I agree, though it's hard not to be negative. My first thought after "oh cool" was "how long until this thing languishes and gets discontinued?" The recent history of AR devices doesn't exactly do Meta a service.

They've been pretty consistent with the Meta Quest things.

What are you referring to? Meta also released their latest gen AR/VR device the same day

Agreed. I was commenting [1] on how this could be one of the posts where HN is totally wrong about looking back 10 years from now, similar to the Dropbox post.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41656380

To be fair, that post wasn't wrong. To this day I still carry a USB thumb drive, most people I know have/use them, and they're still selling very well. Linux users are still fully capable of moving files around themselves.

> IIncredible amount of negativity here.

It's FB. They're not popular. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole, because I expect it will be absolutely stuffed with user surveillance.

And they'll likely drop support/updates for it quickly after release... These out of pocket devices are sunsetted faster than mobile phones, especially so because they require completely independent development teams that companies love to roll essential staff off of.

There have been so many attempts to make VR glasses that it's really not innovation at this point, it's just gimmicky throw-away pocket tech. Something far better to invent is a phone that can project on walls, or project a full-size keyboard onto a table for an easier writing experience.

Most of these companies are gutted by investors, and turned into profit machines... There are very few visionaries leading projects now, and huge hurdles with IP theft and related lawsuits that hold up most of the typical innovation, unless these companies come up with game changing ideas that focus less on pushing out ads, they're going to fail with micro-projects like this. VR glasses have been around for ages, none of what Zuckerberg demoed was revolutionary, gotta be honest about it.

So far Meta has been great about supporting Meta Quest and Oculus products.

Was just going to write that there is no way people trust META to become their eyes. Maybe some smaller player. We already greatly distrust f*n mobiles which eavesdrop on everyone's conversation. Considering recent cyberpunk breach I actually expect more people to try to distance themselves from this all. It will probably be top product for telemedicine and teletutoring one day, but it will never be safe in the hands of Meta, no matter how many lammas they put in the loose...

Think about it - sometimes it is much more about trust than technology. Yeah, I know all your chats go back and forth commercial GPTs, but you know half of my GPT interraction is already local inference based and it does similar job, and is OK. So that much about wanting to let s.o. see your naked friends. Their days are numbered and if you see how IT history unfolded - there is always rush to the cloud and away from the mainframe. Its like the breathwork in criya yoga, happens simultaneously in a sense.

From the funny side of things - such wearables open perspective to lot of people talking to themselves being O.k. in society. Perhaps we could only agree to have such visual interface when things get closer to what guys have in Cyberpunk 2077. Honestly I really hope someone developes a genetic enhancement or all children born 2000 suddently become enlightened enough to master telepathy.

I'm much more fascinated by the propspect of personal electronics, and how cheap they have become. I don't want Meta in them for sure, and nobody apt-get installs gcloud or fb as his must have tool.

> We already greatly distrust f*n mobiles which eavesdrop on everyone's conversation

Yet every single person carries one.

Often out of necessity. I fantasize about disconnecting, but the reality is more complicated; it would difficult for me and others around me were I to disconnect.

I solved this problem by using a GNU/Linux phone.

Perhaps very soon we also start bringing jammers of all sorts when the device is not to be trusted. Not a new concept - every sane person uses firewall and/or VPN.

you should definitely have a firewall but the security advantages of a VPN are questionable, pushed hard by VPN vendors, who are biased due to what they're selling. They're useful for evading DMCA takedowns but that's not about keeping hackers off your machine.

and yet many people want to get rid of them and move back to a simpler time when people weren’t connected 24/7

I carry mobile phones only out of compulsion. I often wish for the time when we didn't have this leash around our neck constantly. I would drop this and go back to landlines if I could

I used to work with psychology researchers conducting experiments with wearable cameras. Anything involving human subjects needed IRB approval, informed consent, ethics review, etc.

But with essentially any piece of tech you use (not just FB), you check "I agree" on a document you'll never read and give the same data to a private company who will use it however they want. And they charge you for it.

Imagine if I told you a research organization decided to throw out all their ethics and start charging their research subjects to be experimented on, and that this was actually a really solid business model.

It is Facebook. Everything in earshot and eyeshot of these glasses will be surveilled.

