Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Remember how 5G was supposed to support "the metaverse"?[1]

I've been working on a high performance metaverse client. All Rust, all multi-threaded. Designed to max out a gamer PC. Supports Second Life and Open Simulator. Second Life had a reputation for being sluggish. Fixing that.

I'm pulling content from the servers at 200Mb/s, sustained. 400Mb/s in tests, but don't need to go that fast. The servers (AWS front-ended by Akamai caches) can handle that just fine. Gigabit fiber can handle that just fine. The 3D world appears in high detail in seconds. Looks like an AAA game title. Not like low-rez Meta Horizon or Decentraland.

5G can handle that, right? Says so right here in the promotional materials.Verizon: [2] AT&T: [3]

The carriers said "unlimited", right? So they can't complain if you're downloading 100GB per hour.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgale/2022/05/24/how-5-an...

[2] https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2022/4/why-metaverse-needs-...

[3] https://www.verizon.com/about/news/5g-makes-metaverse-real

[4] https://www.xrtoday.com/event-news/5g-networks-crucial-to-me...

Are you insinuating, sir, that a telecommunications company has lied to the public? A lie that increases their own profits?? How dare you!

While lobbying for Government funding for 5G, too.[1][2]

[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/accelerating-5g-united-states

[2] https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/...

As I learned the hard way once, when AT&T say “unlimited” they mean up to a certain amount for data. Y’know. Like how Olive Garden offers unlimited breadsticks but then when you get your bill they charge you $40 for each breadstick over the unlimited amount of 2.

A literal case of there being no such thing as free lunch.

Especially since given the ultimate horrifying finiteness of both the material and time in the universe, the dream of truly unlimited breadsticks will forever be outside of our reach.

This is actually good analogy. OG will definitely throttle your breadsticks if you eat too many by taking their sweet time bringing another basket.

Not the way I ask for breadsticks they won’t.

Surely that is a joke? They don't actually charge $40 for breadsticks, do they?

Unlimited is a term of art that means "limited".

Can we just start calling fraud by its own name?

I'll order one criminality with extra politicians and one large diet-fraud-lite(tm) with extra ice.

Just charge it to my offshore. Cheers

Yup. Buffets have been that way forever. No one is actually allowed to eat unlimited.

But I'll eat until they kick me out. That's how I know I got my moneys worth

I'm not sure what you mean. Most buffets won't limit you.

There is always a limit even if it's not published.

For what purpose? People can only eat so much. The buffet doesn't have to limit you. And if the buffet isn't limiting you then it's valid for them to say "unlimited".

For what purpose? Polynesians.

Buffets have inherent limits in the way they do things. It's just transparent to you unless you know what to look for.

Limited buffet hours. Most Indian buffets are lunchtime only, and the restaurant is open, say, 11am-1pm, and then closes until dinner. Indian buffets are often leftovers from last night's dinner, too, so there's a limit to the amount of food that they won't cook more.

Size of plates, bowls, glasses. This is an easy one, and you can use it to go on a diet. If you have large plates or bowls, throw them out and get small-capacity dishes. Buffets will make you use a certain size plate, and so each trip you can only pick up so much food, and this helps you notice that you feel full before taking more.

You may also be required to use a clean plate each time you dip into the buffet. This might have various effects on how you regard the food you took originally.

It's still fair to say unlimited for all of those except not cooking more. Much like you can easily have an unlimited 1gbps connection. (Or 'unmetered' is advertised sometimes.)

I'm not sure what you mean, as far as buffet dark patterns go, nothing really unreasonable happens that comes anywhere near the limits of the human stomach.

I had to buy a prepaid cell subscription the other day. I went with the one that stated "Truly Unlimited"* as the headline, clearly to differentiate it from all the other "Not Truly Unlimited" plans.

* Truly Limited for heavy users.

"Un limited." It's Spanish, probably.

In theory yes? But 5G deployment is still catching up to LTE so It’s still going to be dependent on how saturated the bandwidth is. I’ve found that in some crowded situations (conferences and the ilk) switching to LTE actually performs better.

I'm interested in more info about your client. Is it open source, is there a website or blog post about it?

http://animats.com/sharpview/

I look forward to trying your viewer when it's ready.

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