> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. I used to work at meta, I was in one of the many research teams that were upstream of horizon. The Failure was pretty much entirely Zuck's fault, in the same way that when a ship smashes into rocks, its the captain's responsibility. The first big problem is that there was never a clear definition of what "the metaverse" was mean to be. It was a pivot that kinda appear after orion (the AR glasses that were supposed to ship in 2020 Q3) failed to ship. A small team had made a VR clone of roblox, where you could make your own games in VR. It was low poly and stuttery on the Quest. Another team was working on getting hand interaction into the quest. A third team thought "hmm, we have a avatar system, what if we can type on keyboards? could we have meetings" The meeting system and the roblox clone carried on, vaguely separately. Then Zuck saw them and decided that they needed 500 more engineers each. Time passed, progress wasn't fast enough, so more engineers were smeared in. Then the meta rebrand, and then the whole weird everything smashed together branding. All the while more engineers were being piled in, most of them had no experience in 3d, let alone games. But, that would have been fine if someone at the top had been steering, making joined up product decisions, Advocating for the users. carmack sorta tried, but a) he wasn't the easiest to work with and B) Boz thought he knew better TLDR: Zuck can't product for shit. He thought that shipping disjointed features would make a platform. It didn't. He also thought that dumping 11,000 people into an org, most of which have no experience of games, VR, 3d or graphics would lead to a good outcome.
> Maybe i'm just old -- a cron job can fetch the info and push it to some notification service too, without also being a chaos agent. Here's a concrete example: A web site showing after school activities for my kid's school. All the current ones end in March, and we were notified to keep a lookout for new activities. So I told my OpenClaw instance to monitor it and notify me ONLY if there are activities beginning in March/April. Now let's break down your suggestion: > a cron job can fetch the info and push it to some notification service too, without also being a chaos agent. How exactly is this going to know if the activity begins in March/April? And which notification service? How will it talk to it? Sounds like you're suggesting writing a script and putting it in a cron job. Am I going to do that every time such a task comes up? Do I need to parse the HTML each time to figure out the exact locators, etc? I've done that once or twice in the past. It works, but there is always a mental burden on working out all those details. So I typically don't do it. For something like this, I wouldn't have bothered - I would have just checked the site every few days manually. Here: You have 15 minutes. Go write that script and test it. Will you bother? I didn't think so. But with OpenClaw, it's no effort. Oh, and I need to by physically near my computer to write the script. Now the OpenClaw approach: I tell it to do this while on a grocery errand. Or while in the office. I don't need to be home. It's a 4 step process: "Hey, can you go to the site and give me all the afterschool activities and their start dates?" <Confirm it does that> "Hey, write a skill that does that, and notifies me if the start date is ..." "Hey, let's test the skill out manually" <Confirm skill works> "Hey, schedule a check every 10:30am" And we're done. I don't do this all at once. I can ask it to do the first thing, and forget about it for an hour or two, and then come back and continue. There are a zillion scripts I could write to make my life easier that I'm not writing. The benefit of OpenClaw is that it now is writing them for me. 15 minutes * 1 zillion is a lot of time I've saved. But as I said: Currently unreliable.
As a Microsoftie of more than a decade... Yeah, I see this. We have an internal system called Cosmos[0] that does a great job of processing huge quantities of data very fast. And we sat on it for years while the rest of the industry moved to Spark and its derivatives. We finally released it as Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) but did a shit job of supporting/promoting it. We built Synapse, and it's garbage. We've now got Fabric which I guess is the new Synapse. I wouldn't really know because I probably have five different systems that I use that basically do large-scale data processing, and yet Fabric isn't one of them; who knows, maybe it will become the sixth? We've had numerous internal systems for orchestrating jobs, and it wasn't until Azure Data Factory that we finally released something externally that we sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really use internally. (To be fair, some teams do use it internally, but we're not all rowing in the same direction.) I regularly deal with multiple environments with different levels of isolation for security. I don't even know how it's all supposed to work -- I have my regular laptop and a secure workstation and three accounts that work on the two. Yet I have to do some privileged account escalation to activate these roles; when I'm done, there's no apparent way to end the activation early, so I just let it time out. These things are but a fraction of the Azure offerings, but literally everything I have used in Azure makes me absolutely HATE working in the cloud. There's not a single bright side to it AFAICT. As best as I can tell, the only reason why Azure makes so much damn money is because Microsoft is huge and can leverage its size into growth. We're very much failing up here. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/big-data-processing-at-microsoft-hyper-scale-massive-complexity-and-minimal-cost/
Got it. Doomerism will fix the fact that there will always be assholes/people trying to break systems for their own gain. Or maybe doomerism will lead to rolling the dice and hoping we somehow magically get a better system where no people suck? This is not who we have historically been. Hence why gerrymandering is an issue today, because they are doing it today. But we have to put in the work to challenge the assholes. The world will always have assholes I don't think giving up/burning it all down and hoping they then magically go away is a political philosophy. The current Republican 'dixiecrats' are an extension of their traitor ancestors that WANT to burn it all down. Seems idiotic to help them in their goal. Fuck these loser traitors I'm keeping my country. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Kjah99E1fIo Edit because I'm throttled: You completely jumped talking points. Gerrymandering is an issue today, meaning it is a new issue, that we need to fight, today. But I got it. You think/see America as irredeemable. I see us as constantly improving things, and don't see how a different country name/system of government would change/fix the horrible things you bring up, or make the worse elements of our society better. I have seen an America that fought to remove the cancer of slavery. That is ashamed of the internment camps. The doesn't give af about interracial marriage. And that America has been steadily winning WHEN PEOPLE FOUGHT FOR IT. But maybe you are right. Destroy the USA, change the name to 'Super Friendly Nice Perfect Land', get rid of democracy, and maybe racists will stop being racist. Looks like you are a surgeon. You would know we have many Jewish hospitals because Jewish people weren't allowed to be doctors. So Jewish people worked around that and changed things. Our system allows for improvement. There is no indication a random new one will. I have seen videos of Muslims talking about how they won't allow Jewish doctors to treat their kids, so yes, things can go backwards. Doesn't mean we give up. We need to challenge backwards people and backwards thought, not give up because they suck. You basically support the policy of the crappy 'dixiecrats' that run the Republican party, whose ancestors have been anti-America since they started then lost the civil war of burn it all down.
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