AR is certainly cool tech. It is just too bad there’s no company doing it that isn’t doing it just to spy on you.

> Everything in earshot and eyeshot of these glasses will be surveilled.

And ads will be plastered over everything in your field of vision. Honestly who would sign up for that?

Plenty of people pay money for smart tvs, Netflix, etc.

Smart TVs really are stupid, but at least netflix ads only show up when you're using netflix. AR glasses would plaster ads all over any show you watch on any platform, as well as on sunsets, walls, family members, etc.

> next consumer electronics platform

I really hope this isn’t the case. We have enough screens around us as is, the last thing I want is screens pressed up against my eyeballs

Sort of the whole point of this style of waveguide optics is that the screen is not pressed up against your eyeballs. It's projected out 3-6 feet in front of you (and ideally, anchored to the real world in some way).

I think the main question will be if Meta can run the glasses under a different business model than ads/personalization. I know Meta feels like they missed out on owning the hardware ecosystem with mobile, but a big part of why Apple's product work is because their business model is not ads.

If they can fix their incentives there it will address 80% of the concerns in this thread.

Counterintuitively I think a passive screen affixed to your face will reduce your reliance on all other screens. Glasses aren't a great form factor for scrolling feeds, but they are much better at connecting you to your physical world (which phones are the worst at). That plus just the posture improvements [1] that glasses can provide over the phone may make this a winner.

[1]: https://www.today.com/health/texting-neck-how-hunching-over-...

It doesn't matter if they can or can't, Apple will do a better version of this and people will buy it because they're a much less shitty / shady company than Facebook.

Even if apple’s was worse in most ways, it would still sell.

For your children’s children, AR is going to be a commodity product like cell phones are today.

I highly doubt it. People are people and don't change much. Teenagers especially are all about personal fashion/appearance, and outside of a short-lived fad don't seem likely to want to wear a computer on their face, regardless of how fashionable you are able to make them look. You may as well build the battery pack into a baseball cap and say you have to wear that too.

Teenagers don't have any problem wearing airpods even though those look really stupid. I wouldn't count out the power of marketing or teenager's need for approval from their peers.

> [...] airpods even though those look really stupid

speaking /as/ a teenager, that's presumption. maybe it's an Apple-sponsored mindhack, but I actually think wireless earbuds (incl. AirPods) look quite a bit better than their dangly wired counterparts.

Could be part mindhack! I remember Apple's iPod advertising campaign which centered around silhouettes of hip looking users with the trademark white dangly wires snaking into their pocket. I guess with this desirable tech hidden in your pocket, the wires were the best way to recognize that someone had one!

I guess since airpods are visible (and expensive) they are now the desirable focus, and anyone with wired earbuds is hopelessly out of date!

Making them stick out visibly from the sides of people's heads was absolutely a design choice so that people could be "seen" with the product.

Apple is very big on being a status symbol which is why they put a giant shiny (at one point glowing) logo on their laptops and why they spent a lot of money trying to convince iphone users to not use a case which would hide the logo.

Maybe I'm just a lot more accustomed to seeing wires than sticks pointing out of people's ears, but I'd hardly be the first person to say they look dumb. It was a concern reviewers took into account (see for example https://mashable.com/article/apple-airpods-review) and people often say they look like Q-tips/antennae sticking out of people's heads (or worse https://screenrant.com/hilarious-apple-airpods-memes/)

Part of it is that they stick out way too far so you can see them when looking at someone directly. It's especially distracting in cases where they're sticking out in different directions.

it might just be that I was never in a terribly wire-laden environment -- I'm in college now, where something like 70% of people have airpod-shaped devices in their ears at all times, and even in high school seeing wired earbuds was infrequent. the AirPod aesthetic is the only one I remember wrt listening devices.

I don't know if the same effect would occur with these glasses, though. it seems unlikely that they'll have significant /public/ use amongst young people any time soon. I've never even seen an Apple Vision Pro.

Children’s children? What? Like 50 years from now?

These AR innovations are going to produce great value already 5 years from now.

it's not really a matter of if at this point, it's a when... it's the peak of screen technology that we've been hurtling towards for nearly 100 years

I really hope you’re wrong. I suspect that the future is technology which blends further into the background rather than being shoved closer to our faces.

