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Comment by hrbf | Hacker News Reader

Upon reading news like that, I’m convinced I have made the right choice following my gut feeling and intuition to move away from the tech world. It’s absurd. This is adding yet another layer of needless complexity, just for the sake of earning yet more money. It does not solve any real issue, it benefits very few people at the expense of most. In this regard, it’s like the cryptocurrency of business applications. Late-stage capitalism in fully swing indeed.

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I work in medical simulation and there is incredible potential for remote training with this sort of tech.

In manufacturing training too. Basically any training that involves physical handling.

Both fantastic applications that make sense, but not mainstream. It almost makes sense the strategy is to create any type of consumer VR industry to reduce the extremely high expense VR would have if only training and simulation were it's main applications.

I see high dollar but limited market as well - I’ve seen the course plans for below and RN level and it’s a lot. Adding tech at that level seems rife for issues, but at the high tier (re: same places that buy multi million dollar MRI machines) where the money is there, sure!

Mainstream is mmorpg, it’s inevitable

Perhaps to train robots?

I really don't know anymore whether I was snarky or half-serious.

I'm getting there, myself. All tech is converging on the single goal of making the rich richer by serving ads and influencing elections. I'm tired of it.

I hear the local public transit company is hiring bus maintainers, training included.

Tech is the only sector that is actually even borderline competent these days.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/blame-lockdowns-on-silicon-vall...

"Without technology to keep the economy from imploding, they(lockdowns) wouldn’t have lasted."

I say a prayer to Bezos every time Amazon delivers something perfectly, come rain, shine, war or pestilence.

This guy looks like a crank: https://www.wsj.com/news/author/andy-kessler

Appreciating the American Psycho vibes in his bio:

"He is the author of several books including Wall Street Meat and Eat People."

http://35.185.30.157/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Grahams_Hier...

If they're writing an opinion for the Journal or the Time you can be pretty confident they're a crank.

???

Plenty of other sectors managed to be competent before, during, and after the lockdowns.

And your example of tech doing things right is...logistics. Not tech. Logistics has been doing its thing for over a century, long before computers were a thing.

Agreed. People really don’t appreciate Bezos or Amazon enough

I'm of the same mind, but I worry that the total failure of the VR Meta-whatever is wishful thinking on my part -- because even if it succeeds, I want no part of it. If that means I end up living in a hut in the woods while everyone goggles into the Zuckerverse, then so be it.

At least with cryptocurrency, I could kind of admire the anarchist techno-optimism of it (who doesn't hate banks?), so I felt like I wasn't emotionally invested in it failing when I realized it wasn't going to work.

The VR stuff has me thinking I really need to start a business before I'm subjected to this dystopian horse-shit as a condition of employment.

Everyone fake-emoting at the wall-o-faces in video chat apps is already pretty bad. Blocking out the world with a spying-on-you headset so you can work in a bad knock-off of Second Life is too far.

>just for the sake of earning yet more money.

>It does not solve any real issue,

Contradiction detected. Who will buy this tech then?

That's a hard one. One part of this deal with Microsoft is making the Microsoft Game Pass available to the new Quest headset purchasers. But due to the price point, they're marketing the new headset at businesses, not end consumers.

It's like none of the departments within the Quest group are talking to each other.

It's funny how the "I see the value in crypto" and "I see the value in a metaverse" have turned into exactly the same group. There seems to be this bisection of groups, 1 group of people who seem just fine with technology as it is today. And another group that wants to launch into the next phase of digitalization.

Although both seem okay with using AI.

I mean I want to launch into the next phase of digitalization, I just don't want it to be this stupid.

I see the value in crypto, but as a chronological consensus, not as a currency.

I see the value in the metaverse, but as a cheaper lower fidelity alternative for the real world, not a more productive version of it. The metaverse as a replacement for the real world, IMO, will always be a cheap copy, and only suitable for things which in the real world are uneconomical, impractical or impossible.

Neuralink-style HMIs on the other hand I see as a potential alternative to working with computers. Who needs goggles when you're part of the machine?

> Neuralink-style HMIs

Cyperpunk is interesting as an aesthetic and all that but I’d never in a million years would want to actually live in that dystopian nightmare.

> Late-stage capitalism in fully swing indeed.

Businesses making poor products has little to do with late-stage capitalism. That’s been a theme of both capitalism and socialism for as long as people have had different ideas on what’s important.

What did you move towards?

I’m currently looking into working with disadvantaged children at a local school, teaching computer skills. I may also move towards psychology and coaching (the kind that takes proper training). There’s more on the table: professional gardening, writing books, starting a (small) plain fare vegan restaurant.

Training STE fields could use this.

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