One of the insalubrious aspects of living in a state that increasingly feels like 1930s Germany with beaches and theme parks is that lots of stuff seems too trivial to notice. But remember this stupid shit?
It’s a still from a faked hype video for the metaverse, the immersive blah blah blah that was going to change everything and inspired Facebook’s rebranding to Meta. However, despite spending well over $100 billion dollars on R&D alone, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has moved on from his company’s metaverse project, according to Ed Zitron at Business Insider:
From the moment of its delivery, Zuckerberg claimed that the Metaverse would be the future of the internet. The glitzy, spurious promotional video that accompanied Zuckerberg’s name-change announcement described a future where we’d be able to interact seamlessly in virtual worlds: Users would “make eye contact” and “feel like you’re right in the room together.” The Metaverse offered people the chance to engage in an “immersive” experience, he claimed…
The inability to define the Metaverse in any meaningful way didn’t get in the way of its ascension to the top of the business world. In the months following the Meta announcement, it seemed that every company had a Metaverse product on offer, despite it not being obvious what it was or why they should…
Companies’ rush to get into the game led Wall Street investors, consultants, and analysts to try to one up each other’s projections for the Metaverse’s growth. The consulting firm Gartner claimed that 25% of people would spend at least one hour a day in the Metaverse by 2026. The Wall Street Journal said the Metaverse would change the way we work forever. The global consulting firm McKinsey predicted that the Metaverse could generate up to “$5 trillion in value,” adding that around 95% of business leaders expected the Metaverse to “positively impact their industry” within five to 10 years. Not to be outdone, Citi put out a massive report that declared the Metaverse would be a $13 trillion opportunity.
I’m no business genius, but maybe the Meta team’s inability to get the avatars’ legs right should have been a clue? Christ on a crumpet, what a colossal waste of money. And Zitron is right about the Wall Street lemmings following Zuckerberg over the cliff — there were virtual land-grabs associated with this half-baked foolishness. The amount of money and effort wasted is incalculable.
Zitron notes that while Meta isn’t officially shuttering the metaverse project, Meta and key partners like Walmart and Disney closed divisions and laid off staff associated with their unpopulated virtual worlds, and Meta bosses, including Zuckerberg, now say they are chasing generative AI unicorns, so it looks like the writing is on the wall.
There probably will be compelling virtual worlds where billions of people interact for work or play in the reasonably near future. And who knows, maybe they won’t launch with much fanfare as an obvious monetization scheme.
Zuckerberg’s fellow tech warlord Elon Musk punctured his own carefully crafted hype balloon by overpaying for Twitter and making stupid decisions that ran that platform into the ground. The current Meta metaverse collapse probably won’t get nearly as much attention because nobody used it.
But if Zitron is right, arguably this is a worse face-plant than Musk’s misadventure. It’s also yet another argument for confiscatory tax rates.
Open thread.
craigie
I think the things that truly revolutionize the world tend to sneak up on society, not be announced as The Next Big Thing.
Baud
Wall Street has a real group think problem.
Baud
Meta is weird to me. I’m not active on Twitter or Facebook, but I get how people use them. I just never understood Meta at all.
rikyrah
Been on TikTok.
Woman stole A MACHINE GUN in Texas.
All her ID was fake.
She parked where there were blind spots for the cameras.
A $50,000 gun
Stolen.
Elizabelle
@craigie: Good point.
Also, as Betty Cracker says, TAX THESE FUCKERS.
It may be an uncomfortable fact for some that what were considered “confiscatory” tax rates helped to preserve our actual democracy.
Further, the government can just about always use the money better than these gazillionaires, with their spacecraft and megayachts and stable of bought and paid for political actors.
Another Scott
There was some stupid metaverse promo clip of a bunch of people in a room at a museum, and some guy stood up from sitting on a bench. I think it was Popehat who said the guy had the world’s strongest quads, or something – it was a freaky and stupid and totally distracting motion.
But it was worse than that. Before then, avatars were literally nothing from the waist down.
I remembered IBM trying to do some sort of virtual world hype in the early 1990s. I didn’t see the point then. And I don’t see it now.
When the software gets in the way of (doing the job / having fun / clear communications / whatever), it’s bad software. No amount of hype fixes that.
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
Stop the presses, I have breaking news.
A rescue kitty still to be named!
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: That’s a sweet face. I recommend Baud!
scav
@rikyrah: Is it a competition over how many TXan cliches one can tick in a single event? Did she cut some barbed wire fence while doing so? Easy point there.
Miss Bianca
@schrodingers_cat: Kitty-Boo!
Baud
@rikyrah: I don’t get it. What’s the point of a fake ID unless you’re purchasing the item?
Ken
I have to see this as a huge failure at analyzing user requirements. The sort of people who would use Meta are the ones who don’t make eye contact, and don’t want to be in rooms with other people.
Jeffro
That list of arguments grows longer by the day!
Also, Betty, I think you meant HIGHLY confiscatory tax rates.
Amir Khalid
@schrodingers_cat:
I recommend an Irish name with a very tricky spelling.
Baud
@Amir Khalid: Haha.
