That's a trend I've noticed as well over the past few years. It somehow feels like it's becoming increasingly “important” to make money from whatever you do on the internet. The idea that you can just create things because you enjoy it, or because you want to share what you've made with others in the hope that they might like it and offer interesting feedback, seems to be fading away.
I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be disappearing more and more.
I have seen it said in hacker circles that people in their teens and twenties now are not just more reluctant to share stuff for free like FOSS, but they are even outright suspicious of such endeavors. To a generation who grew up on platforms and apps that maximize engagement for maximum profit, a community that doesn’t do that looks like a bunch of weirdos, maybe a cult.
I'm not sure I've seen that personally although most of the tech folk I know are at least somewhat older.
In fairness, I do think "side hustles" and the like have become much more normalized as the default. And even if the odds are poor, there are least enough anecdotes of Substack authors, influencers, and the like making enough money to perk many people's interest.
And additionally, Samsung never released their Odyssey VR (or it's successor) worldwide, which in my opinion was the reason WMR failed as it was the best of the WMR headsets at the time of their release (of course the HP Reverb was better, but it came out much later).
I’m still very salty about Samsung never officially releasing their Samsung Odyssey VR headset in Europe. It was the best VR headset among the Windows Mixed Reality headsets at the time of their release.
Of course, the HP Reverb was better, but it came out much later, too late for WMR to really take off.
I still believe that if Microsoft had forced Samsung to release the Odyssey VR headset worldwide, WMR could have been a success.
And I’m pretty sure Samsung won’t release this one (the Galaxy VR) worldwide either, which will be the reason it fails and Google will probably take that as an excuse to shut down the project as well.
> I still believe that if Microsoft had forced Samsung to release the Odyssey VR headset worldwide, WMR could have been a success.
I'm not sure if Microsoft actually wanted to try to make it a success. They made a lot of decisions that didn't help it succeed, with one of those decisions leading to every headset being a brick (officially, although Oasis fixes them) now. I could go on and on about it, because I love my Odyssey+ and it's frustrating to see how they screwed the ecosystem up so badly.
But I still remember the uproar in various communities about Samsung’s decision not to release what was, at the time, the only premium-tier WMR headset, with higher resolution and refresh rate, a wider FOV, mechanical IPD adjustment, and a few other features.
Only the HP Reverb WMR headset, released about two years later, offered comparable premium features and launched in more regions. But in my opinion, by then it was already too late.
The thing is, even at a slightly higher price point, the Samsung Odyssey would have been a great entry into PC VR for many people, since it was still one of the most affordable headsets compared to its competitors at the time, like the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift.
That alone could have helped WMR gain more traction. But many reviewers weren’t too impressed by the other WMR headsets from different manufacturers. Some even compared them to the Samsung Odyssey and suggested waiting for Samsung to release theirs worldwide, since it was clearly the better one (at that time, in 2017).
Which is kinda sad. Way back in the mid-2000s, I was playing World of Warcraft with a few people I had met in the game itself. Later on, we chipped in to rent a TeamSpeak server from a company that offered ready-made servers and we had a lot of fun. You didn’t even have to do much admin work. :(
You still don't have to do much these services still exist, even for Mumble. Their limitation is scaling. So if you want way more than just a handful of people, you either start charging everyone an entrance fee, or you cap the server.
Discord's limitation is scaling as well, to be honest. It's incredibly hard to follow a server full of tens of thousands of people. Just because something can scale in a technical sense doesn't mean it will scale in a human one.
There’s something else I notice in my daily work with all kinds of different people, which I like to call “tech avoidance.”
For example, this week I helped someone set up an account on an online library platform we use. I had to tell them multiple times not to tap the buttons in the email, website, or app right away, but to read them first. They were clearly nervous, and you could tell they just wanted to finish as quickly as possible and get out of “that very techie situation” to simply use the apps.
I mean, yeah, I get it. Technology isn’t for everyone. But the (sad) fact is that we live in a world largely dominated by it. And although it has created many problems we now need to solve with even more technology, it also helps us solve many of the problems we had before.
My hope is that AI will evolve to the point where it can become a kind of companion for those people, guiding them through situations involving technology that they find difficult or intimidating.
I really liked his series about modern c++ and learned a lot from it. It even made me understand some of the more complex topics of it and kinda rekindled my will to keep on learning.
Something i never understood about WASM is....Why? Why the need for yet another binary format. I mean we have java bytecode and .net bytecode already, why was there a need for yet another bytecode? Or was it an case of https://xkcd.com/927/ or similar? :D
One thing that sets Wasm [1] apart is that, the Wasm virtual machine is significantly lower-level than JVM, .NET or python virtual machine.
That makes it a better target for compiling C but also means different code bases will have to implement such things as strings, dictionaries, sets, etc. themselves, and that means it will be harder to combine multiple libraries in a single Wasm binary.
[1] I think they already lost that war, but that’s what the spec says it should be capitalised. https://www.w3.org/TR/2025/CRD-wasm-core-2-20250616/: “A contraction of “WebAssembly”, not an acronym, hence not using all-caps”
yeah on the surface it looks like just another bytecode. but wasm wasn’t some pointless nih thing, it actually filled a gap: a secure, standardized, vendor neutral format for the web that isn’t chained to orcle, microsoft, or anyone’s private stack.
I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be disappearing more and more.