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Posted by David Nield

https://lifehacker.com/tech/chatgpt-has-added-branching-chats?utm_medium=RSS

Over the past few years, we haven't had to wait long for the launch of new ChatGPT features, and the latest upgrade pushed out by OpenAI is the ability to branch conversation. This means you can steer your chats with the language bot in a different direction, and then return to where you started to continue the main thread of the conversation.

According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the feature had been introduced by popular request, and it's not difficult to imagine ways in which it could be useful. Think if it like being able to create threads on Slack or Discord—you can follow tangents and related ideas without cluttering up the main conversation.

How to branch conversations in ChatGPT

Branch conversations open up in a new tab. Credit: Lifehacker

As of this writing, you can only create branch conversations in the ChatGPT web app (though they can be read and added to from any device). While they can be used by both paid and free users, you do need to be signed in to see the feature.

In any of your conversations with ChatGPT, click the three dots at the end of a response, then choose Branch in new chat. A copy of the current conversation will open up in a new browser tab, and you'll see an extra chat in the navigation pane on the left, with "Branch" added to the start of its name.

You're then able to keep both conversations going at the same time by switching between browser tabs (or clicking between the chats on the left). The two chats will be the same up until the point where you started the branch chat; from there, you can take the conversations in whatever direction you like.

OpenAI hasn't implemented this in a particularly elegant way, and the chats you've opened can quickly get unwieldy if you're doing a lot of branching. To help bring a bit of order you can rename chats, or delete them if you're sure you don't need them—click the three dots next to a chat in the navigation pane, or in the top right corner when a chat is open, to find these options.

You can also make use of ChatGPT Projects to put your chats in different folders that are kept separate from each other. Your branched conversations all stay in the same project, though you can create new projects and move chats between them as needed.

How branching chats can be useful

You'll need to keep on top of all your branches. Credit: Lifehacker

There are all kinds of ways branch conversations could be useful, and you may well find that different ideas for new threads come to you as you interact with ChatGPT. There's no right or wrong way to use them, and if a thread doesn't work out, you can simply delete it and go back to where you were.

Say you're composing an email to your boss, telling them you can't stand to work another second under their management—but in a polite way. You can use multiple branch conversations to test out the phrasing using different tones and approaches, without having the same text repeated again and again in one chat.

If you're researching your favorite literary masterpieces, you can go off on a tangent about one particular book or play in different chats, and still keep your main central conversation concentrated on overarching themes and ideas.

There are also obvious use cases for coders. Branched conversations let you test out separate debugging strategies or design ideas simultaneously in different browser tabs—and there's always the option of retracing your steps and going back to where the branches first started.

You could even use branches to supply ChatGPT with the same basic blocks of information, then get it to answer the same questions but in different tones, using different lengths of response, or with any other variation.

https://lifehacker.com/tech/chatgpt-has-added-branching-chats?utm_medium=RSS

Posted by Stephen Johnson

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-watch-virtual-reality-porn?utm_medium=RSS

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A friend of mine used to say that the first question we ask when we’re introduced to a new piece of technology is, “How can I use this to have sex?” To that end, here’s how to use a Meta Quest 3, Quest 3S, Quest 2, Apple Vision Pro, PSVR, Vive, or other VR headset to have sex...or watch virtual porn, anyway.

(If you're wondering what else you can do with your Quest 3 or 3S, here's a guide to the must-have apps for both.)

How to watch VR Porn with a Meta Quest 3, Quest 3S, Quest 2 or other VR headset

It’s almost comically easy to have an “entry-level” VR porn experience in virtual reality with any headset that isn't manufactured by Apple. (More on that below.)

Entry level porn VR porn viewing, step-by-step

• Lock the door.

• Put on your headset.

• Click on your web-browser-of-choice

• Navigate to a site that hosts VR porn. Free video megasites like Youporn have a VR section, or you can use Google to search something out. Clicking on a video should launch you into VR—but "should" is doing a lot of work. These are random files hosted on janky free porn sites, so don't be surprised if you need to do a little trial-and-error to find one that works correctly.

