Just to be clear, the bosses are showing off how they got legs before all the employees and the employees are very excited about that? https://t.co/d6RYt7Wboa
— Downtown Brandi Frown ?? (@ItsTheBrandi) October 12, 2022
now convinced this is a government op to make computers so lame the children will go outside and become strong so we have a supply of able-bodied conscripts for the end wars of the 2030s. https://t.co/QA84nmiaC9
— Starfish In Charge Of WB Tax Evasion Dept. (@IRHotTakes) October 12, 2022
"It is very funny when Zuckerberg and Facebook, operating under any name or brand, faceplant into a mountain of shit; the only good thing either of those entities can do with their essentially infinite wealth is lose it." https://t.co/BPn8i9W7X0
— Matthew 👻 Terrill (@Matt_Terrill) October 12, 2022
… For an extravagantly financed flagship online product of one of the world’s richest and most powerful companies, 300,000 “monthly active users” is a pathetic count, roughly equivalent to zero in a world of eight billion people even before you get into the possible shadiness of “monthly active users,” one of those weird latter-day metrics—does it count unique IP addresses? Devices? Sessions?—with a dubious relationship to any knowable number of actual human beings. For Meta, which over the past year-plus has put whole entire billions of dollars behind CEO/chairman/godhead Mark Zuckerberg’s wager that “metaverse” (wearing the internet on your face) is the way of the future, this is an ominous portent. But also and more materially it is a big friggin’ sinkhole that has already swallowed, like, a thousand times the total revenues of this website.
Which, first of all, ha ha ha ha ha! It is very funny when Zuckerberg and Facebook, operating under any name or brand, faceplant into a mountain of shit; the only good thing either of those entities can do with their essentially infinite wealth is lose it. If that were all The New York Times had to report in Sunday’s delightful article about Meta’s season of struggle, it’d be enough. There’s other good stuff in there: A running conflict, for example, between John Carmack, the principal creator of some of the most influential video games ever made, who wants Meta to focus on the metaverse user experience, and some other executive bozo who, uh, “has approached it from a longer-term point of view with a focus on business opportunities,” which I assume means sacrificing user experience for the sake of, uh, doing deals or something. Who knows.
Anyway here is my favorite part:
In September, Vishal Shah, the vice president in charge of Meta’s metaverse division, wrote on an internal message board that he was disappointed in how few Meta employees were using Horizon Worlds, according to a post obtained by The Times.
In his post, which was first reported by The Verge, Mr. Shah said that managers would begin tracking workers’ use of Horizon Worlds, and said that testing their own technology was essential.
“Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time?” Mr. Shah asked. “The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”
… People do not like or want to play Horizon Worlds; the list of those who do not like it or want to play it includes many Meta employees. That is not what Mark Zuckerberg wants! Mark Zuckerberg wants people to like Horizon Worlds, to play it all the time, to get a taste of Meta’s metaverse and never want to go back to the normal internet where Facebook and Instagram are lame dinosaur shit and his company is flailing for relevance among younger generations. Mark Zuckerberg wants to live in a world in which Horizon Worlds, and by extension Meta’s other metaverse products, are successful and the billions he’s poured into them amount to his having purchased the future. His underlings could set out to create that world by making Meta’s metaverse stuff as popular as he wants it to be, but of course that is a huge and complex mission that already has torched the GDP of island nations without much to show for it, with no clear path to the destination but loads of peril along the way. For one thing the work would start by endeavoring to find out why nobody likes it, which might possibly reveal that Zuckerberg’s vision is fundamentally boneheaded, that no critical mass of normal people shares his zeal for clamping the internet to one’s head and getting vertigo just to shop for a salad bowl. Zuckerberg can simply fire and replace the next thousand suckers who report this finding to him, like Stalin erasing any underling who informed him that one of his armies was at risk of encirclement and must retreat…
None of this is to say that Meta’s metaverse won’t come to be. At high enough concentrations, wealth and power have a way of erasing, even if only temporarily, the distinction between prognostication and commandment: What the guy with all the money dreams, countless other people will strive to make real, if only because that’s all you can get paid to do. It’s very possible some kind of widespread metaverse adoption is as inevitable as our tech overlords want it to be; that someday not too far in the future, even if nobody particularly wants a face-mounted online and nobody has developed one that doesn’t suck absolute shit, some eager-beaver sociopath will just unplug the older internet to make Mark Zuckerberg’s visions into reality. So that you and I will have no choice but to adopt the new, to stagger around our living rooms dressed like Robocop merely to attend worse-looking virtual meetings in a 3DO-grade digital mall, and Zuck can avoid forever the horror of being told that he was wrong about something. This is why progressive tax codes and/or guillotines are very important.
