Samba, rsync, sshfs, even fusefs... but there's seemingly nothing that can keep your files yours across your own devices without extensive hacking/setup, suspicious EULAs, MitMs, etc. We can build it, but normies can't
Despite the shock at the amount of money meta spent on their version of the metaverse, I don't think they spent nearly enough to accomplish their vision.
Meta, to the detriment of the market, tried too early in the VR lifecycle to own the market. They basically tried to become the iPhone and Apple in the year 1990.
Tell me, do you believe any singular company in the year 1990, with 100B to burn, would be able to create the iPhone, in any of its varations? Absolutely not, there too much research, too much to invent, too much to program and not nearly enough talent and money for one company to manage.
I think you make a good point but also, honestly, VR seemed so beyond Facebook's depth. Zuck, IMO, was reaching for a pie on a table at the other end of the room. I understand the whole point of acquiring Oculus was to get allies on that table at the other end but---excuse my corpo-speak here---I don't think Oculus ever had synergy with the rest of Facebook's business.
This is just my 2c as an outside observer, software engineer ofc. I'm sure some MBA could make a case for said synergy. But it made sense to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp, for instance, because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks. But Oculus?!?!?! IMO Facebook had a better chance opening a cloud computing division.
So, achieving the Metaverse dream with the money Zuck has spent was always gonna be a tall order at this point but if anyone could've made it work, it wasn't gonna be a social media company.
> because they'd face similar tech challenges and could benefit from each others' growth playbooks
Another point of view: antitrust. What Zuck did with Whatsapp at a minimum ought to be highly illegal. He's a black hat hacker from his history and WA is more of the same. Brian Acton said "it's time, delete Facebook". That's not mutual benefit, that's conquering
On the hardware side, sure, not being able to solve the hardware challenges always seemed like a real possibility.
On the gaming side though, other companies succeeded in making profitable games. Meta seems to have just spent and spent, without getting a game people wanted to play.
They did though! From what I understand from people who made those profitable games is that Facebook funded, either though investments or grants most vr games out there. Even ones not owned by the company (like beat sabre, batman, deadpool, etc).
The problem is, like someone else mentioned, the company itself. Facebook is a middleman company. other people make stuff, showcase it on one of their properties (insta, marketplace, whatever), and then go back to the people actually doing stuff.
VR seems cool but imo just sucks as a product no matter how it has been used. Like who is the market for? Gamers? They might be trying to play for the next 12 hours straight. They don't want to waive their arms around and turn their head.
Nongamers? And you are going to somehow get nongamers to shell out for the required hardware for this casual half interest pursuit of theirs? Doesn't work.
I feel like zuck has been billionaire for too long to probably understand this.
Even sites with that option already (like wikipedia) still report being hammered by scrapers. It's the full-funded aligned with the incompetent at work here.
Good luck. To have something that a regular family could use would require remote access from the company for troubleshooting, updates, maintenance.
So you get all of the downsides of cloud hosting (company employees can still remote in), with none of the upsides (all the hardware is now geographically distributed, instead of one big building) with the privilege of paying for it instead of being "free" like facebook/google.
Honestly? They might. A game I play (Torn.com) started using AI and over dramatic ads, and they outperformed (higher signups, and higher retention) the more traditional and even player created ads.
The owner expressed surprise and frustration over it, because it kinda sucks that's what works.
And cheap paperback novels, movies, TV, pornography and video games. The amount of stimulation or positive reward available through these things with only a small effort and a small risk and a short waiting time are much greater than anything available in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness with a similar degree of effort, risk and waiting time.
Not sure if that was an attempt to reduce my argument to an absurdity.. but now we can see many of those things evolve and adapt in real time with lots of testing to reach their maximum potential.
There is a lot of individual variation in susceptibility to a vice. For example, I never had any significant amount of trouble avoiding any food I believed was bad for me. It just never required much willpower, but it is so easy for me to fall into a habit of overconsumption of video entertainment that I haven't owned a television set in decades (and lichess.org is blocked 3 times in my /etc/hosts: near the top, again near the middle and again near the end of the file).
haha no worries, i may be insecure and seeing the flaws in my own argument there..
Similar in some ways i've tried things in my 20's that should have got me hooked but never felt the urge to do or seek out those things. Can't watch TV either but computer games on the other hand... absolutely hooked.
You're not. You feel obligated to send a thank you, but don't want to put forth any effort, hence giving the task to someone, or in this case, something else.
No different than an CEO telling his secretary to send an anniversary gift to his wife.
That would be yes. What about a token return gift to another business that you actually hate the ceo of but have to send it anyway due to political reasons?
Convienence. Consoles are popular because you just plop down, hit the on button and play (in theory).
And while people don't care how much spy/adware their computer is, they do care when frequent notifications, popups and updates interfere with what you're doing. Nothing more annoying that having a windows notif steal focus from a game you're playing through steam link in the other room (personal experience).
I'm so glad that they've improved steam and link on linux so much, having to run it on my s/o windows computer was a pain.
In 2032 new HN usernames must use underscores. It was part of the grandfathering process to help with moderating accounts generated after the AI singlarity spammed too many new accounts.
my hypothesis is they trained it to snake case for lower case and that obsession carried over from programming to other spheres. It can't bring itself to make a lowercaseunseparatedname
Most LLMs, including Gemini (AFAIK), operate on tokens. lowercaseunseparatedname would be literally impossible for them to generate, unless they went out of their way to enhance the tokenizer. E.g. the LLM would need a special invisible separator token that it could output, and when preprocessing the training data the input would then be tokenized as "lowercase unseparated name" but with those invisible separators.
edit: It looks like it probably is a thing given it does sometimes output names like that. So the pattern is probably just too rare in the training data that the LLM almost always prefers to use actual separators like underscore.
The tokenization can represent uncommon words with multiple tokens. Inputting your example on https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer (GPT-4o) gives me (tokens separated by "|"):
reply