Hacker News Reader

I want to use and build tools that make my life more connected and enjoyable in the real world. I dont want to live in a ready-player-one-esque virtual world where I don't get physical connection with the people, places, and experiences I love and make life worth living. I think as I get older I'm gaining this realization more and more.

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.

The "metaverse" is designed for the proles that watch 8 hours of television daily.

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.

All the successful tech entrepreneurs also seem to limit or delay what tech their kids are allowed to use far more than regular parents.

> I'm glad that Meta is martyring itself to push things forward.

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.

> It also sounds like it would make me less active...

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.

It's for the kids. You don't use roblox, but it's immensely popular. Roblox is, in my mind, almost the perfect analogy for what meta will be for the next generation if all goes well for meta.

> having a company that is fundamentally a UGC aggregator more deeply embedded in my life sounds awful

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.

> Kids these days grow up with all those new apps, environments, they practically live in the internet

But is it good for them? And do companies like meta care, or are they just trying to milk dollars from them.

Some companies are better citizens than others.

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.

>> 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?

> but what is so appealing about a "metaverse" vs a phone or video call?

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.

Citation needed for the schooling part.

It's obviously a conjecture, not citation needed.

I bet there are studies being done in Australia or other rural parts of the world… have a look at „school of the air“ rather fascinating topic.

Kids being left at home to "go to school" in VR has obvious economic benefit.

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.

You would leave your kids alone at home with only virtual oversight?

As the father of a 5 year old, correct me if I’m wrong but don’t kids need to interact with other kids in meatspace?

What is with this dystopian vision people keep pushing that has everything virtual? Why would anybody want to live in that?

Covid conclusively proved that online schools are for poor people who want to be stuck in perpetual poverty.

Rich people will obviously pay for in-person schooling and reap the future job prospect rewards.

Covid showed throwing a bunch of teachers with no appropriate training or properly structured curriculum at the problem will fail utterly. There are plenty of functional remote schools.

Can you share an example of one that you would consider better than in-person schooling, rather than merely functional?

Connections Academy's been doing fine by my kids so far, the one that's old enough for it has been getting decent mid-90ths on the state assessments.

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.

In its current form though I wonder if communication via be will be a step backwards, as I'm not aware yet of any way of capturing facial expressions, like a video chat would.

> I'm not aware yet of any way of capturing facial expressions, like a video chat would.

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.

Pretty sure that would be a straightfoward ML task based on a tiny camera in the headset.

It's gonna happen either way, both Meta and Apple are investing a ton working towards this, only thing is which will be in control of it.

idk but somebody need to start working on the metaverse equivalent of mouse jiggler asap