I agree with your ideal goal, but there are hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on getting it in directly into our eyeballs.

Maybe we'll be lucky enough to die before it's normal for this stuff to be integrated into our brains (which again, billions of dollars being spent on figuring this out).

I think the hardware and idea is great. But I simply can't ignore the fact that it is made by Facebook, which is basically the posterchild for modern addiction optimizer adtech business.

The last company I'd want to put right in front of my eyeballs for any extended periods of time is Facebook.

This is the only comment on here about fb that makes sense. Meta is fully capable and willing to make products that protect user privacy, and they have in the form of WhatsApp and others. But what they definitely aren’t capable of is building things you aren’t addicted to use in order to generate them revenue constantly.

Maybe as they transition to hardware they’ll spend more time making their products worthy of chronic upgrades rather than chronic addictive usage.

"negativity" or people who are stating their perspective on a product.

Was there a lot of engineering, novel problem solving, and even new invention? Yes.

Does that matter to customers if it comes together in a product that they don't feel is good enough? No.

For a site focused on tech and startups there is an awful lot of whiteknighting for companies who should know and do better.

it's a prototype...

Doesn’t matter.

Don’t show it to the public if you don’t want their opinion. Assuming meta knew this, it’s pretty insane that there are people defending the honour of their billion dollar corporate bff.

Even when it isn't a "prototype" and simply just doesn't have a consumer version, the public will be negative about it. Look at the Apple Vision Pro. That's a shipping product with a massive negative public opinion because it doesn't have a consumer version and no one understands if they are "Pro enough" to care to buy one. Look at Microsoft HoloLens. That was a shipping product with some large Enterprise and Government customer contracts. But the public perception of it was miserable, which is partly why Microsoft dumped a lot of their research in that area and lost of their brains in that area to Meta, so it's ironic and hilarious to see Meta making the same mistakes again that Microsoft already made with a variation/iteration of the same tech.

This would be like Telsa coming with new tech. Tesla / X-Twitter & Facebook / Meta are companies I will never financially support. They make money off propagating misinformation and their CEOs are not decent human-beings.

I mean, sure, I get that. But also, are any big tech CEOs decent human beings? It's hard to participate in tech at all with that strict of a moral code.

What misinformation does Tesla propagate

I think they're referring to Musk going off the deep end in general. There's also the whole "We'll have self driving cars in two years!" That they've been peddling for the last decade.

Even the way they marketed their early cars as self driving/autopilot was deceptive. Plus they covered up safety issues, and there have been many privacy issues as well.

Trust Is Built in Drops and Lost in Buckets

Negativity? Yes Facebook was negative for 20ish years and as a result of their behavior technical people don't like them.

This is not something, we are wrong about even if your "negativity here" silently suggests that.

You reminded me of something, please read this article: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/leave_my_br...

It is helpful for becoming negative to negative companies where they deserve it.

IG Farben had great technology (for that time) but needed change of name and half of century of good service so they have been removed from our memory as producers of Cyclone B. Now they are known as Bayer. And my neighbor (concentration camp survivor), while he was alive, wasn't buying Bayer products and he was quite vocal about it. Any of them, regardless of technology, different people, different products,... Guess why. Will you say he was negative?

Thats why FB was renamed and I am eagerly waiting what they will be like after 50 years. Until then, they will not be anywhere near my devices and even less filtering my sight.

For me personally they build a lot of trust back with their work on llama. Also they do have capable software engineers. But hardware is a different thing. I am still burned by their handling of hardware support for Oculus devices. To such a degree that neither VR nor AR is of significant interest anymore, never mind developing software for such products.

That said, I was never a Facebook user. I do have an account and that is that, which I tend to not use in most browser session because of Facebook surveillance.

If you are android user, dont know about Apple, 3rd party applications are full of Facebook SDK, try installing https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard/releases (and pay author a coffee, he seriously deserves it) and check the domains apps are accessing. You might figure out you are Facebook user. Just nobody told you.

This was the point of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) on iOS. If an app embeds a third-party SDK that tracks you, such as the Facebook SDK, they are required to get your permission first with a system popup. They aren’t allowed to track you silently without your knowledge.

I would be very interested in learning how ATT compares with Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection. Does anyone know?

