Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

If you’re asking yourself:

Why are all these giant companies going hard on AR and repeatibly in cycles it’s for one reason:

Egocentric data and full control of the highest bandwidth human I/O (vision + sound) is the most important possible data pipeline to get

Its the penultimate data pipe, with direct connection to the brain being the ultimate data pipe (see:Neuralink)

Every company that is winning and going to win in the future is the company that can best predict human behavior, such that it’s directly shaped by the platform itself

Google had a internal teaser trailer about this a decade ago that I’m sure someone has seen. Hyperreality was a short video about this probable and likely future

So it’s all a game to get perfect attention and the best way to do that is - literally - something like the interface that is used for the matrix on each hovercraft

If you introduce that too quickly - like now - then you scare everyone. So Apple rushed it and Meta is a actually good at timing in AR cause they have a giant lead, so they can wait till people forget.

The goal is titration of all encompassing spyware that eventually literally controls your behavior. The short story Manna is currently, unironically, and not hyperbolically what the employee experience at Target, Amazon warehouses and Walmart are 1:1. The corporate goal is to have everyone in their ecosystem deterministically creating, consuming and engaging at the peak for optimal tuning of the attention system.

It's dumber than that. Meta just wants to own an App Store and get 30% of some platform's revenue.

I'd believe that better if Meta didn't also deliberately provide a sideloading mechanism and encourage homebrew.

It's a believable end-goal, but it doesn't seem to be the direction they want to go in the immediate future.

you are reading too much into Meta. They arent the NSA

True, the NSA needs a FISC warrant to conduct mass surveillance.

Normal people don't know how to side load.

The 5% that actually care are power users, these are the folks who buy every iteration, develop for the device, etc.

I'm not a power-user though. I use a 3-generation-old Oculus Quest 1 that doesn't get first-party official updates anymore. Am I really supposed to expect Meta to push an update to a depreciated platform to disable a feature?

?

I agree with you, I actually use Android since I prefer to be able to install what I want.

it's likely dumber than that: bait and switch. Facebook had done this before: they gave third parties rich access to their data via Graph API, which in turn helped Facebook to grow.

Once their social graph growth phase began to slow down, Facebook severely cut off data access.

Well, that's an interesting way of framing it.

Yeah it’s wrong. They locked it down because it was a regulatory and reputational disaster.

I will never believe Meta or Apple excuses for our computers not being computers. Video Game Consoles are about complete control to create a fake digital market and it needs to end.

I have an Oculus Quest 1. How are they going to update it to stop supporting sideloading when they've stopped supporting it officially altogether?

They don't have to. If this market pans out for them:

1. Almost every VR device is not yet sold. It doesn't matter what you can do with existing devices because they are a tiny fraction of the market.

2. Devices are going to improve drastically. No one is going to be using a VR device from today except as a retro computing device anyways.

They can close that door any time they want, all they have to do is add a paywall for a developer account.

You don't need a developer account to sideload on the Quest.

Unless something has changed, you need a Meta account and must enable developer mode, which requires signing up as a developer in order to sideload.

e: Checked and confirmed, though they call it Debug Mode now. Still need to sign up as a developer.

Meta already owns an app store. They introduced their own payments channel, then they cancelled it

They want to own a successful app store.

Back in the day ~2010, Facebook was the app store. Farmville et al were more popular than the top games on mobile at the time. They really should have pushed for a mobile version of it, as the lack of that is what killed it.

I fondly remember those days. It feels like such a missed opportunity.

Imagine Craiglist / Facebook Marketplace taking 30%.

My sense is that every generation we have engineers that grew up on some sort of VR-like sci-fi trope and keep trying to invent that thing.

Like flying cars, I'm not sure the writers are always right.

What you have to keep in mind is that this is already a done deal and was for decades. Rather than ai goggles people had 3 5 and 8 and Croncite was the source of truth. Before that it was the preacher. Before that the shaman. People are hardwired to outsource fact checking to the most compelling and charismatic choice to them. Probably for pragmatic reasons considering if you actually sat down and thought critically about everything going on, you wouldn’t have time for anything else. Don’t worry about it, think inwardly, chop wood, carry water. Keep your focus on what you see in front of you in life over what others want you to focus on for their own benefit.

Do you have advice on how to survive in the modern world? Society is pretty complex. I need an AR map just to know where its safe to sleep without trespassing.

Focus on the plate in front of you. Your home. The people you know in real life. Your job. Knowledge of an airstrike half a world away doesn’t mean anything actionable to you, so don’t fixate on that sort of information.

No it's because they need to have a growth plan and developing massive new markets is what shareholders have wet dreams about.

Failure is irrelevant. It keeps the share price high while they try other things at the same time.

All they want is mind control. All of them. All the time

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