Zuckerberg, to the social media team: "I don't care that 'the metaverse' is 'inconvenient' and 'has no practical applications'. Your job is to sell it. Tweet about how you can suck people's feet in it or something. Fuck you." https://t.co/SCLmDZZgK9
— Promo Code: Rudy (@canderaid) October 11, 2022
When the original torso-blobs were first released, it was widely hypothesized that Meta, conscious of its workplace-friendly image, just didn’t want pranksters creating obscene avatars (a predictable first impulse for your average tech-nerd). But it turns out making legs is actually quite a technological feat, so…
THE LEGS WERE A LIE:
Facebook's legs video was a lie: https://t.co/PEAWnikTLw pic.twitter.com/h4PUGluiqJ
— Kotaku (@Kotaku) October 13, 2022
… As UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton has since reported, Meta has issued a follow-up statement, which says, “To enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture.”
Deep down, of course, you all knew this. From vertical slices at E3 to photo tricks shown at Apple events, there are always grains of salt we need to chew on every time a company trying to sell us something that isn’t out yet.
But there’s something especially funny about this in particular, that a project that has spent billions of dollars to look like a Kinect demo—a piece of hardware first shown off in 2009—has ended up with its own dumb feet-related moment…
(raises hand) because he's blowing billions on an incoherent vanity project and helms a company that routinely lies, engages in anti-competitive behavior, undermines consumer privacy, opposes transparency, and has been widely criticized for enabling fascist propaganda? pic.twitter.com/76Qijpx1CL
— Karl Bode (@KarlBode) October 13, 2022
On the other hand, there’s *some* IRL experiences Metaverse can already approximate pretty closely…
Ok say what you will about the Facebook metaverse but they successfully recreated the standup comedy community https://t.co/gKKJgpaVbX pic.twitter.com/eyni8yZtCq
— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) October 15, 2022
divF
Clams got legs!
ETA: my very first first.
mrmoshpotato
Meh. How bout them Utah Utes!
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
I’ve seen better legs in a bucket of chicken.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@mrmoshpotato: Did they beat USC?
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Dodgers on the brink of elimination.
Padres riding the wings of the rally goose.
mrmoshpotato
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: Yup. 43-42
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@mrmoshpotato: See they beat U$C, any loss for the Trojies is a good day.
ColoradoGuy
The graphics remind me of my old 19.2K modem, waaay back in the mid-Nineties. Unlike phonograph records, ancient graphics ain’t cool.
HumboldtBlue
And speaking of Pennsylvania, how those Philadelphia Phillies who sent the Cobb County Crackers back to whatever city they play in after kicking their asses in the NLDS 3-1!!!
NotMax
Defray of sole.
//
James E Powell
My hometown Guardians are working the Yankees. However it turns out, I love this team!
My Dodgers, on the other hand, are proving that money doesn’t mean shit.
And it’s raining in San Diego & they’re playing through like they were in Minnesota or something.
Feathers
Took a course on Second Life 15-20 years ago. It sounded fascinating, but the reality was just underwhelming and inconvenient. One of the virtues of a website like this is that we can each say our bit and anyone coming along later can catch up. In a virtual world, everyone has to be there at the same time, find the location, come up with an avatar, and then deal with whatever the interface is. All to have a conversation that was inevitably less interesting than either in person, zoom, or a discord like message board. You can also find out about an event, get there, and find that no one else or maybe one or two other people are there.
I read one commentary about how virtual worlds are incredibly popular with bosses and other people who are used to being able to control their calendar and make everyone else show up on time and wait for them to get there. It sucks for everyone else.
And I hate, hate, hated having an avatar that I had to walk around in. It was pointless, and yet everyone seemed to fuss so much over them.
I am just astonished that someone is trying to resurrect this failed experiment from over a decade ago. The real reason the tech world pushes out older workers is because we know what didn’t work last time.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Fowl weather at the Padre game
NotMax
Remind me, how do you say “delusional megalomaniac'” in Simlish?
//
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Feathers: Pretty much, most folk are too busy for that crap.
