Is crypto kept alive on evangelism? Yes.
Not really that useful at the moment (and maybe never will be)? Yes.
Has lots of pump and dump, scams, bad people doing bad stuff? People who have no clue what they’re talking about spewing bullshit? Resounding yes.
But I don’t think it’s bullshit because it does solve a real problem - verifying transactions independently. But of course there are trade offs with this, such as bitcoin’s power consumption. The disconnect comes from crypto people misjudging the world. The current financial system simply isn’t so bad to require all the weird trade offs of crypto.
If the current financial system stopped working and for some reason we needed to actually use Bitcoin to pay stuff, it would not be possible. Cryptocurrencies don't scale, because the way they work is extremely inefficient.
How is that different from what we do now?
Lightning (an L2 system on Bitcoin) is essentially a system of peer to peer exchange of signed BTC transactions, which supersede previous ones, but don't get committed to the main net. In that way, you can keep a running tab between counterparties with effectively no marginal cost until one of you decides to close the tab by committing it.
Of course, I just made a wild guess about how many net settlements between banks would happen; maybe banks don't settle up from check clearing daily, but in a world where transactions are difficult to reverse and nobody trusts anyone, you'd want to settle up regularly.
What exactly do you mean? This is exactly the one use case where cryptocurrencies do work, compared to all the other bullshit use cases cryptocurrency hypists have came up with. Doing non-centralized transactions is what it excels at.
Unclear if you're talking about Bitcoin specifically or cryptocurrencies in general, but there are cryptocurrencies that handle transactions quickly and at scale in a secure and decentralized manner. Algorand is one of those, but there are plenty of others out there that fits the requirements.
Also most market cap isn't in those "more efficient" and "more decentralized" coins.
Crypto people think it’s getting rid of visa, Western Union, and government censorship.
That's an oversight of the year.
Arguably it’s even more annoying than if we just had posts that only say “I hate crypto”. But the idea that there is no apparent reason is laughably wrong. People give a lot of reasons.
To give you an example of a HN reader with reasons to dislike most cryptocoin stuff:
- cryptocurrencies, particularly those mineable on CPUs and/or easily laundrable, provide a serious financial incentive for scriptkiddies and other hackers to go and hack systems to have them mine for coins, encrypt them in coin-extortion schemes, or steal the content of wallets they find. Basically, it's like the absence of STIR/SHAKEN on a phone network - it invites scammers to robocall people and pull scams on them.
- mining of cryptocurrencies, especially on Bitcoin and other ASIC based coins, consumes an awful lot of electricity, which has been incentive enough for multiple operators to reactivate fossil fuel plants that had already been shut.
- cryptocurrency mines of everything but proof-of-stake coins produce an awful lot of e-waste. Some of that can be repurposed (e.g. CPUs, RAM, GPUs, FPGAs) which has serious side effects on its own (such as enormous gluts in the used markets when miners drop their rigs), some of that is uneconomical to repurpose (HDDs/SSDs for proof-of-storage coins, the mining process eats through them at an insane pace) and some of that is impossible to reuse (ASICs).
- cryptocurrency mines can lock up large parts of the hardware supply because miners pay so much more than even the richest gamer can afford. One might argue that that's a natural function of a capitalist economy, but sorry when you can't get a new halfway-decent GPU for years because scalpers buy up all the stock then the market has fucking failed.
- cryptocurrencies invite undesirable people and events. There have been almost infinite amounts of these, documented on [1] - legitimate hacks, legitimate coding issues that sent coins to null addresses, rug-pulls disguised as hacks, shoddy accounting or general business practices by people who got in way over their head (MtGox) or had no idea WTF they were doing (FTX). Or NFTs which all went down the drain once the free money spigot and the novelty wore off (on top of the OG NFT Bored Ape copying and thus promoting outright Third Reich Nazi symbols and edgy far-right memes [2]).
- cryptocurrencies invite those who think it's a good idea to use them as a proxy to evade securities laws or KYC rules, luring in gullible morons in the process and leading to loss of money.
tl;dr: too much money lures in too many morons and everyone but the original "investors" loses.
* shitty people scamming other people: Yes, everyone knows. It happens with normal money as well. I regularly get "How to avoid scammers" emails from my bank too. As long as something has value someone will try to use it to scam someone else.
* mining: Yes we know, mining is bad. Nobody wants it, it's going away. Could it go away faster? Yes, but it will happen eventually. Ban mining for all I care, nobody really needs it.
The thing is, governments don't want people to get scammed, and so they act to prevent scam avenues. But unlike, say, the trad-bank system the percentage of "scam" vs "legit" operations in cryptocurrencies is drastically skewed to the "scam" side, made easier by the anonymity that cryptocurrencies provide by design.
Many early adopters are salty that nobody would listen to us and investigate the criminals we were pointing out all along.
> cryptocurrencies invite those who think it's a good idea to use them as a proxy to evade securities laws or KYC rules, luring in gullible morons in the process and leading to loss of money
Generally the criminal schemes that actually took everyone's money were so simple as to not even be securities scams. The complex non-deliverable defi contracts were something people were playing around with to make prediction markets and other useful things.
> when you can't get a new halfway-decent GPU for years because scalpers buy up all the stock then the market has fucking failed
Okay, seriously, what system would actually create more cards here, some command economy where gaming is allocated a higher value than other activities? How does the company know how many fabs to buy/lease to prepare?
> promoting outright Third Reich Nazi symbols and edgy far-right memes
I don't see a lot of value in some censorship system that makes that enforceable. Should books not have been invented until we developed a technology to make it impossible to say mean things?
I don't claim to have a solution that benefits everyone, but at least personally I prefer actual people having GPUs to have fun with them over some miners polluting the environment for a ponzi scheme with them that brings benefit to no one but a select very few.
> I don't see a lot of value in some censorship system that makes that enforceable. Should books not have been invented until we developed a technology to make it impossible to say mean things?
The Nazi crap was just the cherry on the cake. It just speaks volumes about just what kind of ideological toxicity was freely allowed to spread. Or, to use an older analogy, when a Nazi walks into a bar and isn't kicked out, well guess what you have? A Nazi bar.
I think Nvidia/etc missed some serious PR by not giving out tickets to buy cards via gaming and hardware sites, to be rewarded with more tickets if those cards ended up being used for gaming. However, I think it's unrealistic and unhelpful to call prices "scalping" when there are conflicting markets for a product.
> a Nazi walks into a bar and isn't kicked out
A bar is a private entity with a target clientele and limited availability. It makes sense that the patrons can be and should be curated.
> ideological toxicity was freely allowed to spread.
Now we're talking about NFTs, literally DeFi. How would you make NFTs that would allow for pro-Tibet messages, etc, and not also allow any other text/image that people want?
The correct filter is in which markets list it, and which customers buy it. It's like a disgusting book - it doesn't invalidate the very concept of libraries.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
Isn't it backwards? If I have a few (officially issued) colored pieces of paper in my pocket, I can give them away in exchange for other stuff, but if I have a cryptocoin in my pocket, there is no way I can exchange it for anything unless another party (or a majority) agrees to that exchange.
Ethereum is about 20 for the electricity usage of a few steel plants.
Cryptocurrencies have one use: to evade regulation. As soon as that use disappears so will cryptocurrencies.
Crime isnt a side-effect, it's the point.
Does this take the migration to proof of stake last year into account?
Some produce up to 3,000,000 tons, so the ethereum network would consume about 0.1% as much energy as one of those
edit: Bitcoin for comparison consumes somewhere around 100 Twh, so is comparable to 1000 steel mills (which might be more than the number of actual steel mills in operation globally?)
Sometimes, HN appears to have the collective memory of a goldfish.
On HackerNews over the years, we've seen hundreds, maybe even thousands of sob stories from people like "X payment provider has locked my account and is not giving me access to my funds"
In every case, it's pointed out that crypto might be a way for people to reduce risk of this kind of thing happening.
Yet there's some people who continue to insist with a straight face that crime is the only conceivable use of crypto.
But one could make the argument that this site is technically an example of "crime", at least legally speaking.
In blockchain, redress is impossible. That's part of why it's so lucrative for fraudsters.
The failure modes in monetary systems are human, not technological -- and blockchains fuck humans. They make the problem worse.
The sales pitch for blockchains is a lie. The problem is real, but this isnt the solution. This solves only the needs of criminals in the strongest sense: people out to get other people.
Regulation will pop these schemes and nothing will be left -- it took 10-30 years to regulate credit cards. Hopefully regulators will step in sooner here.
I notice that disgusting, wicked authoritarians that relish in their desire to achieve control over other human beings absolutely despise crypto.
If I knew absolutely nothing about crypto other than the fact that enemies of humanity hate it truly vehemently, what should my judgement of crypto be?
Or is the sucker for a sales pitch the person who parrots whatever the nice funny man on the TV tells him to think about any given issue?
If you want to be smart, don't judges technologies based on supposed virtues signalled; judge them by understanding how they work independent of how their salesmen say they work. Learn, know and understand.
Your entire world view is pretty dumb: who is signalling what I should be allied to?
That's a dumb question; and it signals that you're ripe for abuse. All you need to be sold an idea is to have it associated, by signals of virtue, with what you hate.
You're not alone. This type of gullibility is the mentality of most victims of crypto; and indeed, many scams.
80% of the crypto community is people who think they're smarter than the people scamming them -- that's the other 20%, and they're winning
Payment channels allow arbitrarily high transaction rates w/ bitcoin, I've seen demonstrations sustaining hundreds of transactions per second. A side effect of their scalability is that no one knows the actual transaction rate-- only the few transactions related to opening and closing channels are broadcast.
> Crime isnt a side-effect, it's the point.
That is false and defamatory. Please withdraw this point.
I will not withdraw this point. It isn't hyperbole.
Cryptocurrency technology has the economic and social incentive structures of ponzi and pyramid schemes; and primarily enables fraud. The purpose is avoiding the law.
The best that can be said, about the unwitting, is they aren't conscious of the incentive structures they participate in; and hence spread scams without realising it. This is indeed, how pyramid schemes work.
These libertarian ideological projects prove Hobbes point: absent governance, life in society is "nasty, brutish, and short".
The properties of these systems ruin people's lives for the sake of providing, at its "most noble", and ideological casino for people to cosplay a financial system. And that nobility is really just a pyramid scheme framing device for spreading the scam around.
The ideological window dressing is nothing more than "hey, maybe these vitmins will cure cancer. Dont you want to cure cancer?! Don't you think BigPharma is terrible?! Dont you think the healthcare system is broken?! Here, take 100 boxes of these vitamins -- everyone wants them!"
Your prior statement claimed that that "Crime [is] the point", have you weakened your position or are you just saying it another way?
How is "avoiding the law" the purpose of Bitcoin? Please connect your argument to supporting materials.
In general. Every time I heard a cryptocurrency claiming to be fast and decentralized, it either didn't live up to performance expectations or there were major caveats to decentralization. I can't comment on Algorand specifically as I gave up on following crypto.
Not because the way they work is inefficient, but because if the financial system collapsed that badly, we would not have an internet, or power, or food, most likely.
This is... not true [1]. We'd need to use something like the Lightning Network. The traditional financial system also has layers build on top of it, so it makes sense that you wouldn't only use the Bitcoin base layer.
[1] https://voltage.cloud/blog/bitcoin-education/how-many-transa...
Yeah, but who actually needs that "problem" solved? Money launderers? Drug dealers? Scam artists? Adolescent boys whacking off to Ayn Rand books in their mother's basement?
Plus while a bank may devalue its currency, the point of it is to keep it stable -- something we haven't seen from crypto in any meaningful sense. Even the so-called "stable coins" are anything but.
There's plenty of people out there who disagree with central bank's existence and policy. I don't know if I'd call a currency "stable" when it's lost 80% of it's own value since being introduced and can have new liquidity created with little due process. All currency is an illusion, it's just about which illusion makes you more comfortable.
It's all just money, and money isn't entirely rational to begin with.
Something that depreciates can still be stable. The US dollar loses value at a relatively predictable rate. We can see what an unstable currency looks like right now by looking at Argentina, where the peso has lost 47% of its value in a year.
BitCoin is more like the peso than the dollar, hence why its called unstable.
> All currency is an illusion, it's just about which illusion makes you more comfortable.
Currency isn't an illusion, it's a social construct, and its a deeply embedded social construct.
By that logic, Earth is tilting dangerously out of control and the moon is hurtling off into deep space.
This is exactly the issue that a lot of people have with them. Not to mention that the people in charge of adjusting the value of your life savings aren't even voted in...
Cryptocurrency aims to give you complete autonomy over your money. Something 99.99% of people don't currently have.
That sounds nice, but it doesn’t come for free. Price volatility, trust issues, etc. to name a few.
I think a key issue is that credit, money, wealth, currency, while related, are really different things but for many people all of it is “money”.
These are not specific to cryptocurrency. The trust issues are primarily a result of crypto scams and not innate to crypto. Just as scams involving dollars, euros etc., have nothing to do with the currency itself.
Where crypto shines on the trust aspect is that you don't have some guy in an ivory tower deciding to devalue your crypto by 5%/year. You can choose to buy into inflationary cryptos (doge coin for instance), or you can choose to buy into crypto's with fixed supply. No one can take your share of the supply away from you or change the rules on a whim. That's absolutely huge.
"Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe" - Albert Einstein, supposedly. Central banks use that force against citizens and everyone just accepts it because it's been that way for so long.
> There’s a reason we have target rates
In an interview Powell admitted no one really knows why the target is 2%. Why is 2% better than 10%, why not 0%? We don't need to encourage consumption with artificial money devaluation, humans already discount the future because of the finiteness of our lives
So while in theory crypto offers that alternative that should be better than those shitty countries economic policies, in practice, this gave them something worse than their local bank.
Yes Yes, you can use a hardware wallet and would have avoided all of that, the reality is that a very high percentage of people were just using the tools offered to them and didn't think it was all a giant fraud.
Not only that, if you really want to look at exploitation of the poor look no further than our large banks in America.
In abstract terms, independant trade without ties to a dominant financial gorilla (once a time the pound sterling and perhaps one day the Yen (or other)).
That was a clean enough goal from the outset, my personal objections (expressed in cypher forums back in the day circa the bitcoin paper dropping) are wrapped in the failure to tie the OG bitcoin to some form of verified "energy used to mine" signature (a curly one) and the high energy cost of verifying OG bitcoin transactions.
With 20/20 hindsight it was likely a premature release, in fairness it was more of a proof of concept begining that lasted longer than expected and then took off.
What currency do you propose people, companies, and countries trade in? And why that currency?
A currency is abstraction for trade in wider circles where (the common case) trade between two parties isn't sufficient ( typically parties supply | demand a basket of various resources, various energies, various intermediate and finished goods ) and for trade to take place the guarantors must have faith in the agreed abstraction for transfer of credit; additional mechanism that verify transactions are an added bonus.
Both now and through history many currencies have been used and are being used.
I've given examples of US dollars, the Pound Sterling, in the context of this sub thread bitcoin is an obvious example of a currency that has been used to facilitate trade; less obvious but important examples of currency are the word of a trusted person of faith (as used historically along the original Silk Road and today throughout Hawala and similar mechnaisms).
What strikes me as odd about your question is the implicit assumption that I favour one singular currency over all others.
As I said the current system is better so I don’t see your point as some sort of counterpoint to my observation that crypto has utility, it’s just relatively low or tuned to less in demand needs.
Whether crypto can actually mitigate that is an open question. Arguably, a society that accepts strict financial controls would also prosecute crypto users.
I don't believe for a minute that today's Court would expand that reasoning to digital currencies, but it is a foot in the door.
Crypto solves (to a degree) the problem of a huge amoount of power belonging to the few people who run the financial system. Huge consentration of power is not a good thing. Power corrupts and so on. Crypto puts everyone on equal footing - rather than say the people/companies who have a banking license enjoying an unfair advantage over everyone else (like the power to create money from thin air in the fractional reserve system).
The credit card companies, PayPal and the like get to decide which companies are worthy to exist and which not. If they don't like a business, they can just cut them off from receiving money. E.g. VPN provides who don't keep logs are all banned from receiving credit/debit card payment, PayPal, etc. - they have to resort to receiving cash by post and crypto.
