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"Money is given to friends."

While that's completely true, I do think it misses a key underlying point: VCs (and many breeds of investor) are not ultimately selecting for value creating ideas, or for their friends: they're selecting for investments they believe _other people_ will pay more for later.

In the case of startups, those people are most likely other VCs (at later rounds), private equity (at private sale) or retail investors (at IPO).

Very rarely is the actual company profitable at any of those stages, demonstrably and famously.

So the whole process is selecting for hype-potential, which itself is somewhat correlated to the usual things people get annoyed about with startup cliches: founders who went to MIT; founders who are charismatic; founders who are friends with VCs; etc...

So yeah, they invest in their friends, but not because they're their friends. Because they know they can more reliably exit those investments at a higher value.

Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, this is a fascinating hypothesis and honestly super believable. It makes way more sense than the intuitive belief that there’s actually something under the human skin suit understanding any of this code.

Context: micro (5 person) software company with a mature SaaS product codebase.

We use a mix of agentic and conversational tools, just pick your own and go with it.

For Unity development (our main codebase and source of value) I give current gen tools a C- for effectiveness. For solving confined, well modularisable problems (eg refactor this texture loader; implement support for this material extension) it’s good. For most real day to day problems it’s hopelessly confused by the large codebase full of state, external dependency on chunks of Unity, implicit hardware-dependent behaviours, etc. It has no idea how to work meaningfully with Unity’s scene graph or component model. I tried using MCP to empower it here: on a trivial test project it was fine. In a real project it got completely lost and broke everything after eating 30k tokens and 40 minutes of my time, mostly because it couldn’t understand the various (documented) patterns that straddled code files and scene structure.

For web and API development I give it an A, with just a little room for improvement. In this domain it’s really effective all the way down the logical stack from architectural and deployment decisions all the way down to implementation details and debugging including digging really deep in to package version incompatibilities and figuring out problems in seconds that would take me hours. My one criticism would be the - now familiar - “junior developer” effect where it’ll often run ahead with an over engineered lump of machinery without spotting a simpler more coherent pattern. As long as you keep an eye on it it’s fine.

So in summary: if what you’re doing is all in text, nothing in binary, doesn’t involve geometric or numerical reasoning, and has billions of lines of stack overflow solutions: you’ll be golden. Otherwise it’s still very hit and miss.

It's not sequitous mate.

The idea that a Labour Secretary of State would be phoning up the Cabinet Office screaming down the phone at them about interaction design on the website while a Tory one would just have their feet up is ludicrous and you know it.

This feels super unfair to the gov.uk experience design which for me stands out head and shoulders above any other web workflow delivered by the public sector I've ever come across.

Pages are snappy, terse, consistent, clear and unsurprising. I agree this specific example feels a bit dark-patterny and occasionally stuff like self-assesment can have more steps than necessary, but overall it's really high quality.

In comparison the process for getting a DUNS number felt like going through some kind of a psychological experiment.

Finally, this:

> a party in power famous for paternalism

is just enclowning yourself with a partisan and non-sequitous point.

If your theory is that this global push by legislators to introduce age restrictions is actually a secret Trojan horse to harvest government IDs orchestrated by the platform owning capitalists…how do you account for the fact said capitalists have been desperately lobbying against it for years?

No, they’ll probably just follow Australia’s lead[1] of: default allow; algorithmic age estimation; account suspend; ID to unblock. Chill.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyp9d3ddqyo.amp

Yeah, definitely boils down to how much of a factor the aesthetics of the 'tiny carts' is for you in the whole experience. I can imagine some creative modding that would make a collection of themed USBs just as appealing, if not more :)

I guess the lack of a built-in SD card slot might make the Minisforum options less attractive

Such a cool concept! For anyone who didn't slog through their docs, the recommended hardware system (and the box in their product shots) is the Geekom A5 https://www.geekom.co.uk/geekom-a5-mini-pc and the 8BitDo Wireless controller https://www.8bitdo.com/ultimate-2c-wireless-controller/

Those + some SD cards and a spare evening for setup makes this a really tempting £400 project.

I don't know if you're conflating 'Metaverse' with 'NFTs' or something, but in Meta land it's very much a VR/AR term.

If you're interested in where they're currently focusing their spending and the timelines for return on investment, the recently leaked memo isn't a bad place to start https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-cto-to-staff-leaked-memo-2025-...

The original paper abstract [1] cuts through a lot of the jargon on the website, but yeah it's just a research platform for capturing (and doing limited processing on) video and telemetry for the purposes of AR-focused ML research.

It's not a new headset or a protoype for one.

"Egocentric, multi-modal data as available on future augmented reality (AR) devices provides unique challenges and opportunities for machine perception. These future devices will need to be all-day wearable in a socially acceptable form-factor to support always available, context-aware and personalized AI applications. Our team at Meta Reality Labs Research built the Aria device, an egocentric, multi-modal data recording and streaming device with the goal to foster and accelerate research in this area. In this paper, we describe the Aria device hardware including its sensor configuration and the corresponding software tools that enable recording and processing of such data."