I’ve got a 40+ hour week at the Home of the Orange Apron and spend any other free time I have shooting and processing my shots. Most of the folk I work with are similarly time constrained, who has time for these pointless games. I just don’t get it.
Now back to processing my shots from last Monday.
Another Scott
I forget the name of it, but sometime in the 1990s IBM was playing around with avatars running around in a virtual space on a web page. It seemed pointless to me then (I think I tried it for about 5 minutes and succeeded in running into someone else on a featureless flat plane). That was it.
I was recently at a hybrid virtual/in-person conference. The virtual stuff was held on Gather.town. The default avatars were little munchkins with about 30-factorial different varieties of hairstyles, skin colors, outfits, etc. I don’t think more than a handful of people bothered to customize their avatars to come close to matching their appearance. 60 year old white men were young Black women with purple hair, etc. :-/
As usual, the learning curve to figure out where one is on the map is high. Figuring out how to enter a room without blocking others, how to sit down in a chair facing the right way, how to go up or down stairs, etc., etc. It is not intuitive at all. Maybe people who grow up playing video games on their phone have an easier time with it.
The ability to see who is in an audience for a multi-session conference is useful. But using a keyboard to wander around a virtual plane to end up in some “room” is not more efficient than clicking on a link and seeing a list of names.
So, some progress has been made in the last 30 years – enabled by much larger bandwidth connections and faster computers. But there still seem to me to be substantial baseline problems that need to be addressed – like trying to make the virtual spaces “look like the real thing” may not be the best mapping (people don’t walk using a keyboard).
Meta’s stuff is worse – who cares that one can (eventually) have an avatar that jumps up and down?? There was a tweet a while ago making fun of some avatar in a museum getting up from a bench and it was the most ridiculous motion – (roughly) “worlds strongest quadriceps!!”
I remember seeing an Oculus demo at one of the Smithsonian museums a few years ago. The screen resolution was very low – maybe SVGA-like – very pixelated. It was something about some Mexican legend of some flying goddess or something. Ooh – I can tilt my head around and see different perspectives of a pixelated world!! :-/
Yeah, someday this will all be grand and wonderful. One can “be” at the Battle of Little Bighorn and see it in all its glory. Or one can operate a piece of equipment from home just as if one was there in the room with it. Or one can do whatever. Yay. Lots of things will be possible in the future. But lots of pioneers go broke and “The Next Big Thing” usually isn’t. Fast followers are often the ones who clean up (Apple didn’t invent the Smartphone, Ford didn’t invent the automobile, Boeing didn’t invent the airplane, etc.).
But I guess Z spending money on software and hype is better than him buying up Rembrandts and Klimts and giant diamonds.
tl;dr – I’m a skeptic that this Metaverse will be useful for much in less than 10 years.
Cheers,
Scott.
divF
Padres win!
I’m happy for three reasons.
(1) seeing the big bucks dodgers lose.
(2) Bob Melvin deserves everything he gets from an ownership that is willing to spend enough money to succeed in the postseason. He endured managing the A’s for all these years with John fisher as the owner, who viewed the baseball team as a means to a big real estate deal.
(3) Hungry Joe is very happy right now.
NotMax
@Another Scott
Digital tofurkey, minus any nutritive value whatsoever.
HumboldtBlue
@divF:
Indeed, he did.
Here’s a view of the Padres win taken from a nearby high rise.
Steeplejack
@divF:
Is that from B.C.? It’s stirring vague, distant memories.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
“Zuckadroid.”
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Another Scott: I should note that there are things that virtual reality is useful for. As a photographer, it can be really helpful in scouting locations…get some VR glasses and Google Earth and you can compose your shot before you get to the location. I don’t have the VR glasses, but I’ll get on Google Earth and “go” to a place before I get in the car and drive up there, since there is a pretty steep monetery and time cost is heading to a location and just looking around.
divF
@Steeplejack: Yep. Since AL (and I) is “of a certain age” I’m pretty sure that’s what she was riffing on.
divF
@Anne Laurie: Thank you!
Shalimar
@Another Scott: I think you’re right that the future is being able to visit places virtually as if you’re there, replacing some tourism and making history more immersive. No one wants to visit a virtual conference room. If it does replace meetings, it will be with informational add-ons you can view when you’re bored with what people are saying.
John Revolta
Who remembers Beta? Beta was superior to VHS in every way. And yet, VHS is what we ended up with….
Anne Laurie
@divF: You are correct!
