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What will become of Mark Zuckerburg's empire of shit?
I was recently thinking wistfully of the brief golden age of Facebook, and how it made me more connected to my social network. At one point, most of my friends and family posted updates about their lives. I knew all about my friends from high school and college. I even connected to members of my extended family. And I could easily ask questions to my network and receive answers. It was great.
That was a long time ago. Zuckerberg pissed it all away. At first, he tried to replace the news media. Later, when that failed, he went all in on maximizing ad revenue. Facebook is now a wasteland of ads, AI, and clueless boomers. Nearly 100% of its value proposition is gone. No one I care about posts there any more.
Zuckerburg did a few things right, all more than a decade ago:
He figured out that people will give you all their personal info for free and that this is worth a lot to advertisers. In his words, "they trust me, dumb fucks".
He made sure his voting shares didn't get diluted so he has, in theory, monarchal control of Facebook
He bought Instagram for cheap in 2012
He has reaped the rewards of these decisions handsomely and currently is the world's 4th richest person with a net worth north of $200 billion.
But what has he done more recently?
Bought WhatsApp for $19 billion and promised to never advertise on the platform. Even though he has broken the promise, it's unclear how they will ever recoup this
Blown tens of billions on the "Metaverse", a project which no one wants and has negative traction
Made "Stories", "Reels", and "Threads" – blatant knockoffs of existing products which failed to win in the marketplace
Made an open source LLM called LLAMA which was initially a success but has been blown out of the water by a Chinese startup that trained a superior model for just $6 million
I recently read the book "Titan", about John D. Rockefeller. Despite being history's greatest philanthropist, Rockefeller viewed Standard Oil as his real contribution to humanity. People take the wrong lesson from his life, which is generally viewed as "he did a bunch of evil shit to get rich but he gave it all away, so it's okay."
Bill Gates folllowed that model. Maybe Zuckerberg thinks the same way. But it's unlikely that anything he can do with his billions can undo the damage his social networks have done, and continue to do to the social fabric. The irony is that if he had just focused on making Facebook the best version of itself, he would probably be even richer today, and beloved for making the iconic product of the age.
But instead we have Instagram, Reels, and a bunch of other shit that just makes people miserable. Will it stand the test of time? I doubt it.
It certainly has negative traction, but I for one really want the metaverse. I grew up at the height of the virtual world craze, and I really miss that energy. I would absolutely love a credible and full-featured virtual world where you can customize a character, build structures, socialize with people, and play games, especially if it had connections to real-life friends in VR. As it is, these features all exist, but are spread throughout different games and platforms, many of which are dated, like many MMOs and Second Life. I absolutely see the value proposition of the Metaverse, but I would want to see some credible implementations of the opportunity for expansive creativity and socialization.
That being said, this has been the dream of silicon valley and cyberpunk for several decades at this point, and they've never gotten it to take off. But I will absolutely keep the dream alive.
As far as I can tell this is essentially the entire reason the concept continues to even hang on at all despite the almost total lack of any meaningful use case outside of some niche video game crap. Ask what business purpose the technology serves and maybe you hear something about virtual meetings. Ask why anyone would bother when Zoom and the like already exist and you hear crickets. It's a solution looking for problems that don't exist.
"never buy a monitor again" sounds pretty good for business use, particularly travel -- but the resolution is not there yet.
It's a small monitor you tie to your face. That's it. Unless your traveling businessman owns a laptop with no screen, he's actually buying an extra monitor.
Yes?
If the resolution becomes adequate, this would create the impression of being surrounded by monitors, no?
I would be pretty into that, even at home.
So what happened to never buying a monitor again? You're still going to own a regular screen for every use case where having it tied to your face isn't optimal (might want more than one person to see it, don't want to be blind to the world, etc.) plus this extra screen you tie to your face so you can pretend you're surfin' the cyberworld.
Work gives me a laptop -- it has a screen anyways. I don't want to "surf the cyberworld", I want a seamless desktop covering ~180 degrees in front of me, so I have more room for windows and stuff.
You can sort of do this now with 3 (or 6!) 40" 4k screens, but those are expensive, not seamless, and don't travel well.
Not sure what's hard to understand about this?
The part where "never buy a monitor again" sounds pretty good, when it seems like you're just buying one extra monitor to wear on your face.
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FPV drone control.
Do people do this? The thought makes me motion sick.
Yes, it's very common, but I wouldn't do it for the same reasons as you (I can't even play Unreal Engine games on a large screen)
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Because Snow Crash made it sound super-cool thirty years ago!
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The hardware simply isn't here yet. The headsets are tethered and yet still too heavy, they are sweaty and disorienting, they don't have enough resolution for quality text, they give people motion sickness because the framerate/sensors are to slow.
Solve each of those hardware issues (most need an order of magnitude in improvement), then you can start with software. Do that part semi-well, and you've killed both phones and personal computers in one stroke.
A lot of these problems are individually solved -- the Bigscreen Beyond weighs 150 grams, consistent 90hz framerate is the low end of new headsets and 120hz the up-and-coming standard, low-latency wireless video is a (admittedly even dweebier) SpaceX when it comes to doing what a lot of people were calling impossible five years ago, even cheap sensors are vastly improved and hardware sensor fusion is the default option -- and there's incoming tech that'll merge most of these.
