Fuck AI

Facebooks idea for improving vr was buying out all the major game studios, never doing anything with them, then shutting them down and taking down the servers.

All mean while they tried to push this idea of the "metaverse" which aims to be the place you work, play, watch movies, events, buy fictional property, buy nfts, etc, etc. The biggest failure facebook has seen thus far. Its so pathetic that they changed their name to meta as if they where betting on the idea everyone was going to walk around with a vr headset. Its ironic they didnt quickly change their name back as fast as they gave up on vr for glasses and ai.

The consumer is always right, the ceos are always disillusional to the point of incompetence. The only time it ever works out is when they have a monopoly or enough money to force their inflated egos on the rest of the population, forcing us to go down with them when inevidbily they fall.

Did you not have any experience with reddit? You crossed the hive mind on VR and AI, and you are also getting in the way of a hate train. If a sub or post is about hating someone, that hate has to be pure, unconditional and undistracted.

But to your points: Quest. Agree. Awesome piece of tech; however Mark Zuckerberg tried to turn it into something nobody wanted: an entry into an artificial world where people could live entirely on Facebook's servers. There was so much wrong with the MetaVerse, as conceived, that it takes several YouTube videos to explain all of it, but, as a movie guy, this is my favorite primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLItp5SiRGw

AI: Strongly disagree there is any kind of mass market for AI. Claude, the most heavily used programming LLM, which is the best use case for an LLM's mass adoption, recently tried raising prices to start to turn a profit. People started limiting their tokens or dropping the service entirely.

Another massive chunk of LLM use is people taking their AI-generated content to make a few bucks. A service that costs $4 to make $5 worth of product will naturally see huge adoption! It's not the future if that $4 is heavily subsidized. The instant the actual cost is $5 investment for $5 worth of product, that technology is as dead as aspirin suppositories.

At this point in the game, it's obvious that AI in a bubble driven by insane levels of social and regulatory failure, and Zuckerberg is just getting on the bandwagon to impress his cool billionaire friends.

Apple and Android both followed the same path: Let DIY people do what they want, follow that community let them create wild and free tech on your platforms using your tools for free.

This is how apple started, it's how google started, it's the nature of the early internet and computer companies.

That should give you a clue to what went wrong with the Facebook Phone and Quest. Quest has been against developers for a long time, there's very little support for devs there, because Zuckerberg wanted them to all go make the Metaverse for him (same thing is currently being attempted with Unreal Engine 6 and their metaverse attempt "Verso").

AI simply steals from people and defrauds/denies and lies about it. That's their approach to the DiY, hacker, and FOSS developer ethos that made the internet and cool shit we have possible. All these large companies now think theft and mistreatment of devs and FOSS are the way forward. When it's the way to stagnation and death.

But this time AI companies have automated the theft, and hooked it up to mass proliferation of data centers and deregulated pollution. Killing the planet and the software ecosystem at the same time.

Oculus hardware was the means to make leap into otherwise unattainable dream of Metaverse. Didn't everyone laughed at the idea of everyone binging Facebooks VR Chat for every social interaction and service? But it so happened, that a byproduct of that idea became an affordable VR headset.

Billionaire Bro Zuck literally writes that the goal now is wiring AI, once again, to every our interaction with the world that sounds self-contradictory and delusional even in short quoted paragraphs. Well, if we get some open models out of it, fine, but it's not like we get superb technologies from a space program. We get nice things from the Torment Nexus they still fail to build.

Why does anyone think "listening to the customers" is how capitalist companies make money?

Because it's a surface level. Most businesses in the world provide services where and when they sell organically. It's a given you sell more ice cream somewhere on the beach in warm season. CC wasn't selling riichi mahjong to bored white people, they created a pretty basic timekiller, one in the millions. They outsmarted competition by shiny graphics, addictive mechanics, gambling-like techniques and marketing. That's not what Zuck tries to sell or do in his speech.

He doesn't promote something simple, like CharacterAI selling their sex bot with nsfw ads targeting lonely people. Or Grok being there to make waifus from the girl you liked in highschool targetting X dot com users. Or even Google suggesting it can make this email for you. Mark once again has a convoluted image of everything-app that solves every problem so you as a person can just physically log off, lol. I don't think even the dumbest person in the room feels nothing is off about it. At best, it sounds like a fever dream about something in the future.

If he wasn't looking so goofy, I could've thought he is talking to investors instead. Like, the better example from the past is cloud infrastructure, and while no one with contemporary mobile internet felt it'd work, it worked with enough push and technological advancement - so much for the needy consumer! But to see that you need to be clever and know the time is about now.

He is telling that the end user's gonna be wrapped in their AI services like in a blanket. And while it's safe to place some bets on that, just in case it works out in the end, his history with Metaverse disaster being a very similar thing doesn't infuse long-term trust in his visions. It's okay for Wall Street to gamble with that toy for a while, but he isn't even Musk in that dimension and calls his shots after everyone else when the hype is already down.

His Meta is a behemoth that wouldn't die anytime soon, he's safe to preach and try anything. But instead of generalized bullshit we hoomans certainly need, he may instead start small and sell something we probably want, that ticks at least one box in our list. Like, I've seen a lot of people still using FB for it's marketplace, and I'm sure some LLM agent can be implemented there to consult both consumer and seller. Like the one who looks for generic pictures, duplicates, untrusty deals, weird descriptions etc on the buyer's side. It seems like an obvious thing that compliments his own service, but to know that he needs to use his own service, lol.