Roger Moore
All these companies have gigantic money pots, and rather than giving it back to investors in the form of dividends or stock buybacks, they’re either sitting on it or investing it in stupid shit. This says there is too much money chasing too few good investment opportunities. It’s time to raise wages so more of that money is going to people who will spend it on stuff.
This will achieve two desirable goals. On the one hand, it will mean companies no longer have more money than they know what to do with. Instead of throwing money at dumb schemes or buying each other, companies will actually have to start thinking about how they want to invest their limited resources. On the other hand, it will mean employees have more money to spend on goods and services. That will obviously be good for the employees, but it will also be good for companies because more consumer spending will mean more was of making money.
Miss Bianca
@Ken: Right?!
Plus the fact that the damn avatars look so damn goofy. Shit, don’t any of these people that Zuck was paying play the latest video games? Those “Meta” graphics are beyond pathetic when you compare them to, say, the latest iteration of Grand Theft Auto.
NotMax
eldorado
it’s almost like a confiscatory tax rate though
Another Scott
@Baud:
RawStory.com:
Nobody could have predicted!!1ONE
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
Speaking of Twitter, when does Musk’s first debt payment come due?
NotMax
Grrr. Fix.
Jumping on the blandwagon.
//
Baud
@Another Scott: Ah, thanks. So rent-to-
own-steal.I guess the only solution is to get more machine guns in the hands of the good guys.
ETA: I wonder how much ammo she has for it.
Bugboy
I really sat up and noticed that with all the gloriously crafted CGI in the Meta advertisement(s) I viewed, the sales pitch isn’t “See what Meta can do!”. Instead, it’s “Just hang on, see what Meta is GOING to do!”…
This is an exercise in “Venture Capitalists Reinventing The Wheel”. After all, there exists a virtual world that already got there, 20 years ago: Second Life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life
Roger Moore
@craigie:
At the very least, they spend a lot of time solving basic problems before there’s a “sudden” breakthrough that makes them the next big thing. Look at just about any interesting technology, and you’ll find decades, even centuries of people noodling around with it trying to make it practical before it really hit the big time.
Another Scott
@Amir Khalid: Made me look.
Welsh cat names:
I assume that Eye – o – L – o not LOL-O. But it’s hard to be sure. I also assume that it’s pronounced “Jack” or something similarly inscrutable.
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
twbrandt
@Baud:
Neither did anyone else.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Miss Bianca: I know! I look at my current character in Guild Wars 2 compared to this Meta crap and all I can come up with is What were they thinking?! What was the point of their Metaverse?
I can party up in GW2 with my friends, husband and brother and run around a huge virtual world ( can even buy drinks and get “virtual” drunk. There are random dog and cats and kittens that you can pet in the game (Yes I am five )
We can look each other in the eye, oh you mean like on a Zoom call or a Webex?
NotMax
Originally posted in wrong thread.
Fun stuff from Ed.
The history of the hearse.
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat: Darling kitty. And some beautiful and colorful artwork in the previous tweet.
Maybe name after a special place? Preferably not in Wales.
Or: Have yet to meet a cat named Wordle. And it is a passion.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Bugboy: or as we like to call it Vaporware:
vaporware: definition –
software or hardware that has been advertised but is not yet available to buy, either because it is only a concept or because it is still being written or designed.
MattF
I’m waiting for the virtual reality that shows fifty people sitting in a room doomscrolling on their mobile phones and tablets. Promo cartoons of people jumping around or making (ugh) eye contact misses the point in a big way.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
“Meta” is confusing because it has two meaning when referring to Zuckerberg. On the one hand, it’s the new name of his company, formerly known as Facebook. They decided to rename the big company from Facebook to Meta because Facebook was only one of their products, and they wanted to resolve the confusion. So now Meta (the company) is the owner of the social media networks Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and some more I can’t think of.
Unfortunately, this creates some confusion because Zuckerberg is (or was) super hyped about the concept of the Metaverse. This is the idea of a virtual world people visit using VR technology; the name is taken from the virtual world in Neal Stephenson’s seminal novel Snowcrash. People in the Metaverse are represented by “avatars” that are their virtual body. In principle, the avatar could be anything you choose it to be, but it will look and act like a goofy computer game until it can actually represent something like a real person with facial expressions, body language, and so forth. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that, so it’s going to remain a fringe technology for the foreseeable future.
TaMara
Remember during the shutdown, all the drone videos of deserted cities? That’s how I picture the fate of the metaverse. Abandoned. Digital trash blowing down the streets. Avatar crows singing sad caws from the top of light posts.
Elizabelle
@TaMara: And when you look at the buildings. They are all facades.
It is a set. For a movie nobody wanted to see.
TaMara
@schrodingers_cat: Is it a girl? I suggest an Emily or Emma name if it is.
El Cruzado
@Roger Moore: They are ALSO doing ginormous stock buybacks. IIRC Alphabet just announced a 70 billion one, Apple has done hundreds of billions so far and I can’t imagine Meta is far behind.
eclare
@schrodingers_cat:
Awwww, sweet face!
Baud
@Roger Moore:
But why would people do this? It reminds me a little of Esperanto, which was designed to be a universal language so everyone could communicate each other, but not enough people want to learn a new language just to do that.
