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By 0xbadc0de5 2022-02-2618:411 reply I laughed when Lex's first move was to ask Mark to complete a hardcopy CAPTCHA ("Please circle all the traffic lights"). Kudos to Mark for playing along.
Having not had an opportunity to hear Mark Zuckerberg speak in a (fairly) candid manner before now, I appreciate Lex's effort to get this out there.
By infogulch 2022-02-2619:43 "Very impressive performance. Now we can initiate the interview procedure."
Having finally watched the whole thing, just writing some thoughts below...for those who maybe didn't or can't watch.
1 - Zuck really, really is all in on the metaverse thing. I was never sure if it was his idea, or he sees a trend, etc, but now I'm convinced it's all his idea. I find it odd but interesting someone with essentially unlimited real life resources seeks such escape.
1.5 - I think he also overestimates its success. He pretty much sees everyone using it for work, gaming, friend interactions, etc. I just can't see it being so ubiquitous. Also saying people will spend as much on virtual clothes as real clothes feels offbase, but maybe I'm wrong.
2 - I was a little frustrated because he seemed so... unemotional. Being asked about bullying, suicides... most things that would make people stop, think, or even choke up...Zuck just started into his spiels never really answering the questions well. Unsure if it's perhaps just because he's been asked so many times he has it loaded. Seems very inauthentic.
3 - The negative sum thing was interesting. He basically said any choice they make lowers people's opinions on FB, because the side that agrees just thinks 'about time' or 'at least they didn't screw this one up', whereas the side that disagrees gets angry. May sound basic to some, but I never really considered it before.
4 - It was nice to see Zuck -finally- show emotion toward the end, talking about family time and death. A side of him I don't think many people have ever seen. For the first time, he actually looked pensive and even perhaps distraught before answering. Though I did kinda laugh when he said it's weird he used to care about his company most before he had a family, but now it's probably his family. Something so obvious being presented as an aha moment felt...weird.
> 1 - Zuck really, really is all in on the metaverse thing. I was never sure if it was his idea, or he sees a trend, etc, but now I'm convinced it's all his idea.
It's not just zuck. Microsoft, google, apple, etc are all focused on it. Nadella and others have called it the next internet. So the entire tech industry is betting big on it. Microsoft just spend billions of Activision in preparation for the metaverse.
https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/satya-nadella-the-meta...
And it's not all his idea. A company the size of facebook doesn't work that way. He has final say, but he has a team working for him. And as I stated, it's an industry-wide thing. Not just a facebook or zuckerburg thing. Whether it amounts to much, we'll just have to wait and see. But my money is on zuckerburg, nadella, cook, etc.
> 1.5 - I think he also overestimates its success. He pretty much sees everyone using it for work, gaming, friend interactions, etc. I just can't see it being so ubiquitous.
People said the same thing about social media and smartphones.
> 2 - I was a little frustrated because he seemed so... unemotional. Being asked about bullying, suicides... most things that would make people stop, think, or even choke up...
No it wouldn't. People are able to talk about things without getting emotional. It's the basis of all rational debate/discourse. Are you right now crying uncontrollably because we are talking about bullying, suicides, etc? Of course not. The only reason he'd do it is if his PR team said fake tears work well on the braindead public. It's why so many in media ( from Rachel Maddow to Stephen Colbert ) were crying on-air. An easy way to manipulated the masses that waste their lives watching them.
> Are you right now crying uncontrollably because we are talking about bullying, suicides, etc.
Well, no.
But if I had created a product and learned it was being used to torment children until they killed themselves, then yes, I absolutely would feel gutted and likely cry. Perhaps I'm too empathetic to be a CEO, which is fitting I guess - I'll never be one.
By qiskit 2022-02-270:39 > But if I had created a product and learned it was being used to torment children until they killed themselves, then yes, I absolutely would feel gutted and likely cry.
Using that logic, everyone who created anything would be crying all day. Is it just facebook that's the problem? What about smartphones? What about the creators of Netscape? What about tim berners-lee. Facebook is a product used by billions of people. What do you want? Is it just facebook or the internet?
> Perhaps I'm too empathetic to be a CEO, which is fitting I guess - I'll never be one.
For how empathetic you are, you don't seem to feel any empathy for zuckerburg.
By mark_l_watson 2022-02-270:411 reply Nice comments and summary. I almost watched the whole thing, skipped 20 minutes a half hour in. The only product that Facebook/Meta has that I really like is the Oculus technology. I love the Oculus and some of the content. I do wish them luck with the metaverse.
I think VR is a healthy activity, in small doses. I can get up from my desk feeling tired, and 5 minutes playing ping pong against a robot is refreshing, similar in effect to walking outside for 5 minutes.
