If you're interested, Folding Ideas did a video essay covering the metaverse and why it never really took off, that's really well done. However the main bullet points:
* Text is the bedrock of basically any content online and text is uniquely difficult to convey in a VR setting without being annoying. It either ends up just floating in space or you have to attach it to objects or you anchor it to a HUD, and a HUD has its own cavalcade of issues in VR around motion sickness. The most successful VR applications, paradoxically, involve the least text they can manage.
* In order to make things accessible to a wide market the applications have to be incredibly simple, to run well on bad hardware, which is uniquely difficult with a 3D space you have to render twice while maintaining high enough FPS to not give people motion sickness
* Most often any CTA in the environment would simply load a web browser, because you couldn't actually... like, buy a product in VR. You were redirected to an amazon listing or shopify website.
* And that's before you get to maintenance. Any intern can update a website. A VR space requires either a dedicated dev budget or accepting whatever janky building tools the platform ships with, which have never once been good enough to build anything actually worth visiting.
* Putting all that aside, there seems to be a substantial slice of humanity who just are not compatible with the tech. I myself enjoy it regularly, I had some issues with motion sickness early on, but toughing it out for awhile got me my "VR legs" as it were and it hasn't been an issue, but I've heard all kinds of things where people's physiology just rejects the headsets.
Overall I think it's just far better as a niche gaming thing and the only reason Facebook and others went so hard into the metaverse was to hopefully recreate the birth of the Internet, and to become landlords of a new digital frontier. And for that, fuck em.
You also have to be "all in", so to speak, in order to participate. I can window or minimize a screen on a PC. I can pause a game on a console. I'm immediately aware of my surroundings in both cases. With a VR headset, I have to physically remove the headset before I see where I am within physical space.
It feels so silly expressing this, but the act of putting on a headset that completely engulfs my vision with screens, even if my space is already clear with a boundary, feels like a much bigger commitment than opening Steam. It doesn't matter if I'm standing for room scale or if I'm already seated with the headset next to me. Both cases feel like extra effort for a lesser experience.
I mean, I'm fine with datacenters plugging into the grid, if they pay for it. I don't understand (and I mean feel free to explain it) this weird shit where a datacenter goes up and everybody's power bills start increasing. I have assumed that it's because the grid's facilities require upgrades to meet the new demand, but in the case of the "new demand" being "one structure consuming an assload of power" it feels incredibly shitty to lay that burden on the taxpayers.
It's due to lack of investment in the power grid on a generational timeline. We used up every bit of slack and extra capacity in the name of efficiency and not needing to spend the money on building stuff.
It's also nearly impossible to build large-scale things like long distance transmission lines - so even stuff like solar fields and wind farms are difficult to make pencil out these days. You are talking a decade or more to get anything big done, if you are lucky.
We ran out of parlour tricks like trying to game efficiency and curtail residential usage. We also ran out of industry to offshore. This was coming for us either way, just AI datacenter buildouts were unexpected and pulled demand forward some odd number of years.
I was always planning on building an off-grid power setup for exactly this reason - the writing was on the wall decades ago. It just came a bit sooner than I expected!
A large industrial scale power user that operates at roughly the same base power load 24x7 is an absolute dream customer for a grid operator. The fact we can't make the perfect customer profile pencil out without raising rates should be a giant huge red flashing warning sign with bells going off to everyone. Heck, these facilities can even typically participate in demand shedding programs on top of being ideal.
We've been living off the cheap power our grandparents invested in building for us. Time has come to pay the piper.
A lot of the increase in bills people are seeing come from necessary upgrades to the distribution infrastructure. Something that was going to be happening anyway.
Ideally, the revenue from the new customer would be enough to cover the upgrades, so long as the new customer makes an up-front committment (from which loans can be written) that makes their risk (of having to pay for the upgrades even if they shut down much sooner than expected) about equal to if they build out their own off-grid system. And then they could sell to existing customers for slightly less than before, due to scale and an overall reduction of peak-to-baseline ratio.