Elizabelle
@El Cruzado: Hmmm. Think of all the companies we have heard of lately. Headed for bankruptcy. Did a bunch of stock buybacks earlier.
These companies are financial instruments.
Roger Moore
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
I think the goal is for the metaverse to eventually be able to represent people as they react in real life. In you game, things look really good because the characters are using motion captured movements from real actors. That can make their movements look fluid and realistic, but it also limits them to the range of behaviors the game creators thought of when they were doing the mo-cap work. The goal for the metaverse is to be able to do something like mo-cap in real time, so the metaverse avatar can do whatever the person they’re representing does. They’re nowhere near there, but that’s what they want to do.
narya
Is it time for a rant? It’s always time for a rant! I was able to apply for unemployment, which I did as soon as I was eligible. I then got some consulting work, as you all know, but hadn’t made much. I dutifully reported what I was earning, but made the stupid mistake of putting a few weeks into one week of certification. BOOM! I made too much that ONE week, so was kicked off completely. I’m apparently still eligible, but it has been weeks trying to get back in. I also apparently did the Wrong Thing to get back in–I reopened instead of reapplied? Calling = waiting on hold forfuckingever, though the actual person is usually pretty helpful. The person w/ whom I spoke today maybe steered me back in the correct direction? Who knows. I am SUPER fortunate that I don’t need these funds to survive, but that also makes me have infinite sympathy for folks who absolutely do need these funds to survive.//end rant
Miss Bianca
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Right, see, this is the thing I don’t get – I *don’t* play video games, and EVEN I KNEW that video game design was already doing exactly what “the Metaverse” was supposed to be doing and doing it about 1000 times better. So, WTAF, Zuck?
@Roger Moore: Ah, ok.
RaflW
Frankly, the wholesale merchandising of several conservative SCOTUS justices to billionaires is at least as strong an argument for confiscatory tax rates on the rich. As to Zuck, thank FSM he’s turning out to be yet another tech billionaire with awful instincts about what customers want. Let him blow another $100B on more nonsense!
JoyceH
Remember when there was the breathless announcement of the Next Big Thing, which turned out to be the Segway? Okay, there are uses for them, I think you can rent them to tour downtown DC, but hardly the Next Big Thing.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
And lets not forget that the Metaverse and virtual worlds like it base their trade, economy , etc on BlockChain:
The Metaverse – what is it?
”
“Bloktopia: Bloktopia uses virtual reality to provide users with an immersive experience. It is a 21-story virtual structure representing the 21 million Bitcoins currently in use. With new virtual experiences, it provides a variety of revenue-generating potential. People can design their avatars, participate in numerous activities, learn about cryptocurrencies, and purchase virtual “real estate” in the tower. Using the platform’s builder tool, you can also utilize this real estate to make artwork, games, sequences, and other things.”
Sure! – let have more BlockChain/BItcoin which requires immense amounts of electricity to produce. We are already looking at an El Nino that’s on track to cook large portions of the planet and glaciers melting at unheard of rates. Lets put more strain on the power grid and more carbon in the atmosphere. Hopefully the Metaverse is dead and gone for good.
The costs of Bitcoin mining
“In Texas, the computers kept running until just after midnight. Then the state’s power grid operator ordered them shut off, under an agreement that allowed it to do so if the system was about to fail. In return, it began paying the Bitcoin company, Bitdeer, an average of $175,000 an hour to keep the computers offline. Over the next four days, Bitdeer would make more than $18 million for not operating, from fees ultimately paid by Texans who had endured the storm.”
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
This Meta stuff reminds me video game companies trying to force NFTs on customers who absolutely wanted nothing to do with them
Captain C
@TaMara:
There’s a Pixar movie to be made of this, at least a short. The graphics will be at least an order of magnitude better than the actual Zuckverse.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
Very good question. I agree that most people don’t actually want to do this, at least with the technology where it currently is. I think the goal is to have something that’s way better than the trash you see above, to the point that being there in VR is very close to being there in person. At that point, there are all kinds of applications. It’s just that we’re probably still a decade or more from having that kind of realism, so what we do have looks like utter garbage.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Roger Moore: Which I understand for some uses, for instance my boss at a former job was a quadriplegic, could this technology allow him to function with more freedom, maybe, although if it relies on a VR headset and VR addons, maybe not. But the real world costs of what these “meta worlds” are based on are just too high.
Ken
Does anyone know of a site that tracks the performance record of these? I know the experiment has been done for stocks, and a dartboard does about as well as most of the people out there recommending individual stocks (even if you take out Jim Cramer). I’d be interested to see the success ratio for these “next big thing” predictions.
For that matter, I think it’s high time we had a meta-rating for the “analysts”, as in “company X failed to meet analysts’ expectations”. If some analysis company consistently “expects” more than what companies deliver, it sounds like the problem is with the analysis.