That’s all you need to know to get a taste of the VR porn thing, but because of the massive file sizes of VR video, streaming is likely to be choppy, and free movies are usually not in the highest resolution—again, janky but free. For a better experience, you’re going to have to (gasp) pay for it.

Suggested headsets for VR porn-viewing:

• Meta Quest 3

• Meta Quest 3S

• Valve Index VR Full Kit

• Meta Quest 2

• HTC Vive Pro 2

How to watch VR porn with a Meta Quest 3 and 3S

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The above instructions for streaming "regular" VR porn work on Meta Quest 3 and 3S headsets, but the "3 series" has front-facing pass-through camera arrays that add a new wrinkle to adult content: augmented reality.

Getting your pass-through-porn on can be fairly complicated, so here's a separate post that goes into detail about how to get augmented reality porn to work on your Meta Quest 3 and 3S.

How to watch Porn with an Apple Vision Pro

Apple's Vision Pro can stream, download, and play “normal” videos (both adult and "mainstream") on gigantic virtual reality screens easily through its web browser, but immersive, 3D videos produced specifically for virtual or augmented reality will not work on your Apple Vision Pro's browser.

Part of the issue is that WebXR, the programming interface for accessing augmented reality and virtual reality devices, is not automatically enabled in the Vision Pro's browser. Not having WebXR enabled means no VR porn, but it also means you won't have access to a slew of non-adult VR and AR content like web-based games, tours, productivity apps, etc.

Here's how to turn WebXR on:

1. Open Settings.

2. Select Apps.

3. Select Safari.

4. Scroll to the bottom of the window and select Advanced.

5. Scroll to the bottom of the window and select Feature Flags.

6. Under Experimental XR Features, enable WebXR Device API and WebXR Hand Input Module.

7. Under WebKit Feature Flags, enable WebXR Augmented Reality Module and WebXR GamePads Module.

8. Exit Settings.

9. Open Safari, or if it's already open, refresh a WebXR-enabled page to check it is working.

But even with WebXR enabled, you still can't launch full VR porn videos on an Apple Vision Pro—yet. I spoke to Alex Novac, of VR Porn site SexLikeReal, and he said, "a lot has been done on our end to make things work with AVP. It's a great tool for videos. Will be making a huge update soon."

Advanced VR porn viewing

If you've given free sites a chance and found their VR offerings to be lacking, here's how to go deeper in.

• Pick a VR website. Because VR porn is relatively new, more costly to produce, and has a smaller audience than “normal” adult videos, there aren’t an overwhelming number of sites dedicated to it. Most of the ones that are out there have sample videos to view, and some provide single-day access for very cheap. This list of the top VR porn sites is a good place to start.

• Did you lock the door?

• Open the browser, navigate to your newly chosen site and enter your credit card digits. Membership fees vary from site to site, but expect a range of $20 to $30 a month.

From here, you can stream full-length videos at very high quality. If you have decent home internet, streaming should work fine for most VR videos, but if your streaming is choppy, you can:

• Download and save video to your device— These videos can be over 10 gigs, so it might take some time.

• Play the video—Major VR headsets come with great video browsers, but if you want advanced features, download Skybox for 10 bucks. That way you can save video to your PC and stream from your computer easily.

• Get the right player: Some adult VR sites are configured to work best with specific browsers or video players, and you should be directed as to what to install.

The world of virtual reality enabled sex toys

If you're looking for the most cutting-edge, technologically advanced virtual sex experience, you're going to need some hardware, specifically, a (NSFW) virtual reality sex toy. These devices are designed to vibrate and oscillated in sync with videos, VR content, or to be controlled remotely over the web.

