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The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

ericlippert.com

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Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#401

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #399
lozenge wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the common opinion is that nobody will want or use the metaverse. Getting paid to build something that nobody will use isn't immoral, it's amoral.

Helping an advertiser trick kids into spending their time in a pupil dilation monitor/retinal scanner so that ads can be optimized for impact based on biometric markers isn't amoral, it's immoral.

I know it's an accepted sci-fi trope and people (including advertisers) genuinely believe it's the future, but advertising doesn't work that way.

When you peel back the layers and figure out how this sausage is made, underneath it's just sociology and broad target audiences. (Age, sex, location, social status.)

Retinal scans don't help solve this problem.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#402

Post by opo »

astrange wrote: post #207
TremendousJudge wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people in the US are vitamin D deficient, it's very cheap, yet it's rare for people to take supplements.

Yes, D+K is the best one to take. D only can lead to heart issues (atherosclerosis), and multivitamins don't really have enough to help here. It doesn't replace getting real sunlight though. Or if you're an Inuit, eating polar bear livers.

>It doesn't replace getting real sunlight though. Or if you're an Inuit, eating polar bear livers.

Not that I expect HN readers to likely end up in a situation where they have to decide whether to eat a polar bear liver, but that is definitely a part of the polar bear that no one should eat:

>...A polar bear’s liver contains an extremely high concentration of vitamin A. This is due to their vitamin A rich diet of fish and seals. The Eskimos have long been wary of eating the polar bear for this reason, but it’s something the early Artic explorers found out the hard way. Ingesting the liver can cause vitamin A poisoning known as acute hypervitaminosis A. This results in vomiting, hair loss, bone damage and even death. So although actually capturing a polar bear may seem life threatening, it turns out that eating its liver is just as deadly.

https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2016/10/04...

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#403

Post by kaashif »

pronlover723 wrote: post #386

> News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles This to me sounds similar to "I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers" ( https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=164a442a-1b90... ). That was wrong or "people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours" ( https://qz.com/593329/choice-quotes-from-a-1985-new-york-tim... ). Looking around the beach and especiall…

> News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles

Cutting that sentence off there paints a slightly different picture from the full sentence:

> News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”.

Plenty of people want to wear VR goggles, but it's hard to see how the metaverse specifically will take off.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#404

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

whakim wrote: post #363
djur wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this a lot, and I'm not sure why people are so confident about it. Lighter, thinner, more durable materials are a huge upsell and focus of ongoing product development in eyeglasses, and that's to save 10 or 20 grams. The lightest VR headsets are still an order of magnitude heavier than eyeglasses. Closing that gap while also addressing the resolution and battery life issues with existing headsets is going to re…

I think it's inevitable in the long run, the question is just whether those breakthroughs come too late for Meta (my guess is they will). The salient point is that given enough time, hardware limitations won't be an obstacle to a metaverse-like something.

I'll just leave a comment here about flying (and self-driving) cars.

Some things aren't waiting for technological innovation.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#405

Post by brundolf »

kelnos wrote: post #264
ericlippert wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point and don't mean to be argumentative, but a couple small corrections. First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years. Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my opinion internally, though I haven't been broadcasting it either. The first thing I said in our team group chat when we'd heard this announcement was (context, I am much older than most people on the team) "…

> Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally. It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it. I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employmen…

Some people work on making the metaverse more addicting, others work on improving instagram's accessibility, others work on abstracted computer science problems that only happen to be under the umbrella of the same corporation that makes Facebook

It's not black and white; there are degrees of separation. You and I participate in an economy that somewhere, many layers down, causes human rights abuses. No ethical consumption under capitalism.

It's impossible to separate completely. Everyone has to pick and choose how many layers of separation (and from what) are needed for them to feel okay about their effect on society. For you or me that might mean we won't work at Facebook or Amazon, but your startup's angel investors aren't angels either. Neither are the companies you buy your devices from, or the banks you lend your savings to.

This isn't to say we shouldn't care, but we shouldn't pretend things are clear-cut, and we should take care throwing rocks at glass houses.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#406

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

dathinab wrote: post #119
a4isms wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the same thing as people say about fires. When you put out a fire you are a hero. When you prevent the fire in the first place, everybody thinks it's business as usual and nobody understands why you are needed. I got a dose of very cold water about this thirty years ago when I was building payware that improved developer productivity. I gave a presentation about its ROI, and afterwards, a developer walked up t…

Ironically this quote also show how broken the US is: It's normal to take pain killers. It should not be. It should be a last resort. You should take what fixes the problem and give your body time to heal not take pain killers and pretend nothing is wrong. Pain killers are addicting, can have an increasingly reduced effect, can have a bunch of side effects and can make the end result much worse by not healing wounds…

It’s important to draw a distinction between narcotic painkillers like opioids and safe painkillers like anti-inflammatories. In general, it’s safe for people to occasionally take certain painkillers for minor pain. In some populations, drugs like aspirin can even extend life when taken daily.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#407

Post by langsoul-com »

lozenge wrote: post #340
kelnos wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally. It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it. I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employmen…

I think the common opinion is that nobody will want or use the metaverse. Getting paid to build something that nobody will use isn't immoral, it's amoral.

They shipped 10 million quest 2's. That ain't nobody.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#408

Post by kqr »

apohn wrote: post #14
snoopy_telex wrote: post #2

Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the metaverse more dollars?

It's possible to have teams that save millions of dollars a year and not be worth it to keep them. For the sake of argument, let's say a statistics team has 5 people. Cost of Employee at FB, including insurance, office space, 401K match, salary, bonuses = 250K/year (probably very conservative). Cost of Data and Software Infrastructure to support them (including people to respond to Infrastructure support tickets), le…

If the company as a whole has an ROI of 10×, then a position with a 4× ROI is actually reducing the marginal profit of the company.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#410

Post by Mikeb85 »

langsoul-com wrote: post #407
lozenge wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the common opinion is that nobody will want or use the metaverse. Getting paid to build something that nobody will use isn't immoral, it's amoral.

They shipped 10 million quest 2's. That ain't nobody.

People are interested in VR for gaming. Not for the metaverse. Zuck should be building a console or something, not wasting time on something no one wants.
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