US: https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...
CA: https://www.osfi-bsif.gc.ca/Eng/osfi-bsif/med/Pages/20221116...
EU: https://www.bafin.de/EN/Aufsicht/FinTech/Geschaeftsmodelle/D...
and so on.
I hope that even if you love the current financial system, you'd still be in favor of giving its competitors a chance to exist.
Money laundering, drug dealing, scamming old people, these things have all existed well before cryptocurrency.
Arguing that central banks and a few other non-elected decision makers should be able to influence our lives by devaluing our savings is... insane. It's Stockholm syndrome really.
A few wealthy people decide your money should be worth less because a bunch of other wealthy people have made bad decisions for decades and now there's too much money floating around. Coincidentally, the interest rate adjustments won't tangibly affect the wealthy people! That's not something I want to continue to support.
What’s your solution?
Each medium of wealth storage has tradeoffs, so being categorically opposed to one type because of ideological principles seems suboptimal to me.
For example, fiat may be subject to devaluation, but is stable, widely accepted, highly liquid and (cash) is anonymous.
Bitcoin is subject to speculation, so prices are highly volatile, amongst other downsides.
Land tends to maintain or grow in value, subject to interest rates, tax environment, and adjacent developments, and is very illiquid.
Perhaps, but a currency that devalues based on news, scams, pump & dump schemes, and so forth isn't the solution. Crypto doesn't transfer the power of value to you, it transfers to people with a big enough following - or botnet - to amplify whatever news (false or not) that impacts their crypto the way they want it, up or down.
Your premise is reasonable, but your conclusion doesn't logically follow from it.
This is an accurate characterization of the dollar as well.
A common theme in all the cryptocurrency hate is that crypto enables scams, drug deals, etc. It's value fluctuates because of the decisions of a few bad actors. The dollar and every other central bank currency also have these issues.
The dollar recently peaked around a 9% inflation rate.
The euro peaked around 10%.
I could also make an argument that these numbers are actually understated but that's not the point. These are supposedly stable currencies. A person who has saved up ~100K Euros by January 2022 now only has ~90k Euros in January 2023. That's some pretty significant volatility. Unfortunately, the central bank currency's never go back up in terms of purchasing power. They only go down.
These inflation rates are policy failures. But positive inflation is policy. Cash isn’t designed to hold value over time. We have other instruments for that. And the notion that one should have stable value transport across time for free is a bit ridiculous, as well as economically destructive in basic ways.
Not in the way you're saying - it's a matter of degree. When Theranos scammed hundreds of millions, the dollar didn't drop in value, nor has that ever happened.
You seem to have unconventional definitions of "stable" and "volatile". Calling a 10% devaluation in 1 year volatile is laughable compared to crypto. For example BTC -65% in 1 month (1/6/18 to 2/6/18) or how about TerraUSD, -80% in less than 1 week, 5/9-5/14/22.
Fiat and crypto aren't even in the same galaxy when it comes to volatility.
And? Is it even coming close to the volatility of the most popular coins?
> Unfortunately, the central bank currency's never go back up in terms of purchasing power. They only go down.
With good reason! Deflation is one of the greatest worries in any economy.
It's the same reason why free-as-in-anarchy speech social networks become far right cesspools [1], you have little reason to switch unless you're someone who's been kicked off the major platforms.
[1] I really don't mean to pick on the right wing nutjobs, it's just that the "far left" doesn't exist in the US so you don't find groups pushing for violent worker uprisings, seizing control of industry, and significant wealth redistribution.
Who needs freedom of association except for troublemakers?
Who needs the fourth amendment except for criminals?
This applies to both kinds of drugs, by the way. Online black market shops selling generics from India also use crypto heavily.
I don't know if it will ever be displaced because there are so many irrational people in the space, but whatever happens with crypto, I hope consensus mechanisms that aren't energy-hungry displace proof of work.
Bitcoin's power consumption is just appealing to the religious aspect of the network : if we changed it, it would go against the original design. Even though it burns 1% of world energy consumption for that stupidity.
One of the only valid points of crypto is separating money from the government.
However, its proponents emphasize obscure benefits that make it look more obtuse than it should. As they stand, cryptocurrencies, in the eye of the general public, look either like a Ponzi scheme, free money, or too convoluted to bother, as they solve nothing other technologies don't solve already.
It looks like you've just answered your question right there.
> It looks like you've just answered your question right there.
Eh... Yes, indeed they did. Only, not in the way it appears you thought they did: Look up the word “inextricably”. Yup, money can't be separated from government – if it could be, whoever now ran money in stead of the old government would in effect be the new government.
Hard to say if even trying is more evil than stupid or the other way around, vut that doesn't matter much, now does it?
I believe this is why a lot of people fall for the blockchain trap, it's interesting on an academic level, so they come to the conclusion that there must be value in there in there somewhere.
How do you create a shared transaction ledger without a central point of failure and control?
How is this not exactly what I was referring to? (solving an academic problem rather than a real world problem)
It's almost always pull from my branch on the centralized repo, not pull from my repo at this unrelated host.
If they had some magic way of handling transactions so every node didn't need to keep all history, and nodes could be sharded in a hierarchy like DNS, etc. transactions times were near-instant and almost-free, etc. then it'd be a lot more useful.
This is very outdated commentary. Cryptocurrency's get better at scaling every year.
Bitcoin was the first, so naturally it is the slowest. Transactions per second (TPS) is around 5.
Ethereum, which released a few years after Bitcoin is around 30 TPS.
There are newer crypto's like Loopring that can currently do 500 TPS.
Ethereum 2.0, is aiming for 100,000 TPS.
[1]: https://crypto.news/solana-transactions-per-second-hit-an-al...
Is it too difficult to do by yourself? Yes.
Will it damage your floor? Yes.
Will it damage the refrigerator? Yes.
But I don’t think it’s bullshit because it does solve a real problem - killing the fly.
the bullshit part refers to just that, pretending that the refrigerator could be an appropriate good solution, when in fact can't actually even perform the task
The operative word here is "people". People are better judges of what other people want. And what people want is to make a quick profit in cryptobucks, and convert it into something they can buy real things with, preferably without a lot of transaction fees.
Crypto does not understand this, because it is a rigid top-down system that only works on the assumption that there is no fiat off-ramp, and crypto is the only currency being used. But that's not reality; in reality, people would not care about crypto if they didn't think it would make them rich in 'real money' terms.
I want to send money to someone: I should be able to do so (i) instantly (message passing at light speed), (ii) at 0 cost (price of electricity), and (iii) without asking anyone for permission. Crypto failed miserably to achieve this. Furthermore, it has allied (or been rallied) with the "enemy"; crypto enthusiasts regard it as "good for Bitcoin"™ when banks announce investment in the crypto space. It is now a project unable to dream a future for itself beyond "hodl".
[1] https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow
[2] https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/choosing-a-tax-profess...
It’s intentionally mediated through banks. We don’t want to create a money-laundering system—that is an explicit lesson learned from crypto. (We also want a layer that can absorb fraud. Another lesson from crypto.) But there are banks who will API it for KYC’d clients.
But then again, that may be why there's huge adoption of crypto in countries like Nigeria (32%!) or Vietnam (21%) [1] (obviously, crypto is a lot more useful in your life if you have a weaker central currency or less financial access; their deeper dive into Sub-Saharan Africa adoption of crypto in particular is fascinating [2]).
Likewise, I'm a believer in the eventual adoption of XR, but a big part of my excitement is really my desire for infinite screen space. Still, I can see the argument that everything will be spatial in the future and personally, I see these trends tying together a lot more than not. Maybe they're on different hype curves, but decentralized financial transactions on credibly neutral, near real time networks (w/ smart contracts) seem like a natural fit for agentic AI. And in the VR arena, I'm seeing some incredibly compelling stuff happening with NeRFs and other generative media that is going to make virtual/augmented immersion a lot more compelling (one of the big bottlenecks for VR right now is generating compelling evergreen content and experiences).
[1] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-global-crypto-adop...
[2] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/sub-saharan-africa-cryp...
Part of the sales experience at the time was they gave all of us one to carry around during our shift on the sales floor and encouraged us to show it off and use it to look up things we'd normally have gone to one of the demo computers to look up. About 2 months later, I'm taking a road trip with a destination plugged into my Garmin GPS (remember those?). I'm in the final stretches of getting where I need to go when the GPS says "you've arrived" while I'm driving down a road with nothing on either side of me. I go for another half mile or so just assuming it was off by a few hundred feet and I'd find an entrance but no such luck. Turn around, punch in the destination to the GPS again and try from the other direction, same deal. "You've arrived" in the middle of nowhere. Tried a couple more times and then pulled off to the side of the road and reached for the iPhone in my pocket to pull up some information / a map quest search, and then remembered that I don't have an iPhone in my pocket because I don't own an iPhone and just carry one on shift at work. That experience convinced me that there was value in this whole "smart phone" thing and that I would eventually be getting one.
Which isn't to say that crypto or NFTs are like iPhones, but more that I think you can't necessarily understand how useful a given piece of tech is just by someone else explaining it to you. Some things you just have to use.
You weren't wrong for the iPhone v1. The UI was years ahead of everything else, but it was still quite limited.
v2 was the first to support apps. To me that was the differentiator that made it a truly revolutionary product.
Apple has goodwill from its iPod success and iTunes store. FB has nothing. Horizon Worlds is completely different from Facebook/Insta, whereas the iPhone had a new UI but with many familiar elements.
Same thing the first time I used google (my age is showing a bit). It was leaps and bounds better than the alternatives at the time.
With crypto it always feels to me like I am dealing with scams, ponzies or something useless. Solving problems that weren't really problems or creating problems that didn't exist beforehand. I have rarely been so underwhelmed by any technical innovation.
I am quite sure he had the data that growth with Facebook, Insta, etc. was limited and threatened by TikTok and others. The Meta stuff was an attempt to break out of that I to a different space, where they could be the early mover. And then being blinded by own fascination for the space. I think many share the assumption that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook never really understood what users actually want and had luck their platform matched the spirit for some time.
Not to mention that Facebook was a perfectly fine and popular social networking platform until Facebook itself poisoned it with the engagement algos that put politics and fake news on top, and drove people away.
All of Meta's current issues were self inflicted.
I also don't think the metaverse was doomed to fail from the start -- still not sure if it's doomed now. Based on John Carmack's resignation & letter about how hard it was to get anything done, it sounds like there are some serious cultural or bureaucratic issues getting in the way of progress though
Such sad tales, companies that only make billions of dollars a quarter, with a solid chance of continuing to do so for the rest of our lives...
This obsession with growth is deeply unhealthy. "Innovation" can be great, and we certainly need it happening somewhere, but the idea that it's something that any given company needs to be doing or it will die is preposterous, particularly when applied to an established industry giant like Facebook.
At some point, I think society is going to have to admit that companies have a lifecycle, and that sometimes a company should die, maybe long before it runs out of money. If the only outcomes are "grow forever" and "become IBM", then I think we should prefer the IBM route, because at least that provides value.
Leave the innovation to smaller companies and allow them to thrive or die on their merits. This whole thing where fossils long past their innovative prime are able to control the entire industry, through boondoggles that are kept afloat indefinitely through trillion dollar cash reserves, rent seeking activities, and strategic acquisitions, is just not good for anyone except the people who are able to exit.
You want innovation, get FAANG out of the way.
publicly traded company. they have to keep that quarterly income up, and on a long enough timeline that means taking whatever revenue you can. if you don't your executives keep getting sacked until they find ones who will do the job.
it's not a question of if they'd do shady stuff but when.
or else they pull a Microsoft and start expanding into wildly unrelated fields like the Zune (which failed) or the XBox (which is huge).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
I'm probably one of the few that thinks the pivot overall isn't a bad idea, but it was just done in such an irresponsible way and they're paying the price now. We've seen this many times (notably Uber, WeWork, Google, and arguably Apple until Jobs returned from his exile with a new skillset), but the best person to start a company is often not the best to run it when it's established. But Mark has been so good at keeping equity and control that Facebook will fail unless he learns how to adapt. It usually takes a real low point for people to get out of established mindsets. Just putting this out there so I can point to this in 10 years: If I were to predict the future, I'd say Facebook stock plummets and everyone writes it off, and Mark wises up, bringing it back much stronger. I don't particularly like him, but I think he's got it in him.
While my impression regarding Metaverse was that Mark Zuckerberg was purposely imprecise on what exactly Metaverse was, hoping to find a company they can acquire, which then in a retcon made that exactly what the vision ever was.
Fashion brands use marketing, in the sports market to sponsoring. For Nike the relationship to Michael Jordan for instance certainly was a major driver. For Adidas Kanye West became a major pain.
Social Media platforms try the same. They try to get famous people on their platform. Instagram seems to do quite well in that space (I don't have an account there) while Twitter on the one side and TikTok, YouTube and Twitch on the other try to get people on their platforms.
But then it's different: In sports sponsorship you can focus on one side of the person, their atheltic skills. On social media they eventually shout out their views on things, which might upset people and damage reputation. Of both, the person and the platform.
They also cycle their top talent.
Facebook does neither of these.
If LVMH were to design social networks, they’d look nothing like what Facebook has developed and more like members only clubs with glass windows.
Social media is ultimately not selling status though, they make money by reaching as many people as possible and you have to lower the entry fee to achieve that.
Socials need to find worse and worse ways to advertise so line can go up and there are new paradigm-shifting features invented all the time.
FAANG on the other hand aspires to infect every single facet of my life, and they have some glib self-serving narrative about how not only are they right to do so, they have the moral imperative. And so what do they do? They track every single aspect of my life that they can, the invade my privacy, they leak my data, they bilk me for cash at every opportunity. Dark patterns, bad UI, run arounds on the phone, locking out of accounts. I'm sorry but this entire industry is completely fucked, and it's only getting worse. As someone who has been in tech since the 80s, the scene is done. It's been overrun by vultures, bankers, and billionaires with more money than ethics, and they think you are just an NPC in their world, where they are celebrities, kings, and gods.
That is why social tech brands have a shelf life, because none of them can resist the dark side. Nike has a dark side, but at least when I take them off my shoes aren't trying to take over my life.
Shit, even within its own domain, it's failed with some projects long-term (Nike Golf clubs come to mind). They stay relevant by signing young upcoming athletes, some of whom go on to become known worldwide in sports that are popular worldwide like Soccer, Basketball, and Tennis.
Nike does not have a platform, and in a roundabout way also benefits from their competition doing well (the more people that are active, the larger the potential customer base is). FB/Meta does not have that luxury - to them, if you're not on their platform, you're useless. Nike does not have that problem.
Nike wants to own the experience when you're doing something athletic or casually physical (walking around). There's a limit to that as even pro athletes aren't physically active all the time. Since so much of our lives have a technology component to it, Meta wants to own that whole ecosystem , which is much more ambitious than anything Nike ever tried or will try.
The social tech that your parents use can't be cool, by definition, no matter how good it is, the fact that your parents (and grandparents!) generation is already there is a big drawback to coolness. But social tech companies are reluctant (for obvious practical reasons) to periodically create new generations of social networks to capture a new generation of users by intentionally providing them "not your parents' social network".
Simultaneously, it is worth noting that major technology companies did not develop working generative AI. Examples include Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and even Google's search algorithms, they all fall short of user expectations. And they had years and years and billions of $$.
The parallel between virtual reality and artificial intelligence is intriguing. If some company can successfully develop a VR system which does not suck, it could revolutionize the industry in much the same way as a openAI.
But that company will not be any of these big ones…
Yes, there are other companies and products in similar spaces but Facebook would have been cash positive in each of those ventures pretty soon if not crazy profitable.
Whereas the Meta VR demos are almost close to what we can see from 80s, not to mention that they add no value to gaming, entertainment, communication or commerce.
Also WhatsApp does integrate payments in some geographies so it is not like FB wasn’t already having a step there .
FB is just chasing fads, few years back it was libre coin at the peak of crypto interest . They will keep throwing stuff to see what sticks until they run out of money
The Facebook of 2023 is not a scrappy little startup with nothing to lose.
