Meta Platforms. X Corp. tell me those aren’t straight from a strangely prescient cyberpunk classic
I’m just waiting for Omni Consumer Products (OCP) to open in Detroit.
Omni is actually a Swedish news aggregator. They just need to expand and change a bit.
Corporate Consumer Products already makes everything in China… hmm
Don’t forget Truth Social. Straight out of ministry of truth.
And Taco Bell already exists so there’s that
u/Wogi has been fined three credits for violation of the verbal decency act.
Oh good, I needed some toilet paper. This three shells thing is bullshit.
That’s not new, it’s just new to English. I lot of Soviet countries had pravda.
Especially when their main selling point is that they don’t do fact checking.
I still think it’s hilarious that Facebook renamed to Meta, and anything they did with the “metaverse” was a huge failure. It’s like they didn’t learn their lesson from Second Life.
Second Life isn’t owned by Meta. And just by the amount of money Second Life earned, and somehow still earns to this day, it was a pretty huge success. The only real success in the “virtual world” field. It’s not surprising somebody else would try to emulate that success.
They don’t own it, that means they can’t know about it?
Why would they learn from a mistake that wasn’t even a mistake and wasn’t theirs to begin with? Like, what is the point you are trying to make?
I think the confusion begins with your statement that Meta didn’t “learn their lesson from Second Life.” What’s the lesson they should have learned? Why should Meta have learned a lesson from something they didn’t own?
The big lesson from Second Life to me is that it’s a novelty for 95% of potential users, and a fixation for a few true believers.
VR and AR are in that era of radio in the 1920s, or personal computers in 1977. They’re interesting, people might gawk at one for a little while if given access to it, but right now, the long-term audience is going to be primarily enthusiasts who are passionate about the technology for its own sake.
We’re still waiting for a lot of details to snap into place to make it broadly appealing:
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The hardware and setup needs to be turnkey. Newer kit is getting a lot closer, but I think it’s going to be hard because you have to factor in things like “setting up a wide enough floor space to avoid injuring yourself when using it” and “we haven’t really resolved that this gives a fair number of people violent sickness”
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There need to be killer apps. Some of the VR experiences seem like they’d be fun, but eventually exhausting. It’s sort of like the motion control (Wii/Kinect/PSMove) trend-- people enjoyed them, but it seemed like it burnt through quickly, rather than becoming a core part of new gaming experiences going forward.
AR likely has an easier road to “killer app” because it can be applied to a bunch of vertical use cases; I’m picturing a fry-cook with a heads-up display that tracks how long each patty has been on the grille and its internal temperature, for example. Even if mainstream consumers never buy AR gear, there might be a million devices sold to businesses. Makes me think of Windows CE; the consumer launch was muted, but it was on a billion scanner-oriented devices for years.
“There need to be killer apps” you say, but have you looked at the VR titles on Steam etc?
There are already a lot of fantastic VR games. Touristy cities even have VR gaming arcades where you can pay high prices to play on their VR kits.
The main barrier to wider adoption is the high price for good VR equipment, and the runner up is probably the complexity of setting up and using the systems. So yes that’s similar to PCs in the early days, maybe like the 90s were with PCs and the Internet.
While there may be good apps, I tend to define “Killer App” as a specific program that people not already in the ecosystem will explicitly buy into a hardware platform to run. The classic being VisiCalc for the Apple II and Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC. On the gaming side, think about how many millions of Game Boys were sold so people could play Tetris; one suspects a significant number never saw another cartridge in their life. Or, perhaps less hyperbolically, Halo got a lot of people onto the Xbox platform, and FF7 did the same for the Playstation.
Does any VR title have the same degree of wide awareness and demand those programs had at their peak?
I could imagine someone trying to force the hand by moving a beloved franchise into VR-- imagine if the next Dragon Quest was VR-only, for example, and people who buy everything with that cute blue slime on it would also buy cute-blue-slime shape headsets. Meta has the resources to buy such a situation into existence, but it might not be what they’re after because it’s likely to still be only a narrow draw-- they’re used to building a platform for All The People, not just the audience who followed a single beloved franchise over.
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They should have learned a lesson from Second Life. It was so much graphically better, more sophisticated and immersive even in 2d .
Users had a world where they could build, interact, buy land, make, buy, sell items and art, go to concerts, have virtual sex, attend classes, build a castle , explore, etc, etc. It would have been awesome in 3d.
This was like 20 years ago! Meta had such an opportunity there but instead had half avatars and chat rooms. It sucked.
A lot of it comes down to the Quest processors as they are just not very powerful. It had to be backwards comparable with the 835 Snapdragon processor form the Quest 1 and that is a 2016 processor. Makes senses it was so basic as they wanted to have many avatars on screen at once so things had the get cut…like legs. Ahahahaha.
I am not defending Meta, but just stating the facts and one of those facts is Zuck has said this is a long game and that it will be at least a decade before the Metaverse becomes something half compelling. I agree with that assessment. It is just not there today, but it will be.
Pretty much. Welcome to the fucking future I guess. There’s no flying cars and green cities and happiness or bloody universal healthcare, instead we have corpos trying to turn us into their consumer slaves and governments turning authoritarian. Just do what you’re told and buy more. Don’t ask questions don’t think just browse TikTok, improve your social credit score, and imprint more ads into your psyche until WW3.
We’re walking into hell with our eyes wide open fuck me it hurts.
I read this with the voice of Johnny Silverhand
Who is just another product of a shitty corporation
or bloody universal healthcare
I guess it depends on where you live. It’s not true of the whole world.
Murica. Yeehaw.
It’s definitely not all the utopia some thought it would be, but it’s also definitely a lot better than the dystopia some predicted. Also, I personally prefer the internet to flying cars.
There are flying quadcopter taxis testing in Dubai
The only thing really keeping them from flying rich people in from their gated community and landing in the street in front of a restaurant is regulation.
With better battery life they’d be more flexible, but they’re already technically capable, and compact enough.
Also when you try to speak against all this shit people ridicule you and ignore you. If they cant do that easily then its always just apathy and “it is what it is” whining.
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My first ISP in the late 90s was Skynet Online.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(satellite)
The UK already owns it. I’m pretty sure Terminator takes the name from the UK military satellite network. And SpaceX has launched Skynet satellites for them before so there is probably some agreement.
The NSA also already has a surveillance program named SKYNET, which uses machine learning. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKYNET_(surveillance_program)
That one I’m pretty sure was named after the Terminator program.
Those names were always parodying the names of actual corporations. I’m pretty sure Weyland Yutani is basically supposed to be like Lockheed Mitsubishi
Normal people reading dystopian fiction: “wow, the author really portrayed well the downfall of humanity if we were to go down the wrong path”
Billionaires reading dystopian fiction: “hey, you know what…”
When runaway capitalism is the norm and all the shareholders care about is that bottomline, then they will lean into the dystopia and be blatant about it when nobody is stopping them laughing all the way to the bank.
When Weyland corp announce a merger with Yutani industries it’s time to worry.
Or when Arisaka starts moving in on Militech turf.
Ngl I wouldn’t mind being chromed
That’s the worst part, we’re rapidly approaching the corporate dystopia of cyberpunk, without any of the crazy drugs or body mods.
Give me gorilla arms, damnit
I just want to live forever as a semi-coherent cloud of nanites. Is that really too much to ask?
We’ve got the crazy drugs and body mods coming, don’t you worry. Haven’t you seen the videos of people who make designer prosthetics and robotic hands for themselves?
Soon somebody’s gonna put roller skates in their feet and then it’s all over. That’s how you’ll know it’s the singularity.
Realistically speaking, we really need to start differenciating between restoring human functions (like artificial eye for the blind) and enhancements augmenting abilities normal human limits (that same eye having x-ray and nightvision).
Restoring functions, at least, should be treated as universal medicine and healthcare and be available for whoever needs it.
That requires defining normal function which is mega dangerous. Especially as we move away from default humanity.
Hope you don’t mind being billed for the whole surgery, including amputation of limbs you never asked for in the first place. Shiny stuff with soul crushing debt - sounds like American colleges.
I never asked for this. Wrong game, I know :)
Mankind Divided had a very abrupt cliffhanger. Adam needs a proper closure to his story.
I always thought this for the financial market: Standard & Poor
Moody
The Fed (as in, the past tense of feed)
fannie mae and freddie mac have this distinct dystopyian taste to me
Waiting for Weyland-Yutani…
building better worlds
Union Aerospace
Time Warner
DisnATTTimeWarner?
Gesundheit.
You want a trip down “is this a cyberpunk dystopia company” name, go check out the data brokers on the data broker registries in Vermont and California.
Acxiom, Experian, TransUnion, Oracle Data Cloud, CoreLogic, Axle, Equifax, Foursquare Labs, Inc., OnAudience, Nielsen, … … … …
California itself has about 517
There’s also E Corp from Mr. Robot.
And the characters called it evil corp anyways so it might as well have been the name.
Not exactly, most of the characters seem to call the company E Corp but the main character (who’s also the narrator) “corrects it” in his head.
I find it amusing how nobody noticed when Valve changed their name to Valve Corporation ages ago, and people keep referring to it as Valve Software.
Yea, X Corps definitely becomes the manufacturer of the protein bar machines on snowpiercer
And lab-grown artificiel pet snakes as in Blade Runner