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13561

Thanks for the extra context. I haven't actually looked at what you at Zappar are doing for a while. Would you care to comment on what the key differences are between Zapworks Studio [1], Zapworks Designer [2] and Mattercraft [3]? Their elevator pitches on those pages feel like they have pretty complete overlap with each other tbh.

[1] https://zap.works/studio [2] https://zap.works/designer [3] https://zap.works/mattercraft

I think one insight (that's maybe not obvious enough on their landing page?) is that their product appears to be multiplayer out of the box (in the same sense that Figma is) which I think you'd agree is a pretty significant value add over your proposal of Unity + Meta simulator.

Yeah, to be fair to Boris ordinary.space looks like a much more appropriate tool for interaction design than Mattercraft, which looks much more like a drag-and-drop tool for building relatively static, single user 3D scenes. Mattercraft also looks to be pretty bloated with random content features (3D Text?) in comparison.

Yes, our company [1] is profitable providing a B2B XR meeting platform used by various heavy industries for different internal and external use cases including product design, high-impact sales and training.

We're in Oil & Gas, Healthcare and Higher Ed amongst others and currently support Quest, HoloLens and Magic Leap.

We (and loads of competitors) are growing at a steady pace, the numbers probably wouldn't excite a VC associate, but there's more to life and business than that.

[1] https://fracturereality.io/

You definitely should blame the contractors.

It's become very clear as the public enquiry has progressed [1] that Fujitsu were:

- aware of several bugs - including ones they'd fully understood the cause and mechanics of - that would induce double-counting of transactions

- aware that criminal prosecutions were underway against users of the system in which just such double-counted transactions would clearly have had a material impact on the case and the evidence aduced

- failed to raise the above in a timely manner, either to the Post Office who had directly requested audit logs, to external auditors, or to the justice system itself

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/17/post-office-...

"15 Years _to life_"

To be fair, neither of the two organisations responsible for Horizon over the period in question - Fujitsu Services, formerly ICL Pathway - in any way resemble your pastiche of "YC Offspring" startups.

Indeed, they were the exact opposite: huge multinationals with presumably gigantic legal, infosec and HR policy departments who could probably jump through the various compliance hurdles required by this procurement process in their sleep.

By comparison the startups you're complaining about usually take years to reach sufficient maturity to take part in large public sector procurement processes like this.

Clearly in this case maturity and scale were not a bulwark against incompetence, opacity and mendacity. Indeed the opposite - as I type this the Post Office's lawyers Herbert Smith Freehills are making mealy mouthed justifications for witholding reams of technical evidence from the public enquiry for months. It's disgusting, and as someone running a small business and endlessly having to justify our commitment to information security, data privacy and transparency I find the hypocrisy infuriating.

Everything is not 2D. Most of the first-party apps they've showcased are, but both the launch event and subsequent videos + documentation have shown full 3D capabilities, both in VR and MR mode of operation for both first- and third-party apps (including full build support in the Unity engine, meaning a huge number of existing VR + MR apps will be deployable on to AVP relatively quickly if developers choose to invest in porting).

HoloLens was commercially released in 2016 and its successor, the HoloLens 2 in 2019, the latter of which is still available.

And the Google Glass (not 'glasses') would not have allowed 3D in any true sense as it lacked the capability to calculate the user's head pose in space, necessary for 3- or 6-DoF tracking. It was essentially a heads up display attached to your face.

+1 for Nand to Tetris.

As someone who came to computing through high level software and a little later than many (I wasn't dismantling appliances at age 5 like you hear in a lot of people's origin stories) this was a really empowering ground-up introduction to hardware architecture.

One of the few Coursera courses [1] I actually finished and found rewarding, challenging and fun throughout.

1. https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer

I would point you (and anyone else asking similar questions) to the article I linked above as it's well written and definitely better informed than I am.

Briefly, it sounds like the dataset is not copyrighted, but is also no longer publicly accessible. The artifacts produced from it (the 360 VR app, and this fly-through video) are copyrighted, proprietary products being marketed to schools, for profit.

I'm definitely not opposed to the use of open access data sets in creating commercial products, I think that's a great idea and I've done it myself in the past. But it does seem a shame in this case that the people doing the commercialising haven't done a great job of acknowledging others who've done the really hard work of creating the assets in the first place.

Something seemed fishy about this as soon as I started reading the About page. A little digging turned up this great bit of reporting from HyperAllergic from January 2019: https://hyperallergic.com/480239/a-virtual-reality-app-that-....

EDIT for tl;dr purposes: the models and textures have almost entirely been developed through public funding over a 20 year period but have recently been trademarked by Bernie Frischer Consulting (AKA Flyover Zone Productions) which this website is serving as a shop window for. Seems pretty sleazy and a bit of a shame to me as: 1) it's a great if slightly patchy resource which sounds like it really should be under public access somehow; 2) a couple of hours in the hands of a decent 3D artist to setup lighting and cameras correctly would do this model so much more justice.