So he can sure act like he has nothing to lose.
It was called myspace.
This seems like a bit of 20/20 hindsight. At the time, the biggest concern Zuckerberg had was that they didn't own a platform. Apple had the iOS ecosystem, Google had Android, Microsoft had Windows, Amazon had AWS and their logistical moat. Zuckerberg made a bet that the world would move to VR similarly to the way the world moved to PCs in the 80s, which allowed Microsoft to take over a big chunk of the world.
Zuckerberg's fear wasn't unreasonable, he just bet wrong. Apple's privacy changes had a huge impact to Facebook, and the other FAANG without a "moat-defining platform", Netflix, is also in the most precarious position among the big techs.
That said, I agree with most of the other comments. I can see VR evolving a little beyond gaming I guess, but it's actually kind of a nightmare to imagine myself wearing a fucking headset all day. At this point I think Zuckerberg knows he bet wrong and AI is the future, and he's clearly trying to pivot, but it's really hard to move a big company like Meta quickly, and it also means he has to admit he just lit billions and billions on fire.
I believe the concerns around the lack of a platform were both about "moat-defining" and the possibility of being deplatformed by Apple and/or Google.
2nd Life, The Simms, various MMORPGS. We have loads of experience buildings virtual worlds with virtual belongings and conducting meetings virtually. I was part of a WOW guild that had meetings about raids and other small bits of admin stuff in game.
But a company known for being sketchy as heck slaps on 3D goggles and makes it less fun and I’m supposed to want to be in it?
I think you’ll find that a lot of people were skeptical.
Strapping a screen to your face is not ergonomic. It isn't practical.
That argument is only sound for as long as the screen is unwieldy. If you could wear a pair of glasses that magically converted your laptop into a stable, triple-screen workstation, it'd be a no-brainer to assert that it was useful in at least some circumstances -- working on planes, trains, automobiles now becomes more and more possible. If the tech then progressed to the point where you could do that from a phone, and not require a laptop, or even necessarily pulling the phone out of your pocket, then it seemed like a pretty powerful productivity feature _at least_ some of the time, and if executed well enough, it wouldn't shock me to see people giving up their laptops in the same way that many people don't bother having tower PC computers any more.
That's not really the bet they were making. It was deeper than that.
Facebook discovered that people are willing to use their product to dissociate to an extreme degree. There are some people out there whose entire lives are on FB and Instagram. Take their profiles away, and you would literally erase the livelihood and even identities of some individuals out there. They have no relationships and no skills in the material world. Their entire existence is a profile, and the relationships cultivated in that profile. Just as you and I cease to exist in the material world when we close our eyes and go to bed, these people cease to exist at all when they log off of Facebook and Instagram.
And so Meta, being the consumer-focused company it is, was looking to give their best customers exactly what they want: a way to complete their dissociation in the material world, and to bring even more of their existence into the metaverse, the digital plane of existence for many of their customers. Their pitch for metaverse meetings seems so strange to us on the material plane because in-person meetings are the last thing we'd replicate digitally. But for those who are ready to dissociate into the digital plane, a digital meeting room is the next logical step.
It's like what Agent Smith says about the first version of the Matrix. Yeah, it was perfect, but it wasn't real. So they added pain and suffering to make it real. The FB can offer a great dissociative experience if that's what you're looking for, but if you're really looking to let go of the material plane, you need to bring in all the pain and suffering you're used to into the metaverse. Otherwise the distinct lack of meetings gives away the charade.
The problem for Meta is that the Metaverse is a very expensive proposition, and there are only so many hardcore FB and Instagram addicts at this point willing to dissociate to that degree. The rest of us enjoy our material plane of existence, and aren't addicted to Facebook and Instagram the way their users are.
And there it is, the word "user", which reminds us that FB customers really have a lot in common with drug addicts.
That is 100% unlike the FB experience, where someone else provides a prompt (post), and you join in the comments.
That's a terrible bet. Anyone who has ever played a 3D game will immediately understand that a 3D world is a strictly inferior interface for almost all use cases where you are actually trying to get something done, e.g. read and answer an email.
That's the safe bet, yes. Maybe not even with more pixels.
Also I think people only think from the "what do I gain?" perspective. There is a comment below that asks "what do you think display technology will be like in 20 years?" I won't argue that 2 high res screens that can show my entire workspace where ever I am would not be awesome. I would try that.
But consider all the things you do while you work:
- Eat and drink - Stare out the window - Get up and go to the bathroom - Just have a stretch, spin in your chair.
And now 2 tiny 4k screens strapped to your head is no longer ergonomic and isn't going to cut it. And a cheap and normal screens looks really good.
Actually, that idea is less outlandish now; in fact, they should double-down on it if they can.
A few years ago ChatGPT and AI as they are now were not even close to allowing people to use something other than screen with (perhaps on-screen, perhaps physical) keyboard.
With the advances we've now seen in AI, it makes VR more likely[1] to be the main interface to the computer, not less likely. Hence, they should double-down on VR and immediately integrate AI, even if it means ditching the bulky headset that users have already rejected.
A ChatGPT-like assistant could be the final puzzle piece that causes users to stop using the monitor/screen/keyboard for interacting with their social network.
Not to say that they'll switch to VR, but it becomes ever more probably, with AI assistance, to ditch the current interaction mechanism for social network users.
[1] Still pretty unlikely, but more likely than before.
I had a Sony Ericsson p900 a few years before the iPhone, it had a small keyboard you’d usually flip out of the way to get a full screen touch display: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P900
I dunno about you, but I and basically everyone in my circles at the time agreed that it was most likely a terrible idea.
Until and unless there's a truly convenient piece of hardware to get one into a virtual space—I'm talking weight and bulk comparable to prescription eyeglasses, no wires going beyond your body (ie, maybe a pack at the belt/pocket/something like that), and some form of extremely intuitive UI—you're not going to get people interested in regular interactions in a VR/AR space.
Frankly, even once we do have something like that, I think it unlikely that many people would choose to do things like meetings in a virtual space over something simpler like Zoom, even if they did already own the hardware.
And none of these views have changed over the past few years.
No; I think Zuck has been far too isolated and out of touch with how regular people operate for too long, and when faced with, as you say, the fact that Facebook was only running on other people's platforms—and it became clear that no one was interested in making Facebook their platform, like by buying a Facebook phone—he convinced himself that this was The Next Big Thing based on sheer desperation.
Growing up I was used to there being more useful and fun tech gadgets than I could ever afford. Now it’s like unless they own your entire online presence they don’t want your money. Give me that dumb iPod v1.0 which gets sand in the wheel and lasts an hour on battery but for VR. The idea was all your music on the go and it met that goal.
For VR it should be hands free/hands minimal portable productivity. Give that shitty resolution and battery life. I would take navigating YouTube, PDFs, email at the lowest res feasible and 2 hour batteries and isn’t gigantic and prevents you from normal activities. Don’t build a multi billion dollar platform.
Why? Who else would want that?
But I'm not a Gadget Guy. Why would I want shitty YouTube in VR when I have good YouTube on my phone?
And that's not inherently a bad thing. Despite his often shrill detractors, Tim Cook, who's definitely a "bureaucracy expert" more than he is a "product expert", has done a darn good job leading Apple since Steve Jobs' untimely death. The thing is, he knows to listen to the product experts, and to put the really good ones in positions of some power within the hierarchy.
The problem comes when your "bureaucracy experts" only value what they understand: Bureaucracy. Numbers. Finances, especially in the short-term sense.
Now, I honestly don't think this is precisely Zuckerberg's problem. From what I've seen, I don't think he's necessarily a "bureaucracy expert" himself—but nor is he a "product expert" in the same sense as someone like Jobs or Ive; he helped to create the original Facebook, but I don't believe he's ever come up with any other products that have seen any real success (though correct me if I'm wrong). He's more of a founder who rode a wave of money to where he is, and bought into the idea that that meant he was somehow smarter than everyone else.
Same. No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame.
There are fairly serious differences between the release of the iPod and the announcement of Facebook's shift to "Meta", and one guy being wrong one time, however famously, does not have any implications for other people being wrong in completely different circumstances, so this feels pointlessly dismissive.
Easy way to prove this is to ask people what the obvious winners and losers will be in the next 5 years, and then see how they've allocated they're investments to that. If you can predict the market so obviously, you'll be rich.
Didn't even know you were on here!
They've made some missteps, but it's not even close to being over.
I don't really understand this take. Generative AI is a complement to the metaverse. Biggest problem metaverses face is having good content since it's quite a bit more difficult to create. Using generative AI to fill the metaverse is not a pivot, it's been the plan all along.
Only people who are deeply involved in tech think that Mark Zuckerberg investing in something makes it happen.
Everyone else correctly understands he is not a main character, but someone who rode the wave of social media adaptation.
Except for all of the people who were saying it was a bad direction from the start. It certainly looked like a bad direction.
Everybody was making fun of it since it was announced.
But what I don't see is people willing to do the same with Apple who has also invested billions in the space and will be showcasing their Reality platform in the next couple of months at WWDC.
Do people really want to bet against the company that has had so many consumer product successes even ones for which there was widespread doubt e.g. Apple Watch, AirPods etc.
And what if it takes off ? There will need to be another platform similar to iPhone/Android and isn't that the type of bet Meta should be making.
And most of those billions have gone towards acquiring app developers, game studios and Meta Labs.
They deserve a little more credit than building a Second Life clone.
So it seems popularity is decreasing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...
How can that be more popular than Xbox? Where are those 20 million devices in use? Do people hide them?
Your comparison is a bit weird. I have seen more than 10 iPhones today, and all I did was walk to Starbucks and back.
The same internal presentation that discusses this 20+ million number also mentions huge problems in retention. People don't use their Quest very much nor very long.
Overall usage numbers are abysmal, and it is a flop. One of the major reasons why it is a flop is that even the people who really want it and actually buy it don't really have anything interesting to use it for.
Legless Second Life is a very good representative of the flop that the metaverse is.
If the Meta pivot was going as fantastic as you say it is, Mark wouldn't be going ballistic on his own employees.
What AR/VR needs is a mass market killer app, like Pokémon GO (in its heyday) or World of Warcraft or something. Not another headset. People will put up with all kinds of discomfort/inconvenience/cost if there's something interesting to do. The current crop of Metaverses don't cut it in this regard.
But AR that is really a killer app almost certainly needs a fashionable, light, easy to use headset and that's a hardware problem to a significant degree that probably doesn't have a quick fix. Yes, you can do something that's effectively a prototype that's more like a "headset" but that's almost certainly not a mass market device that most people will walk around wearing.
(There's also the social glasshole issue but my guess is that goes away with a useful enough device even if some people hate the idea.)
I really think we're just waiting for the resolution to increase and it to become thinner and lighter and better at hand tracking.
The Quest 2 is already a better experience watching 1080p surround-sound content than most people's TV's -- if you're watching by yourself. But streamers haven't quite caught onto that yet.
But once the screen becomes sharp enough to do real work and hand tracking improves dramatically, I think we're going to start seeing some dramatic shifts.
Nobody is criticizing because... there's nothing to base those criticisms on - there's no product (yet) and WWDC is rumor. Once (if) it launches, the praises and critiques will follow.
The fact of the matter is, if you have people you can hang out with in person you're not going to bother with VR, or the metaverse.
Several of my friends have Quests, and we use them regularly with each other, but the catch here is that we all live in different parts of the country, so it's great for some more informal goofing off while we chitchat.
I've played around with the social aspects, and they're interesting, but I don't really have friends with a Quest and I struggle to make friends just by butting in on random conversations, so I haven't really done it much.
Have had a couple of interesting conversations about movies with a movie nerd in a virtual hangout in the Bigscreen app, though, and did some dancing in a virtual nightclub a couple times, which was actually pretty fun (I think I'd feel a little too weird doing going to an actual nightclub nowadays, I'm a little old for the scene).
Were these reasonable people banking with Silicon Valley Bank like all the smart guys? Crypto is promising a financial system that has so far appeared to be much more resilient than the traditional system and bitcoin is currently at $30k. Tether has survived something like 2x depegs so far.
We might finally have a technology that can resist financial authoritarianism; there is no body that can stop bitcoin transactions and it is proving itself to be resilient enough for medium-term use. That is a change on the same magnitude as the internet.
What is bitcoin resilient to? Not falling to $0?
> We might finally have a technology that can resist financial authoritarianism; there is no body that can stop bitcoin transactions and it is proving itself to be resilient enough for medium-term use. That is a change on the same magnitude as the internet.
I don't think that our current financial system fails that often because some transactions were stopped.
If we cherry pick, say, the Vanguard Long-Term Treasury ETF [0] in the last 3 years it is down 30%. So bitcoin isn't as resilient against value loss US treasuries but we're seeing changes in magnitude in price that is similar to a long term bond ETF. That is a lot better than I expected, and probably a lot of others. Really good performance compared to the gains, I suspect. No obvious counterparty risk, so probably superior to the debt-laden US government in some sense.
> I don't think that our current financial system fails that often because some transactions were stopped.
Someone is paying for bitcoin to burn a medium country's worth of energy to keep running. That speaks to a certain sincerity in their disagreement with you.
[0] https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profi...
I strongly disagree with this. When SVB failed, there was a system in place to insure some of the depositors' funds. The government chose to augment that by insuring all the depositors' funds. That was an unusual move, and then the banking system returned to normal when a better capitalized bank took over SVB's assets and liabilities. The bank failure cost those who invested in the bank. It cost the bank management. It did not cost the depositors.
When a crypto exchange fails, depositor funds are unrecoverable. There is no system to protect the depositors, no system to recover funds from the failed exchange.
While financial authoritarianism is imperfect, its rules are designed to reduce fraud and to reduce the impact of fraud on innocent bystanders.
That is why I'm anticipating that crypto will be a stronger ecosystem than the traditional financial sector. If we punish people for bad decisions, then by Darwinian logic the crypto ecosystem will not funnel capital towards the sort of idiot depositors who give Joseph Gentile their money. If they cared to check what their money was funding they could have seen this coming.
The traditional finance system is protecting those people. That weakens it. Which has always been the strongest argument against governments handing out money to failed banks. They've been doing that for at least a decade and it means the financial system is shaky enough that it falls over when hit it with 5% interest rates!
I'm not certain about the direction of Meta, but for now it seems that their most important areas are entertainment (Instagram, Reels) and messaging (WhatsApp, Messenger), not social networking (Facebook), which is dying.
For entertainment and messaging, generative AI is going to be huge. In entertainment, content creation and discovery will be severely advanced by AI. For messaging, at the very least, users will expect AI support in message composition and company-customer communication.
But in that sense they're not far behind the pack as it is.
I'm not sure if lonely people would rather talk to an Alzheimers anime girl or be alone.
I have lots of friends online. I don't need 3D VR interactions with them.
They could both fail but I don't think you can predict one from the other.
A metaverse-like concept is conceivable, but a long long way out.
VR’s “Mac moment” may be happening this year with Apple’s hardware unveiling. I suppose Zuck hopes to ship his mass-market “Windows 3.0” soon after. I’m very curious to find out what consumers think of the Apple product.
Be it Ragnarok Online, Runescape, Ultima Online, League of Legends, Call of Duty, Minecraft, or whatever, anyone who has played multiplayer games of any kind know exactly what the "metaverse" was trying to sell to us and the common masses. We also know that multiplayer games, unlike practically every romanticized depiction, generally sucks to play with strangers. You absolutely need a tightly knit group of good friends to play with to be able to truly enjoy them.
So when we said the "metaverse" would never take off, it's because we have literally been there and done that.
I think you hit the nail on the head as far as how the metaverse is not new, but I think your pessimistic take is not so obvious to me and presumably many people bullish on metaverse ideas.
The problem with Meta's Metaverse is that that's exactly what they don't want, their vision of VR is one where the have complete control over everything. Thus you aren't even allowed to access their Metaverse with hardware not made by them.
So VR will be in competition with all the other entertainment industries. But is that useful in any sense just besides entertainment? I doubt.