As you say, it's because the connection between the increased load and the factors requiring additional spending are at enough of a distance that they're hard to account for. If the datacenter operator argues (often with support from the power company, who has to convince government officials their rate increase is OK) that most of the grid upgrades were going to happen regardless and they've already paid for the increase fairly attributed to their operations, how can you really know whether that's true?
Power doesn’t just apperate out of thin air. It has to be generated and that has costs. If suddenly the grid draws more power then more costly sources have to feed it. Everyone pays for the same power.
The big consumer also buys in bulk and negotiates better rates etc.
There's also the supply/demand aspect of it. Some electricity is cheaper to provide than others - the cheapest is the renewable or nuclear that's already built in the area, but when demand is high, the grid provider will source electricity from more expensive sources - coal, natural gas, or importing it from neighboring utilities. So, using some made-up numbers, if your existing cost for 100MW is $0.10/Wh, getting the next 100MW might cost $0.50/Wh, bumping the cost for everyone up to $0.30/Wh.
Oh they know, but it's requested because clients want a fancy website, and just having fucking text on the fucking screen explaining what you fucking sell is boooooring.
And also completely functional and accessible but where's the fun in that?
I'm trying to be the change I want to see in the world by offering IT services in my local area, and I'm getting a good amount of traction. Might need to take on a second person soon. Turns out small business owners especially have a lot on their plate, and if you're tired of their WiFi sucking ass, odds are, they are too, and if you offer to fix it for a reasonable price, they'll pay you.
Hell I unfucked a local place's WiFi for the cost of a free meal for my wife and I because I couldn't browse Imgur whilst eating lol
I mean, as much as I don't want the Government to be able to do that, I don't want private industry to be able to do that even more tbh. Though both options are pretty horrendous privacy-wise.
Until recently I felt the opposite way -- what they could do with that was more targeted advertising. The government currently in power is demonstrating that they can do far worse, and plans to.
I'm reminded of a video essay I watched about AI once, which took a side tangent into surveillance capitalism:
"Google's data harvesting operation became a load bearing piece of the Internet before the public understood digital privacy. And now we can't get rid of it."
The public has been conditioned to expect web services free at point of use. Legitimately it's hard to monetize things like YouTube without ads, and I get that. But turning our entire ecosystem of tech into a massive surveillance mini-state seems like an astonishingly shitty idea compared to just... finding a way to do advertising that DOESN'T involve 30 shadowy ad companies knowing your resting blood pressure. My otherwise creative and amazing industry seems utterly unwilling to confront this.
Edit: Like, I don't know, am I crazy for thinking that simply because we can target ads this granularity, that it simply must be that? I get that the ad-tech companies do not want to go back to blind-firing ads into the digital ether on the hope that they'll be seen, but that's also plus or minus the entirety of the history of advertising as an industry, with the last 20 or so years being a weird blip where you could show your add to INCREDIBLY specific demographics. And I wouldn't give a shit except the tech permitting those functions seems to be socially corrosive and is requiring even further erosion of already pretty porous user privacy to keep being legally tenable.
Society won’t delay reward now for future good on its own. Even if one person will, there’s a line of people who will step in to pollute the lake or kill the whales for a bag of money.
It will just decay until it’s a short squeeze into oligarchy or worse (the corrupt will be forced into an arms race of accelerating corruption as opportunity becomes scarce). Then some other country who isn’t leaving it up to their society to do the right thing will be in charge. Until the same happens to them.
This is the value of religion historically, one of the few ways of coercing a population into doing the right thing for their own good. But every group can be spoiled or hijacked by a small handful of bad actors who are willing to do what others are not.
Admittedly, am layman, have only heard numerous sciencey folks talk about it, but we've found all these basic components in space already, naturally occurring, and while we've never to my knowledge recreated actual, genuine abiogenesis, we have observed every process required for abiogenesis to be a reasonable explanation for the origin of life.
As to your question on we should see the formation of new life everywhere, well, if we looked hard enough we might? The answer is competitive exclusion. Abiogenesis would've occurred on a remarkably clean earth: any life now emerging from the proverbial space dust is both almost certainly not preconfigured for this biosphere, and is instantly drowning in competing microorganisms that are. Anything that does form is likely quickly killed either by natural forces or competing organisms. Meanwhile, our life goes everywhere: We've found living bacteria on the outside of the ISS!