To be clear, ATT is the system Apple put in place for native apps that is enforced by the App Store review process. When it comes to the browser, I think you’re more interested in Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP).

You should check out WebKit‘s tracking prevention policy:

https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention-policy/

Also the Privacy category on the WebKit blog:

https://webkit.org/blog/category/privacy/

Specific blog posts you might be interested in are:

https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

https://webkit.org/blog/9521/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki...

https://webkit.org/blog/11338/cname-cloaking-and-bounce-trac...

https://webkit.org/blog/11545/updates-to-the-storage-access-...

https://webkit.org/blog/15697/private-browsing-2-0/

Yes, I am aware, that Apple is trying very hard to be the only one in ecosystem, that is tracking you where you cant do anything to avoid it due to completely closed phone.

With such a cure, you don't need disease.

That is why I was using heavily modified Android.

As I could prevent Android tracking me and kick the Google spyware out of it completely.

I am now using Sailfish ( https://sailfishos.org ) and I don't need to care about Google or Apple any more. Need to patch banking app from time to time and use plastic cards, but this is acceptable (well, not from bank software but I couldn't care less, they are free to port it to linux and make it open source /s ).

---

Anyway, the GDPR is requiring from applications to disclose tracking and allow you to chose what tracking if any, you will allow, before it occurs. Not only that, PIA cant be a payment for app usage.

So in theory, Apple is only enforcing what is already required from applications by EU directive.

Paid and provided by "Pay to win games, targeting kids, not preventing fake news (covid, human harrassment etc.), probably someone died due to lack of taking ownership/responsibility, election fraud through not acting on it.

Yes i do like Llama but lets be honest who paid for it and for what.

Just because suckerburg gives us nice toys...

He could actually start giving his money away to humanity in a relevant and meaningful way to start fixing what he did to our society.

> Paid and provided by "Pay to win games, targeting kids, not preventing fake news

Guess what? New iOS features and YouTube videos are paid-for and provided in the exact same way. Both Apple and Google are complicit in spreading misinformation, advertising to kids and profiting from lootbox/microtransaction revenue. But nobody consciously objects to Apple for partnering with Taboola, or Google for supporting extremism on YouTube. No sane critic lashes out at Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai demanding they donate their life savings to offset the obvious damages they've created.

I think Meta and moreover Facebook is a purely detestable platform. It's absolutely hilarious how unwilling this website is to apply the same criticism to their other favorite services. The cognitive dissonance is arresting.

To be fair, you don't know what the poster believes about those services either.

That's true, but my stance frankly wouldn't change if they also thought Google and Apple needed to spend the rest of their existence as a charity case. My point is more that it's a silly measure of damages, since this behavior is table stakes in the FAANG echelons. It's like saying that we should reject Open Source contributions by Google and Amazon because they pay their engineers with money made off exploitative server deals. It's a reach.

Open Source contributions are there for three reasons. Either the license requires it (Google Fuchsia is a step into avoiding this), it is a public relations stunt or they want other software developers work for them for free (which is also dropping the wages for their developers).

Never ever mistake any company that has public stocks doing anything else but earning money for the stock owners. As they didnt buy the stocks to support charity but to earn money.

That is actually simple, they are the same but I am not using behavior of other corrupt companies to make Facebook look better. Or try to derail debate to other companies.

Which is imho the correct behavior.

And, if possible (do read further, to see what I consider possible), I don't use their products, not having any Apple product, phone is Lumia with Sailfish OS and carefully blocking all the shit 3rd party products bring in, potentially not even using them (smartwatches aka spyware on your wrist, due to cloud dependence), Windows (i have Linux and FreeBSD everywhere, even kids don't use Windows but they do use Graphene OS on phones, couldn't do anything else there due to peer pressure)

Where this is impossible due to the public drive (try to block Google/Microsoft/Amazon ASNs and you will be effectively alone on the internet, due to cloud - interesting detail, while even Duckduckgo doesn't work, the Yandex does), I do everything to avoid as much of crap as possible, like blocking the trackers, randomizing fingerprinting, youtube ads, not having a google account, using youtube for exactly what I am searching for (a lot of content on internet is no longer written, which I prefer, but rather recorded as a video, so you are literally forced to use youtube), being 100% self hosted (not on cloud, physical server that I have built, with ups in my house) from mail to caldav, using self hosted searx for searching, having redundant zfs storage, doing backups to the tape, have my own VPN randomly deployed to other VPS providers...

