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Meta Myths

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Re: Meta Myths

#201

Post by flashgordon »

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'…

Yeah the lemonade I am hoping to see here is this can actually result in hardware commoditazion and accelerate research in a bunch of other areas.

Re: Meta Myths

#202

Post by nr2x »

ChrisClark wrote: post #133
Kye wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has Tesla changed? All it did was show a market for non-garbage electric cars. Other more established companies are running laps around it now. How much of that $25B went to the ever-retreating promises of self-driving?

> Other more established companies are running laps around it now. Huge citation needed. You can't just lie and will it to be true. :D

When was the last time they had a new model? I’m seeing a virtual Cambrian explosion of non-Tesla EVs in the South Bay in just the last year. Bolt and Leaf are the entry level models that make EV accessible. Tesla is still way out of reach for most people, serving a niche audience, and now merging their brand identity in many peoples minds with the toxic soup that is Twitter.

I’m all in on EV, but Tesla blew it by failing to focus on the Bolt and Leaf market. And their SWEs are now apparently spending their time solving twitters HR problems.

Re: Meta Myths

#203

Post by nr2x »

deckard1 wrote: post #104
alerter wrote: post #37

I always wondered if it was a mistake for Facebook to try to rapidly casualise VR after acquiring Oculus. If they spent even a small fraction of their metaverse billions developing high-end, niche products (flight/mech sims etc.) then they could cultivate a loyal base of affluent users. It probably wouldn't be profitable by itself, but it would grow their user base and act as a nice showcase of what VR is capable of.…

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…

To be fair, mkbhd is a genius at what he does.

Re: Meta Myths

#204

Post by nr2x »

nineplay wrote: post #89
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…

> Who are these people who are still using Facebook every day? Me. Most everyone I know. Move from the tech bubble to the suburban parent bubble and I think you'll that nothing is replacing FB anytime soon. The school pages are there, the kid's clubs and activities and team pages are all there. The neighborhood pages are all there, NextDoor exists of course but it tends to be poor imitation of the FB group. I know wh…

I’m in South Bay, no parents or school use FB. Some WhatsApp, but that’s it.

Re: Meta Myths

#205

Post by nr2x »

JoeJonathan wrote: post #183
nineplay wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who are these people who are still using Facebook every day? Me. Most everyone I know. Move from the tech bubble to the suburban parent bubble and I think you'll that nothing is replacing FB anytime soon. The school pages are there, the kid's clubs and activities and team pages are all there. The neighborhood pages are all there, NextDoor exists of course but it tends to be poor imitation of the FB group. I know wh…

I’m glad you pointed out that Reddit gets a free pass. Aside from the fact that r/TheDonald flourished there, r/all regularly shows videos of people dying and men smacking women (r/pussypassdenied). There’s also a weird, self-congratulatory sense of community that leads to mob politics and pile ons in a way distinct from Facebook and Twitter. I think it means something that people identify as redditors, and not, say,…

Good for niche topics though, you can build a pretty nice feed and avoid the front page mess.

Re: Meta Myths

#206

Post by nr2x »

dont__panic wrote: post #81
ernestipark wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we have to adjust our understanding of what 'using' Facebook means. Despite its flaws FB has done a good job of layering useful products on top of the social network despite the original purpose of Facebook seemingly losing popularity. In my circles, the typical news feed and posting updates part of Facebook is pretty much dead, and I never use those features personally anymore. BUT Marketplace, Messenger, an…

Interesting point. I also found this passage intriguing: The problem with this line of reasoning is that Meta’s capital expenditures are directly focused on both of the two main reasons for alarm: TikTok and ATT. That is because the answer to both challenges is more AI, and building up AI capacity requires a lot of capital investment. This makes it clear that Facebook/Meta's overlords don't think of these products as…

And yet viagra spam still exists. If the distribution cost approaches zero you can still find that 0.00000001% of hopeless idiots.

Re: Meta Myths

#207

Post by onepointsixC »

baby wrote: post #192
karmakaze wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There will be one, it's just still hasn't launched yet.

Re: Meta Myths

#208

Post by karmakaze »

andybak wrote: post #187
squeaky-clean wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the meta quest pro which released last week, but the tech for something in the same price range as the Quest 2 but better probably isn't a thing yet. The Quest 2 did have a $100 price increase 6 months ago.

Carmack was arguing for a cheaper, lighter headset instead of the Quest Pro: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/10/carmack-wants-a-250-v... > As a "counterpoint" to the push for the Quest Pro in the Meta offices, Carmack says he "personally still [tries] to drum up interest internally in this vision of a super cheap, super lightweight headset." His rallying cry, he says, is a target of "$250 and 250 grams" for a hea…

This reminds me of the Woz/Jobs divergence--Apple under Jobs did well.

Without experiencing Project Cambria/Quest Pro, I can still imagine the hard-to-believe-it's-not-real feeling of presence with the incremental improvements + real-time facial expressions. That does seem important to be able to demonstrate. I haven't as yet heard reviews that express this though.

Re: Meta Myths

#209

Post by tomaskafka »

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 !

> iPhone: $3.6B

Is that an amount to create an initial iPhone? While it was awesome, if it stayed like that, it wouldn't change the industry. It would seem fair to add up all the R&D costs that went into getting iPhone to where it is today, which will be much higher.

Dtto Tesla. For Apollo, we know the total.

Re: Meta Myths

#210

Post by tomaskafka »

saltythrowaway wrote: post #107
eachro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you're allowed to say, what sort of techniques from google are they underinvested in?

Embedding-similarity based retrieval for one. Probably shouldn't get into the details here but Google has made incredible advances in the retrieval step of your typical retrieval / ranking pipeline and for a variety of reasons meta has not implemented them in production, despite having open sourced tools in this area. There are a few other advances like this Google has been using for long enough to publish on, meta e…

Oh, I have a similar story from a local country-leading job portal. I tried to persuade them to invest in embedding-based search instead of the category (which is often wrong and ambiguous by both advertisers and searchers) + keywords, but '2 people for 1 quarter to demonstrate a prototype able to be tested in production' seemed too risky for the management, despite having really cool results from the offline prototype :/.

The risk of missed opportunity is harder to visualize and thus rarely considered.

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