Among the best-known teledildonic sex toys is TheHandy. Funded through Kickstarter, this "high-end male stroker" syncs with everything from videos to VR content. As is usual with these devices, you hook up a Handy, then stream a video from a (again, NSFW) VR site like Sexlikereal, and the device will virtually "connect" with the movements you're seeing in your headset, using scripts that are either human-made or AI-created. It's definitely immersive and unique, if you can get past the tech-headache of syncing everything together. (Humans aren't entirely obsolete yet, but we're getting there.)

Is virtual reality porn any good?

Now that you know how to view porn in virtual reality, you have to ask yourself if you should. Virtual reality’s “you are there” immersion provides an experience that is different from traditional porn. But it’s not necessarily better. Like all things of this nature, it comes down to personal taste. I checked out some VR porn (for research purposes only, of course), and, without going into too much detail, here are the pros and cons:

Pros

It's immersive: The illusion that you're in a room with another person (or someone else is in your house) is so convincing, it's almost scary at first. If that's what you're looking for from adult content, you'll find it here.

It's different: I'm an experiential kind of person, and VR pornography is definitely not like anything else.

Gender-bending: Most virtual reality porn is designed for heterosexual men, and shot from their point-of-view, but not all of it. There is VR porn shot from the POV of all genders, and that provides maybe the most unique experience of the genre: putting yourself in the (virtual) skin of someone else. Looking down at yourself and seeing a different male body, (one that doesn’t skip ab day) is strange enough, but looking down and seeing yourself with a differently gendered body is positively freaky in the best possible way. I can only assume this will lead to a new age of empathy and the end of sexism and homophobia. (A girl can dream.)

It's cutting-edge: VR porn is a look into the possible future of human sexuality, especially if you're adding in a literal sex machine like The Handy. It's like communing deeply with the robots. You may be thinking, "but that sounds more creepy than sexy," and you have a point.

Cons

It's weird: In general, I like weird things, but VR porn can feel strange in a depersonalizing way. Maybe it's the feigned intimacy from the performers, or maybe it's the uncanny feeling of being in two places at once, but there's something about it that ain't natural, and it's a hard feeling to shake.

It's a hassle: Experiencing VR porn in full, with as high a resolution video as possible and with the addition of a virtual sex toy, takes a level of technical and personal dedication that might not be worth it to you. It reminds me of slot-car racing—sure, it's a lot of fun, but is it fun enough to warrant dragging out the tracks, setting everything up, making sure the cars are tuned up, etc.?

Locked-in perspective: Putting the viewer right up in the action means the camera is locked to a first-person perspective to make it seem like what's happening in the scene is happening to you. If you like that kind of thing, it’s gravy, but if you don’t … well, you gave it a shot.

The performance: The camera/you are very close to the performers in most VR porn videos. The illusion is fairly convincing, but actually selling that kind of intimacy requires acting talent. It’s a different kind of performing than film or stage, and, at the risk of being negative, many pornographic performers don’t have the chops to pull it off, so it can just feel weird—and not sexy-weird, either. Again, your mileage may vary.

Limited content: Because it is more expensive and more difficult to shoot VR video, and because there is a smaller audience, it seems like almost all VR porn is geared toward a mainstream porn audience. If you share the tastes of the majority of porn viewers, you’ll be happy. If you’re into something more esoteric, you might find it difficult or impossible to find exactly what you like.

So there are pluses and minuses. If you’re curious, try it once. Worst case, you’ll have a funny story. Best case, you’ll be the first one on the block to boldly go where only the most pioneering perverts dare to tread.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-watch-virtual-reality-porn?utm_medium=RSS

Posted by Joel Cunningham

https://lifehacker.com/tech/adjust-remarkable-paper-pro-light?utm_medium=RSS

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding my work at Lifehacker as a preferred source.

I've reviewed enough digital notebooks over the past year that my wife has started rolling her eyes at me every time I have to sign for a package, and of that expansive lot, the reMarkable Paper Pro and its newer, smaller sibling, the reMarkable Paper Pro Move are among the most impressive.