NotMax
@schrodingers_cat
Scheherazade. Zaddlie for short.
eclare
@narya:
That sounds awful, a process that is too easy to screw up and too hard to fix. And like you said, hits those who least afford it the hardest.
citizen dave
I love colossal business failures–great post! Recalling that women were being assaulted in the metaverse: https://nypost.com/2022/05/27/women-are-being-sexually-assaulted-in-the-metaverse/
A somewhat smaller scale failure, but happened at the start of the pandemic so didn’t get it’s proper due, was Dyson trying to remake the EV: Dyson has unveiled its abandoned electric car project, which racked up $500 million in cost before the vacuum manufacturer gave up on it. May 18, 2020
Anyone remember the Segway rollout on Good Morning America? It’s going to revolutionize everything! December 3, 2001. Check out Diane Sawyer’s awesome look at someone (producer?) at the 2:04 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tppv2NgZOQU
RobertB
Not apologizing for Zuckerberg. But I know that your average PC, like my cheapo laptop, doesn’t have the graphics horsepower to run something like Guild Wars 2 or Grand Theft Auto 3. Until fairly recently, integrated graphics processors in PCs were surprisingly bad. So if Zuck is banging the table and insisting that Meta should run on a $200 Walmart laptop, he’s going to end up with Nintendo Wii avatars. There’s no excuse whatsoever on spending $100B though.
eclare
@Ken:
For Jim Cramer, there is a fund that shorts everything he recommends. I saw some stats a while back, it’s doing well.
Miss Bianca
@NotMax:
What, not Sherry?
Michael Bersin
The story of a Pride Festival, right wingnut pearl clutchers, and the Warrensburg, Missouri City Council continues. There was a city council meeting last night. The busybody right wingnuts are now demanding a city ordinance banning drag shows.
Addressing Bigotry – Warrensburg, Missouri City Council Meeting – May 8, 2023
Addressing Bigotry – Warrensburg, Missouri City Council Meeting – May 8, 2023 – part 3
These people are nuts. The threats are real.
I still have to transcribe another dozen or so public comments from the meeting. That’s probably two more posts.
MattF
@Ken: I’d guess that the volume of predictions correlates with the volume of loose cash floating around. But accuracy in prediction is hard— especially, as often noted, prediction about the future.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Roger Moore:
I’ve never read Snow Crash, but I’ve seen it referenced. I can’t imagine naming a product after something from a dystopian sci-fi novel
brendancalling
All those Facebook/Meta avatars make my stomach hurt. I think the term is “uncanny valley“?
Anyway, those avatars are the stuff of nightmares so far as I’m concerned. Imagine waking up one morning (one evening) and your spouse or partner has turned into one of those things—you’d be out the door screaming in seconds.
Also, too, why would ANYONE except a socially-inept dork who wrote up a whole app to rate the hotness of the women with who he went to college? I can’t think of anything WORSE than being on the Internet all day—I’m already online too much.
Geminid
Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks has announced her candidacy to succeed retiring Maryland Senator Ben Cardin. If elected, Ms. Alsobrooks would be the third Black woman to hold a Senate seat.
Congressman David Trone and Montgomery County Council Member will Jawando are also running for the Democratic nomination.
Cameron
@schrodingers_cat: As long as it isn’t one of those Gaelic names that look like an allergy medication.
NotMax
@,a href=”https://balloon-juice.com/2023/05/09/metahearse-open-thread/#comment-8837495″>RobertB
Sleek gaming graphics integration aside, an el cheapo Walmart laptop can be surprisingly beefy
Renie
Is it a bad thing that Zuck lost billions and that makes me happy?
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Picture Mark Zuckerberg. Try to control your gag reflex.
mrmoshpotato
I’m learning things!
NotMax
@Miss Bianca
Too bubblegum.
;)
Paul in KY
@Baud: How about Baudalina?
Another Scott
@Ken: All of these financial / corporate / audit / PR places are too incestuous. KPMG said the 3 big banks that recently failed were doing just fine. Etc.
It’s crazy hard for normal people to do due-diligence these days. Even Buffett was quoted as saying that Musk was a ‘genius’ recently…
I’m not a stock picker. I’m in an S&P500 fund and almost never look at it. But, the trouble is, just a few giant stocks can swing the average and cause problems. Yet another argument for higher corporate and top-1% taxes – people’s long-term retirement investments shouldn’t be held captive to sociopathic man-babies with too much money.
Cheers,
Scott.
Paul in KY
@Baud: They may have wanted ID to let her handle it or she fake bought it & used the ID to allow her to walk away with it?
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: So sweet! A girl, right?
Paul in KY
@Baud: If it is 9mm, can get alot fairly easily.
Bill Arnold
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Snow Crash is about 30 percent joke. The main character is “Hiro Protagonist”.
I want the “Meta” corporation to collapse because they appropriated the word “meta”. (Similarly, they cannot be forgiven for Facebook-the-propaganda-platform.)
Betty Cracker
@Ken: That would be a super useful site!
Layer8Problem
@Amir Khalid: Ok, then Bronagh.
MattF
@Layer8Problem: Pronounced “Woof”.
schrodingers_cat
AFAIK, according to his rescuers its a boy. He is very calm. Asleep now.
tam1MI
@schrodingers_cat: Here’s some “sweet” themed names for a kitty (since I don’t know whether or not it is a boy cat or a girl cat, I am listing both types of names):
Snickers
Hershey
Cupcake
Sugar
Honey
Tootsie
Shasta
Also, since Star Wars day just passed, here’s a few names from that!
