon, per IGN, where RSI founder and CEO Chris Roberts showed off a roughly hour-long prologue of the game’s promised 30- to 40-hour storyline. IGN also reported that the live on-stage demo suffered “a number of crashes, bugs, and graphical problems,” which helps explain why a little more time is needed to get from “feature complete” to “actual release.”
“We did say we were doing it live, risking the demo gods, and they brought their wrath down on us,” Roberts said on stage, according to the IGN report. “Both the team and I are confident of giving you this game in 2026. Obviously, you can see it’s not going to be tomorrow because you saw a few crashes there.”