u/geezorious

I just got the Viture Pro 2, and no matter how I adjust it the screen is slightly bigger than the eyebox, so on my right eye the lower right corner is cropped off, and on my left eye the lower left corner is cropped off. The eyebox is oval not really a box, and those two corners fall off the oval.

Is there a workaround for this? Can I shrink the screen so it fits in the eyebox?

I have an Xreal One Pro, and I enjoy 3DoF. But, in order to watch Netflix shows from my iPhone, I need to enable “Increase Brightness”, otherwise any dark scene is nearly completely black and unwatchable (e.g. try Heroes on Netflix, S01E04 at the 41:00 minute mark). But then I lose 3DoF and even lose Follow.

Does anyone know if there’s a workaround for this? I love how “Increase Brightness” solves black crush, even when I dial brightness down to level 2. (I think Increase Brightness lowers contrast, and there’s no independent contrast setting.) But I hate losing 3DoF.

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I miss the old era of Civilization (Civ 1, Civ 2, SMAC) and Master of Orion 1 where conquering a city/planet gave you a technology if the defender was ahead in tech. I know Civilization got rid of it because it created a snowball effect where it encouraged warmongering and you would get runaway victors who’d become stoppable juggernauts. But that’s exactly why I played those games. I enjoyed the transition from struggling to being so vastly ahead that victory is all but assured. It was like progress quest, where progress kept accelerating.

Are there any modern 4X games that preserve this mechanic?

I just saw Disclosure Day. It’s a fine movie, but it leans on a McGuffin with arbitrary powers and arbitrary limits. It works repeatedly for diving, but one invisibility use causes it to crumble. I get why: simple stories want evenly matched protagonists and antagonists so the audience feels tension. If one side is One Punch Man, there’s no story.

&gt;! The aliens themselves follow the usual sci‑fi template: bipedal, human‑sized, comfortable in Earth gravity, and flying ships that are maybe a few decades ahead of ours. Compare that to The Three Body Problem, where the aliens are centuries ahead, which is far more realistic. !< Humans went from horseback in the 1800s to the Moon in the 1900s to AI in 2020. A few centuries of exponential progress should push us into Type I and maybe Type II territory on the Kardashev scale.

So why do most sci‑fi aliens show up as Type 0 or barely Type I, only slightly ahead of us, yet somehow capable of interstellar travel? They usually don’t even have AGI or ASI, which makes them look behind us.

Thinking about AI more, pre‑AGI technology progressed mainly as a function of time, with energy acting as a mild accelerant. AGI and ASI would be a phase change. Progress would become a function of compute, and compute is the product of time (seconds) and power (watts). That product is energy (joules). Once progress is untethered from time, or only weakly tied to it as time becomes the junior term in the product, measuring advancement in years becomes meaningless. When measuring progress with respect to time, progress would always look astronomical and nearly asymptotic. Energy becomes the real bottleneck. To keep advancing, you need more of it. That means reaching Type I, then Type II.

Maybe the Great Filter isn’t war or self‑destruction or any of the usual time‑based risks. Maybe the filter is the energy gap between Type I and Type II. The compute ceiling of a Type I civilization might simply be too low to generate the breakthroughs needed to escape and become Type II. If AGI makes time irrelevant, then the filter isn’t temporal. It’s computational.

Maybe the finite set of things you can compute with Type I energy, within the finite lifetime of your star, is nowhere near enough to solve the foundational problems required for Type II. Problems like escaping spacetime constraints or, in Asimov’s terms, “how can the entropy of the universe be decreased?” Cosmic AC only answered that after the universe died. “Insufficient data for a meaningful answer” might really mean “insufficient compute for a meaningful answer.”

Maybe Asimov was too optimistic about humanity reaching Type II, Type III, or anything like Cosmic AC. Maybe Type I is the trap. Maybe the Great Filter is simply that almost no civilization ever gets enough energy as Type I to push past into the next stage, Type II.

So yes, this started as a movie review, but it ends with a question: maybe we should rethink the Great Filter as an energy barrier rather than as some disaster that wrecks civilizational progress?