Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Indigenous Alaskans/Canadians and ice flows come to mind. Hello nice Polar bear.

 

And Zuck loses $29 Billion in net worth overnight. Glad to hear it.

I don't know who Meta is supposed to appeal to other than ignorant kids who don't realize the dangers of living in a virtual landscape for extended periods of time. Granted, this already happens somewhat with internet and video game use, but VR hijacks your limbic system in a way that makes net surfing pale in comparison.... and I'm sure greedy advertisers are salivating at the thought of controlling a person's entire worldview from top to bottom now, with Zuck's latest venture as their trojan horse.

 

I'd call this "the new generation is ruining everything" alarmism but having used VR once I actually agree. I liked it and that scared me. Won't touch it. Call me old but I think it's going to result in huge misery for a lot of people.

 

We already let one of the strangest, least sociable people in the world redefine social interaction by popularizing a bizarre detached form of it that seems to be just worse for everyone who isn't given to puppetry. It can't be too surprising to see that same person, now at the head of a massively wealthy conglomerate, try to redefine reality by creating a bizarre detached form of it that distracts people from the real one and is just worse for almost everybody (possibly excepting puppeteers).

One might say that the VR world could be better if the real world gets bad enough... except that if the real world gets -that- bad, it won't be able to support the VR world. And the people for who it's worst aren't going to get to play in it anyway.

 

I'm speaking specifically as a Brit here, re UK institutions...

If the Comanches had been paying tax all their working lives, which included a specific and significant amount called National Insurance, which was specifically meant to cover their welfare needs (as well as contributing to those of others), they would probably have found "Happy retirement, now get out there and die," to be a pretty rough payback. I think it is bad enough that the benefits have been whittled and cut and pared away, year after year, is a pretty rough payback. A private insurance company would not have been allowed to get away with that.

There was a nasty little tory schoolboy who stood up at a Young Conservatives Conference, and expressed something similar to the idea of sending the old out into the frost due to their no longer being contributors. I forget his name, don't much care, but yes, he did become a tory MP.

Indeed it is voluntary, and some of us never did. Not to facebook, at least, but I have to confess that I find Google useful enough to have sold my soul to them. I let Google remember where I was last Tuesday, because sometimes I want to know, and I never remember.

The new opium of the masses?

 

I have an important meeting coming up in a couple of weeks that centers on a personnel and community issue that is difficult, particularly for the conflict avoidance/nice people.

This has given me an idea, getting them to 'complete the picture' themselves of what happens in various action and non-action scenarios. Thanks!

 

Not if you want to use the internet, or any modern commercial mobile or computer OS, or any apps. You're being tracked in a hundred different ways that are invisible to the user, some of which will even bypass OS level Firewalls, DNS, and VPNs. Not that there is any reason to trust commercial privacy VPNs.

The phones and computers of almost every single person on the planet are constantly chirping like little birdies, sending your data to countless unknown destinations without your knowledge.

OS and App behaviour is verifiable by anyone running Wireshark in monitoring mode to observe device network traffic.

 

a bit harsh. as a product for consumers, yes, they hardly provide value or innovation. as a product for businesses (advertising vehicle with insane demo. reach and engagement statistics) they remain one of the best if not the best on the internet. their revenue versus the capital expenditures required to maintain their revenue streams (practically zero) is insane.

the media likes to shit all over Zuckerberg and FB constantly, to the point where it starts to feel like a smear campaign half the time. Facebook is still a grossly profitable business with steady growth, and over the long term has been undeterred by market trends. the Meta/VR stuff is just a reflection of all that's left for grossly profitable giant tech company to do: invest in developing tech that seems crazy and laughable until 5 years later it is the market norm, and no one is laughing anymore.

 

I am old enough to remember two post war German chancellors with balls, Brandt whose sincere apologetically gesture in Warsaw in 1970 took some balls and Schmidt who went through with the NATO double track decision knowing full well he risked the failure of his coalition government (and fail it did).
At the time I did not believe it would work. I did not care much for Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher but you have to give it to them their plan to bankcrupt the USSR with the arms race worked.
Schmidt is one of the last statesmen Germany has had. Now we have an ex chancellor who is Putin‘s whore.

 

I think the strength in what you're doing is people have an easier time following what is iterative and revealed as interrelated parts rather than an overloaded slide.

This may sound stupid but maybe we need a file format that is not an animated GIF, not a powerpoint, not a video, not purely audio, but allows easily sequenced combination of those pieces.

 

agreed... it can be a wonderful tool for anything in construction. Owners have a hard time visualizing space from looking at a set of plans or renderings for a building. Put a VR headset on them and let them walk thru the building during the design stage... results in wonderful feedback to the design team. Penn State actually makes great use of VR on some of their recent construction projects...

Agreed - going to the construction world yet again... we can make wonderfully accurate renderings/drawings very early on, but the software can also generate something that looks like it was drawn using a sharpie for schematics. For whatever reason, some people just respond better to something conceptual that actually looks conceptual (like it was drawn on the back of a napkin)

 

There's also the authorship factor. Your diagram is unintelligible to me but your participants know what everything is and ask for copies. This effect is seen all the time in our engineering group. People who built something always know it better than everyone else even when cleanly written SOP's are available. It's messy desk syndrome: "Don't move anything! I have a system."

 

I don't do facebook, but I occasionally look over my wife's shoulder to find out what my friends are doing (and wife only uses it every few weeks). I'd thought that there must be a lot of development, but sounds likely that, yes there is, but all on the data harvesting side rather than improving UI (?).

Good point. Being long since a non-worker, these things don't occur to me.

I eventually succeeded in becoming MS-free, a decade or so ago, and things might have changed, but doing something well is not what I associate with them: Doing something, and then putting all the efforts into marketing it and slamming the competition is the MS I (used to) know.

 

People have been saying this about VR forever though. All the way back in the 80s. "Just you wait and it will come to be the dominant form of interactive experience!"

And it never happens. Even the relatively popular VR now (Oculus etc) which is way more popular than the older stuff because of its higher rez is still extremely niche. Nobody wants to wear the gear.

This the same reason 3D movies failed and are hardly done anymore. People hate the glasses and those things are plastic and weight virtually nothing. James Cameron is pushing for 3D screens without glasses but VR requires gear and unless it's a tablet or phone, people dont want to deal with it. All those cyber punk movies and shows with people happily using gear is just fantasy. The human body is more comfortable operating with minimal interface.

The way meta is presenting itself is a VR experience and that technology is not going to become mainstream in the way it's currently constructed.

The only thing I see working is holograms, where no wearable gear is needed. Maybe Zuck should've invested in developing that instead. As usual, he's short sighted and just trying to manipulate and profit from current trends. Probably out of desperation.

EDIT: Even something like The Matrix only works because when you're in it, you're not aware of the interface. Your "virtual" body is without constraints.