(Long battery life + wireless + ultralightweight is, admittedly, hard)
The intermediate trouble is that the people interested in the current tech are a tiny community, they're near-invisible to outsiders while what portals into the world are available give a poor or actively misleading grasp on the state of current tech, and the minimum cost of buyin for a not-awful experience ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
The bigger problem for Meta, specifically, is that even if they get past all that, it's not clear how they make money off it. There are business models for VR that make sense, for better or worse -- but none of them make sense for Meta; they're either things Meta are actively bad at, have competitors that are eating their lunch with Meta's own hardware, or could easily have a million competitors in three years.
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I don't think they need an order of magnitude of improvement. There's already headsets being sold now that are lightweight visor style headsets rather than helmet size headsets, more of these coming soon, and wireless tethering between computers and their headsets is now a thing. It's not all perfect yet, it needs a bit of tweaking to be consumer ready, but at this point the main thing is for pricing to come down.
First look, those still only have 2K displays. A whole lot of modern screen time (even doom scrolling) is text interaction, and if you smear 2K pixels across a 100°+ field of view, you're not doing anything productive with text for any length of time.
The Vision Pro has double the pixel per line, uses tricks to increase pixel density where it matters most, and you still wouldn't really want to look at text with that headset.
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Our family has an Oculus Quest 2, and it's not tethered (unless you want to pair with a computer that way, which I'm told shaves off a few milliseconds of latency vs WiFi 6?), not excessively heavy for adults and teens, not disorienting, renders text readably even with small fonts at a distance, and doesn't give my motion-sickness-prone wife problems as long as she keeps her sessions under an hour. I find it sweaty, because I almost exclusively use it for exercise games, but in the few cases where I play something else it's fine. I can definitely see room for resolution/framerate/latency upgrades, but we're nearing the 5 year anniversary of "eh, good enough".
All that said, I don't use it very often recently, solely because of software issues. If it takes 20 seconds to start up the OS, another 20 seconds to convince the thing that I've cleared enough open space to play in safely, another 20 seconds to switch from my wife's account to mine, another 20 seconds to start up the game I want to play, another 20 seconds to load up the level I want ... man, I only had 15 minutes of free time in between work and dinner today, I'm going to need 5 of that to cool down, and I've just burned 15% of the rest staring at one loading icon or another. It's so much easier to go to the treadmill or piano if I'm feeling like self-improvement or to the Steam Deck (roughly 2 seconds from hitting the power button to being ready to unpause my game in progress) if not. And the 20×N tedium is for a game that's in the Oculus walled garden! Getting the thing to pair properly with Steam on another computer is so much more tedious that I've barely even tried out Half Life: Alyx, despite that being a bucket-list-tier game for me.
Man, the quest 3 is a huge improvement then - I got one for Christmas and I just experimented and booted it and my steam deck up at the same time, and it was just finished loading the steam deck when passthrough and the internet connected on the quest 3.
If you want to play half life alyx though, you need the tether. If your WiFi is good the latency won't be a huge difference, but getting it connected is so much simpler it should be criminal somehow to not package them together. With the tether literally all I have to do is start steam vr, then connect the tether, and it figures itself out. If I want to try a different steam account I just unplug and reboot and start again.
Do you have any recommendations though, while I'm at it? I've been loving the shit out of Maestro and my brother gave me this cool game that feels a bit like half life meets bioshock called Genotype, but I want to try some of the exercise games and I don't even know what I should be looking for there.
For exercise, Beatsaber and its clones are the go-to, but I've also found Rumble (Avatar Earthbending contest) pretty fun if you don't mind pvp.
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Doing a double-take at the first part of your comment ... maybe it's possible that the quest 3 isn't a huge improvement, but rather the Steam Deck is? I was using Steam from a laptop when experimenting with the quest 2, and I confess it didn't even occur to me to try VR via the Steam Deck after we got the Steam Deck. Will any USB-C to USB-C cable work for the tether if I want to give that a try?
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Beat Saber seems to be the most popular, and I definitely had fun with it. I prefer Supernatural, but that does have a recurring fee.
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Come on, that's a 2K display stretching its pixels across a 100°+ field of view. At that point, you can't even read instruments in flight simulators or racing sims, not to speak of productively interacting with text. And it turns out that even a lot of tpyes of doom-scrolling heavily rely on text interaction.
Those headsets will get competitive for a lot of tasks when they get to the level of a cheap office monitor 3' away from your face, and that's around an order of magnitude more pixels (per line, two orders more pixels in total). The Vision Pro has 2x the pixels per line, uses tricks to increase pixel density where it matters, and is still far away from looking at a shitty full HD display.
I hate interacting with people or real objects while wearing one of those. To make this go away, you need transparent displays or really good pass-through mode. The latter is less than ideal, because turns out most other people really hate talking to someone wearing a headset - no matter if you paint a face onto it or not.
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Use Virtual Desktop. I found it basically works out of the box.
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