Bottom line, doing everything that nobody else "has time to do it" and it is surprisingly simple and non time consuming when you "find time to do it" aka "you know how to do it and you consider it easy".

Or when you are sick enough of companies trying to privatize internet. SAAS? Over my dead body.

Anyway vacuum cleaner is rooted and modified, "Smart TV" is not connected and blocked on router (with default blocking hardware that wasn't added to the pass trough rule manually), became smart under my conditions with raspberry pi. Avoiding buying anything with "smart" label unless i know I will be able to root it or circumvent call home, like air condition.

Interestingly, mail server where everyone is complaining about not self hosting it, is the simplest, nicest piece of software, that I don't even need to look at it for months. It just works and all mails get delivered.

+40 hours / week backend software development for some company and having a family with kids in primary school. Just so you know I am not in pension yet. ;)

Apple is responsible for plenty of death in foxcon companies.

Google, is a lot different than Apple or Facebook. Google did a lot for our society through Android, Google maps, https, Gmail, Kubernetes and Search.

YouTube had a problem with fake news and especially the algorithm (flat earth etc.) but they actually acted on it a lot faster than facebook ever tried.

But yes pls don't assume something without knowing were my viewpoints are. There is no cognitive dissonance but we talk here about facebook and not about every other companie on the planet.

I don't think we need more billionaires giving their money away. I think they and their companies need to pay tax properly so we can vote on how it's spent.

I have made my peace with React (I know I can draw anything I can imagine with it, which I can't say for Vue, I can even draw 3-d worlds) but many people think React ruined web development.

Did you just compare a Silicon Valley tech company selling ads to IG Farben? It’s very hard to take this post seriously even though your point stands.

Why are you downplaying them as “a tech company selling ads” when the most relevant characteristic of theirs is facilitating genocide in Myanmar, then obstructing the investigation, and fuelling ethnic violence in more places like Ethiopia?

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

https://time.com/5880118/myanmar-rohingya-genocide-facebook-...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks...

I'm not sure exactly what the extent of the "facilitation" was in the first link, so what I'm about to say might be a little vague, but the second doesn't appear to be about them covering up their role in said "facilitation", but rather their refusal to provide so much user data to The Gambia looking to prosecute Myanmar officials for war crimes.

The way you've phrased that makes it sound as though Facebook were trying to hide the actions they took to facilitate things, which I think is a miscommunication.

I think the Myanmar experience has a lot to do with why Facebook tries to disappear politics talk on Threads. I mean, negative talk about your neighbors is how political violence starts.

People on the Fediverse get high and mighty about the Myanmar incident but in a Fediverse world the Myanmar government would have run the big instance in their language and would have defederated anyone who tried to stop them, alternately outsiders could have defederated but then they wouldn't have any influence.

Fediverse folks could have refused to run a server to support genocide but there is no way they could stop their software from supporting genocide. A centralized system like Facebook does have more control and more responsibility but when they took that responsibility later on Myanmar kicked them out

https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-censorship-virtual-privat...

Why ? The discussion is about fixing brand reputation, and he quotes probably one of the most disgustingly successful rebrands in history. If even IG Farben managed to successfully rebrand, surely a company that just went "a little too far" with private data, can too. Looks quite on topic to me.

It’s a level of hyperbole that could only be taken seriously by an autistic person or someone in tech. That’s why.

Not only my point stands, I still remember a world almost without narcissists, people traveling for fun, not to take a photo to brag, times where people listened to doctors not some people recommending horse dewormer, UK not suffering due to Brexit consequences ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8425058/ ), people actually bonding in person,...

Or in words of Umberto Eco ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco ):

“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”

You are underestimating the horror that Facebook did to human society. I am accusing them of crime against humanity. And all that, just for selling ads - where you will be able to see the comparison with IG Farben, do whatever it takes, to earn money.

I accept the argument, that if they wouldn't, someone else would, but nevertheless THEY did it or we would be talking about someone else.

