unicorn_cowboy

Someone make a Jeeves chatbot where he opines about missing the good ol' days of assisting curious strangers on the world wide web.

This is their recent acquisition (producer.ai) rebranded.

Before the purchase, the quality of generations had been going down for a while (IMO; subjective and anecdotal). I tested multiple iterations of their chat interface and was never thrilled with its ability to actually understand or adhere to prompts. I had liked their previous (Suno/Udio-like) iteration (Riffusion).

Curious to hear how it performs for people now and whether anything has improved.

• Not just a Meta failure: 70+ years of VR history (including Microsoft’s Hololens flops and Apple’s Vision Pro stagnation) shows every major player slammed into the exact same wall: betting billions on “inevitable” infrastructure instead of experiences that actually answer “why VR?”

• The metaverse was never inevitable: Horizon Worlds peaked at 300k MAUs, cratered below 1k DAUs, and is now shutting down. Meta burned $73B building ghost towns; the real survivors (Beat Saber: $255M revenue, VRChat: 150k+ concurrent) succeeded by giving users embodied activities and emotional hooks, not empty virtual offices.

• Hardware wasn’t the problem: Quest 3 is cheap, comfortable, and capable. The comprehensive crash happened because giants chased AAA ports and productivity tools while ignoring what actually retains users: presence + community + meaning.

• Management-school case study, updated: The $70B lesson isn’t “VR died.” It’s that corporate metaverse bets failed exactly where indies and niches thrived.

Full breakdown of what works (and why the giants missed it) here: https://linernotesxr.substack.com/p/what-works-in-vr-lessons...

Here's a starter pack of resources:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-holographic-unive...

https://www.essentiafoundation.org/

https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/

Be advised this is not something that can be understood through intellectualization. At some point you have to put down the books and seek out the experience.

It's missing the forest for the trees.

Materialism is not fundamental; consciousness is. This assumes materialism as fundamental.

Yeah, please leave the cultural analysis to anthropologists, sociologists, etc. The engineering-focused materialist way of looking at stuff like this makes my head and heart hurt.

You can also use this to set yourself up for success at the end of the day by closing/zero-ing out everything, and then just starting the first thing you need to do the next day. Then when you start work the next day, you've already got a feeling of momentum because your space is clear, your focus is set, and you've already started the task.

This author is a psycho. In a good way.

Can you elaborate?

SaaS is very much not my area of expertise, but this makes sense to me: https://x.com/DavidOndrej1/status/2019126831761572169

TLDR excerpt: - Top layer — the AI agent. The thing that actually executes the work. - Middle layer — the SaaS UI. The dashboards, the workflows, the buttons you click. - Bottom layer — systems of record. The databases, CRMs, and ERPs that store the real data.

Right now, value is getting sucked upward into the agent layer and downward into the data layer. Everything in the thin middle gets crushed.

It's fun to live out 90s hacker fantasies.

types furiously

[ACCESS DENIED]

types double furiously

[ACCESS GRANTED]

dramatic turn to camera

"I'm in."

Can someone explain the actual use cases for this that folks are excited about?

Nobody wants to be responsible for writing the film they're watching, as they watch it. Nobody wants to engage with a virtual world that has no story, narrative, meaning, purpose.

What is the actual use case for this, once we move beyond the tech demo stage?

The idea it will wholesale replace existing 3D graphics/rendering pipelines and processes any time soon seems so far-fetched to me (even just logistically) that I can't wrap my head around what people are thinking here.

This strikes me as a fancy parlor trick. Unless I'm mistaken, we need proper world models to do the things people are erroneously assuming this to be capable of one day.

Very cute and charming!

I wish they would simulate the extremely slow load times to make it feel time-period accurate. You were waiting multiple seconds for images to appear before you even had any idea what you were looking at.

That’s a fair point. Reality Labs covers AR (Orion), neural interfaces, and the Ray-Ban partnership too.

But the 'Metaverse' was the governing thesis that justified that entire strategy and burn rate. Even if the breakdown is 50/50, we still have tens of billions spent on a VR software ecosystem (Horizon) that's nearly empty.

The specific dollar amount matters less than the ratio of 'capital invested' to 'consumer value created'. And there's a big gap between those.

Key Points:

• Meta lost $73B proving that infrastructure without purpose creates ghost towns.

• Hardware friction is a myth: History shows users tolerate massive friction (early smartphones) if the value is clear.

• Beat Saber & VRChat succeeded not because of tech, but because they solved for "embodied meaning" rather than simulation.

• It's time to stop porting 2D concepts to 3D and start building for presence.