I just wish the screens on these two premium e-ink productivity devices were a little more forgiving to my middle-aged eyes—and thanks to a software update earlier this year, they can be.

Dim by design

In my reviews of both the Paper Pro and the Paper Pro Move, I noted that their integrated front lights are too dim to be very useful. (In contrast to the backlight on an LED tablet, e-ink devices are illuminated by a lighting layer sandwiched between the outer glass and the inner display that reflects down.) Though reMarkable doesn't publicize the number, at full strength the front light illuminates to around 3 to 4 nits, according to testers on Reddit. In contrast, the front lights on the competing Kindle Scribe and Boox Note Air 4C can get much brighter—up to 94 nits. (For reference, the screen of my M1 MacBook Air laptop peaks at 400 nits.)

According to a statement I received from reMarkable, however, it turns out this was an intentional decision—a limitation baked into the design of the product.

"The light is designed primarily to gently illuminate the page when ambient light is low—for example, in a dark conference room or at night—without compromising battery life or the natural paper-like experience," reMarkable said in an emailed response to questions. "During development, we tested extensively across brightness levels and environments, and we intentionally capped the maximum brightness to strike the right balance between visibility, comfort, and battery consumption.

I appreciate the thoughtfulness—reduced eye strain and longer battery life are certainly among the chief advantages e-ink offers over a traditional tablet—but I think things got taken a bit far. Consistently during my testing, I found both reMarkable tablets to be too dark to read easily unless I was in a room with a good deal of natural light or a nearby lamp. Adjusting the front light to max made almost no difference. Even in a totally dark room, I still found myself squinting or bringing the device close to my face to read smaller print.

A recent software update gives you more options

Credit: Joel Cunningham

It seems I wasn't the only one disappointed in the feature. A year ago, shortly after the Paper Pro's release, Redditors were sharing tips for altering the code of the operating system to remove software-based lighting limits. The volume of user feedback ultimately prompted the company to rethink its design decision, sort of: While the previous limits remain, a software update earlier this year (after my review of the Paper Pro was published) introduced a new setting to boost brightness.

"After launch, we heard from some users who wanted the option for more brightness in certain situations," reMarkable said. "In response, we added the [Extra bright] toggle in the display settings, which allows users to increase maximum brightness beyond the default range. This lets people choose what feels right for them while preserving our original design intent."

To try it out, open Settings menu on your reMarkable Paper Pro or Paper Pro Move and tap Display, then tap the slider to turn on Extra bright. (You'll see a warning that doing so "will drain the battery faster than normal.")

The reMarkable Paper Pro Move with Extra Bright mode enabled, compared to a Kindle Scribe at max brightness. Credit: Joel Cunningham

The effect isn't nearly as dramatic as I expected—as you can see above, it's still much darker than a Kindle Scribe at max brightness—but it does improve legibility at least somewhat under the conditions described above. The photo at the top of this article is a side-by-side comparison showing how bright the devices can get with and without the new option enabled, and you can see it in action in this video from YouTube user @howtotechstuff.

As the company noted, a brighter light will indeed drain the battery faster. According to @howtotechstuff's video, in testing, his battery drain went from 4% an hour to 8% an hour under similar usage conditions. Honestly, that's a pretty big hit for such a moderate increase in brightness, but it may be worth it if it makes the device more useable for you.

Is a front light even necessary on a digital notebook?

While I still find more utility in the brighter lighting of other devices I've tested, it's worth noting that a number of e-ink notebooks I've written about—including the 13.3-inch Boox Note Max, the Viwoods AiPaper, and my personal favorite, the Supernote Manta—forgo front lighting entirely.

Adding lighting to an e-ink device is always a tradeoff (though not nearly as much as adding color)—inserting a light layer into the display stack can impact both clarity and the distance between the outer screen and the inner e-ink display, and writing digitally feels more like pen and paper when that distance is as small as possible. Lightless devices can also be thinner, though that's a much less important factor if you ask me; beyond a certain point, too-thin e-ink tablets can get pretty fragile.