Even if you don’t like it, idiots do have as much right to speak as any Nobel Prize winner. Not only that, the more they speak, the better, as the chances of stopping being an idiot increase. All Nobel Prizes were at some point also idiots, if they’re still not idiots today about some topics.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley for a racist idiot, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling for an alt health idiot, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson for a psionics idiot

https://bigthink.com/the-past/nobel-disease-great-scientists...

This reeks of nostalgia. The past wasn't as great as you remember it, and the present isn't as terrible as you think it is.

Nope, I am quite rational here and if I wouldn't witness change in society, I wouldn't believe it. I am seriously worried for humanity, as what I am seeing today is: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808 (and this was shot in pre-facebook era)

Fun fact, they didn't have large budget for shooting so they were searching for footwear that would look futuristic. They found some unknown company producing cheap "shoes" so horrible that the director wasn't worried for it to succeed as "no one would wear that". The company was Crocks.

https://media.snopes.com/2023/09/idiocracy.png

Anyway, this whole thread is actually proving my point. It wouldn't happen before Facebook.

Go back to any random year in human history and ask the older people whether they think the world was better when they were young. They will all say "yes" (evidence for this exists in countless survived writings, as well as other social phenomena like people becoming more conservative as they age). It's one of the most natural things in the world.

That alone should be a very strong signal that maybe your nostalgia is not based on a rational unbiased observation of the changes in society.

edit: and to be clear, obviously there have been times in history where things really did get worse for a period. But if you're proposing that that's happening now, you have a massive burden of proof to overcome, and you should be absolutely really totally sure that you're not being influenced by rose-tinted glasses. Which I'm not even sure is possible.

I understood immediately where you are pointing. And I wish you would be right.

Correlation does not imply causation.

So what? You believe the world has gotten worse every year since the beginning of time? Or is it that all those older people throughout history have been wrong, but somehow it's you that's finally gotten it right?

Whatever. I don't have time to fight every logical fallacy you produce. I think I have explained it well, there is no need for me to bother with everyone who doesn't understand it.

Your Kaczynskian wall of text sure told em.

Fair that perhaps they (the director specifically) thought that (they look like something nobody would want to wear) about Crocs. Heck, I thought that back then, many did. So perhaps that's why Snopes is saying it's true.

But Crocs had actually become somewhat popular already before Idiocracy.

The more realistic full picture explanation being that they chose something that they or someone on their staff, like many "look at those idiots" types (myself at the time included), already knew and considered a stupid trend is much more likely. It doesn't at all negate that they in fact thought nobody with taste would wear those shoes, but I don't think that choice was entirely made in isolation not aware of the trend.

The effect of watching the movie and seeing Crocs worn was yet another of those pieces of evidence that the stupid people of today connect to that fictional future world, like all the other stuff on the movie dialed all the way to the top (energy drinks, corporate sponsorships, etc.)

The mere fact that someone knew of Crocs, thought of them, and chose them because of their ugliness, means they were popular/successful enough to pop up on someone's radar, despite them ostensibly not being something that would be worn by anyone. Perhaps they didn't know how much more popular Crocs would become but they for sure must have picked them as an artifact of things already going in a weird direction (Why can you get this? Who would want this? Someone must, these will be the stupid people of tomorrow.)

But also, actually, so what?

Look at some of the fashion of past decades older movies. Some of it is cool but a lot of it is super ridiculous.

And if you look at Crocs, are they really objectively stupid? Treating them as a high fashion item probably is. But they are versatile and robust, good for many types of use cases were people used to wear other types of cheap plastic sandals. People wearing leather shoes surely thought sneaker were stupid until they became so mainstream that they were evaluated more objectively.

Citing idiocracy and Crocs seems like a very weak argument to your case and even Idiocracy's point (fashion choices don't indicate the world is getting stupid). Mind you I'm not disagreeing that things have gotten worse in many ways and social media is definitely not helping. OTOH, Facebook actually was somewhat reasonable for a long time, and useful to connect with people. Only once the Twitterification of it started did it get so bad. But somehow Twitter never gets the bad reputation.

No. Crocks became popular after Idiocracy. Check the year they were shooting as it took them a few years to release it. Chat with Mike Judge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBu_RpKqCg8

Yep

At most, it just laid bare to see what were the normal social interactions and thoughts of millions of people and made possible far more viral spread of ideas. On the last one, I don't even think it's social media's fault, it's probably the whole internet at large, it's just these sorts of interactions happen most there.