Leia
Obi-Wan
Sabine
Chopper
Bix
Lola
Lothal
Finally, since kitty is a tabby cat, you could name it Tabiyyah*, which is the Arabic word that “tabby” is derived from.
* – I *think* it is pronounced Ta-BYE-yah.
Paul in KY
@narya: There should be a physical place (Fed bldg) you can go to.
tam1MI
Well, then, ignore the girl names in my post just above! 😜
NotMax
@Bill Arnold
Tried reading Snow Crash not long after its appearance on the ultra-enthusiastic recommendation from friends.
Gave up in pococurantism several dozen pages in. Chacun à son goût.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
True lol. Zuck has been a weird dude since always. I remember the videos on YT calling him a robot from his Senate testimony
Geminid
I’ve noticed that the potential debt ceiling crisis has triggered a lot of Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder in people here, but I’m putting this Politico Playbook excerpt up anyway. It’s based on a detailed and “wonky” report released this morning by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
cain
@Michael Bersin: Expect these people to run for office later so they can take it over.
Another Scott
@RobertB: Way back in the primoridal olden days, when I was a temp for a tiny company that wrote software (on Windows 2.x) for banks, I was helping to put their help system in this new thing called “hypertext”. I mentioned to one of the lower-level managers that it was ungodly slow, and he said, “that’s fine – we’ll just sell a faster PC with it.”
If something works well enough, companies (and early adopters) will be thrilled to throw newer and faster hardware at it – hardware is “cheap”.
The Metaverse problem was the “Why” not the “It’s too slow”.
Cheers,
Scott.
RobertB
@NotMax: They’re okay for everything but graphics. Example: On https://www.videocardbenchmark.net a $150 Gateway has a benchmark of 279. My GTX 970 from 2014 (bought mine in 2017) is 9643. And that’s reflected in the frame rate.
If you’re not gaming, it’s fine. A friend bought a PC that you can stick on the back of your monitor with velcro. He doesn’t game, so he can get away with that. I do game, so I have to insist on a little graphics performance when I have to replace my gaming PC.
Intel and AMD are coming out with more powerful integrated graphics now, as a cheaper gaming alternative.
BretH
Ed Zitron is a treasure. His posts about companies wanting to retreat from work-at-home are priceless.
https://ez.substack.com/
JoyceH
@NotMax:
My sister was always telling me that I HAD to read Snow Crash. Never have but still have a copy around here somewhere.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Bill Arnold:
FaceBook, and even some of their other platforms, is associated with old people. I think eventually they’ll hit a ceiling with new users
Anonymous At Work
The “journalists” who cover these topics have an acute issue: FOLS, or Fear of Looking Silly. Calling BS on BS when everyone else is writing otherwise makes you Look Silly. Being right later on is cold comfort and often too long after the fact for accountability.
artem1s
@Roger Moore:
Yep, saw that one coming. So many of these stupid ideas come directly out of SciFi books these asshats read when they were 14*. It’s like they read Jules Verne and decided to spend $1XX billion on getting the first picture of the monster in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. They have no understanding of how things actually work. They want their cool stuff and they want it NOW! I’m pretty sure Meta sounded like a good idea to Zuckerface mostly because all those annoying people out there are only NPC’s to him anyway. So any avatar should be good enough for all us NPC’s right? We should be grateful! and we’re lucky they decided to give us legs at all.
*I’m pretty sure Bannon gave TFG the idea for slogan MAGA. It’s straight out of Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Talents”. And there is a possibility Elon’s obsession with space travel could have been inspired by her novels too – but I think he’s probably just misunderstanding the Book of Moroni and/or Scientology.
JoyceH
In other news – the fence guys are here. I’ve been waiting for them to come repair my fence for a couple months, called a few times, expected to get put on the schedule, instead they just showed up this morning and got to it. By the time I realized they were there and working, the grape vines were GONE.
Layer8Problem
Once upon a time, neigh on thirty years ago, there was a miniseries working on being edgy called Wild Palms (no, not the Faulkner story that was renamed), with God help me Jim Belushi, Angie Dickinson, and Robert Loggia. As best as I can recollect the future there had in one tiny scene Belushi and two other people meeting, the guy in the wheelchair telling Belushi to put on the normal-looking glasses, and suddenly he sees the three of them standing in a late eighteenth century French mansion’s room in late eighteenth century French upper class garb. “That would be cool,” I thought.
It hasn’t happened yet, damn it. The future has failed me.
tam1MI
@schrodingers_cat: Some boy names for a cat:
Purrcival
Purrcy
Romeo
Oz
Cole 😜
Jackal
Bogart
Elvis
O’Malley
NotMax
@RobertB
True. Gaming requires oomph which nominally average users do not.
Hell, there’s now high end phones with benchmarks in the high four digits. Although why anyone would choose to play graphics intensive games on a piddly little phone screen escapes me.
Matt McIrvin
@Layer8Problem: I recall the plot revolved around a dangerous drug that could somehow convince you that your paltry virtual-reality session was a hyperrealistic all-senses hallucination, virtual sex included.
JoyceH
Hey, what about puppy names? I’m planning to get a puppy this fall. Another Samoyed of course. My current dog is Jazzy. Names I’m considering are Taffy and Pixie. Friend thinks the vowel sounds in Taffy is too similar to Jazzy. Thoughts?