I actually have a (low-res, pixilated) gif of the original B.C. cartoon, but I can’t get FYWP to load it correctly as a comment.
NotMax
@Shalimar
Subject to editorial whim.
“Funny, I didn’t know Reagan was on Mt. Rushmore.”
NotMax
@John Revolta
Still own three – count ’em, three – Betamax machines.
frosty
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
I was a Dodger fan when the Yankees beat them in 77 and 78. My dad was a Dodger fan, seeing them at Ebbets Field. Nevertheless, Go Padres!!!!!
John Revolta
@NotMax: Shoulda known. Balloon Juice does not disappoint!
Glidwrith
@Anne Laurie: Clams are aerodynamic!
LeftCoastYankee
“But it has an app” and “has no practical applications” will be the duel epitaphs for this wave of technology investment.
I’m starting to understand how so many Gilded Age “Barons” ended up losing their fortunes.
James E Powell
@HumboldtBlue:
That’s Cleveland.
frosty
@Shalimar: Virtual tourism will suck. I can’t tell you how many places I’ve been where I tried to take a picture and as soon as I put a frame around it the experience was lost.
Plus, it’s not cold and rainy or hot and sweaty. Or there’s not enough air to breathe because you’re above 10,000 ft. Or the smell of the swamp is overwhelming. These things matter!
Yutsano
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: I’m too lazy/tired to look it up now, but I will be rooting for whoever plays the Astros next. Gawd their fans are some assholes.
James E Powell
@frosty:
And the food.
James E Powell
@divF:
San Diego Padres are also a big bucks team. Top five payrolls ranked 1 through 5 are Mets, Dodgers, Yankees, Phillies, Padres.
Guardians at the other end of the line, 28th of 30 teams.
NotMax
Whew. In the spirit of Maxwell Smart, missed becoming a planet infested with Hulks by that much.
;)
NotMax
@frosty
The iSmell didn’t exactly set the world on fire.
HumboldtBlue
@James E Powell:
Completely confused me, I was wondering where those ugly brown boxy buildings were located in downtown Dago.
Also, fuck the Russians.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@frosty: I spent a good deal of last Monday above 10,000 feet(Little Lakes Valley, South Lake and the Bristlecone Pine forest). The altitude didn’t bother me as much as it did last year, but I walk 15 miles a day at work and I’ve lost over 50lbs..
Tony Jay
“I read about the greatest Players evolving past their lumpen humanity by plugging-into the Crystal Wind of electro-reality when I was a kid, and I want to own it!”
Seems to me that numpties like Master Zucky consider themselves functionally equivalent to those time-travellers who get thrown back to a more primitive era armed only with their own genius and a ton of future knowledge and end up ‘inventing’ gunpowder weapons and the telegraph.
They ‘know’ that the future will involve a version of the Internet where everything is virtual, all basic interactions with things like ‘work’, ‘leisure’ and ‘retail’ will require plugging into this virtual world, and all the cutting-edge stuff will be done by hybrid cybernauts who sport in-skin nanoservers in their brains.
Since they’re gifted with this certainty, it only makes sense that they want to be the founding fathers of this Futureworld. And because they’ve also read about Uber-rich industry titans of the future living on autonomous satellite fortresses and being rich enough to do whatever the fuck they want, they want that too.
Frankly, we’re all letting them down by realising that they’re basically just very wealthy Cosplayers who want to wear their costumes all the time. Shame on us.
bjacques
B.C. had some real classics buried amongst the misogyny and griping about kids these days.
My favorite was just an exterior view of a cave and
”McSPLAT!”
“Oh Mcno!”
”I dropped the Mceggs on the Mcfloor!”
”You’re Mcfired!”
But I’m seeing it more like The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Lucky, and it really needs to come with free drugs, like Chew-Z or Mimezine. Some days the only thing that keeps me going in my shitty job in Meta User Experience second level support is waiting for the new Perky Pat layout to drop.
p.a.
Atrios has a set comment about people like Zuckerberg, something like “why don’t these people just move to Tuscany and use their money to enjoy life?” We’ll all be better off.
dm
Before Hiro Protagonist was doing katas in a digital Burning Man, Case was a bodiless point of view navigating an abstract 3d infographic of data and money exchange in the Sprawl. That’s always seemed to me to be what 3d telepresence was for: a new way of seeing.