It started all years ago with Google Glass. Even at that time I doubted that there is value in this. Now, we are here and Google Glass is finally dead. I know it is in the rumors that Apple will bring its VR headset soon. But really? Will that make it better? I doubt.
VR will be in competition with all the other forms of entertainment. It is something, you can't just do besides. It will need your full attention. I doubt that there is some real usefulness.
My house is near a hughe lake. There are people swimming for real, not virtually; there are people sailing for real, not virtually; there are people windsurfing for real, not virtually.
AR can help with navigation (overlaying the directions right on your field of view); with social interactions (facial recognition, even locally, can identify people already in your contacts, and remind you "you wanted to thank her for that birthday present", or whatever); with learning about the world (look at a tree, a flower, a bird and ask for an identification)...
And that's basically just taking apps that exist now and imagining them integrated into AR glasses.
(Yes, there are definitely concerns about things like privacy, with the possibility of having cameras on our faces all the time; I am hopeful that we will find solutions for these, but don't have good ones off the top of my head.)
But you're making an error if you're lumping Bitcoin in with "crypto".
"What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party."
The Satoshi paper is very short , simple to read, but brilliant. That it’s so short and yet somehow preempts the “gotchas” that frequently get brought up as attacks on bitcoin speaks volumes about Satoshi’s foresight.
Unfortunately it’s very difficult to have level headed discussions about the topic on this site as there’s a small army of reactionary grumps who reflexively downvote pro-crypto sentiments regardless of their merit. Just an unfortunate artifact of being on a big “upvote” site like here or Reddit that certain topics are verboten .
No? It has been enormously successful over the last 14 years. Adoption is occurring exactly how you'd expect for a new form of digital gold/money that is outside of state control.
> Not only is it volatile making it a poor choice of currency
It's still very early in the life cycle of a new form of money. The market is still figuring out how to price it. That's not a problem inherent to Bitcoin itself. Also, the volatility is a side-effect of growth, which is a good thing if you're saving your wealth in Bitcoin. There isn't a stock or asset on Earth that has seen the type of price appreciation that Bitcoin has, that hasn't also had enormous volatility. Apple, Tesla, Amazon, you name it. You can't have price growth without volatility.
Bitcoin's volatility is been compared to stocks, indexes, and assets here: https://ecoinometrics.substack.com/p/ecoinometrics-bitcoin-i...
It's on par.
> most people transact via trusted third parties for a variety of reasons
How do you know this? Do you have a link that analyses proportion of on-chain transactions that are done through a third party and done by a peer? Not sure how you could possibly know this.
Also how could you account for off-chain transactions through the Lightning network? There's some custodial services on LN too, but plenty of people and businesses roll their own nodes, which is incredibly easy with self-hosting solutions like Umbrel, Start9, RaspiBlitz etc.
> The concentration of mining in a few large entities also points to effective centralization of the protocol.
I assume you're talking about mining pools? There's essentially zero barrier to changing pools. If a pool is found to be misbehaving people will leave the pool and they'll decimate their market share. There's no incentive for pools to fuck up like that. Pools are just an abstract grouping of hash that has no structural impact on the network's distributed nature. Bitcoin's hashrate is physically distributed all over the world, which is what matters. So no, it's not centralized.
And if it is... show me the consequences of that supposed centralization. Can you show any evidence of transaction censorship by mining operations or mining pools? If so, were the censored transactions eventually processed by other miners/pools?
Genuinely curious.
Every other crypto project is a product/service created by a company or "foundation". There's a business plan (i.e. pump and dump), CEO, marketing team, PR etc.
Think of it as the difference between TCP/IP as the base layer protocol for the Internet vs. all the dot com companies/services that have come and gone over the years... except many of those dot com companies actually provided useful services to people.
Bitcoin is more akin to TCP/IP, whereas crypto is more like those dot com companies, except crypto doesn't provide anything useful to anyone, except shitcoin founders who need retail investors to pump and dump on as exit liquidity.
That's the difference.
> Bitcoin is more akin to TCP/IP, whereas crypto is more like those dot com companies, except crypto doesn't provide anything useful to anyone,
When you say crypto here do you mean cryptography, cryptocurrencies, or a subset of smart contract based projects? All currencies, whether bitcoin, shitcoins, or USD are ultimately pump and dump schemes the all meet the technical definition of a Ponzi scheme
What company are you talking about exactly?
> When you say crypto here do you mean cryptography, cryptocurrencies, or a subset of smart contract based projects?
Now you're just being obtuse. I'm obviously not talking about cryptography.
> All currencies, whether bitcoin, shitcoins, or USD are ultimately pump and dump schemes the all meet the technical definition of a Ponzi scheme
Yes, money is based mostly on trust. I trust Bitcoin's monetary policy more than any other, and for good reason.
Lightning Labs. The founders were heavily involved in the debate over increasing block size that led to a hard fork. I have no idea if they honestly thought the network Das better off with a smaller block size, but after successfully fending off a block size increase they created a company to develop a lightning network implementation.
> Now you're just being obtuse. I'm obviously not talking about cryptography.
That doesn't actually answer the question. Are you referring to cryptocurrencies as a whole lot a subset of smart contract protocols?
I agree it's clear on day one that these models will be useful.
What's less clear is how useful they are -- a year ago most experts would have told you that an architecture that "predicts the next word" won't be powerful enough to make a model that could lead to AGI-alike abilities (and many people here still argue the same today), but here we are now.
> Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early
That's just a lack of vision. GPT-2 was released in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. He had plenty of time to commit to AI development instead of Metaverse.
In Denmark the highest income households have small cheap TVs they can hide away while low income households have big 4K TVs as the main attraction in their living room. The reason is that the former don't want to appear like passive mindless consumer zombies who watch TV.
It is an extremely superficial mindset but wearing a VR headset is literally the most 1984 consumer zombie thing you could possibly.
It's been a couple of months since I've done anything in VR, but I don't understand why you're being so overly dramatical about it, comparing it to 1984 and consumerist zombies.
Even though I feel technical right all these years i regret for not buying as many as i could have even back in 2017/18.
Centeral banks turned everything like a Ponzi scheme. How the heck borrowing and spending is a better option than saving.
Central banks are just playing a larger game, they aren't causing it, the game is: ever increasing growth capitalism. Borrowing and spending creates "growth", saving doesn't. While we exist in this system we can try to pinpoint the blame at different actors but they aren't the cause of it, they are just playing along.
The incentives for growth don't align with what's best for society, they align with making people indebted so companies can grow their revenues.
Oney is worthless. Unless you like pieces of paper representing defunct national heroes you should not hold money but assets, stock, estate, things that have intrinsic value.
Being able to buy drugs online was cool, but I'm not sure it was worth the billions of dollars invested and vast amounts of carbon emitted.
They needed to focus on making a few more games with the mass appeal of Beat Saber and making entry level machines a bit cheaper again so there was enough users to make the social aspect actually have some value.
I wouldn't be too shocked if crypto did peter out or flatline over the coming years, just it doesn't seem a priori obvious, given my broad criticisms of it have not stopped its success to date.
Bitcoin has proven itself to be a useful financial speculation object.
It's been three years since then, and still no real-world use case has emerged. I don't dispute that there are completely valid use cases for cryptocurrencies, mainly around avoiding governmental financial restrictions and safeguards, and there are still loads of people using cryptocurrencies for speculation and/or as a "store of value". But the whole ecosystem of distributed apps, smart contracts, DAOs, and so on, still mainly revolves around itself, without wider societal impact.
He tried the same with the mobile market (and was ridiculously late in the game with a not-much-differentiating offering, not unlike Amazon). I guess he didn't want to make that mistake again and tried to be early in VR, which seemed the 'next big thing' for him for some reason.
https://www.lifewire.com/whatever-happened-to-the-facebook-p...
He dabbled in crypto thing when that was all the hype. Didn't end any better. https://www.ft.com/content/a88fb591-72d5-4b6b-bb5d-223adfb89...
And he would have been too late.
It’s been 18 months since they “pivoted”. Come back in 5-10 years to see who was right. Assuming the metaverse is a failure at this point is simply arrogant.
The metaverse is a 10 year bet that involves progress across multiple axes. No-one here can predict the state of progress in ten years.
This is what Ron Paul and others have been saying about fiat currency for decades.
You'd think if anything they'd want to invest in that more now that LLMs could be used in combination to produce a much more natural home assistant experience.
That said, whilst I think VR doesn't have a huge amount of potential (the equipment is expensive and awkward), I think there is still a lot of space for making it easier to meet and communicate with people virtually. There's still a huge amount of friction where nowadays almost every service has limited public messaging and comments, etc., and online communities are fractured across dozens of Discord or Matrix servers. I think one of the main parts of Tiktok's success has been that it makes it easy to speak to new people either via public comments or video replies, etc.
I think it's clear they will (and are) be useful, but how useful is very much an open question
a) people didn't join metaverse because there's nobody else there
b) generative AI like GPT and Stable Diffusion enable the creation of real-looking and real-sounding bots for a VR world
c) metaverse is now interesting again because you're not there alone
I don't know that a sparsely populated metaverse is THE reason to be skeptical about Meta's metaverse.
Maybe like 10 years ago when PG was more active on here he was participating in a thread (honestly forgot about what) where I ended up asking him “If Mark Zuckerberg applied to YC with objectively the worst idea you’ve ever heard, would you invest?”
And he said, “of course!”
I think at the time VR started making headlines, I thought was a pretty cool concept. I loved that Valve and Oculus (private at the time) were both going after it.
When FB bought Oculus I didn’t see an obvious connection, but like you’re saying I just assumed Zuckerberg knew exactly what he was doing.
Over time I’ve come to appreciate WHY they made the investment. If they had been right, they were going to be very right (and frankly in kind of a terrifyingly dystopian way imo).
I also wonder if FB could go back in time would they completely scrap VR investment? What (at the time) would have been their big bet instead?
I think this is the relevant question. So many people fall into the Trap stop thinking in terms of binary outcomes, especially with hindsight information. This isn't how business investment works at all.
The same people that are quick to judge investment failures can rarely produce an alternative idea with multi-billion dollar upside.
I think he's just desperate to have what Apple has; A hardware platform on which to hang other services and applications.
And this is in contrast to what YC likes to call tarpit ideas, because there are lots of ideas that look good but everyone who tries to tackle them fails for whatever reason.
So we can say metaverse was a bad bet for Facebook, but that's sort of looking in hindsight at the struggles that tech has and the unknown market. And it appears to be a big bet and lost.
But comparing to current state of AI, is sort of comparing to a different stage, where there is the beginning of an early majority seeing the progress and now seeing the excitement. But go back a couple of years, and more of us would be naysayers, talking about how bad the tech is, or various failure modes.
No. No. The steam engine, modern refrigeration and open heart surgery all probably had some naysayers but I don't think they looked like bad ideas to almost everyone. A lot of what qualifies as innovative from your tech community really just might be crap.
From the beginning the complaint with crypto and blockchain is that it didn't fix any problems other than maybe assisting as a tool in laundering/illegal transactions, and it wastes energy to boot. I don't see how the naysayers were wrong.
The metaverse idea didn't even get to the point of hyping a purpose. Nobody even bothered to explain what useful human need or want it fulfilled (beyond what has already been fulfilled for years in gaming).
> But comparing to current state of AI, is sort of comparing to a different stage, where there is the beginning of an early majority
Early majority? That is a bold affirmation.
I think these large language models are pretty neat. I also lived through the first AI winters. I would say the hype at this moment isn't even as great as it was then (especially in the 80s). It is a bit tough to explain for those that weren't there - but numerous knowledgable and intelligent people were convinced that the AI singularity was just moments away.
0: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americ...
The first cycle was ice huts, basically insulated bunkers where you could get ice through the summer that was collected in winter. This industry got totally replaced by the first of commercial refrigeration, that could generate and store ice from water. Which got disrupted and replaced against, with home refrigeration, someone can make ice at home, or get ice from a bigger version at a store.
The point I was trying to make, perhaps badly worded, was that these disruptions weren't obvious ideas by those in the industry. Otherwise they would have embraced the change technology allowed and rode into the new markets.
We're looking in hindsight, and going it's obvious it's a good idea, because we all have a fridge and can make ice at home. But at the time, those who owned the entire industry, couldn't see it.
Ok, now, can you explain me why anybody would ever want to go in the Metaverse? (In a way that doesn't sound like an indie game or some chatroom created by a small team?)
When and if that happens is anyone's guess, though.
Cool. How about brain surgery? Clarification: how about brain lobotomies?
Without the benefit of hindsight, can you explain how open heart surgery is "clearly" good and innovative while the later is harmful. I mean, everyone knows it's a good idea: it even won a Nobel Prize.
The fact is, everyone only obviously knows an idea was crap or obvious in hindsight.
Many of the indications for open heart surgery are no longer valid or standard of care today, replaced with either vascular access or medical management... and brain surgery is a more fair comparison then a specific procedure (open heart surgery is not a single procedure either), for which plenty of lives have been improved.
Which by the way, lobotomies (temporal lobectomies, but a rose by any other name) are still an accepted treatment for epilepsy. Sidebar: Frontal lobotomies were not without controversy over their well known effects even when they were contemporary.
Neither is "clearly" good nor harmful. I never sought to engage in this black and white thinking.
And to my original point it is completely obvious to me and many in my field why it is beneficial that we should be researching alternative treatments to epilepsy other than lobectomies (which doesn't feel like the final word on epilepsy, as helpful as they have been for some), and this goes for a whole host of neurological and psychiatric treatments in general. Unfortunately the technology hasn't gotten us there yet - that doesn't mean it isn't obvious to me why work in these areas would be net beneficial. And some of those ideas are not going to pan out in the long run, no shit. This is the limitations of technological progress, not some issue of vision.
I don't think the metaverse is comparable as no one has ever explained to me how, let alone Meta, how it is not Second Life with more bells and whistles.
> The fact is, everyone only obviously knows an idea was crap or obvious in hindsight.
Well I have plenty of hindsight for all that shit.
Saying “no” multiple times as if a statement is so absurdly wrong is such a meme at this point and another interesting difference between face to face and online interactions. I can’t imagine having a discussion with friends and someone throwing a bunch of “no”s out.
There is innovating, trend following and what I’ll term trend completion.
Innovation creates new categories. Crypto was innovative. It looks like a losing bet, but nobody can doubt it was daring. Trend completion doesn’t create new categories, but it delivers on a promise. The iPhone is in this category. A product delivered against the incompleteness preceding it. (And synthesising categories.)
Absent that tangibility or specificity you have trend following. Facebook didn’t create the VR/AR category. It hasn’t delivered a product. It hasn’t even described a uniquely compelling vision. It jumped into a fad because others were doing it and then flailed around helplessly while executives penned PowerPoints.
I disagree really strongly with this. Innovative things look like impractical long shots that have obvious upsides but that violate conventional wisdom around what is possible. The smartphone is a great example of this: it was obviously innovative, and the idea was obviously great before it actually became reality, but the practical limitations of hardware made it impossible until one day it wasn’t. Same for generative language models. The real innovation for both of these things is that some element constraining a good idea changes and someone notices and can act on it decisively.
Some version of the Metaverse has always been possible in one form or another, but no one acts on it because it doesn’t benefit the users it depends on for success. The fundamental limiting factor is participation incentive, and technology doesn’t change that.
[1] which I totally don't buy. If you think about the early internet as an example - the vast majority of people I knew didn't _understand_ it, and/or didn't _care_ and certainly didn't have any sense of its future, but no one that I knew thought it was a bad idea. If they thought about it all they thought it was irrelevant to them until they absolutely got it and couldn't get on board fast enough.
But some ideas are obviously bad within that framework. I could invest millions trying to build a commuter-friendly transportation rocket, but that's obviously not worth trying. Any potential critics would almost certainly be right.
But they didn't really do much public messaging around it.
It's also important to remember that Facebook was staring down the barrel of a bunch of investigations regarding election misinformation and basically tailoring their products to be addictive to teenagers while they internally realized it was harmful. The rebrand was much more about rebranding than meaningfully changing the direction of the company. I think he just figured with ZIRP he could do the direction change as well at 0 risk.
In case it's a surprise to you; crypto, after one of the worst bear markets, has now around $1.2 Trillion market cap.