NotMax
@tam1MI
Boy cat?
Mandu.
;)
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Another Scott: I get the virtual world in one sense, if they could really make it like the Star Trek TNG Holodeck. I have the good fortune to be able to travel fairly regularly for leisure but it would be cool to be able to virtually visit places, like really visit them – see the sights, feel the sunshine and breeze, smell the smells, hear the sounds. Like, be right there without actually going there.
Like imagine being able to virtually visit the Swiss Alps, or the Serengeti Plain, or Banff, without the expense of actually booking airfare and making hotel and other arrangements. For places like the Louvre or Venice I’d almost rather visit virtually because they get so mobbed.
Layer8Problem
@Matt McIrvin: I think you’re right. Which by the way is Zuckerberg’s next big idea, after the Artificial Intelligence play fails.
Matt McIrvin
@artem1s: Most of Elon Musk’s ideas are things that were key elements of late 1970s-early 1980s futurism as depicted in science fiction of the time and things like Omni magazine. I remember all of that stuff too.
RobertB
@Another Scott: If they wanted to grab early adopters, the early adopters were there already. Second Life is still out there AFAIK, and they could have put together a jazzed up Second Life and saved $99B.
I wasn’t in the room, but I suspect that they wanted Meta to work for anyone who was remotely interested in the concept, and ended up with avatars without legs.
As for Windows 2.x development, that’s pretty old school. I did some work in Windows 3.1 way back when, and it was a great big PITA.
NotMax
@JoyceH
Tuffy.
Dilemma solved.
(Although for a Samoyed, Shedmeister might be a more appropriate fit.) ;)
JoyceH
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Or places that are too hot/humid or cold, or too dangerous. There are a lot of really neat places I’d like to see, but these days it’s just not safe.
I did do a tour of a British Museum gallery on a headset a while back, that was pretty cool.
Elizabelle
@BretH: That is a good site. Thank you. I subscribed. (For free, at the moment.)
What a great URL he got.
Manyakitty
@Baud: rubber check?
Michael Bersin
@cain:
They already have. One of the self-righteous ringleaders ran as a stealth candidate for the county health board and won. Less than 9 % of registered voters turned out for the April election.
Manyakitty
@Another Scott: she sounds nice. Wonder where she was headed.
NotMax
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Cool right up until you walk six steps and end up smashing your face into a wall. ;)
RobertB
@Layer8Problem: Google Glass was taking a stab at augmented reality until recently.
Vernor Vinge’s “Rainbows End” was set in that sort of reality IIRC. You put your contacts in, and they wrap up everything in whatever digital environment you want, in real time.
Baud
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
That makes sense. But I don’t know why you need a single “place” like Meta for all that. Just offer the VR tours.
Eolirin
@Roger Moore: Microsoft demoed tech that can do that a long time ago now. They’ve been doing telepresence demos for at least a decade, and have been doing real time full body 3d capture demos since Hololens became a shipping product. It’s a solved problem in terms of capturing the data in real time.
What isn’t a solved problem is that people don’t have spaces where they can set up camera arrays or even a couple of Kinect cameras to get angle coverage and then have the virtual environment be similar enough to their real one that their motions make any sense.
It’s wildly impractical outside of very contrived situations, like duplicate meeting rooms across multiple sites, and will remain so until we have something like Matrix neural implants.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: Stephenson’s fictional Metaverse already seems quaint in some ways: he imagined that people would actually do a lot of their online business this way, things that we’d do by clicking through to a website now. And the etiquette rules of the place meant that you’d have to appear at a few designated spawn points, like in a shooter game, and ride your virtual motorcycle or whatever to the virtual Fry’s so you could buy something off the virtual shelves. A lot of that struck me as things that people wouldn’t actually stand for, unless they were playing a game.
Manyakitty
@schrodingers_cat: what about Schrodinger? I still my my little dude and it’s been almost 4 years.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Geminid: It’s crazy that a bunch of people who haven’t even been in the State Assembly much less the US Congress are getting into the race. I figure Jamie Raskin might throw his name in and I figure if he does he’ll win. Unless his health issues are a limitation. I just don’t see a county-level politician making the jump straight to the US Senate.
Eolirin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Snowcrash is a comedy.
Steeplejack
@schrodingers_cat:
A beauty! Happy acquisition/enslavement.
Ken
I’d think the coolness factor would depend on how well the system does at mapping real-world walls, furniture, open manholes, burglars, etc. to the virtual environment.
Matt McIrvin
@Bill Arnold: I found the satirical elements of his real world more fun: a society atomized into “franchise nations” and “burbclaves” run like fast-food restaurants.
The plot was over-the-top ridiculous, having to do with ancient Sumerians and Bicameral Mind theory and a computer virus that could somehow infect people through their optic nerves and make them produce a biological virus.
cain
@Eolirin: Just re-use your dining room or living room in the old houses – nobody uses those rooms anymore ;)
Sebastian
@Baud:
The Heckler & Koch MP5 is a submachine gun (Maschinenpistole 5) and uses 9mm pistol ammo.
