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In-reply-to » Metaverse Could Contribute Up To 2.4% of US GDP By 2035, Study Shows A study commissioned by Meta has found that the metaverse could contribute around 2.4% to U.S. annual GDP by 2035, equating to as much as $760 billion. Reuters reports: The concept of the metaverse includes augmented and virtual reality technologies that allow users to immerse themselves in a virtual world or overlay information digitally on ... ⌘ Read more

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no @prologic@twtxt.net @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club I love VR too, and I wonder a lot whether it can help people with accessibility challenges, like low vision.

But Meta’s approach from the beginning almost seemed like a joke? My first thought was “are they trolling us?” There’s open source metaverse software like Vircadia that looks better than Meta’s demos (avatars have legs in Vircadia, ffs) and can already do virtual co-working. Vircadia developers hold their meetings within Vircadia, and there are virtual whiteboards and walls where you can run video feeds, calendars and web browsers. What is Meta spending all that money doing, if their visuals look so weak, and their co-working affordances aren’t there?

On top of that, Meta didn’t seem to put any kind of effort into moderating the content. There are already stories of bad things happening in Horizon Worlds, like gangs forming and harassing people off of it. Imagine what that’d look like if 1 billion people were using it the way Meta says they want.

Then, there are plenty of technical challenges left, like people feeling motion sickness or disoriented after using a headset for a long period of time. I haven’t heard announcements from Meta that they’re working on these or have made any advances in these.

All around, it never sounded serious to me, despite how much money Meta seems to be throwing at it. For something with so much promise, and so many obvious challenges to attack first that Meta seems to be ignoring, what are they even doing?

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In-reply-to » I've seen BlueSky referred to as BS (as in Blue Sky, but you know...), which seems apt.

@prologic@twtxt.net I know very little about it, but speaking secondhand, it looks like there’s a single centralized server now and they’re still building the ability to federate? Like, the current alpha they’re running is not field testing federation, which makes me think that’s not a top priority for them.

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In-reply-to » So the news is telling me, Bluesky is the hottest new decentralized thing, with parole waiting month to join, or buying invite codes of ebay, for thousands of dollars.

They haven’t written the federation code yet. Its literally run on the staging instance. People are paying to access the alpha. Though if you want a code to see what all the fuss is about there are a few with invites around here.

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BlueSky is cosplaying decentralization

I say “ostensibly decentralized”, because BlueSky’s (henceforth referred to as “BS” here) decentralization is a similar kind of decentralization as with cryptocurrencies: sure, you can run your own node (in BS case: “personal data servers”), but that does not give you basically any meaningful agency in the system.

I don’t know why anyone would want to use this crap. It’s the same old same old and it’ll end up the same old way.

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In-reply-to » DEEPL now has a Writer https://www.deepl.com/write - very nice, fast and available in multiple languages. Write better texts, instantly.

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

There is (I assure you there will be, don’t know what it is yet…) a price to be paid for this convenience.

Exactly prologic, and that’s why I’m negative about these sorts of things. I’m almost 50, I’ve been around this tech hype cycle a bunch of times. Look at what happened with Facebook. When it first appeared, people loved it and signed up and shared incredibly detailed information about themselves on it. Facebook made it very easy and convenient for almost anyone, even people who had limited understanding of the internet or computers, to get connected with their friends and family. And now here we are today, where 80% of people in surveys say they don’t trust Facebook with their private data, where they think Facebook commits crimes and should be broken up or at least taken to task in a big way, etc etc etc. Facebook has been fined many billions of dollars and faces endless federal lawsuits in the US alone for its horrible practices. Yet Facebook is still exploitative. It’s a societal cancer.

All signs suggest this generative AI stuff is going to go exactly the same way. That is the inevitable course of these things in the present climate, because the tech sector is largely run by sociopathic billionaires, because the tech sector is not regulated in any meaningful way, and because the tech press / tech media has no scruples. Some new tech thing generates hype, people get excited and sign up to use it, then when the people who own the tech think they have a critical mass of users, they clamp everything down and start doing whatever it is they wanted to do from the start. They’ll break laws, steal your shit, cause mass suffering, who knows what. They won’t stop until they are stopped by mass protest from us, and the government action that follows.

That’s a huge price to pay for a little bit of convenience, a price we pay and continue to pay for decades. We all know better by now. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? It doesn’t make sense. It’s insane.

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In-reply-to » DEEPL now has a Writer https://www.deepl.com/write - very nice, fast and available in multiple languages. Write better texts, instantly.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net

I have to write so many emails to so many idiots who have no idea what they are doing

So it sounds to me like the pressure is to reduce how much time you waste on idiots, which to my mind is a very good reason to use a text generator! I guess in that case you don’t mind too much whether the company making the AI owns your prompt text?

I’d really like to see tools like this that you can run on your desktop or phone, so they don’t send your hard work off to someone else and give a company a chance to take it from you.

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In-reply-to » On LinkedIn I see a lot of posts aimed at software developers along the lines of "If you're not using these AI tools (X,Y,Z) you're going to be left behind."

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah. I’d add “Big Data” to that hype list, and I’m sure there are a bunch more that I’m forgetting.

On the topic of a GPU cluster, the optimal design is going to depend a lot on what workloads you intend to run on it. The weakest link in these things is the data transfer rate, but that won’t matter too much for compute-heavy workloads. If your workloads are going to involve a lot of data, though, you’d be better off with a smaller number of high-VRAM cards than with a larger number of interconnected cards. I guess that’s hardware engineering 101 stuff, but still…

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