I have been active on internet forums since the mid-late 90s. Facebook and Instagram and their other social media didn't create any of those bad human traits, they were rampant to begin with.

What these normie-networks did do was make a UX for public posting so easy that scores of low-education users were able to be influenced and re-share low-infromation-quality stuff in huge magnitudes. FB is guilty of making a super accessible user experience, and then in not being aggressive early enough in having high standards for its userbase. But it didn't invent society's ills.

I found myself stepping back from social media and deleted a lot of my accounts in 2016 -- the election and the Cambridge Analytica thing was a big reason. LinkedIn could have been the worst because I had spent so much time promoting myself and prospecting, I met a lot of good folks but I also met so many bullshitters who helped make me into a bullshitter.

The influx of normies circa 2000 did not seem so bad to me but Facebook and Twitter were another thing.

I was thinking a lot about it, but at the times of IRC and forums (and modems ;) ) this was not an issue on society scale. Facebook actually revolutionized it and made it available to anyone including showing the more contraverse opinions to other people as it was more likely for them to click. They were/are literally pumping up all the bad in society, to earn more money.

My point is that the less savoury aspects of human interaction were still happening, just not in the open. The popularity of the internet as a medium of human interaction just made it visible, recordable, searchable and pressed the gas pedal. I wouldn't particularlyblame FB for inventing this.

So your argument is that making computers and the internet easier to use for normal people is cause for societal destruction? I can’t be convinced, but that does seem like more of an indictment on people than it does tech.

Not my argument. You are fighting Umberto Eco (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco ) here.

Let me repeat him as you probably didnt catch it (I dont understand how, but this is one of the things, I dont understand, so I wont argue about it):

“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”

I can just confirm that what he has seen and described is correct. And the more that you are standing your ground, the more you are proving, he was correct.

His entire argument amounts to Eternal September[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

The tech company that got Donald Trump elected, and helped make all of our grandparents into lunatics?

That Facebook?

Wasn't that Twitter? You know, the site he actually used?

2017 called they want their meme back.

You remember that Facebook customer who got sued for breaking privacy agreements and profiling FB users? That’s the most public one.

Also the Russians sitting around posting on social media meme is still actively in use. I’ve seen it at least a handful of times this month

In American history books we just call it Zyklon B.

facebook has not been negative, they notably refused to play ball with the antipoaching agreements with other big tech companies in the bay, and technical people such as myself greatly respect them for it

Facebook still has 3B happy users.

It's only privileged, highly-paid coastal elites that hate FB.

Zuck, can literally say GFY as they don't matter in the broad scheme of things and innovations.

My non-computer-nerd midwestern friends, some of whom are blue collar and zero of whom are anywhere near making coastal FAANG or finance money, all hate Facebook.

Yes, but are they on Instagram though?

Oh, yes, because that’s how network effects work. Every single one would be happy if Meta and all its properties folded tomorrow, though.

Why is this an argument? First of all x many people using something doesn't necessarily mean something is good (network effects if not fake accounts) but also buying up competition is somehow seen as a positive?

Ummm sure buddy. Let's bring anecdotes vs real world data

Where’s the data?

The negativity goes both ways. I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg will think we're "dumb fucks" for buying this new gizmo.

My god, he said that when he was in college. What is it with this recently popular opinion that nobody is capable of changing for the better?

Changing for the better? Really? Facebook under Zuckerberg has done plenty of predatory things, such as track users across non-Facebook websites, create shadow profiles for people who don't even have accounts, conduct studies to try to make the platform as addictive as possible, and sold access to peoples' private messages revealed in the the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal

When he called people "dumb fucks", he was including you

Facebook's ongoing behavior towards its users is consistent with the original quote. I don't see any evidence that something has changed besides PR slop.

I just want to elaborate on something here, the full quote is "yeah so if you ever need info on people just ask; I have over 4000 email, sns, addresses" "What? How'd you manage that one?" "people just submitted it, I don't know why. They 'trust me', dumb fucks"

That's not a great look seeing what they've done since then and people always focus on the wrong part of the quote. "I would've said the same thing" (would you?) - he was offering his friend user info.