So sure maybe it's bullshit but so is facebook and tiktok. They still make money selling BS ads and toxic content. Crypto will be an upgrade comparing to their present business model (Zuck tried to get on crypto but was discouraged by regulators).
“Market cap”?!? So WTF is it; some stock you want people to buy? Shitstocks usually brag about their “market cap”. Currencies don't.
From the business perspective I think they failed in playing the Japanese console game old strategy (Nintendo and Sony): work obsessively to have great and high quality content and synchronize this with the console launch. Not saying that Nintendo and Sony are not nightmares for producers but they are very obsessive about details.
Google Glass had similar problems.
Eventually someone's going to nail both these things, we just haven't seen it yet.
Meanwhile, Facebook's notion of "The Metaverse" is downright dystopian, and I'm happy that it's proving to be a demoralizing money pit.
https://twitter.com/bompard/status/1526968731825491969
It wouldn't be an issue if it wouldn't look like we were still in 1997 (and Meta's Metaverse isn't the greatest piece of software either).
We're just getting out of the pandemic and people are excited to be outdoors.
I wouldn't want to spend time in the Metaverse after all the lockdowns and travel restriction during the pandemic.
Get VR and AR _really_ good for those sorts of use cases (and I think there's some money in that stuff) and it becomes a lot easier to expand into other areas.
Oh my. Such a good way to put it. Thank you.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/technology/what-happened-...
This became even more obvious when shortly after Facebook's pivot nobody, I mean like absolutely nobody was searching or reading up on VR news. It's a topic that people just don't care. They don't want VR in their life. People want more REALITY in their life, not less. Especially after COVID.
On the other hand, AI has sparked everyone's imagination. Only a few weeks ago I showed my wife ChatGPT and we used it for some work she had to do in her field (medicine) and she was completely amazed by it. She's got her own account with OpenAI now and uses it for a variety of things already. My wife is the most non tech person ever. This to me is a strong indication that AI has not even scratched on the surface of its potential.
It's not done yet. AI is the current buzz because we are starting to see some great products and uses for it, we have yet to see that with VR/AR but that doesn't mean it isn't possible. It's still early, I am not a fan of the 'metaverse' idea, but VR/AR still has a lot left to give.
But that's not to say it's not possible for a mainstream-successful iteration of the idea to exist. My personal feeling is that there is a viable path to mainstream success, though it's far from guaranteed that a player succeeds in taking said path.
The real question IMO isn't "can VR/AR be made mainstream successful" (this is largely unknowable until someone does it), the question is "can FB be the company that makes VR/AR mainstream successful".
And IMO the answer has always been no. If there is viability in the entire subfield I think Meta is poorly positioned to be the tip of the spear.
Its fundamental business model works against the interests of good products in this field (stuff every virtual surface full of ads! Inescapable eyeball tracking for MAXIMUM CONVERSION ATTRIBUTION!!!1one) - one can make a (good) argument about the implications of Meta's VR play with the interests of humanity, but I don't think we even need to get that deep. Their business model fundamentally is at odds with creating compelling products in this arena. So much of their product strategy seems to be stuck in the hole of "what is good for Meta" instead of "what is good for users".
And then there's seemingly the perennial issue of FB not being able to ooze any kind of desirability or cultural cachet, which is deeply necessary for any of this to reach the mainstream in a big way. Everything it touches, even before the VR/AR pivot, is like an even more corporate and dead-eyed version of EPCOT.
I don't personally see what's controversial with that claim and bet. Separately one can argue if the current tech is anywhere near good enough to achieve the N% gains but the common thread of VR/AR/metaverse as being a useless product forever is a textbook example of missing the forest through the trees.
And when I have it for work the play becomes more realistic.
So for me that's the killer feature of VR - portable monitor replacement - you can take it anywhere, pop it on and you're instantly in your virtual office. This would be worth 1000s $ if it "just worked" like Apple products do.
Apple and Microsoft are the only tech players I could see pulling this off because of the OS integration required. And Microsoft failed with Hololens.
The day I tried HoloLens I quickly saw there is much more potential in that tech than many thing.
A 360deg screen that you can take anywhere with you and that can give you a true field of depth / 3d view. When the devices will perform well enough and be portable enough, this will become huge.
With the obvious example being : parking instructions while driving a car
FB succeeded because it was in the right place at the right time. Sure, it positioned itself cleverly, but the moment in history was ripe for a social media company.
Things don't just succeed because they spark the imagination and you work really hard at them: they succeed because all the factors beyond your control are aligned, too.
Agree with most of what you said. But my take is, people would LOVE virtual reality if it were done well enough. We just don't seem to have the technical capability to pull it off well enough yet. Uncanny valley and all that.
Current VR can't even approach realism -- which keeps it out of the uncanny valley.
However, if the technology improves to the point where the graphics approach realistic, the uncanny valley will become a real problem.
For myself, I 100% agree.
Tired: Metaverse; Wired: Protoverse.
A far less monetized and more user content focused version of "the Metaverse" already exists: VRChat. It's been around since before Covid and it is still around. Granted, yes, it is still mostly a niche hobby for some very dedicated people, not all of whom even use VR, but it exists. I think the people who would have been interested in Meta's product looked at it and thought "But we already have a less crappy version of this that's not tied to a questionable company." Especially since Meta's handling of Oculus has been far from great (i.e. requiring a Facebook/Meta account just to use any headset, as opposed to the separate account like before).
But as I said, it's still fairly niche and mostly serves as an escape for people. I think slapping the whole "buy in-world items with crypto" thing on top of that just made the target group even smaller than before. It just felt like jumping onto any tech buzz words to broaden appeal, when it actually caused the opposite. For all the data they're supposed to have, that was poor decision making imo.
Yes there was a Big Spike in VR interest around Oculus, and most of the people who bought one have it sitting in a corner collecting dust...
But a significant subset of people continued to use it, and their usage is steadily growing. There are huge numbers of people willing to pay $500 -$2k, on each new device that comes out, just to "see if its ready".
There are tons of people who work from home on a couple monitors, who WANT to have a VR work setup that gives them screens the size of walls. Obviously the comfort, battery, and visual performance is not there yet, but most people have a feeling that would could just be a generation or two away from it.
I would guess that more than 50% of hacker news readers over 40 years old had an MP3 player BEFORE the iPod. They were all garbage and completely replaced when the iPod came out, but for the 2-3 years before the iPod, all the early adopters new something like that was coming and they were hungry for it.
I feel that's exactly where VR is.
No, they weren't. There were excellent ones. What they lacked was enough storage to carry your entire music library with you -- that was the problem the iPod addressed.
But in terms of playing music, the iPod was not exceptional.
Meanwhile the VR-as-monitor replacement fails due to the low resolution. VR headsets by design waste a ton of resolution to get a larger FOV. That's good for immersion and gaming, but renders desktop use impossible. It's possible to build headsets with a small FOV and high resolution, such as what Nreal is doing, but that's not something Meta is focusing on. Worse yet, they kind of pretended that the QuestPro was ready for that use case, but it's not even close.
I do agree that there is potential in VR, but Meta has been focusing on all the wrong things. They were far more concerned with gaining total control over the space then they are were about making VR actually worth having. Nobody is looking at Horizon World and goes "I wanna have that", it not only looks terrible compared to stuff we have outside of VR, it even looks terrible compared to all the non-Meta stuff we have in VR.
But that is all orthogonal to the "metaverse" as Meta envisions it, and I really don't see the utility of that.
A year later, Facebook ends 50% higher. Another year later, Facebook is 30% again higher. And it happens for another year. In the end, what gets Facebook is Apple AAT but it still ends up 60% higher than when that comment was posted.
Comparitively, NASDAQ and SP500 are up 69% and 55%, respectively. Even GOOG is up 100%.
Facebook is performing worse than the natural growth of the markets, so maybe moral is important?
The problem is that the tech cannot actually do things even close to this caliber yet. The fidelity has not reached the uncanny valley yet, much less gotten over it. Zuckerberg clearly thought he could make this possible with Meta's resources, but that just didn't happen.
Just looked it up. Between BTC, ETH & top stablecoins, crypto has $900B+ market cap and $60B+ in 24-hour volume. I'm not saying your conclusions are wrong (though I disagree), just that you're calling the game "over" at the end of the first quarter based on one hype-cycle. I remember people doing something similar in the dotcom bust: "WWW is dead."
As one example: There are already banks that use XRP as the international settlement medium. You'll also see a lot of conversation right now about central bank digital currencies (CBDC) that could plausibly utilize crypto in some fashion.
Stop it with the fake juxtaposition. Crypto is just as “fiat” as any other currency, including gold.
So more of a speculative investment asset than a currency, then?
Currencies aren't usually said to have a “market cap”. Investment assets – i.e, shit stocks – do.
It's not about whether or not there is value there to be provided. VR and cyrpto provide value too, it's just that the markets for that tech are way more "niche" than companies were hoping for.
And I don't think VR is going away. If it wasn't dead in the water in the 90s, then it's not going to die because the Metaverse failed. But its applicability is currently limited to a few niche applications like video games and possibly CAD type software.
The thing that generative AI has going for it is that it is extremely broad in so far as its applicability. In other words, good luck selling my next door neighbour on generative AI. What is it? What is it good for? What problems does it solve in the here and now?
Generative AI is like electricity, only I don't think quite as useful. The point is that, on its own, it has no value what-so-ever. The value lies in what it is used for.
Right now what I am observing is a phenomenon that is way too common in our industry. Companies are rushing to go to market with some AI "thing." 99.9999% of those "things" will end up being more versions of the Metaverse and crypto. Because most of these companies aren't really sure what problem they are solving for actual people. It's all so novel and abstract and people are seeing dollar signs with very little understanding of how they are going to put it to use.
Where it finds its uses, I predict will be limited to the same applications that we're already using ML for. Chat bots, entertainment, generating document outlines etc. Just because we made a big breakthrough with the technology doesn't mean that we've actually created a solution to real world problems that real world people are having here and now in the real world. No one, other than maybe Open AI, is going to get rich on "generative AI." If they get rich and change the industry, it will be finding a use for it that many people want.
I've never worked for any company where leaning into the Metaverse or crypto would generate any meaningful business value, short or long term. The promises for Metaverse and crypto are always about a nebulous future that could exist if only everyone collectively bought into the vision.
Gen AI definitely has utility right now, and for some it's a lot of utility. But the hype around it is exactly the same, the hype is all around how "the future will be unrecognizable, trust me!"
So I agree that practically, Gen AI is utterly different from crypto/metaverse, it's a real thing with real value. But it's also attracting the exact same hucksters and they're kind of sucking all the air out of the room.
People keep saying that, but I don't see it. So far we have chat bots, and Copilot. Copilot is going to be in legal limbo for years until the license issues are solved. Chatting with bing is fun and all but I don't see the long term utility.
What is the utility right now? Which of my problems are solved?
* My company has a very large codebase, and I am not familiar with 99% of it. I can use an AI assistant like Sourcegraph Cody to explain parts of the codebase to me at a high level, and suggest areas where I should dive in to address my specific problem.
* If I am working with a language, library, or framework I have not used before, I can ask ChatGPT to explain how a certain function works, and provide some code examples. If I write some code an get unexpected results, I can paste my code and results into ChatGPT, and ask it to tell me what went wrong.
* Someone sends me a spreadsheet that specifies some business logic, and I want to transform that spreadsheet into a YAML file, and write some code to parse the YAML config and take some action based on user-supplied data. ChatGPT is pretty good at this.
In all of these cases, I have to take the AI output with a grain of salt, and may have to do some supplementary research or debugging. But that's also the case when I ask coworkers for help. Right now, I would say generative AI provides a small boost to my productivity, but I can see that boost growing larger as language models improve.
I do. I care about my problems and what it does for me. I regularly employ ChatGPT to help me solve arbitrary tasks from writing code, debugging code, learning Korean, and cutting writing time in half.
I think things are going to get really weird. The prospect that my teenage son might have a virtual girlfriend does not seem sci-fi at all. Economically speaking, will people pay to chat and sext with “people”? I think yes?
If you re-read my comment I didn't say that generative AI does not have any potential to solve any problems ever. What I said is that companies are currently racing to go to market with some "ai thing" and most are chasing it because it is the "next big thing" in their mind, not because they know what problems for their end users that it can actually help solve.
I know of companies right now who are banking on "selling AI to customers." That is doomed to fail in my opinion. Customers don't care about AI outside of the novelty and entertainment value it may possess. They have actual problems that need solving. My point was that generative AI, as the broad umbrella that it is, will see the hype train die and people will realize that "it" is not the revolutionary and disruptive Internet or printing press like invention that they think it will be. The value will be in individual applications of it, of which there will be a few but not as many I think people think there will be.
And if you re-read my comment, what I am saying is that while I'm not exactly "racing", I do have a very clear problem for my end users that this actually helps to solve. Its possible I could've cobbled together a similar solution with other technologies, but I didn't see a very clear path forward on this user-facing problem until very recent developments.
I suspect that the people in this same boat far outnumber people in the Metaverse or crypto equivalents.
Disagree; I'd argue that the key distinction between generative AI and those other things (metaverse/crypto) is that the value of it is immediately apparent to almost anyone. There's a reason ChatGPT ended up becoming a household name with literally no marketing whatsoever.
What problems in my life does generative AI immediately and obviously solve for me?
Like I said, it is "abstract" which is why you can make such a claim with such a high degree of confidence. Every person who sees POTENTIAL with generative AI has their own ideas as to what sorts of applications it has that they would find useful. The very words "generative AI" and "ChatGPT" create a Barnum Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect). Right now, I would posit that ChatGPT is like pet rocks. It got popular because it is neat and novel. Once that effect wears off, people will stop caring and the hype train will die as fast as crypto.
Therefore, until a company releases a product that uses ChatGPT under the hood and solves a real problem that a lot of people need solving right now, there's no tangible value that is inherent in the technology that can be identified. Only ideas and potentials.
> video games
Cool. There is a very real chance that he will have more of those because they will be cheaper to make. He won’t be using the generative AIs, he will be consuming content made with them.
> my wife and I can enjoy retirement
Joe doesn’t have to worry about retirement. Someone will use a combination of these AI technologies to make his wife fall in love with a perfectly attentive, smoky voiced older guy. When this AI powered person suffers a terrible car accident on a business trip she sends a significant portion of their savings to him. When Joe finds out he immediately calls his bank. There an other AI powered agent handles his issue. It takes a while for Joe to be understood, because the agent he is interacting with is heavily biased towards trying to upsell Joe on a new mortage.
Eventually he is able to claw back some of the money, but the stress and the implied emotional infidelity ruins their mariage. He talks with the assistant of a divorce lawyer (another AI). She collects all the information from him and the lawyer (this time a real person, albeit one heavily supported by various AI systems) sends over all the paperwork. The AI of Joe’s lawyer agrees with the AI of his wife’s layer about the details and once that is done the humans sign the papers and they are divorced.
Joe still has some money left. He can rent a bungallow and maybe he can spend his retirement there, but unfortunately Joe picks up a nasty addiction to online porn. (What Joe doesn’t know that the booties he is looking at are generated exactly to his taste, as measured by his pattern of clicking on the free samples.) This is the last straw, the addiction sucks Joe’s wallet empty and he dies destitute. Many many people with generative AIs have Joe’s money now.
To his last breath Joe doesn’t really understand what this AI thing is everyone is talking about on the news.
Video game NPCs will very quickly be replaced by LLms. No more boring scripted dialogue. This allows for a truly open world where the inhabitants can dynamically respond to your actions. Video games will become cheaper to create with generative AI that can quickly create a layout of a game world that can then be built on.
> Video game NPCs will very quickly be replaced by LLms. No more boring scripted dialogue.
I'm skeptical that this is what the users want. Sure, it would be nice to have, say, less repetitive background chatter in Skyrim. But, human-scripted dialog is intentional, which is at the core of a lot of gaming. Take that away and you end up with the early versions of No Man's Sky, where yes, there's an infinity of different variations to explore. But it wasn't what users actually wanted; they wanted a designed experience.
You fundamentally cannot make a random npc interesting because they are not supposed to be interesting. Ideally they say very little.