Let me look at that coronavirus spike in 3d. Let me watch the antibodies latch onto it. Let me see the difference between what comes spilling out of a cell running an mRNA-vaccine code versus COVID-19 software (in particular, let me see the spikes be basically inert targets for the immune system to bench-press while the virus goes on to chain-react its way through lung tissue).
dm
@dm:…plus give me maybe a next-generation of Dall-EE so the motivated amateur can assemble such interactive animations with some suggestions instead of weeks of coding.
evodevo
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: Yes…GoogleEarth has saved me several times when traveling. Figuring out ahead of time how to approach a destination hotel or whatever in a maze of crooked one-way streets in say, Florence Italy or whatever…I am just too old to be wandering around a strange city trying to get to a certain spot. Other than that, I have NO use for virtual anything…
lowtechcyclist
Zuck is demonstrating why we need confiscatory taxation.
Ken
Especially since Warcraft and other platforms have already done all that stuff with multiple user avatars moving around a virtual world. Or at least, gotten it good enough that “how the hell do I walk through a door” doesn’t get in the way of playing the game.
Frankensteinbeck
Other people have already accomplished everything Zuckerberg wants Meta to be able to do (including legs, even centaurs), except nobody wants to use it for the purposes he intends. The comedy club story is hilarious and makes the point, especially since it’s obviously drawing the people who couldn’t make it on VRChat. Griefers that get kicked out of moderated areas. I’m amused that as pathetic a failure as Meta is, it is already unable to handle the core obstacle it will face if it becomes popular: Moderation. I honestly thought they’d start out policing that hard, and then get overwhelmed. Maybe that happened long ago.
Also, these articles only mention the money The Company Formerly Known As Facebook has poured into this. Other big brands have dumped billions, a LOT of billions, into making sure they have a presence on Meta and will be riding the wave of the grand future Zuckerberg creates. So much money is getting dumped into this hole that something has to break.
@Feathers:
Second Life and VRChat’s accountants would be confused to hear them described as ‘failed experiments’. For that matter, the huge social and RP communities of games like FFXIV would beg to differ. There is a definite market for this stuff. The thing is, Meta doesn’t want those markets and doesn’t want to give those markets what they want. Meta wants the people like you, who aren’t looking to spend money to become someone else for awhile or live in a magical world of its players’ imagination, but just want to get shit done. And for that, Meta offers nothing but inconvenience.
@Another Scott:
Right. The people who want this stuff don’t WANT their body and identity. What the fuck would you go to a fantasy world for unless you want a different experience than this one? Whether people are shitty racist griefers or want to share grand castles in the air and live stories about cyborg dragons, or just be young and hot again, people like to escape their own skin.
@Shalimar:
While it’s sure not going to replace tourism, yeah, definite market for tourism, historical tourism, and fantasy world tourism. Of course, Meta isn’t going to provide those of any quality. If someone goes to the considerable expense, they’ll make their own platform. Or they’ll be player-made, using a platform designed for player-made content. You know, like SL and VRChat, and the building communities of MMOs. Which again, is not what Zuckerberg is trying to make.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@frosty: For some people to see some places in the world virtual reality does afford a way to see places that are inaccessible any other way. While some tourist locations have tried to be more accessible to people in wheelchair s or with mobility issues. A lot of places are difficult to impossible to experience if you can not walk.
NotMax
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone
Stereopticons and Viewmasters were good enough for our forebears!
;)
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@NotMax: very true! Also side note. Why does the woman in the Legs animation have to have gif damn Five inch stilettos on for fucks sake!
Bill Arnold
Don’t see this linked, so:
Report Finds Russian Hackers Gained Access To Millions Of Metaverse Legs (2022/10/140, The Onion)
dnfree
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Great comment! I see Nancy Pelosi walking around in high heels and I ask myself why she doesn’t want to be a better role model for women her age. I quit wearing heels decades ago when I developed foot issues. They’re the equivalent of ancient Chinese foot-binding. I cheered Kamala’s tennis shoes, but now I only see her in heels also.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@dnfree: for Nancy after years of wearing heels she May have shortened her Achilles’ tendon s to the point that flats are painful. I suspect VP Harris got lectured about sneakers not lookin Professional or some shit. I hate heels and my knees are so bad I can not wear them. Used to get my heels of my dress uniform stuck in the turf in formation on the grass in the Navy. At parade rest and they say attention and you go to change position. And your shoe stays in the turf. Good times…