I wish I didn't have to be so negative because these are cool, but it's Facebook. Surveillance and ad tech that cause brain rot are what they do for a living. At this point they could just sell versions of these products that aren't subsidized by evil, and they still choose not to do so. This means no matter how much they talk about the future of AI being open, no matter how nice their AR glasses are, I can't do business with them. Everything facebook does is burdened by being facebook and I for one am glad at least one demographic won't let them forget it.

The technology they've packed into these things is amazing - it's an incredible achievement.

But, that said, there's also plenty of room for negativity around the actual product conception. It may have niche applications, but it just doesn't seem that most people need or want AR for everyday use - it's a solution looking for a problem. For gaming VR seems a better fit than AR, and same for Metaverse in general.

AR seems a bit like Segway two-wheelers - cool and fun, but with limited actual use. I could see AR glasses being used in the same way as Segway's end of life use for tourist city tours, or for other similar rent-to-use entertainment experiences.

The sad thing is that there are a lot of things AR glasses could be useful for in my everyday life, but it all assumes that those glasses are working for me and me alone. I'd never use a product that was going to spy on everything I see and do. I'd never use a product that would fill my vision with ads either.

> The sad thing is that there are a lot of things AR glasses could be useful for in my everyday life

Can you give some examples, because I honestly can't think of any. I certainly can imagine these in specific, mostly niche professional contexts, but as "the next computing computing platform", no thanks.

To be clear, I'm fine if this is "just me", but take this quote from the article:

> You can take a hands-free video call to catch up with friends and family in real time, and you can stay connected on WhatsApp and Messenger to view and send messages. No need to pull out your phone, unlock it, find the right app and let your friend know you’re running late for dinner – you can do it all through your glasses.

Even under their own description, the phone experience is better for me in every way. I don't want something strapped to my face - I want to perform a task and then put my device away.

I think it's telling that any movie or game with cool AR visuals includes access to huge(!) amounts of data, like face recognition + criminal history.

So you're imagining a future where the police are wearing these, strolling the streets and scanning for undesirables?

The problem with waveguides are the manufacturing defects are on the micron level, and you need to get those channels perfect - then produce the same pattern a few more times for other colors, and hope they all perfectly line up.

I don’t see 3D printing being a solution here for a very very long time

I wonder if and when Apple releases smart glasses that take pics and videos too how society will react? It goes against Apple's whole privacy ethos.

IMO it is ironic the EU has forced Meta to take leadership in educating the public on the significance of "privacy," but not in the way the EU wanted. "Privacy" means two different things: (1) censoring sensitive personal life info from the public, versus (2) limiting government power. Who will invent the words to distinguish the two, I don't know, but it will turn "privacy ethos" into "X ethos" and "Y ethos," and Apple will sort it all out.

Some people have morals and ethics and believe that its not okay to just do what facebook does without taking responsibility.

You build a platform which allows you to share fake news and pay to win shit to billions? You make sure the algorithm makes you as much money as possible?

You know who made sure facebook fixes this? Politics, not suckerburg.

Are your morals better than mine? Mine say that Meta is a successful business that has delivered on user demand for a solid while now.

My morals also say that sharing any news, be it fake or real, should be allowed. Likewise they say making as much money as possible is admirable.

Thats just capitalsm not morals or ethics.

With power comes responsibility.

And your moral ethical construct should not just benefit you and work for you but for all.

Plenty of companies are not ethical and not your friend. If you have family and actually care, you wouldn't worry that facebook teaches them garbage? fake news? etc.? Just for the sake of making money or being allowed to do what they want?

Im curious why you would even debate morals here if your main objection is to make 'as much money as possible'? Just accept that its not a moral goal to have.

Moral would be "Making as much money as possible without hurting anyone and benefiting the society"

I often advocate things not for me. I'm quite good in understanding the facebook algorithm and all of that shit. I advocate this for my friends, familiy and other fellow humans including you.

I get it, our characters are polar opposites. There’s nothing you can teach me that I wouldn’t regard as obnoxious ramblings of a lost person.

I agree, just because you don’t like a company or you don’t have a use for the device doesn’t mean that it can’t be a good step forward for tech in general, and for those who will find a use for it.

> Incredible amount of negativity here.

Negativity isn't spared on bad actors.

My only gripe is Meta business model. So I prefer not to use any of their products at all. My loss.