> I'm sorry but how does that story not smells like complete bullshit to anyone reading this?
Because it strokes the anti-establishment anti-intellectual and anti-bureaucracy zones all at once, and a lot of nerds (with love) are contrarians. Us software guys like nothing better than a story about how a smart ass with a computer undid a problem seemingly created by institutions out of whole cloth.
You know if we're gonna pass laws to make it illegal for the government to interfere with the Torment Nexus, the least they could do is not gaslight us with the fucking name of the law. Just tell us the billionaires get to fuck the planet in the eye and the rest of us have to deal with it, at least it's honest that way.
Practically every law, and lobbying organization, is named for exactly the opposite of what it does. If I see the Puppies and Orphans Protection Act of 2028, I assume its purpose is to use puppies to strangle orphans. Proponents will point to the limitation on how many puppies you can use per orphan.
Similarly, if I see the People For X organization, I assume they are against X. The Committee for Green Spaces and Clean Air is guaranteed to be an oil company.
Once you develop that reflex, everything calms down. Though admittedly, I passed a sign for Fidos for Freedom. I'm not quite sure what Fidos Against Freedom does. I think they give dogs to disabled people, and they bark at you if you try to leave the house.
There is something that this tactic misses: when people try to do good things, the name of their organization or policy is usually pretty honest. In an environment like ours, though, that still means that your strategy of assuming the opposite meaning has something like a 95% expected success rate.
The second term for the "drain the swamp" president implies otherwise (it did take another cycle, but that arguably had more to do with covid than corruption).
I find it hard to imagine any evidence-based viewpoint in 2024 that would have led to a conclusion that Trump would be better for Gaza. The two party system doesn't give any room for choices on some issues, but that's hardly an argument that the two choices are equivalent overall.
Evidence? No. But 2024 wasn't an election (IMO) lost on failing to appeal to the centrists and R's. It was one lost by failing to energize the D's. I still assert that a lot of D's simply stayed home as opposed to "changed to R", and that's the most effective form of vote suppression: telling them that "both sides are the same, nothing matters so why bother?"
I've seen this claimed, but I'm not convinced narratives that emerge before another presidential election cycle hold up to scrutiny in the long run. The common narrative post 2012 was that Republicans needed to move to the left on immigration to stay viable, but that didn't happen and Trump won in 2016. The narrative post 2016 was that the Democrats needed to move right on social issues, and that didn't happen (at least not to the extent that people claimed they needed to) but Biden won in 2020. My perception post 2020 is that a lot of people felt that Biden won only because of people being unhappy with Trump's handling of covid, and but Biden wasn't able to last through the next cycle to another election to be able to potentially get more data on that theory.
You're not wrong that Gaza probably affected things, but the larger issue is that there was no primary at all. Nobody challenged Biden's viability until too late, and at that point the party coalesced around a single candidate almost immediately. I'd argue that even if people were happy with her on that one issue, there would still likely be plenty of others that they were not happy with, especially when she was essentially starting from behind due to the baggage left behind from the baggage of being the VP of the president who couldn't even retain the confidence of the party through the election (not to mention how much she was sidelines for the first 3.5 years of the administration).
>My perception post 2020 is that a lot of people felt that Biden won only because of people being unhappy with Trump's handling of covid,
I agree with that. COVID was the breaking point of breaking points and Trump fumbled it especially badly. I certainly agree Trump would have won 2020 had it not been for his handling of COVID.
>You're not wrong that Gaza probably affected things, but the larger issue is that there was no primary at all.
That was a factor too. I see Gaza and the lack of primaries as the same factor: maintaining an unpopular establishment that didn't energize the party. For better or worse (much much much worse), Trump does energize his install base.
The core issue these past 10 years is that "what analysts say" have diverged much further away from what the people actually want. So getting a pulse on the ground is much more important these days than traditional means of surveying and reporting opinions.