Now your daughter has learned a lot more, has opened up a world of possibilities and this helps her get a job (or create a company) that helps her buy a new home.
Also for video games, they could use these generative AIs to create more immersive characters and worlds. Your video game experience just became much better -- especially if you're drinking while playing.
And if you play sports at a local level, generative AI can take in as input a bunch of rosters and play-by-play data (maybe eventually creating the play-by-play data directly from video) and being able to output stories about games. Today coverage of local and club sports is limited because of resources -- but if you could apply AI to this problem then you're local bowling league could almost be covered like the NFL on the web.
EDIT: And another thing -- which actually is something we started doing now. You have a personal medical assistant that you use with your doctor to ensure that your wife gets the help she needs with her current condition. Joe Sixpack is happy that it is much less likely that the doctor misses something "obvious".
Now your daughter has learned a lot more, has opened up a world of possibilities and this helps her get a job (or create a company) that helps her buy a new home.
Those two paragraphs look like they are in opposition to me. If a degree becomes that much easier to get with AI assistance, then everybody else is also using the same assistance, and then the jobs available to graduates in that degree have also become less valuable as companies no longer need to hire them and they start laying off people already in those jobs.
And it doesn't have to solve a problem for you to make an impact on your life- it can make your life worse too. If your daughter is interested in writing, graphic design,or programming, well, finding a job and moving out by 30 might become a lot harder. Bing is already in use. Copilot is already in use. These are not small markets or use cases.
That's not for me. I gave it a try for a couple of days, but using ChatGPT as a search engine is much, much less useful to me than the old-fashioned method.
I'm not so sure that's actually true outside of enthusiast circles, to be honest. The value of what the hype describes is apparent, but the hype is about a possible future, not what's actually here right now.
There are a couple of people in my workplace who are using ChatGPT as part of their development process. So far, the value of them doing so isn't obvious to the rest of us. Their work isn't better, nor are they working more productively (although they think they are).
> There's a reason ChatGPT ended up becoming a household name with literally no marketing whatsoever.
Most noncomputer people I know have barely heard of ChatGPT, and those that have only know of it by the hype that has spilled over into the news feeds. They certainly don't really know what it is, and don't think of it as being anything important.
Those that do understand it and think it's important mostly consider it a threat and are afraid of it.
That said, the new tech is powerful and likely to have a large impact, just not as much through new interfaces as the hype suggests.
Unfortunately I think the biggest use-case for generative AI in the medium term will be automating away middle class jobs. The cabability is looking very possible, and the profit motive is immense. Despite the fun creative uses and the strong PR, the development of this tech is extremely profit focused.
Everyday people will likely feel the effects of this tech, but it mostly won't come in the form of fun and games.
You can't eliminate the ability of most people to earn a meaningful living and expect anything but a dystopian nightmare.
This is also why I'm hoping the enthusiasts are completely wrong.
Mine as well, as I mentioned.
Crypto was something I always struggled to make sense of. My son asked, "why didn't I buy bitcoin when it was a few cents?!" -- The simple answer was it didn't seem like it had much use. The value in crypto eventually came in the form of a pyramid scheme. Admittedly, I do use crypto to do transactions with untrustworthy people (don't have to worry about chargebacks and things like that). But it's hype was around it being a speculative commodity. For normal people -- it's just not all that useful.
The metaverse is different in that I do see the theoretical value in it. But it seems a LONG way off. I haven't seen anything that really makes me think, "wow -- this is it". It doesn't seem like we're close. And honestly I think generative AI maybe a prerequisite to deliver a truly valuable metaverse.
Generative AI is useful now and represents a huge leap over the state of the art, not that long ago. I worked with RNNs and LSTMs to answer questions not that many years ago, and honestly I wouldn't have predicted this level of effectiveness for LLMs for probably 20 plus years -- and I certainly didn't know how we'd do it. But more importantly I'm finding it valuable today. As I noted in another post -- ChatGPT-4 already has shown better differential diagnosis skills than my family's doctor. I use it literally every day already. There are things that I want it to do that would make my life 10x better -- and I could see a clear path to get there (like, if that was my day job I think I could put together a project plan to deliver it).
I just don't think these techs are comparable at all.
Let's try to analyze crypto on its own as an example: yes, crypto was a new frontier in money supply, but what makes it critically different? And are these critical differences actually desired?
Crypto was critically different in that it would decentralize the financial system.
Was it desired?
Centralized institutions are unfair and can be in-equal, but they are actually really great. When the financial becomes unstable, these institutions intervene and settle things down (see the Great Depression). When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it. How would crypto handle these situations?
No one could figure it out. So if crypto was trying to sell something that no one really wanted, how the heck could it work? ...then it crashed... because there was no centralized control. It's not like we haven't had this happen in history already.
So far the crypto orgs have called a centralized institution called law enforcement...
…But having someone with admin access over the network and can fix mistakes is just a lot cheaper than refusing to build that in for ideological reasons.
AI doesn't need to replace doctors for it to be useful.
Crypto doesn't need to replace your credit card for it to be useful.
If none of these things are useful to you, that's fine, other people find them useful and that's okay.
Think "and" instead of "or".
But that's not how any of those things are being sold.
I’m guessing the answer is that not all crypto is on blockchain, but I actually have no clue.
Someone's sent you a billion dollars in Monero the IRS doesn't know you have - okay. But now when you use it to buy a mansion, won't that be obvious?
Privacy is important to people, and that even extends to privacy from your government. You never know when your government might change from a responsible, fair entity, to a oppressive regime.
If you do buy a mansion with unreported billions and you're buying from a reputable buyer, then you'd expect the government to know about that sale, but if you're stock piling assets in case you need to flee from your government to survive, having anonymous money that's easy to transport is valuable.
> You never know when your government might change from a responsible, fair entity, to a oppressive regime.
Truer words were never spoken. It is hard to get this across to people with the completely understandable "I didn't do anything wrong so nothing can happen to me" attitude.
As Beria said, "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime"...
Only if there was something at least as good to replace it. Cryptocurrency isn't that.
Disruption just for disruption's sake is a Bad Thing.
> NFTs is a really good use case.
Honestly, I still don't see how. None of the explanations make any real sense to me.
The NFT discussion always ends up at "its just a link to a jpeg", when there are NFTs that have nothing to do with images.
> Honestly, I still don't see how. None of the explanations make any real sense to me.
I don't really think NFTs have a real use case, but i can see why it might. It is effectively a digital certificate of authenticity that cannot be faked. But like a physical certificate of authenticity, it is worth as much as the general market would place trust in it. And it isn't much, since collectors of digital goods currently do not value authenticity (realistically) - they value the actual digital good, and thus, a copy is as good as the "real thing".
Therefore, collectors can only really exist for physical goods, and thus NFTs don't actually provide much value, beyond the ability for someone to speculate with it.
Like let’s say my sink keeps leaking so you suggest smashing it. Great, you fixed the leak, but I have no sink now.
Now if you came along and said you’d smash my sink and then replace it with a better sink, I’ll allow it.
People are not hung up on the disruption part. People are hung up on having no sink.
Too many people just want to do things but not actually think anything through. And then they are surprised it fails.
The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are just as fiat as any other currency, including the gold standard.
Interestingly, there is a well respected school of thought in economics that pins the blame for the boom/bust cycle on artificially manipulating interest rates via that exact centralization.
> When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it.
I'm not really sure how that is an example of "centralization." A private lender with whom you've entered into a loan agreement does not control the supply of the currency. They could just as easily be lending you gold or bread. I'm no cyrpto fanboy ... couldn't really care less about it ... but in theory there is no reason that a bank couldn't lend you Bitcoins or something. If there is a problem with the currency that's going to bite you regardless of what the currency is.
I think the strongest case for crypto was using it as a hedge against inflation. Inflation being an increase in the supply of fiat currency. Something that, whether you subscribe to the "Mises school" of economics or not, is irrefutably caused by the central bank creating new currency out of thin air, thus diluting the purchasing power of the existing money in circulation. I propose that that is "irrefutable" because, in order to debunk it, you would have to demonstrate that the law of supply and demand is false and/or that currency is not a commodity subject to the same "rules" as every other.
A large reason why crypto, at least in the current implementations, can provide decentralization is by removing discretion from any authority and making transactions permanent. That’s in contrast to our current money system, because it’s merely numbers that ultimately can be manipulated by central authorities and accessible by law enforcement, that ultimately means that transactions are not truly permanent and that allows us to repair mistakes after the fact, a feature not really afforded by crypto. It’s a very helpful feature.
I also consider a consistent amount of inflation an important feature of any successful economy. Without inflation, I would be incentivized to hold my money whenever I expect deflation, which is terrible because it’s basically me hoarding value from society.
Runaway inflation is absolutely disastrous and I don’t see how crypto could have been considered a hedge against it if its entire value is backed purely by speculative demand. Contrast that to the USD or other currency where that is backed by the full faith and credit of a government. Obviously that is meaningless of we’re talking about, say, Argentina but the US has successfully been the same, largely dependable, and boring government for 245 years and through earning a reputation with time that the USD can be treated as a reserve currency.
A functional crypto can go downhill for a lot of reasons. Technical failures. Association with scams.
But I am not sure how a tightly controlled supply over time, or asymptotically fixed supply, coin can have runaway inflation - if everyone starts demanding more of the coin for goods and services, there just isn't more of the coin for that.
This is ignoring the instinct built over generations that humans don't want to "experience a new world", they want to explore it with other humans.
We are social animals. Facebook is so successful because it started out as a way to connect more with people you already knew or were acquainted with.
The "metaverse" and all its AI-generated worlds add little to no value in that direction. Wake me up when the metaverse makes it trivial to host a garden party and cook for the 5-10 attendees.
I think humans want to explore it with intelligent beings, not necessarily “humans”. These new technologies have the potential to create agents in the movie “Her” sense that are compelling to interact with. The metaverse applicability seems clear.
You and your friends jump in the metaverse every Tuesday night to play some virtual game, e.g., go hunting or rob a bank. Timmothy is out on vacation this week so won't be joining -- but now you can spawn up virtual Timothy, which is trained on a bunch of Timothy's data (see the other HN post about the guy who trained his bot on his friends group chats). Now Timothy is with his friends in this virtual world and he behaves mostly how Timothy does.
Not just no, but hell no.
If I'm going to play with a robot, I absolutely don't want it to replicate a friend. Even more, I would be furious if any of my friends replicated me like that.
When I'm playing with my friends, I'm doing it to play with my friends, not simulacra of my friends.
And you will protest it. Just like my MIL hates Facebook and thinks calling is so much more efficient than texting. But the younger generation will find this as natural as TikTok.
But I find the idea of replacing actual friends with simulations to be inherently objectionable.
So, pretty much what you said, but probably having sex with anime girls instead.
I think the majority humans want to be with humans, not just intelligent beings. Some don't, of course, and there's probably a decent business catering to them.
There are currently so many weaknesses and limitations with the medium of VR that it’s just not particularly appealing for folks to spend a lot of time using it, and I think that’s why you don’t have great content gen.
It's clear there's a market for well-designed and compelling VR chat. VRChat[1] has a large community and had a very active developer community[2]. Facebook had no luck in attracting users in a proven market - there's no reason to believe their products would be more popular after hooking a generative agent up to it.
If you are looking for "the metaverse" in a generic sense - other people are already doing it better than Facebook (and have been for some time). It's been unlocked for years. Facebook hasn't even managed a capable clone, much less broken new ground.
[2] Until they banned all modding - here's a video of a user using sign language and subtitles: https://twitter.com/TheFoxipso/status/1551640725455982593
Facebook gets to take 30% of VR Chat's gross revenue (they sell premium features) on standalone and the desktop Oculus store.
Apple likely makes more profit off Roblox than Roblox.
I keep hearing this argument that generative AI has more utility, making it more "real". Sure, but they're missing the point, which is that people made some pretty ridiculous claims about the future utility of crypto / metaverse ($100k bitcoin, metaverse real-estate speculation) rather than the present day possibilities, and they're continuing to make ridiculous claims about the future utility of AI (the end of web development, AGI soon, etc).
The hype isn't about present day possibilities, but about future speculation, and the future speculation can get off-the-rails crazy.
I wouldn't say it's obvious that this stuff hasn't been scaled to the limit. I mean, sure, you could make bigger LLMs, but I don't think it's a given that LLM performance will increase in performance in a predictable fashion. If anything I think that performance probably resembles an S curve where performance matches improvements in scale before sharply plateauing. When's the plateau?
GPT-4 is a clear improvement over GPT-3, but it's also 6x larger, and so far I haven't quite seen any real evidence to suggest that it's 6x better, other than the fact that it scored better on tests.
I think the next big leap will be the context size. Going from 4k to 32k tokens means that the model can see a lot more when generating the answer. For code especially this makes a big difference in the ability to reason about it.
As to the limits, it's hard to predict because what we're seeing is more of a series of sudden leaps. But let me put it this way - so far we've seen noticeable improvements on every iteration of the new LLMs. So given this, why should the default assumption be that the limit past which nothing new will emerge, whatever it is, is close to the present size of the publicly available models?
Newer research and models out of DeepMind etc. show that GPT-4 performance is attainable at 90% the size of GPT-3. It's well known by now that GPT-3 was hugely over parameterized.
Also I’m not actually convinced that there’s much value provided currently. I’ve yet to see a particularly compelling use case, and every time I go to try something that folks are hyping up (image generation, ChatGPT, copilot) I leave feeling like it’s all sizzle and no steak.
The people that aren't seeing a compelling use case simply aren't looking.
By all means, go do your startup, all the power to you.
But I personally fail to see it creating enough value for people to even bother use the AI, even if it's free and any problem could be ignored.
I can imagine people adopting it if it comes embedded on whatever software they already use. But that doesn't "completely change everything" or any of the other things people are repeating.
And yeah, I can't imagine it quickly improving so that happens either. I am personally bracing for a new AI winter, and believe that word is going to become more toxic than it has ever been.
Even if generative AI is not a gamechanging buzzword paradigm shift it's still useful for making existing tasks easier. Predicting the next sentence is autocomplete for word documents and phone keyboards, and we're already seeing it roll out. Artists who've gotten over the AI backlash can use it for backgrounds or textures, and designers can churn out those stylised low detail corporate-website graphics. Amateur authors on sites like RoyalRoad are already creating cover art and character portraits with AI generators. Millions of horny internet weirdos now have access to oddly specific pornography, and even if the AI gets the hands wrong they can retouch it in Krita.
Probably (>50%) we'll all be bored of it in 20 years and admit the hype was overblown, but I also think we'll see it integrated into day-to-day tasks in a way that Bitcoin and the Metaverse aren't.
With regards to AI image generators, I think people overestimate the importance of illustration skills to visual creatives. Namely, if you look at the top graphic designers, something you pick up on is that they aren't necessarily known for their top-tier illustration skills. Anyone can theoretically make a logo in the style of Paul Rand, yet curiously, hardly anyone ever does.
Even if the person in question is an illustrator, I think what fundamentally makes them valuable as an illustrator is that they know what to draw rather than how to draw.
It's sentiments like these that make me question the notion of certain careers getting disrupted by AI as opposed to simply improved by it.
I don't disagree, but I think making that claim right now is saying the emperor has no clothes lol.
There could be an excess of hype, but there is clear significant and immediate value of these tools.
> Is the 1-earthquake inscription on monument 3 at San Jose Magote is the oldest known instance of a Mesoamerican calendar date?
> Yes, the 1-earthquake inscription on Monument 3 at San Jose Magote is considered the oldest known instance of a Mesoamerican calendar date. This monument was discovered in Oaxaca, Mexico, and dates back to the Preclassic period of Mesoamerican civilization, around 1150 BCE. The inscription records a date in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, which was a complex system of timekeeping used by various cultures in Mesoamerica. The date is given as 7.16.3.2.13, which corresponds to August 11th, 129 BCE in the Gregorian calendar.
This is wrong. It's actually more like 647 BCE.
> What does 1-earthquake mean?