I think using VR as a productivity tool for such as software development, shared white-boarding, etc. is a long way off.
I can see the use cases for VR, and I'm interested in the hardware. The circle I can't square is the idea that people love consumerism so much, they just want to transfer the experience into a Facebook marketplace for cosmetic items in some kind of VR walled garden. This is the part that I find uncomfortable and dystopian.
I'd much rather have standalone games of high quality, and hardware capable enough for good desktop computing use cases as an alternative to a monitor.
By mark_l_watson 2022-02-2714:30 I absolutely agree. Tech should be a small part of life (outside of work, of course).
> Also saying people will spend as much on virtual clothes as real clothes feels offbase, but maybe I'm wrong. As a gamedev I can absolutely believe this. You don't have to spend much time googling the breakdown of consumer spend in the games industry to see that this is absolutely, sadly, true. But they don't need to spend all their time in those metaverse to do that.
Isn't the cost different? Asking in earnest, it's been years since I've been big into gaming. I remember xbox avatars charging a couple dollars for an outfit, whereas a typical casual outfit for me would be 50 to 70 dollars
By moogly 2022-02-2623:52 Dota2 cosmetics can cost much more than that figure, depending on if you buy it outright or grind for it.
https://win.gg/news/how-much-does-the-drow-ranger-arcana-rea...
Oh, and most of the additional battlepass rewards are just temporary.
By karmakaze 2022-02-271:30 I don't know how true this is, but read that Rogue (StarCraft 2 player), wins tournaments for the prize money.. so he can spend it in MapleStory. And that he doesn't practice as much as other pros. Mind-boggling if true, since he's in the world champion semi-finals[0] being played tomorrow for his 2nd favourite game.
[0] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/IEM_Katowice/2022#Playoffs...
By usehackernews 2022-02-2713:55 Top end Skins in Fortnite cost ~$20 each. However, on the after market they go for many $100’s.
The difference is accessibility and optionality in the digital world.
I could absolutely see people spend more on digital goods than physical goods.
By bleachedsleet 2022-02-2621:421 reply > I think he also overestimates its success. He pretty much sees everyone using it for work, gaming, friend interactions, etc. I just can't see it being so ubiquitous.
“There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” - Steve Ballmer 2007 [1]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2007/04/ballm...
By thinkharderdev 2022-02-2621:511 reply I think it's perhaps possible that Ballmer, as CEO of a major competitor, was not engaging in dispassionate analysis and in fact there was a non-zero chance that the iPhone would gain significant market share.
By bleachedsleet 2022-02-2621:571 reply I think it’s usually better to accept someone’s words at face value than to attempt to infer deeper meaning. Ballmer has gone on to say that was one of his biggest mistakes and history agrees.
Regardless, there’s many examples of people throughout history finding no value in seemingly pointless technologies only to be proven wrong so I believe the point the quote still stands. I suppose I could always just link to the infamous Dropbox post here instead…
By thinkharderdev 2022-02-2622:291 reply I agree in general, but in the case of CEOs giving public remarks it's safe to assume they are talking their book. Regardless, I don't see it as particularly relevant that people have been pessimistic about technologies that turned out quite successful. For every instance of "they said revolutionary product X was crazy but it turned out to be wildly successful" there are probably a 1000 instances of "they thought revolutionary product X was crazy and it failed miserably and faded into irrelevance." In other words, you have to actually articulate a reason why you think VR will be as successful as Meta claims it will be rather than make a "they laughed at Einstein/Semmelweis/etc too" argument. And with respect to VR I just don't see it. I've played games on the Occulus and they are pretty fun but I just don't see what the value proposition of VR is beyond gaming. And VR gaming can still be a huge industry but I just don't see it being anything more than that. Whereas I think the value proposition of smartphones was fairly obvious. It of course wasn't clear than any particular phone (like the original iPhone, perhaps especially the original iPhone given that it only worked for one carrier at the time) would break through. So it could have been that Ballmer was completely correct if things had turned out slightly differently. But some smartphone would have broken through. I don't think VR is the same. It's not just that there is uncertainty over which particular product will take off, but uncertainty about how big the eventual market for VR products and services will be in total.
By Handytinge 2022-02-2823:061 reply > Whereas I think the value proposition of smartphones was fairly obvious.
As someone who was in the industry at the time, I think you're looking with hindsight goggles on.
In the initial age of smartphones we had Blackberries (email/productivity devices) for business people, then a hodge podge of HTC Windows devices, the Hiptop, etc. There was no obvious path to ubiquity, and they were made for business men or teenagers.
Nothing at that stage indicated either the likelihood of every person in a western country carrying one, common services and businesses switching exclusively to them, the massive quantities of time spent on them or them becoming our primary computing devives.