If the Paper Pro and Paper Pro Move didn't include a front light at all, they would still be great devices. That one is there, but too dim for many users, only makes it kind of annoying—but this relatively new setting helps.

https://lifehacker.com/tech/adjust-remarkable-paper-pro-light?utm_medium=RSS

Posted by Jeff Somers

https://lifehacker.com/travel/how-airline-and-travel-booking-websites-can-deceive-you?utm_medium=RSS

There are approximately 45,000 flights every day in the U.S., all of them filled with people heading off to adventure, relaxation, or business. If you were one of them at any time recently, there’s a very good chance you booked your tickets online, possibly by going directly to an airline’s website. And after buying those tickets, you probably relied on the airline’s website for real-time updates about your flight—and that means you have to be able to trust the information on an airline’s website and trust that the airline is being above board with you regarding pricing, seat availability, and everything else to do with your desired flight. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. Here are some of the ways your airline’s website is built to deceive you.

Fake customers

If you’ve ever spent some time on an airline’s website or a booking site, playing with dates, seat choices, and other logistics, you’ve probably seen a little graphic showing you that X number of people are looking at those tickets. The implication being that several dozen (or more) folks are also sitting at their computers or on their phones, about to click BUY and steal those tickets out from under you.

This is an example of “social proof,” a technique used in sales that leverages our desire for communal validation to push us to buy something. Seeing that all those invisible strangers are mulling those plane tickets makes the decision seem valid and correct—why else would so many other people be considering pulling the trigger on that purchase? But there’s no way to know if there are actually dozens or hundreds of people looking at those precise tickets or if it’s a randomly generated number or a vague approximation. Either way, it’s there just to pressure you into buying.

Deceptive scarcity

Another way airline and booking sites lie to you is with deceptive language around scarcity. If you’ve ever put together an itinerary and the sites tells you that there are only two seats left, so you’d better get a move on, you might reasonably assume that this means only two sets left on that flight, and you’ll be scrambling to find a different flight unless you decide immediately (this is often combined with a timer counting down the minutes that you can hold those tickets and deliberate. Combined with the constant fluctuation of ticket prices as the plane capacity and demand change, this can push you to click BUY before you’ve completely thought it through.

But what that language often actually means is that there are two seats left ... at that price. That’s useful information, of course, but omitting the pricing aspect changes the stakes. There’s a huge difference between having to pay a little more and not being able to book the flight at all.

Check-in fees

You might assume that if you want to check in for your flight in-person at the airport, or have a printed boarding pass instead of a code displayed on your phone, that it’s no big deal. But many budget airlines will charge you a fee for that—and it’s usually not made clear on their website. There is often also a fee if you don’t check in online early enough, usually at least two hours before your flight, and those fees are also typically buried in FAQs and fine print instead of clearly displayed, so don’t assume you’ve got flexibility there.

Convenient weather

It’s smart to track your flights as your departure day approaches, right up until you need to leave for the airport. Better to know that your flight is going to be delayed before you’re trapped in an airport for hours. But unexpected delays can have a ripple effect on the rest of your travel plans, so when a flight is delayed and you have to spend extra money to rebook other aspects of your trip, you might want to ask for some compensation. After all, it wasn’t your fault the plane or flight crew wasn’t there when they were supposed to be.

Ah, but then the airline website informs you that the flight was delayed due to weather, and since weather is outside the airline’s control, you’re not entitled to any kind of compensation. Weather delays are very common excuses for airlines—but Federal Aviation Administration data shows that weather delays account for just a tick more than 1% of flight delays, so the chances that the airline is using weather as an excuse to not deal with your compensation claims are actually pretty good.

https://lifehacker.com/travel/how-airline-and-travel-booking-websites-can-deceive-you?utm_medium=RSS