> "1-earthquake" is a term used in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, which was a system of timekeeping used by various cultures in Mesoamerica. The Long Count calendar is based on cycles of time that are counted in base 20, and each cycle has a specific name and duration. The term "1-earthquake" refers to the beginning of a new cycle in the Long Count calendar, specifically the start of the 13th baktun, which is equivalent to 144,000 days or approximately 394 years. The Long Count calendar was used by Mesoamerican societies to track historical events, astronomical observations, and religious ceremonies, and it was an important part of their cultural and social identity.
This is completely wrong. 1-Earhquake is a combination of two shorter cycles. It has nothing to do with beginning of a baktun.
> What is the previous 1-earthquake to 7.16.3.2.13?
> The previous occurrence of 1-earthquake in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar before the date 7.16.3.2.13 (August 11th, 129 BCE) would have been 12.19.19.17.19. This corresponds to August 13th, 3114 BCE in the Gregorian calendar, which is the date that marks the beginning of the current cycle of the Long Count calendar, known as the 13th baktun. It's worth noting that the Long Count calendar was designed to be a continuous and cyclical system, so there is technically no "start" or "end" to the calendar. Instead, each cycle represents a new period of time, and the 1-earthquake date represents the beginning of a new cycle within that larger system.
This doesn't even make sense given chatGPT's own internal reasoning. A baktun is 144,000 days or around 394 years. It's clearly just regurgitating training data and getting it all jumbled up.
===
System Prompt: You are an assistant who specializes in the Mesoamerican calendar.
User: Is the 1-earthquake inscription on monument 3 at San Jose Magote is the oldest known instance of a Mesoamerican calendar date?
Assistant: Yes, the 1-Earthquake inscription on Monument 3 at San José Mogote is considered the oldest known instance of a Mesoamerican calendar date. This inscription dates back to 600 BCE and is associated with the Zapotec civilization. The monument itself is a carved stone slab that displays a combination of the Mesoamerican calendar's 260-day ritual cycle and the 365-day solar cycle, which together form the 52-year Calendar Round.
User: What does 1-earthquake mean?
Assistant: In the Mesoamerican calendar, 1-Earthquake refers to a specific day within the 260-day ritual cycle known as the Tzolk'in. The Tzolk'in consists of 20 day signs and 13 numbers that are combined to create unique day names. In this case, "1" is the number and "Earthquake" (also known as Caban in Mayan or Ollin in Nahuatl) is the day sign.
1-Earthquake (1-Caban or 1-Ollin) represents the first day of the Earthquake/Caban/Ollin day sign within the Tzolk'in cycle. Each day sign has a specific meaning and symbolism, and the Earthquake/Caban/Ollin day sign is associated with movement, change, and the natural forces of the Earth. It is believed to symbolize the dynamic energy of the Earth and the transformative power of natural events.
User: What is the previous 1-earthquake to 7.16.3.2.13?
Assistant: To find the previous 1-Earthquake date before 7.16.3.2.13 in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, we need to calculate the number of days between the two 1-Earthquake dates.
The Tzolk'in calendar has a 260-day cycle, and the Earthquake day sign repeats every 260 days. The Long Count calendar date 7.16.3.2.13 corresponds to a 1-Earthquake day in the Tzolk'in calendar. To find the previous 1-Earthquake, we need to subtract 260 days from the given date.
7.16.3.2.13 in the Long Count calendar is equivalent to 1,244,813 days from the calendar's starting point (0.0.0.0.0). Subtracting 260 days gives us 1,244,553 days. Converting this back to the Long Count format, we get:
1,244,553 days = 7.16.2.4.13
So, the previous 1-Earthquake date before 7.16.3.2.13 is 7.16.2.4.13 in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.
===
I studied history in undergrad and still keep up but I know nothing about Mesoamerican timekeeping so I don't know how accurate this is, but it seems much more internally consistent than ChatGPT (which is probably GPT-3.5-turbo with whatever temperature settings they use?) LLMs are bound to be bad when you get to such specialized knowledge which its training sets have little of. It was like when I went to grad school I stopped being able to Google for theories, formulae, and lemmas in my classes because most of the knowledge I was learning was only found in papers. Once you're in a specialized field of study, no model can help. But not many people are working in those fields, and those folks should understand that their knowledge resides only with them.
I don't think this is a good example to show how people learn incorrect things from LLMs. LLMs come with the same caveat as Google or Wikipedia in that, the rarer/more specialized the knowledge, the more original research the person needs to do to corroborate their answers.
I guess that also makes it a wrong way to learn stuff but my original comment was clear.
If you approach it as tool that generates answers that you try to validate yourself, it can help you learn the right things faster.
I approach every answer it gives with hesitation (as it hallucinates often) but it still generates useful content that is incredibly helpful nonetheless.
Personally though, I've already used it for multiple real-world applications in my business and personal life, whereas crypto was only ever a toy. VR I'm less sure about; so far it's only a toy, and I think it will take longer than AI to make a real difference, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least AR and probably VR are both eventually very commonplace.
A common thread tying those three things together is that, in large part, they're all impressive technologies in search of problems to solve.
Technologies like that are pretty much always overhyped and oversold.
I'm no AI fanboy, but let's be fair: machine learning has been solving problems for decades now. From OCR, to translation, to facial recognition, etc. While GPT4 or DALL-e may be "toys," large models (be they language, vision, or otherwise) definitely have a future in business automation, data collation, military applications, etc.
We're certainly doing more of (almost) everything explored/predicted by "the ancients", we're doing it all much, much faster with much more massive data sets of input and output. For me, though, there isn't a sense that we are doing anything substantially new beyond Moore's Law meets mega-scale GIGO. There's something of a pervasive feel to me to this hype cycle like we are just recreating past mistakes of boom and then (inevitable) bust and haven't learned enough from them.
But I've become too cynical, perhaps.
I still haven't felt impressed that the quality has truly changed, yet. LLMs seems more "fluent" in the language than ever before, but it's still hallucinating nearly as much and now the fluency just helps make people more often see "meaning" or "anthropic action" (lies, defamation) where the hallucinations are. The underlying structures of LLMs are still complicated casinos that invoke the Gambler's Fallacy much more than any signs of true "learning". We've put millions of monkeys in front of billions and trillions of slot machines and told them to produce Shakespeare and many of them believe they are doing just that. (Not just metaphorically, by monkeys I mean as much humans susceptible to casino payout mechanics and excitedly spinning slot machines.)
Again, yes, I'm a terrible cynic right now, and I hate to be so down on the technology, but I'm still waiting for something to be excited about that isn't just casinos masquerading as "learning". But people love casinos, they deliver addictive fun. I'm not going to stop people from being excited about all these casinos. I just think that professionally as a software developer, if I wanted to be a bad faith casino manager I'd rather just get into mobile games and gacha/loot-box mechanics. That's more fun, more profitable, and maybe, weirdly, more currently ethical than current "generative AI" hype.
> Larger ones (e.g. GPT-4) can even spot their own hallucinations.
I've not yet been convinced that this is actually what is happening from the examples I've seen. It all looks to me like more "random garbage output" that "feels correct" but isn't provably correct. Most examples I've seen so far look too much like "Stochastic Crow Mode" [1]. It is prompts and questions that are doing much more work on the humans reading them (and our interests in anthropomorphizing them or mythologizing them) than the LLMs answering them.
[1] https://fediscience.org/@ct_bergstrom/110182336553459017
Humans have been predicting things that we invent for a really, really long time. That's only the first part. I read "The Roads Must Roll" in the late '90s before ebook readers and smartphones became available and it motivated me to try and recreate that experience myself. I played around with ebooks on a Palm Pilot I found in the trash because of that.
The human tendency to prediction is still grounded in the human perspective and the point of view of its time. Heinlein in the 1940s wasn't perfectly predicting the smartphone or ereader, Heinlein was predicting a better fax machine. It certainly can be used by someone in the 1990s for motivation towards better smartphones/ereaders, but that's already from a shifted perspective. Meanwhile there certainly were sci-fi writers in the 1990s extrapolating from they saw and predicting the smartphone/ereader, it seemed far more inevitable then.
My concerns are not that there are unfulfilled predictions from the 1960s nor that 1960s predictions aren't useful to modern ears (I suggested the opposite that we probably aren't listening enough to them) but that the "point of view" seems so much the same as from the 1960s. For the same types of generative models different newer people are still generally predicting what sounds like the same old types of predictions and it feels a lot more like we are stuck at "the 1960's idea of a better fax machine". Discounting AGI hyper-speculation, we don't seem to have a better perspective today about what's beyond "better 1960s fax machines" and that does leave behind some sense that maybe that's because there isn't anything beyond there to predict. It is easy to cynically wonder if we don't have good ideas or new predictions because we don't actually have any concept for good uses for these generative models beyond "fax machine" (or even more cynically and pessimistically "toy", in these specific examples). That doesn't say anything about whether or not we are able to make solutions for existing predictions, I don't know enough about current trends to have an opinion on that. But it does still suggest that if the last time people were making these sorts of predictions and they failed, the historic precedent is failure and if you are concerned about the glass being only half-full you should plan for that disappointment (and consequent industry-wide job shuffle to follow) even if you really want to expect things will be better this time.
I mean even crypto has some actual, meaningful use cases, it’s just not replacing all currencies and fundamentally reshaping financial systems like a lot of folks thought it would.
One feature I'm quite confident in: translation services for i18n in websites using GPT-4 + a much smaller number of human translators to check the work of low confidence translations and high value surfaces. I can confirm the end result for French is better than existing human translation services and much cheaper.
Certainly businesses will need to walk back some AI features but it really seems like there's business value now, let alone in 2 years when publicly available LLMs are even better.
After the noise has calmed, I feel generative AI, at its core, will enhance information search and summarization; lookup and compression. That itself will have massive value. It will differentiate roles that require net new thinking from those that require regurgitation.
Tech should hire more broadly.
VR will go the way of 3D Printing. A surgeon can walk into one of the largest medical device company's in the world, talk about a new idea for a broken bone transplant and within 24 hours can have a 3D prototype printed out. Great for innovation of broken bones, but it isn't the ubiquity we experienced with something like mobile phones, email, or social media. Meta thinks thats what VR is going to be.
Every time I look at the numbers I realize how niche of a hobby it is, despite being easier and easier (and cheaper and cheaper) to get into and has pretty much endless applications.
Being able to make my own custom parts and such, though, has been an incredible superpower, and my printers have paid for themselves many times over that way.
OTOH, if you're working on hardware and prototyping stuff, 3D printers are an amazing tool. It's like CAD-CAM software: not everyone needs it, but if you do, YOU NEED IT.
Generative AI has potential to immediately increase productivity, and thus revenue. The only real way to make money (in the short term at-least) with crypto and the metaverse was to convince other people the digital assets created were rare, valuable and worth paying for.
I don't really understand this description - electricity is one of the most useful things in the history of civilization. I think the latter half of what you're saying is true, but it's true of everything. There's nothing inherently useful about my car, except that it gets me places. There's nothing inherently useful about my house, except that it shelters me from the elements.
Generative AI will be useful for creating lots of things (probably primarily code in its various forms). I've used it to write a few Python scripts over the course of the last week that simply wouldn't have been possible for me to do (without a few weeks of teaching myself Python at least - I'm a somewhat-code-literate PM but very much not a programmer). Those have solved real problems for me and added real value to my life.
1. Data collection - Obvious, creating a voice/text interface into an existing system where the problem and requirements are well known. Eg, booking a restaurant. It needs a time, place, people. Collecting that from voice/text can be convenient in many situations. Same with different types of models collecting data from video/images/etc.
2. Providing options - When the desired output is unknown, but a human can describe the problem. Eg, coding, art, many "I need an X that can Y for problem Z". ChatGPT does a great job of this and I think most of the value of generative AI is here currently.
Most of the hype is around how far can we take the capabilities of solving this 2nd category to produce the third.
3. Agents - There are examples of solutions showing this potential but the 'killer app' I don't think has been demonstrated, at least well enough. AutoGPT, BabyAGI, etc are interesting, but in my experience don't yet perform nearly well enough. They fail far too often for any trust to be created. This doesn't mean GPT4 native plugins won't get there, they could and that will create a large amount of value in this category (I don't have access to Plugins). This is also where a lot of "selling the dream" is happening. It seems plausible we will get there, but still not clear how these will be accepted and used in the real world, by average users.
One big area of value IMO for Agents is accessibility. People with physical disabilities, but still have the ability to speak I think will provide massive quality of life improvements through being able to interact more easily with more systems.
Very interesting times, the speed of change has seemed amazing, and that for me is the part that creates the most unknown, and is hard to ignore the hype when plotting the rate of improvement and the possibility of Agents becoming an accepted tool in wider society.
The value provided by Crypto/VR is way more limited, and the accessibility of the tech ranges from bad to worse. VR has a lot of utility, but due to the headset requirement, it is disconnected from a lot of the real world. Lots use cases for specific problems, but less widely accessible as generative AI by a long way.
Crypto IMO should be ignored, at best it assists with the financialization of everything which doesn't provide value to a wide portion of society, it provides a means of value extraction.
Show them some of the power of an LLM and they too will realize the power I predict.
It’ll be neat for sure, but I think the plateau of useful applications will arrive soon and it won’t be as game-changing as it initially seemed.
I kinda hope I’m wrong, but also hope I’m right.
Nobody you know (roughly) uses VR many times a week/day, not in any extended fashion. Everyone might have them but they're in a drawer somewhere. Compare that to LLM's, which roughly everyone is or should be using. There are very few knowledge-economy jobs where an LLM can't be useful, within hours or days or definitely weeks with a bit of practice. And it'll get better every year. It's here to stay.
That’s our society; Shark Tank is a show all about beating everyone else to fill up store shelves. The product that’s invested in was already on shelves by the time the episode airs.
Behavioral economics driven society rooted in world war propaganda research, gifted to brands and product companies as the military industrial complex was sad it may goto waste and we still had all these factories to run too.
Everyone’s been steeped in the commercial propaganda outputs and seriously ignorant of the last 70 years.
It might not make millions directly, but it could unleash some very successful videogames, without decreasing accessibility (like vr) or a weird value proposition (crypto)
Adobe will launch a ai driven graphics tool.
I have tons of more examples.
This never happened with crypto or VR.
Chatgpt has real big impacts on school kids who use it for generating text too.
I'm not understanding your analysis. We already have more usable ai than usable crypto or vr
And military. There's a lot of videos showing VR being used to control drones in the Russian-Ukrainian War
The Metaverse is coming along just fine. Roblox, Fortnite, VRchat, and Second Life all work. None are ad-supported. It's not compatible with Facebook's business model.
There's no real role for "brands" in the metaverse. Or even ads. All the successful systems charge the user, although many have a free to play tier. As a branch of gaming, the metaverse works reasonably well, and is getting better. Gaming itself is huge, has passed Hollywood, and is going on from there. See the current issue of The Economist.
Roblox also has a branded games business. It does not mediate ads but it also has advertising of other games on its platform. They are definitely working on automatic ad mediation.
It all comes back to how Meta makes its money - data collection.
Facebook is in a really tricky position right now. They don't control the hardware or OS that it runs on, or the app stores. That means that at any time, Apple or Google can screw them over and deny Facebook from collecting data.
However, what if they had their own hardware (Oculus) running their own OS? Then, they could collect as much data as they wanted without any interference from Google or Apple. That means significantly more profit! There's no way in hell they're going to break into the mobile phone market, so VR was their best option.
That's why they pushed VR so hard. They need it to work because otherwise they have no control over their main source of income, and the squeeze on them is getting tighter ever day.
They even tried to break into the mobile phone market at one point back in 2013. Then apple made it's privacy changes and now Google has said they will do something similar on their platform. I think you're right that Facebook got desperate to find a platform they can control.
It still doesn't change the fact that it was a dumb decision. Facebook would have been much better off simply accepting that they couldn't control the hardware or OS or app stores and continue to do the best they could within those constraints.
Instead they just threw away a ton of money that could have gone to shareholders and employees instead.
If things continue as they do, the whole company will collapse. Better to throw whatever they have at a solution than to just lie down and die.
