Mark Zuckerberg braces Meta employees for ‘intense period’
theverge.com
theverge.com
It also sounds like it would make me less active... One of the things in my life that brings me the most fulfillment and joy. The company is incentivized to keep your brain glued to their systems (and diverted from the real world) for as long as possible to increase earnings. I already feel that I am some animal product being held ever more tightly in my digital stall by my own human weaknesses.
I don't doubt that the tech will survive in some form. It will be cool and useful someday. I'm glad that Meta is martyring itself to push things forward. But delivered by Meta, it sounds to me like an extension of the dystopian nightmare of algorithmically delivered UGC that's fraying the fabric of society in uncomfortable new ways and lowering our collective aptitude for the things that really matter.
Or, asked more simply: Will I actually use the internet for what it's good for, or just keep browsing Hacker News?
I find HN to be one of the best aspect of the internet. And I really do not know what actually internet is for - care to explain?
I feel like it's not supposed to be aimed at people like you, me, or anyone else here for that matter. I feel like it's aimed towards younger and future generations that will grow up with VR ecosystems like that and get used to them, find uses for them that make it fun. Remember that most people don't care what company is behind a product, people still buy Nestle products after all they did. People don't care.
Kids these days grow up with all those new apps, environments, they practically live in the internet, I can see how this would be appealing to them, having your own 'place' in some virtual world that you can do anything with, especially since reality is much more demanding, depressing and will probably become even worse with all the issues in front of us. Is it going to be owned by corporation X? Sure, 100%. Will people care if it allows them to disconnect from reality? I don't think so.
But is it good for them? And do companies like meta care, or are they just trying to milk dollars from them.
However, ascribing a human value such as "caring" to a company is dangerous and ignores hidden motives of an unfeeling machine:
1. you don't know the internal politics and if you did you can't keep up with its changes. That's even difficult to do as an insider.
2. companies are by far and large focused entirely on maximizing something that is frequently adversarial to others (profits, shareholder value) in a time range unknown to us (see point 1).
They might in the short run appear to care, to gain good will in the short term and reap profits later. However as good will becomes less useful to their primary objective, it ceases. Find me a truly "caring" top-2 phone company.
Tldr: companies in the long run are either milking dollars or dead.
This question had many forms in the past, with people questioning phone calls, then emails, then text messages, and so on.
Meta, done right of course, has real potential to actually be good. For example, schooling can easily be done through Meta, which has the potential of monetary savings across the board, and with several advantages over in person schooling.
You don't have to spend time in the morning to make sure the kid is ready for school, if your kid is gifted you don't need special transportation to the magnet school for gifted kids, you can have remote monitoring instead of parent teacher conferences, way easier to deal with bullying, e.t.c.
For teachers as well, they can teach from home, which means they don't have to be colocated in the same area as the school, and so on.
What is with this dystopian vision people keep pushing that has everything virtual? Why would anybody want to live in that?
Rich people will obviously pay for in-person schooling and reap the future job prospect rewards.
It's running a Pearson based curriculum that allows for a decent amount of flexibility and one-on-one teacher interaction. No blockers for working ahead, decent comprehension checks. Lots of opportunities to go off into the weeds.
The big drawback is it does need a parent to help teach it at the younger years, so I get to do most of my coding at night during the school year, but I haven't had any complaints so far.
I haven't personally used it but https://www.vive.com/us/accessory/facial-tracker/ is already available. Leaks also suggest that support for facial and eye tracking will likely be integrated in Meta's pro headset as well.
The funny thing here is that my typical cardio workout for the past year or two has involved VR, and I've found that it's been great for getting the heart rate up.
That said, I'm a heavy VR user who also finds the metaverse talk a bit silly. Will see if my mind changes over the next 5-10 years.
I just completed the camino de Santiago Portuguese de costa, with my girlfriend a 280km thru-hike/walk from Porto, Portugal to Santiago De Compostela in Galicia, Spain. Three weeks of reduced screen time was immensely beneficial to my state of mind and happiness.
Well adjusted intelligent people don't want "convenience" (in the sense of just having everything be a click away). They want interesting and fulfilling careers, travel, to cook, read, paint, play, exercise, spend time in nature, etcetera.
Proles either don't have the health or funds for those things, or just don't want to (e.g. depression).
That's the target audience for all of this stuff. I don't know anyone successful that spends their time scrolling on nonsense like TikTok, it's always the "my life is awful" crew, almost by definition.
Framing it as a service to society is wrong. It was simultaneously a rebranding to escape the stain of the Facebook brand name, and a business decision to bet the farm that everyone in the future is going to want to extend the social isolation/faux-social-interaction of social media into a replacement for the real world.
VR is still a solution in search of a problem. FB looked at the only lunch they had left that wasn't being eaten by TikTok and others, and doubled down on it.
> Others couldn’t believe what they’d just heard. “Did Mark just say there are a bunch of people at this company that don’t belong here[?]” a staffer asked. Another responded: “Who hired them?”
Two sorts of responses, emotionally opposed, but both coming from people V. Rao might categorize as "clueless" in The Gervais Principle.
I can’t tell if he’s lost the plot or this is just another layer to hide Facebooks dependence on user data. Considering the loss Meta took after the iOS privacy update, he realizes user data is no longer viable so he’s just cutting as much possible to keep things afloat.
MZ needs to create an attractive platform of his own. For a brief moment he had one, Facebook was a platform, they managed to even get a killer app: FarmVille.
Then the iPhone came around and ate their lunch. No one cared about developing for Facebook anymore, only iOS and Android.
He will bet the company on a VR device that rivals the smartphone category. He has to.
https://sriramk.com/memos/zuck-unity.pdf
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/13/facebook-mulled-multi-bill...
It will likely happen at some point, if not by Meta than it'll be another tech giant like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or even Apple.
Also they open sourced the bits they didn’t want yo keep proprietary…? According to Wikipedia:
> In July 2021, Amazon and the Linux Foundation announced _that parts_ of the engine would be used to create a new open source game engine called Open 3D Engine
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/heres-why-the-facebook-phon...
They’re too late to the race.
But all that requires expensive and risky R&D.
He already has it.
A platform of people > a platform of apps
Despite what people think about this guy being evil, robotic etc. He never used his 2.5B people platform to attack Apple, Google or any of the other tech companies. Nor to glorify himself or FB
Manufacturing hatred against competitors or super positive narrative for self can be done trivially and with little or no investment from Meta, given that they own FB, WA, IG.
The moment Zuckerberg steps down and another person gets at the helm of FB is gonna be a very tumoltous moment for humanity. People worried about Trump, Putin, Musk, Gates, WHO, WEF.. having too much power have seen nothing yet compared to a bad actor at the helm of FB.
It needs to be broken up, because if a bad actor manages to gain control of it, then it would be like the 1930s all over again. Except there would not be any place to escape to this time around
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
Naturally Zuckerberg was shocked - shocked! - that this happened.
Meta would - at best - be more of the same: harvesting interests, attention, and orientation and leveraging them for mass behaviour modification.
On the one hand, Metaverse could be wonderful for keeping in touch with loved ones and for, e.g., health monitoring. On the other, I am very concerned that Mark Z. will create another FB hell.
0. I can't find the specific job openings that I mentioned but here is a somewhat similar one: https://mobile.twitter.com/dzwetmore/status/1453726967325356...
Here is a nice review of biosignals use in VR: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frvir.2021.6945...
He talks a lot about the Ready Player One VR Metaverse idea but really it's more about getting glasses on your face that brings IG/WhatsApp/FB/ETC into the room and world around you, same thing Apple is working towards too. If he doesn't pull it off Meta will essentially always be in a position of weakness against Google and Apple who control the only platforms that matter going forward.
Whoever manages to make the iPhone of AR will essentially be the conduit between all human interaction and IRL commerce going forwards. Zuckerberg realizes just how locked down the next generation of platforms are gonna be and how it's gonna become very difficult for his existing products to make money in that space if he doesn't have a beachhead on it.
This is such a bad move that I'm going to assume that the source is The Verge misinterpreting a post on Blind.
Big Tech internships are the best way to find raw talent to later train in the company. The internships themselves are mostly a net negative — I'm sure the 3 months of manager support I needed to launch a simple feature could have been used more productively — but being able to identify promising candidates with growth potential in a 3-month work interview is crucial for the growth in the company.
Wasting all that internship time and later not giving offers to young interns who used their potential vacations to work hard in a career-defining moment is just an awful policy.
That pretty much says it all.
What kind of made second life great in the beginning was its roughness and that you could really discover stuff because everybody could basically do whatever they wanted. I have a lingering feeling that this is not going to be so simple this time around.
That said, as long as I dont get a "holodeck" like in Star-Trek I don't think that I'll put on a headset for this.... If im honest with you I dont even want to put on a headset to have an immersive experience with current gen video games, so why would I do this....... to hang out?!
Lastly the way people talk about the metaverse, I am pretty sure that every experience I can possibly have will be monetized to the max. So please wake me once there are pirated servers of the metaverse, leaving me to actually being able to experience a limitless world, not one where the limit is my credit card limit.
I think Mark just put out some buzzwords to buy time.
The consulting companies (Gartner, McKinsey) will tell you that something like Roblox is metaverse already but that Web3 and VR are integral to what it's becoming. I.e., it's tech that's already here, just in its infancy and not working in concert yet. The envisioned ideal combines it into an interoperable ecosystem where you're making global payments and moving virtual posessions from one platform to another.
Games are often the example, but imagine 3D multiplayer environments for collaboratively architecting buildings, public transportation systems, computer chips, or software. You use voice and gestures to speak components into existence and shape flows. Other engineers are in the environment with you in real time. Tools are created to assist you, and you can transport them from one platform to another while retaining ownership. That's sort of the promise and what people are excited about.
Where we are now is like looking at a clunky applet from the early days of the web and going, "This is Web 2.0. Someday all our apps will run in the browser." It maybe was Web 2.0 in an aspirational sense, but it hadn't really been realized yet. Same with the metaverse.
The important elements are calculated. TThey're not created with an airy wave of the hand and some vague hopes.
Transport flows, airliner wings, electronic circuits, and more are literally engineered with differential equations. Voice + gesture is not an effective way to work with them.
A more plausible benefit would be visibility of more parts of the system at the same time. This could be especially useful for software. Multiple wall-sized zoomable displays of all the elements in a big project would be much easier to work with than our current small screens, which provide tiny windows into a very much larger space.
Why not?
AI (DALL-E) can now build images that were once painstakingly created by graphic designers selecting from stock photography and creating layer masks. Now they can use language as a starting point and then adjust the details.
What if you and a group could start with a concept: "a hotel shaped like a pyramid," and then AI does those calculations and prompts you for more specifications? We're on the verge of automating those kinds of tasks, and a collaborative environment only enriches the possibilities.
What they want is platform control over the next big medium.
1. If you can get through the marketing slog thrown out by FB, Epic, and others, many ideas behind a/the metaverse aren't terrible. Perhaps even good. As an old fogie myself, I cannot see spending hours/days in it, but I have to acknowledge there will be a market for it. (Granted, the author is a VC, so he might be a little biased here.)
2. We are a LOT further away from a functioning metaverse than people think/expect/hope. Many challenges exist across the tech (networking, storage, hardware, processing power, etc.). Not to mention identity, governance, and interoperability. Surely many more. Predictions in tech are always foolish, but I would be surprised if we approached anything like a 'Snow Crash' metaverse in the next decade.
FB has enjoyed crazy monopoly software margins for so long, this culture shift will be next to impossible to pull off.
Zuck is right in that there are huge numbers of employees there for who are unsuited for the ambiguous and tough slog of finding a new market. I would guess this number is greater than 80% of their workers.
"What do you mean you don't have 50 microservices!? How is this even going to WORK?"
If your management team don't already know who needs help, and aren't already exiting people who are unable to get on track, then it's the management team who are the people who don't belong at the company.
This always happens, senior leadership make dumb fucking decisions - like close to doubling the size of an already enormous company, or completely abandoning their cash cow core business. Then the shit hits the fan and suddenly Joe in engineering is a lousy slacker who shouldn't be here.
>Zuckerberg has the unusual ability to weather tough periods that might sink other CEOs.
Yeah, this unique talent is called "owning the majority of the voting shares". I'm quite certain at this point the market has priced in the non-zero possibility that Zuck will shovel all the money from the profitable parts of his business into a VR bonfire and that significantly affects the shares.
I thought entrenchment is the primary function. A secondary is to feign care for reports.
I sincerely hope no one is breaking out the stradivarius for 300k+ per year SWEs participating in one of the most cynical endeavors I've ever seen.
They have a high bar for hiring, they have interesting technology problems, engineers who work there are probably high quality. The fact that the company as a whole is in a challenging position doesn't change that.
Why is that signal a stain?
Having had an internship or a year or so in the past is one thing, well all come from somewhere, a recent multi-year tenure from a senior position is something else.
My comment history will prove that i am the first to shit on corporate twats. Also i am not much of a sucker for “fun” 12 hours days.
But he’s got a point there. Company's switching to war mode. If all you care about is time off and perks then move on. Personally i like to demand and get paid but i also like to offer sweat when time comes. I mean you know money dont grow on trees and it goes both ways.