SLHamlet

Her actual testimony starts around 24:30

Like actual creative person Ted Chiang (who moonlights at Microsoft) put it, you might be able to get an LLM to churn out a genuinely original story, but only after creating an extremely long and detailed prompt for it to work with. But if you even need to write that long-ass prompt, might as well just write the story yourself!

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/09/ted-chiang-ai-new-yorker-c...

There's research that the difference happens at the hormonal level, i.e. it's probably not fixable on a certain level.

It's mind-boggling that the industry just generally isn't interested in looking into this. I asked five top ex-Meta folks about this for my book and they shrugged or didn't answer. You can't say VR is the Next Big Thing if it tends to make half the population literally want to spew chunks.

Wonder if they asked Iowa State University researchers about their NSF-funded study that VR makes women and girls twice as likely to get sick, because Meta sure didn't.

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/04/vr-nausea-study-iowa-nsf.h...

LOL thanks for the link!

The crazy thing is the co-founder of Second Life is the one who got Zuck to buy Oculus in the first fucking place! But they ignored what Cory told them about virtual worlds when building HW.

Yes, thanks. Eating is good!

The Metaverse doesn't require a VR headset; VR should only be one device option.

I get deep into this in [plug] my book [/plug] but Neal Stephenson himself changed his mind about it needing VR when he played Doom in the early 90s. Also, VR tends to make over half the population want to vomit, especially women and girls. Another thing Meta ignored, which is crazy!

Definitely agree about VRChat (and Minecraft to a lesser extent)!

This is a straw man understanding of the Metaverse. If you actually read how it was described in "Snow Crash", you roughly get this definition:

"The Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world simultaneously accessible by millions of users through VR and other devices, highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools. It is integrated with the real world economy and compatible with external technology."

I break it down here: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/02/sl-metaverse-stephenson-sn...

There are many multiple platforms which have most or all of these key features, including Roblox, Fortnite, VRChat, and a dozen more, which have over 700 MILLION active users.

You're describing META's version of the Metaverse, which is so confusing, Meta's own employees say they don't understand it:

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2023/01/meta-metaverse-blind-surve...

Really not a smart idea for OpenAI to do this when one of the top Congresspeople represents the Hollywood area, is about to be elected Senator, and already has a bill ready to require AI companies to abide by copyright:

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/04/adam-schiff-ai-video-games...

I was struck how much this reminded me of the Tax Revolt in Second Life forever ago. In the same way Helldivers' fans used the game's theme to shape the protest, in SL the protest took on American revolution / tea crate rebellion themes:

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2003/09/tax_revolt_in_a.html

Well, both allowing kids to monetize and taking almost all the revenue are a problem.

The wild thing is Second Life's 600K MAU players monetize better than Roblox's 350M MAU players -- both for the company (it's still not profitable despite huge revenue) and for the creator community:

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/01/roblox-metaverse-revenue-s...

As Bar-Zeev mentions (and Avi was a lead designer on Vision Pro), even a mixed reality experience can cause nausea.

Far as being "flippant", when I asked Carmack about the topic while CTO at Oculus, he told me that wasn't his department (!). Dude, that your device tends to get half the population sick isn't your problem?

It's the mass market on-ramp the Metaverse needs.

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/02/disney-epic-interoperable-...

Roblox should start sweating. Then again, so should anyone who's created Disney-themed fan content on Rec Room, VRChat, etc.

Anytime someone sends me something generated by ChatGPT, I think about how AI expert Hilary Mason puts it: "By design, ChatGPT aspires to be the most mediocre web content you can imagine."

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2023/03/chatgpt-explained-hilary-m...

Nope, copyright strictly depend on whether the infringer makes money from it. By that logic, Neo-Nazis can print up pictures of Batman wearing a swastika and start giving them away for free, and there's nothing Warner Brothers / DC can do.

"Nazis! I hate [some of] these guys."

Om is one of the Valley's most respected journalists, and specifically pertinent to this post, is also a great photographer:

https://www.photosbyom.com/Collections/Recent-Works/

Thanks much for reading!

Yes, though the Metaverse in "Snow Crash" very much looks and acts like a (mostly) walled garden. With Lamina1 I suspect NS is trying to connect what he envisioned with SC with the crypto/blockchain movement that was inspired by "Cryptonomicon". (Which hasn't proven to be a good fit.)

No. But Roblox, Fortnite, Rec Room, VRChat, and Second Life in particular all have the key features described as comprising the Metaverse in "Snow Crash". Also Roblox, Fortnite, VRChat, and Second Life were directly inspired (the founders have said/told me/I've personally seen it referenced in design talks) by the novel.

Free gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/science/avi-loeb-extrater...

Interesting idea! If I follow it right, may be easier (and much more scalable) just to stream the VR experience to YouTube or Twitch?

Ironically I was about to post about how Meta's Quest 2 sales are still slow but then realized it was maybe a bit more interesting that Meta's CTO kept pinging me on Twitter!

I think the common dev response is just to say "user error" or RTFM. But ChatGPT is being used by 100 MILLION+ people now, so the likelihood that many of them are using ChatGPT in a stupidly dangerous way is quite huge.

Definitely noticed this at Linden Lab. Fewer than 150 people, it felt like a big boisterous sports team with everyone focused on the same goal. Over 150, started noticing infighting, office politics, etc. become more and more of a problem.

The irony is, Philip Rosedale often talked about the Dunbar number in relationship to how virtual communities were best formed/organized!

Oh wow, so happy it's still being updated. One of my first published stories was about the early dev team, but it was even ancient back then:

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2015/12/nethack-roguelike-rpg-open...

Updated since 1987!

> ChatGPT is merely a statistical aggregate of what people says.

That's the crazy part. This is pretty much how Google has worked for like 30 fucking years -- links to the relevant content that has the most links!

But people are all, "OMG ChatGPT is an amazing breakthrough that's going to argue in front of the Supreme Court!"

> how is ChatGPT like a famous robot secretly operated by a human

For one thing it's being trained by a bunch of Kenyans behind the scenes:

https://www.pcgamer.com/chatgpt-outsourcing-report-time/