Fast forwarding 15 years - yes, the value proposition is obvious. However it seems we're in a similar situation with a hand wavey "VR is just for gamers". Time will tell.
By thinkharderdev 2022-03-0414:45 Fair enough. I may just be indexing too much on my own experience. It certainly seemed obvious to me in the mid-2000s that ubiquitous computing would be hugely valuable but I was also a nerd into that sort of thing so maybe I shouldn't generalize from that.
By LinuxBender 2022-02-2619:122 reply I can see value in the future of VR/AR but I am curious about a few things.
- Will there be a balance of open source self hosted VR/AR solutions or will Meta dominate all of this? Along that line do any of the hardware developers provide unrestricted open source SDK's that are easy for developers to integrate into their software?
- Will everyone have to be tied into Meta and tracked around everything they do and Meta tracking everything that everyone looks at with transcripts of every conversation everyone has?
- How will companies incentivize all people to adopt this? Will this be dominated by introverts? Will I see the same variety of personality types in VR that I see in real life? I ask because VRChat is dominated by a specific sub-set of personality types or at least that was my experience.
Kent Bye and others are doing great work around building an XR Ethics framework [1]
XR will soon not only include eye tracking, but full brain computer interfaces with very rich data on how you are reacting to stimuli. [2]
If you think only gamers will strap a box to their head, XR includes augmented reality such as more socially acceptable lightweight glasses. Facebook is working with Ray Ban sunglasses to avoid the Google Glass social rejection factor.
Another Facebook / Cambridge Analytica level manipulation of population could be so much more effective and wide spread. It will be very hard for us to detect how our decisions are being influenced. Wild stuff!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrdqp8zHdAU
[2] https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-brain-computer-interfaces-vr-...
> XR will soon not only include eye tracking, but full brain computer interfaces with very rich data on how you are reacting to stimuli. [2]
VR and AR will have eye tracking in the next generation of headsets. However at the moment unless its trained to your eyes, its pretty inaccurate >5degrees off.
Brain computer interfaces, are a way off. Yes there are ecg style hairnets, but we've not managed to generalise that yet. (we know this because Musk has confidently predicted a timeline for his BCI endeavour.)
But that isn't the major risk here.
We know that glasses need to be light, and not look stupid. This means that we need to optimise to the point of insanity how we manage power. This basically means that its impossible to jump out to the cloud and have battery life. The power budget for an all day wearable is something like 2.5wh
So the risk of facebook listening in to all things is pretty small. especially given that they really don't have the compute capacity to manage it.
This leads me to my point, AR will be local only for most things. but it will have things like build in "friend/object finder" and precise always on mm accurate location services. (its the only way to make AR content workable)
The privacy problem comes in when people start to realise that they can make apps for these glasses that access the camera, A network of cameras that have ultra precise global pose (that is lat, lon, height and roll pitch and yaw of the camera) with inbuilt face detection, you'll have a pretty great stalking network.
Now, so far so logical. Where it gets fun is here, if we allow open source, unrestricted access to hardware, it means that people can build and distribute these apps with little friction. Our present society cannot handle this.
I do don't know what the answer is. AR has great potential for helping people. But I suspect its going to be a total shitshow.
Do I think it'll be a shitshow because Facebook make it? no, I think Facebook will have to make the _most_ secure/privacy respecting system and prove it just to be taken seriously. Its the Apple/startup version I worry about. AR and privacy don't really mix. Butu we are going to kid ourselves that this isnt true for many years.
By ozten 2022-02-2623:01 Thanks for the insights. One doesn't need a Matrix style port into the brain.
Valve and OpenBCI have working Index headsets with EEG and bio-feedback data. Reasonable use cases are fine-tuning game play based on the players stress and enjoyment of different experiences. Today you can buy widget [1] that allow you to control objects in VR (if that game has used the SDK) with your mind my focusing attention on them [2].
Cambridge Analytica used just content and click data! (to build the most accurate map of various countries voting populations and identify key cultural fissures to exploit)
By ge96 2022-02-2723:50 Just commenting, Valve Index (open) and then something like Simula VR (VR desktop) gives you 360 sphere around you open applications eg. editor/browser.
I feel you about VRChat I felt the same (felt old/out of place). Recently tried Zenith bunch of kids. Nothing wrong with that but yeah.
I personally am avoiding meta because I hate that locked in, it's why I'm trying to get into Linux phones over Android (problems with privacy/built in bloat/adware).
As far as an environment for VR like the meta verse, my opinion I think it's a niche right now, guess depends who's around you/your circles. Maybe it's not as rare. Maybe in the future everyone will have a headset like everyone has a phone.
I'm not super against FB though, I found my family (separated long time ago) through their platform so I am grateful for that.