If you set aside social justice issues, the Democrats and Republicans basically agree. Republicans want a theocratic authoritarian state that can micromanage the workers and keep the economy going. Democrats want the same thing but with freedom of religion and more female CEOs of color.
Now you obviously shouldn't set social justice aside, and given the choice, I absolutely prefer the capitalist hellscape where my friends and I are not being rounded up and killed, but that's a REMARKABLY low standard I've had to settle on as a voter.
> GOPs and Democrats are the same on environmental, science, and public health policy completely, huh?
Environmental: Democrats Joe Manchin, Jon Tester, Michael Bennet, Bob Casey, Martin Heinrich, John Hickenlooper, and Ben Ray Lujan all backed the pro-fossil fuel position and blocked the Biden admin's ban on fracking. And that's before you get to the eleven House Democrats who crossed the aisle to vote for gutting NEPA, which is basically the foundational law for environmental review in this country.
Science: Democrats continue to stall on GMO foods despite thousands of studies confirming they're safe, and have pushed heavy restrictions treating them like health hazards with zero scientific basis. This is basically their version of climate change denial and it deserves way more attention than it gets.
Public Health: The entire mess with the ACA, juicing the insurance industry while keeping healthcare gatekept behind financial hooks and ensuring workers MUST stay employed to have any reliable access to it. Yeah they get some points for trying to keep Medicare and Social Security afloat, they don't want all the poor people to just die about it, but those are remarkably low bars.
So, the same? No. That said, NOTHING about ANY of that could be called "Left" by anyone being remotely intellectually honest.
The Democrats and Republicans both are different approaches for the same billionaire class.
They're not "opposite sides of the same coin". Instead, they're more akin to 2 sock puppets. One wears red, and the other blue.
Like the Trump tariffs? They were initially Biden's tariffs that Trump increased and extended. Different clothes, same game.
But I'd be willing to try a good run with democratic socialism, or hell, communism. What we have is the cushy gold-parachute socialism for the elite, and unabashed hardcore capitalism for the poorest. And that fucking sucks. Burn it down.
Yeah and you say that and people are like OH SO YOU'RE FINE WITH REPUBLICANS and, no, categorically not. As a transwoman the Republicans have made it pretty clear my existence and rights are up for debate, so you know, not ever gonna vote for one. That said, the Democrats are not saints by a long, long way and their mealy-mouthed resistance can most often be summarized as twitter posts and flashy statements, and then they go fuck us over in the congressional chamber anyway.
My argument isn't pro-Republican, I just want Democrats to follow through with the shit they talk, and actually live up to the progressive label they try to retain with actual progressive policies, not just more female oppressors of color. That's nice but it's not a solution to the problems we're having.
* Text is the bedrock of basically any content online and text is uniquely difficult to convey in a VR setting without being annoying. It either ends up just floating in space or you have to attach it to objects or you anchor it to a HUD, and a HUD has its own cavalcade of issues in VR around motion sickness. The most successful VR applications, paradoxically, involve the least text they can manage.
* In order to make things accessible to a wide market the applications have to be incredibly simple, to run well on bad hardware, which is uniquely difficult with a 3D space you have to render twice while maintaining high enough FPS to not give people motion sickness
* Most often any CTA in the environment would simply load a web browser, because you couldn't actually... like, buy a product in VR. You were redirected to an amazon listing or shopify website.
* And that's before you get to maintenance. Any intern can update a website. A VR space requires either a dedicated dev budget or accepting whatever janky building tools the platform ships with, which have never once been good enough to build anything actually worth visiting.
* Putting all that aside, there seems to be a substantial slice of humanity who just are not compatible with the tech. I myself enjoy it regularly, I had some issues with motion sickness early on, but toughing it out for awhile got me my "VR legs" as it were and it hasn't been an issue, but I've heard all kinds of things where people's physiology just rejects the headsets.
Overall I think it's just far better as a niche gaming thing and the only reason Facebook and others went so hard into the metaverse was to hopefully recreate the birth of the Internet, and to become landlords of a new digital frontier. And for that, fuck em.
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