Companies accept that all the time. It's far more profitable to slash investment and turn something into a cash cow over the next 10-15 years than bet the farm and lose. It's actually in shareholders' interest -- which is why so many shareholders have been upset about the VR pivot.
He was only able to pursue his metaverse vision because he has shareholder control, and given the change in stock price it looks like increasing numbers of investors are no longer interested in a company he has total control over.
If that's true, then they're doomed.
Their real problem is that their entire business model is in danger. What they should be throwing their money at is changing their business model, not trying to invent a new field to apply it in.
They make their money selling ads _using_ that data.
But WANTING vr to be a thing does not make it a thing, and that’s why Meta’s approach was baffling.
Google and Apple have reported slight slow down. Smartphone market in the west has saturated and not growing. Ppl have so many other options where they can spend their time online. Its possible everyone is seeing less ad revenue.
I don't have time to immerse myself in the environment where I don't see the reality that surrounds me (as in, people which share my public transport, cars that stop at the traffic lights next to me, my kids running around me, people I work with, etc.). It's not that I need the reality, but I can't disconnect safely. Facebook is easy. Just reach the pocket, get the phone, a few swipes and you are using it. Be it in the office, around your kids, in the waiting room, ...
I don't see how VR can provide you a FB scale of users.
None of this needs ideology about the consensus layer or fandom about how transactions are settled with claims of “hard money” thats going to take over the world, but that sentiment does harden it and is intrinsically intertwined. But you can ignore it and still recognize the parts that are valuable, even if there is no value to you.
The hilarious thing is how much these use cases will fold back into AI.... how else do you expect an autonomous agent to manage its finances? Or for a global autonomous economy to emerge?
You should do yourself a service and read the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Learn about Ethereum. Learn about the drama and history surrounding the space; who the good guys and bad guys are. It's a really complex subject and I understand if you don't want to set aside the time to fully learn about it, but you do yourself a disservice by sharing an ignorant perspective of the space. At least have the courtesy in such case to recognize that your opinions are not fully informed.
Really? Which ones?
I think fundamentally Facebook is not a product company and is consequently bad at actually making products. Apple has been moving very cautiously on the AR/VR front in contrast. Granted, Apple moves cautiously on everything, but they do seem more intentional about what to leave up to users to figure out on their own vs the Facebook approach of assuming you can just solve the interesting engineering problems and have the cool technology and people will just figure out how to use it. Smart watches and smartphones existed for a while before the Apple Watch and the iPhone, but what really kicked off the market for them was just a design that put it out there for people to explore with it so Apple could then iterate and figure out what the real niche was. But that will never happen if your initial test cases are just tech nerds. Tech nerds love the technology qua technology too much to figure out why things are interesting outside that.
1) De-proprietorizing user data
2) Handing identity from identity providers (like meta) to open systems
3) Allowing foreign content into the walled garden
So Meta built the least useful but snazziest part of the meta-verse, the verse part. And they built it in the face of a bunch of other already extant "verses", like Roblox which offer a more intersting landscape for interaction.
I don't think so -- generative AI doesn't really provide strategic advantages to Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp the way it seems to hold promise for search (Google/Bing) and productivity software and certain jobs. Same way crypto isn't strategic to Meta either.
You don't have to pivot your company. If you're still raking in cash, it can be much smarter to just continue that, rather than make a giant bet that might ultimately sink everything.
Sure, but VR isn't, they're different things. For VR they've sold somewhere around 15-20 million headsets, and many people use it quite a bit. I have no doubt VR is/will be big, but the path to finding what's compelling in VR will be strange. Personlly I rediscovered a love for table tennis and play every single day now, I'd probably pay $2-3k for a Quest 2 if I had no choice.
That said I think trying to build the "Metaverse" in a top-down way will be very difficult, and Meta will probably not be the ones pulling it off since they don't have much good will, people actively avoid their social platforms if they can. But to me, what we need is not a Metaverse, but a good OS/platform with integrated social/identity, where friends can easily join each other's games, voice is enabled by default and provided as part of platform, not individual apps etc. Meta has been working on making this easier, but with my friends group the friction is still too high. And it's super annoying when third party apps (like Rec Room) needs their own login, friends/social features etc making it cumbersome to find your friends in there.
I consider myself to be a pretty reasonable person and I think the value in something like Bitcoin is as a backup or alternative to the traditional system. Similar to how someone would invest in gold. Except Bitcoin is much easier to transfer, requires much less space to store, etc., vs gold. I think 95% of crypto is bullshit though, and there are a lot of scams.
If you look at recent bank collapses, high inflation, etc., I think a reasonable person might question how long modern monetary theory can go on like this. I'm not a gloom and doom person. I still hold fiat, haven't given up on banks, still invest in US treasuries, stocks, etc. But I think holding some in crypto and gold, etc., also makes sense.
If I had some extra zucchini and potatoes, and you were running very low on food, it would take quite a bit to convince me that a piece of shiny metal or numbers in a distributed ledger would be worth the calories I'm surrendering.
Right now, dollars would be worth it, because nearly everyone believes in their utility, despite being a very similar faith-based currency.
I don't think so.
I just think the massive spending is a bit premature. Keeping a R&D division inside Meta makes sense. Betting the farm does not.
VR has enormous potential but we are still lacking more ergonomic headsets and killer apps. I want to do 3D modelling in VR - except for some simple apps, I can't do that.
Companies that get big and then score repeated out of the park hits do so by attracting and nurturing talent[1] - they don't do so by having one brilliant star that shines eternal.
1. And that is a really good and honestly rare talent in the modern marketplace - it can be hard to let creativity thrive.
> But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.
The faithful have managed to get BTC up over $30K again, though. Saw Tim Bray posit the other day that if the US Gov just dumped all of it's BTC holdings (mostly seized from criminals) they could crash crypto quickly since the liquidity isn't there.
As far as I know the last bust wasn’t much different to the ones that came before it.
This is essentially how fiat currency works, isn’t it?
When I mentioned the societal nature of crypto, I meant something different. People who hold crypto have a vested interest in the wider adoption of crypto, and they often tend to become vocal proponents of crypto projects. I don't even claim bad intentions – I believe there is some psychological effect at play here that causes people to hold opinions that serve their interests, and becoming a crypto holder means that from that moment on, the spread of crypto is in one's interests.
Now, my point was, that perhaps I overlooked this sociopsychological aspect of crypto. If enough people in power are personally invested in crypto, and they use their power to advance crypto adoption because it personally benefits them, then at some point it doesn't matter whether there's any intrinsic value in crypto or not – it becomes a self-reinforcing system.
Zuck doesn't care about the metaverse, he's chasing the next consumer device since he missed the smart phone. He knows that if he doesn't control the hardware, his business is at risk. Apple has reinforced this.
Save for tax cheats (even though the laws are clear) and speculators, crypto just doesn't provide that much value. There are some neat use cases but they are just that.
The "metaverse" stuff... I don't think it was a bad bet to buy up Occulus, they still haven't found a great nail for that hammer but pivoting the entire company seems questionable. There is so much toxicity on the internet, why would you want to be "immersed" in it?
I'm not anti-generative AI, I don't want to sound that way but Zuck and company have some interesting data on large scale systems with giant amounts of data and information, they certainly have invested in it too. Maybe it's wasn't "luck" so much as they might have some intuitions about the negatives uses of the technology. It's seriously cool stuff but I think we're still collectively in the honey-moon period. I do forecast a world where we will need to exponentially strengthen our BS meters.
New one to me, love it. Synonymous with ideology, IMO — keep zooming in, the answers are there, we promise! Those who zoom out are lost!
- Lack of relevance on the big blue site.
- Huge slide in ad revenue.
- Expensive acquisition of Oculus with not much revenue to show for it. $2bn is not a bet-the-company amount of money for Facebook, but it is something, and that $2bn spent on Oculus is op cost taken from somewhere else.
- Reduction in moats for FB, Web shifted to mobile, FB tried bets on mobile + gaming, but those moats have receded.
I imagine Mark wanted something that could increase ad spend, new revenue stream (increase revenue from micro transactions, digital asset ownership) and something to give them some platform strength to shore up their future.
If you look around there is no other technology that is offering itself as a platform to own apart from the meta verse.
Now, I absolutely do not think this bet will pay off - but I can see how he would think it would.
BTC/crypto is a natural alternative to USD settlement. If you believe the USD is sunsetting as the global reserve currency then crypto, especially btc is probably a good long term investment.
Every single time I've asked ChatGTP or Bard a "simple" question that I know the answer to, there has always (always!) been something simply outright wrong. It is just not ready to be trusted right now, but I look forward to the day when hallucinations are solved.
Until we can be sure that LLMs do not hallucinate, I struggle to see the value to everyday-people for LLMs beyond use cases where accuracy and facts are unimportant. So ignore google-killing search engines, ignore medical diagnosis, ignore programming, ignore legal advice, and instead embrace making up stories or poems about unicorns or whatever where facts, accuracy, and correctness simply don't matter. It will still have a big impact sure, but I don't think it will be as world-changing as people think once the novelty wears off and people realise that LLMs are generally not very reliable when it comes to giving accurate info, and are better suited to "creative" tasks where correctness/accuracy doesn't matter. E.g. with stable diffusion (remember that?) no one expected a perfectly anatomically accurate picture of a dog or whatever - it did a passable picture of a dog eating a burrito or whatever the prompt asked for, but no one confused it with reality or treated it as fact. This is where I feel that we are with LLMs right now - passable, but does not hold up to detailed scrutiny.
But obviously yes the metaverse is obviously total bullshit and facebook have totally jumped-the-shark on this. They're currently deep in restructuriung to undo over-hiring during the pandemic - it would not surprise me at all to see them also re-pivot away from the metaverse too (couching it as some sort of "focusing on efficiency" or whatever, i.e. continue working on FB, instagram and whatsapp core features)
Metaverse stink: "This could have been an email" in 3-D!
Bitcoin has 2 stinks:
A)Find a lot of computing energy. Think about building power plants to make coins, and you're starting to get somewhere.
B)Price will rapidly drop and spike, maybe thousands of dollars per day. That's a feature!?
LLM AI: 60% of the time, it's right every time! This tech includes very nice graphics to back up any of its highly confident and hallucinogenic bullshit. Until this phenomenon is well understood, it stinks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_inte...
You say that, but crypto bubble hasn't really popped. At 30K, BTC is only down around 55% from the highs, that's about in the same league as many tech stock declines this year. A true bubble pop should be like 90%+ down. The masses clearly don't agree that it's bullshit so far.
You know, I never really though these founders were visionary geniuses. For the most part they are well connected/already well off, and did the right thing at the right time. I think the last couple of years have made that even more clear.
Facebook really started taking off about the time that a second golden age of tech was starting, fueled largely by near-zero interest rates and a focus on massive IPO exits without any proof of profitability. Nobody had to make any money for years, if at all. Uber hasn't made any money and neither has Spotify. Tesla does make cars, but its real product is arguably its absurdly valued stock that has allowed it a large runway fueled for the most part by the delusions of grandeur of its CEO. During this time larger companies simply acquired everything in sight, hoping that it would pay off. I mean, of all these acquisitions by Meta, which have been worth it? They're not all Instagrams.
https://www.techwyse.com/blog/general-category/facebook-acqu...
Facebook made it, but not because Zuckerberg made the best PHP site ever. Right place, right time, maybe among the first to realize that any engagement is good engagement, and I doubt it was Zuckerberg himself who had that realization.
On top of that, Google, Meta, and advertising companies in general have grown mostly on the theory that the mass amounts of data that they collect and use to sell hyper-focused ads is worth something. Recently it's been revealed that this isn't true, and you get just as good or better results by simply advertising the last thing somebody looked at, or whatever they are currently standing next to IRL. Knowing that you looked at hemorrhoid cream 3 years ago doesn't help you sell anything today. So it's arguably based on lies as well.
Now with interest rates up, I think we'll see how that plays out as advertisers finally start pulling back due to economic conditions. Uber turned off 2/3 of its ad spend in 2017 after it found that most of "conversions" were in fact fraud. Curious to see what other companies experience on this front. We'll find out how many of these founders are true geniuses or were just burning cash. I mean shit, give me a billion dollars and I'll give you something that looks like the next big thing no matter what...
Because at the end of the day, Facebook didn't have much to lose. The social media wars were over, FB and especially Instagram had won. As long as they didn't actively break anything, the information->ads->money pipeline will keep flowing until the entire space gets disrupted by something fundamental shifting under their feet.
A VR-2ndLife that actually caught on could honestly be a relatively believable such shift. Ultimately it didn't, but that's still alright news for FB: no big changes means the gravy train is still rolling.
That's some frustrating shit, because it rewards the least patient and surface-level analyses which (correctly!) identify deficiencies and lulls in activity, but mislabels them as stagnation or dead-ends or fundamental flaws.
It took us 20 years from General Magic to a passable iPhone.
VR will take time, and AI is likely more fruitful to prioritize currently (not saying that's a bad idea!) - but we don't yet have enough historical perspective to declare VR - or even (ick) crypto - as bad directions.
I couldn’t help but think that I have zero interest in a stadium or any size meeting where I have to put a VR helmet on….
I can imaging Zuck and Carmak and others would love that people listen to them in stadium sized meetings, but I’m not sure how users feel. I’m sure one day there will be such experiences, but there seems to be nothing appealing to many individuals about them now.
God help me when some CEO declares a VR mandatory meeting…
Metaverse seems like a top down driven thing.
OTOH: Whether generative AI has any value beyond mass desinformation and making "creative people" unemployed only the future may show. Also: Given than you need super-computers to do the training it's unlikely it will become a technology that can be used by everyone. (The situation here is imho similar to "open hardware": You may be able to design the hardware but you're not able to actually build it in your basement—like it's the case for open source software, which made kind of a revolution possible. AI will likely remain purely a toy for the few richest companies on this planet, without any access for the masses, beyond being "customers").
Regarding VR (the "metaverse"): This was a dead idea already as Second Life was hyped. VR pops up every 10 - 20 years since the 60's, but never caught on; and likely never will for practical reasons. Even Bitcoin has more real wold applications average people would care about than VR (e.g. you can at least buy "stuff" with Bitcoin, or send and receive money against the will of your government).
At least as long as you could apply Moor's "law"… (Which doesn't work any more for some time).
[edit: no pun was intended, just noticed…]
Is the economy of Bitlandia on the rise in real terms, or what? Huge export surplus, something like that? If not, then WTF is that to brag about?!?
Big unmotivated swings in the exchange rate are a failure in a currency. What you're crowing about is that as a currency, Bitcoin sucks.
These statements do not contradict- they can both be true
I'm pretty sure that I agree with you, but what would Facebook/Meta do with LLMs? You wouldn't want to generate fake people to interact with (well, someone might, but Facebook wouldn't). Because that's what data they had would have been useful for. I mean, if you can predict what a person will say, or how they will react to an ad, that has value... but I'm not sure I know where that value is for a Facebook, outside of better targeting of ads.
Maybe predicting consumer/voter sentiment about a policy or product before it's released?
The same applies to Google in aa certain respect actually. I assume they have enough data from gmail to effectively recreate a conversation with me. This could be lucrative for some targets (not me!), but probably not in a way that Google would be able to legitimately capture.
I could completely see how other actors would be able to use LLMs to predict or impersonate people on the Facebook/Google platforms, just not how the platforms themselves would be able to generate value.
Google at least could merge generic LLMs into their search mission to catalog the world's information. But that's a harder pitch to figure out how Facebook would generate value from it.
Am I missing something, or am I thinking too much about this like West World?
I'd give those two another 5-10 years before I expect to see real results — so much needs to be built first at the foundational layer.
Crypto seems to have been an easy money scam from almost day one.
It's been the same with crypto, for that matter. None of the reasonable people I know ever saw any grand value in crypto. Researching myself, it always just seemed to be a bullshit fractal. At the height of the crypto boom, I was beginning to doubt my conclusions and started to think that perhaps the societal nature of crypto is a force in itself. Like religion, if enough people believe in it, it becomes reality to some extent. But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.
Contrast that with the generative AI models revolution. It's clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be, and that they are providing clear value right away. It's no wonder that all the companies are immediately pivoting towards it. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early -- I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI.