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Meta Myths

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Re: Meta Myths

#191

Post by JetSpiegel »

paxys wrote: post #164
hintymad wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The All-In hosts gave a reasonable comment: Meta may well get a leap in humanity, but it should at least show incremental progress to the investors given such a huge quarterly investment.

In terms of pure technology there has been a crazy amount of incremental progress in the area. We have gone from the first kickstarter for Oculus (when VR was just a sci-fi dream) to the release of Quest Pro and games like Half-Life: Alyx in under a decade. Of course shareholders really want to count actual monetary returns as progress, and it's the job of the CEO to decide whether prioritizing short term gains is ac…

> the first kickstarter for Oculus (when VR was just a sci-fi dream)

What? Virtual Boy was released almost 30 years ago, that's a consumer product that sold in the same ballpark as the Oculus Rift.

Re: Meta Myths

#192

Post by baby »

karmakaze wrote: post #158
hintymad wrote: post #44

The All-In Podcast had a chart ( https://youtu.be/A-bIpJdaCnM?t=2126 ) that compared the Meta's investment on VR with the investment that changed human history in the past, all inflation adjusted. It's pretty interesting. iPhone: $3.6B, Tesla: $25B, Boeing: $32B, Apollo: $253B. And Meta's Reality Lab: $4B a quarter !

I can't comment on how that 4B/quarter is being spent. However the Quest 2 has been the biggest success in VR to date. Why couldn't some of those billions have been spent on getting a Quest 3 ready for sale for Fall/Xmas 2022? It would be like Apple not releasing new iPhones level of missed opportunity. Or perhaps it's a huge selfish gamble thinking, let's get our product perfected before everyone realizes how big th…

Yeah, I don’t understand why there was not a quest 3. My guess is that they wanted to launch a good entreprise headset and focused on that.

Re: Meta Myths

#193

Post by baby »

dont__panic wrote: post #69

Myth 1: Users Are Deserting Facebook ..The problem with this narrative is that Meta is still adding users: the company is up to 2.93 billion Daily Active Users (DAUs), an increase of 50 million, and 3.71 billion Monthly Active Users (MAUs), an increase of 60 million.. I've been wondering about this for a while now: who are these people who are still using Facebook every day? All of my family has reduced facebook usag…

People in other countries. Also me and my friends.

Re: Meta Myths

#194

Post by aj12ay »

pascalxus wrote: post #184
deckard1 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, it's a bit weird that Marques Brownlee recently gave a better presentation on Meta/Metaverse than what Zuckerberg cooked up. But I think that's the intent. Because when you lay out Meta's strategy so naked, like Marques did, then you realize that no one is going to buy into it. You need early adopters and those are the ones that are going to sniff out that you're actually building a dystopian privacy-invading S…

Yeah, the zoom replacement looks really cool. Butt... The biggest problem I have doing zoom calls with family is an unstable internet connection at their end and I don't think the metaverse is going to be able to solve that. And besides, I'm certainly not going to pay 500$ for a headset just for Awesome VR calls, if i can just use a phone call. The biggest potential is being able to work remotely. Just imagine all th…

Ok, something I’ve thought about is the Metaverse version of video calls couuuuld require less bandwidth than video calls. Because you don’t have to send every frame — instead it’s the one time cost of a model, and then animations data + voice streaming.

And, maybe you can interpolate better since the domain space is human activity instead of an arbitrary video.

Re: Meta Myths

#195

Post by saltythrowaway »

dom96 wrote: post #167
saltythrowaway wrote: post #26

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I joined to work on meta ads semi-recently. My thinking was that they were under invested in techniques I knew were successful from my time at Google. What I found was a lot of smart people who knew they were under invested and we're capable of closing the gap, but the infrastructure they sat upon was too hard to use to do anything different, and management that rewarded the appearance…

> The result was a lot of config changes making noise in metrics that could be read positively, without implementing the state of the art systems that took a year before you could write a fancy success workplace post about it. That would risk poor performance reviews and the shuffling of reasources away from your team as a result. Meta has recently switched to a performance review cycle of 1 year (from 6 months). It…

I think the actual issue is the underlying culture. Google worked fine with multiple review cycles and you could get a good rating working on something hard that only shipped when it was ready.

However it is an optimistic sign in that leadership must get that part of the problem (long term vision is penalized) and is taking steps to address it. Maybe I judged them too harshly above; I don't know what I would do in their position to turn the ship around.

Re: Meta Myths

#196

Post by danuker »

ramesh31 wrote: post #49

I've really softened on Zuck in the last couple years. The Metaverse stuff looks stupid from the outside, but all else considered, isn't this exactly what we've been asking for out of FAANG for the last ten years? To put all of these insane resources into something that at least could be a cool future to live in? I was the biggest skeptic on earth when they bought Oculus, and assumed it was the death of VR. But they'…

As long as the VR that Zuck is building is just another walled garden, I am not at all interested.

Why wouldn't I play Minetest, OpenTTD, or whatever other social videogame for which I can host a server myself?

I see little value in artificial scarcity coupled with complete surveillance, and awkward and expensive hardware requirements.

Re: Meta Myths

#197

Post by MarkMc »

hintymad wrote: post #44

The All-In Podcast had a chart ( https://youtu.be/A-bIpJdaCnM?t=2126 ) that compared the Meta's investment on VR with the investment that changed human history in the past, all inflation adjusted. It's pretty interesting. iPhone: $3.6B, Tesla: $25B, Boeing: $32B, Apollo: $253B. And Meta's Reality Lab: $4B a quarter !

The Apollo space program had almost no effect on human history

Re: Meta Myths

#198

Post by majani »

JoeJonathan wrote: post #182
nicolashahn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the "metaverse" needs to succeed as much as the hardware does. A set of AR glasses that aren't bulky or sci-fi enables a huge amount of brand new functionality, on maybe even more than smartphones did. In that case, if Meta has the best option on the market, it doesn't need to write the killer app, someone else can do it, just like the App Store enabled iPhone developers to do. I'm less optimistic on th…

Not sure if the technology will get there, but I can see AR being much more useful. I don’t want to cut myself off from the outside world, but I’d love to be able to put on a pair of glasses that allow me to use a giant monitor without needing an actual monitor. Or a home theater. For me, something as simple (though it’s probably technically complex) as a high resolution screen coupled with AirPods for watching movie…

Glasses will simply never be cool outside of some niche communities. They are a sign of disability and weakness for most people

Re: Meta Myths

#199

Post by scarface74 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #105
tejohnso wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> vertical integration has advantages and disadvantages. Which Jobs acknowledged in his 1997 WWDC talk before becoming CEO (again). There's an execution burden with integration and it has to be overcome with solid execution.

It isn't just "execution" -- it's choosing what you ought to build in house now, and what's better to just buy. Building the processor in house probably IS a good call. In Jobs' day, even he didn't build the processor. But nowadays, things are different.

Apple started acquiring companies with chip design expertise while Jobs was the CTO. The first processor that had some custom design by Apple was the A4 which was used in the 2010 first generation iPad and iPhone 4.

I can’t believe that Apple wasn’t working on the first 64 bit in house ARM chip by the time SJ resigned in 2011 that was introduced with the 5s in 2013.

Re: Meta Myths

#200

Post by scarface74 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #119
naravara wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has clearly had difficulties scaling its company to maintain this sort of integration though. They're not bad enough to materially harm it, but you can see the seams. Nothing hides problems like success so I suspect, if Apple does start to founder in the next decade, we'll look back and blame the nest of internal dependencies they have leading them to fall behind peers using off-the-shelf parts.

Like I said: tough tradeoffs. Maybe now you can't easily access a ginormous cloud of AI-optimized processors (I don't actually know this is true, by the way. Anyone?). A few years from now, maybe some large player will offer that, and Facebook / Google will be stuck with these big investments while their little competitors just pay for what they use. I'm not taking a position one way or the other; just saying that it…

The major cloud providers already offer instances with GPUs. Google is one of the three.

And before anyone says that AWS was an offshoot of Amazon Retails excess capacity, this is an urban myth. AWS was always a separate product with separate servers just for selling to customers.

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