NotMax
@RobertB
Can do something and should do something often incompatible or just downright needlessly gimmicky.
Anyone remember the Amazon Fire phone? Five cameras on the front essentially just so the wallpaper could mimic movement in 3-D.
eversor
I’m one of those people who got an alpha developer kit for VR. The OG Oculus before Zuck bought it and Zucked it up good and proper.
It’s not ready for prime time. The headsets are heavy. Wireless still has latency and sucks for anything gaming related so you’re going to need to use wires. Given how close the headset is to your face you need a stupidly high resolution not to have “screen door” effect and that equates to a situation where the graphics card alone is 2000 bucks. Stares at computer with 2000 buck GPU, 12 core CPU, 128gb RAM, and server grade drives.
Even if you can do all that, and I did, it still blows goat ass for most games I play. You cannot play a first person shooter in this monster as it’s just shittier at it than a 360hz monitor with gsync at that. For fighters, RPGs, shmups, strategy games, there is no god damn point in it. Where it shines, climbing sims, flight sims, racing sims, it’s fucking amazing…. when it works.
This is why everything in Meta looks like dog shit.
Zuck never got any of this. VR does work, in a very limited sense. If you can throw 10k at a computer (I also work off mine from home so it’s not all stupid and I’m a tech worker) you can somewhat make it work. Provided you can throw another 2k at actual flight and racing controls, sit strapped to your seat with a wired headset, and just have a blast. For most people though attempting this on a controller is a low frame rate, low details, stomach churning horror show. And since I most like fighters, action adventure games, and beat-em-ups I don’t really use it. Though the SO and her nieces love to do some light saber cutting of blocks to kpop game. Which I’m not going to shit on. Whatever is fun! You do you! But shaking your ass and jumping up and down to “love sick girls” is not exactly a trillion dollar enterprise.
Also VR is a great way to crash into your coffee table and step on your pet.
Eolirin
@RobertB: Hololens continues, at least ostensibly, and actually does something like what you’d want AR to do, unlike Google Glass which was basically a static heads-up display.
It’s mostly gotten traction in medical and construction applications though. The tech is still a good ways away from being viable for consumer uses, unless Apple’s worked some magic.
Ken
Assuming we don’t already have them….
BTW, I am firmly in the “leave me alone and let me enjoy my steak here in the Matrix” camp. Especially since the few glimpses we get of the real world are post-apocalyptic Morlock hell-holes. Yeah, sure, maybe somewhere out there Wall-E has found a live plant and humanity can go back to hoeing corn, but I’d rather not take the risk.
Eolirin
@cain: Hell, no one has houses anymore. :p
RobertB
@Matt McIrvin: I think the first stabs at VR were happening around that time. Remember the movie, “Lawnmower Man”? A whole lot of really ugly notions of what VR could look like.
There were also notions back then of people doing stuff like accounting and software development by waving your hands around in VR. Especially with software development; it’s close to magic anyway, why not do it with abracadabra hand motions?
NotMax
@Ken
“Needs moar horse manure.”
lowtechcyclist
@Elizabelle:
Damned straight. There shouldn’t have been a hundred billion to waste on this foolishness in the first place.
Eolirin
@Ken: That’s the most solved part of this actually. Getting the display to work for a wide field of vision and not be a bulky headset, and getting battery life to be acceptable while the device is light enough to wear on your face, oh and making sure you’re able to get the heat dissipation right for something that is again, on your face, are the hard parts.
tam1MI
@JoyceH: Instead of Taffy you could go with Candy, Sugar, Sparkles, Cupcake, Peppermint, or BonBon.
Instead of Pixie you could go with fairy names like Florimel, Tinkerbell, or Tatiana.
And cuz puppy is a Samoyed I suggest Snowball/Snowy, Blizzard, Cottonelle, Blanche, Paloma, or Milky.
RobertB
@eversor: When it first came out I had to talk myself out of asking for “Beat Saber” + the headset for Christmas. Then I’d remember how Wii and Kinect worked at my house (bored in a week) and come back to my senses.
Geminid
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: I agree as to the Montgomery County Council Member. But Angela Alsobrooks is the top elected official of a county with a population of 967,000 people. She represents 200,000 more people than do Reps. Trone or Raskin.
South Bend, Indiana has a population of 103,000, and it’s former mayor is often talked up as a potential Senate or Presidential candidate. Who’s to say that Ms. Alsobrooks is not as capable a politician as Pete Buttegieg?
eversor
@Sebastian:
It’s also not 50k. And the 9mm round is often subsonic as it is the US NAVY’s prefered weapon for ship action. While it’s still leathal and should not be in the hands of civilians the damage it does is not comparable to an AR by any stretch.
The most common varriant is the N, for Navy. You use subsonic ammo with it and a supressor and it sounds like cat farts and doesn’t bounce off the walls or hall when you are storming an oil platform or doing MIO (Maritime Interdiction Operations), or VBSS (Visit Board Search Seize). The less volume is good for your hearing as well as less of a noise ceiling while you go about it all.
It’s also used by law enforcement, intelligence, and special operations units globally. It’s far from some rare hard to get item.
PJ
Zitron’s closing paragraph nails it:
From his lips to FSM’s ears.
Roger Moore
@NotMax:
Neal Stephenson is definitely not to everyone’s taste. He does some really fun, interesting stuff, but it can be a real slog to get through all the mind-numbing details to get to the good part.
Paul in KY
@eversor: What about the haptic suit you need???
Roger Moore
@artem1s:
In fairness, the first nuclear submarine was named the Nautilus for a reason.
eversor
@RobertB:
Guess what relatives at my place has devolved into. Eight philipinas (don’t ask for the X they will beat your ass) doing beat saber and cooking all night.
Not upset about it though. I’m glad someone is using it, and the food is to die for.
Me, I’m just the manual labor and dish washer while I eat lumpia and lechon.
Tenar Arha
@schrodingers_cat: He’s cute. Maybe call him Pepper bc of his coloring? Or a sweet character from a novel you’ve liked?
Roger Moore
@Eolirin:
It’s a dark comedy. It’s a cautionary tale about how bad things could get if trends get turned up to 11, but it’s scary because you could easily imagine things being pretty bad even if they only get turned up to 8 or 9.
Roger Moore
@PJ:
Then there’s likely no future for Meta. It’s structured so Zuckerberg will be in charge until he decides to give up control. He gives no sign of wanting to do so or understanding why he might want or need to.
NotMax
@Roger Moore
“You can’t spell Meta without ME.”
//
Tony G
My dog always chases squirrels. Fortunately, she hasn’t caught one yet. She still hasn’t figured out that squirrels can climb trees, and that she can’t. WIth her short attention span and inability to think logically, my dog would have a great career in a Venture Capital firm.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
My good man you are making too much sense!
Stop that this instant!
It has always amazed me at how much money people can make out of stupidity, their’s and their customers, and then waste it on completely even stupider crap.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
As someone who manufactured ideas, some of which were a bit out there, it is often an idea that was thought of for some other reason that someone figures out can be used in a different manner that makes change and often change for better.
I grew up with the changes in modern manufacturing of metal and molds for plastic objects from everything manual and designed with a pencil and paper to fully computerized, including the machines that did the work. I started 60 yrs ago and ended up in the same basic line of work for the last nine years of my working life and the difference between then and now likely would not be understandable to someone who had not been in it that long.
The Lodger
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Joe Biden was a county-level politician who went straight to the US Senate, but I can guarantee you none of these folks is Joe Biden.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
Another very common thing is for people to come up with a good idea that just can’t be implemented with contemporary technology. When the technology finally catches up, they can finally implement it. Of course the tech rarely catches up all at once, so there’s still some time for it to start working, but it’s another way things can take a really long time.
A classic example are many of the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci. He had some very good ideas, but they needed a better power supply than muscle. Once we had internal combustion engines, we were able to make them work.
Uncle Cosmo
@The Lodger: I’m kinda shocked Jamie Raskin hasn’t tossed his hat into the ring – he’s arguably the highest-profile Democrat in MD right now.
JBWoodford
@Another Scott:
Maybe they shouldn’t have had the big “MOLON LABE” sign by the counter.
Keith P.
@eversor: I’ve got a Quest 2. It’s great. Mini-Golf is truly immersive while being very blocky (it’s part of the look). Golf+ (outdoor golf + Top Golf) is reasonably accurate and a lot of fun – I really do feel like I’m on a course. Vader Immortal…light saber dojo…it’s the shit. Big Screen for watching 3d movies, like “Fury Road” is also a lot of fun.
The only major downside is motion sickness (I usually have to teleport around) and the visual fidelity not being quite there yet – if I play a PC game like kayaking, the screen door effect is noticeable, and the field-of-view could be better.
Geminid
@Uncle Cosmo: I saw a report that Rep. Raskin is considering the race and would make up his mind this month.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
More and more technology has made it easier to bring some of those ideas to fruition and design and build the process or product.
It has also made it easier to build things to the technology level that a lot of modern things require. For example the last job I did in the machine shop I worked in was grinding 6 hardened steel pins to a specific size that required a tolerance of +/- 35 millionths of an inch. That is +/- .000035
Matt McIrvin
@RobertB: The funny thing is that Stephenson actually doesn’t imagine software development happening that way: the competent programmers who build the Metaverse drop down to “Flatland” and use windows and a command line to do the actual work.
Birdie
Contrarian view: I don’t think this pivot proves Zuckerberg’s inability to lead, if anything, it shows the opposite. Madly holding on to the metaverse when no one is buying what you are selling is bad strategy. Given that Meta’s LLaMa model, which they open sourced, is the basis of a lot of current, fast evolving academic and open source development in generative AI, you could argue they are well positioned to capitalize on something that people seem to be interested in using. Google and Microsoft are building walled gardens for their AI models, leaving space open for Meta to play as the open source base model of choice. Remember what Google accomplished with the Android ecosystem?
There are sunk costs from the metaverse investment and people will lose their jobs – this is bad and sad, and could have been foreseen too, I think. But quickly shifting a tech company’s focus to tech that people want to use is not, contra Zitron, the sign of a failed leader. It’s a reasonable recovery step from earlier poor decisions. (And we could discuss whether he should be canned because of the earlier call, but that isn’t Zitron’s argument.)