Such hogwash. Because people dismiss the latest lofty vision of a tech behemoth (that has a long graveyard of unsuccessful services behind them) we're now "legacy" and "old people yelling at clouds"?
Disregarding Meta entirely, I would say it's completely normal for people on HN to be sceptical of new things. Most new things don't work out. Most new things are either vaporware or snake oil. It's hard to tell the good from the bad sometimes.
> Because people dismiss the latest lofty vision of a tech behemoth
No, the reason is because many new technologies are dismissed here not due to technical infeasibility, but because posters cannot understand the point or value proposition. When this is happening in response to technologies that many people are using and investing in as early adopters, which provides proof of some kind of value at a minimum, is generally speaking a sign of being out of touch to write it off entirely as doomed to fail, vaporware, etc, because you simply do not understand what people are investing their time and capital in.
For example this comes up continually with VR and AR and crypto, extremely rapidly growing technologies with tons of capital flooding into them. It's one thing to say we can't do something, it's another thing to see entire industries forming around you and tons of capital being allocated and saying it will all fail simply because you don't see the point.
Will you recognize that it doesn't actually have to be a point to it, though? As long as you can spellbind investors there doesn't actually need to be something useful that's build at the end of the day. "Crypto" is a good example of this. A lot of the products and services that were build using Blockchain could just have used a normal RDBMS.
Sure, no doubt. But the arguments fielded on HN as to why these various technologies are dead ends and will implode once people become rational are weak. They're usually from people who literally have never used the technology (or, used it many years ago.) At best, they have, don't get it (which is fine) but then go on to make the leap that since they didn't get anything out of it, the whole thing is a house of cards. This is a similar error as thinking every new tech that comes along is going to be the next big thing.
The value prop of VR and AR is remote social presence on par with f2f and full sensory override. This is why Facebook is pivoting the entire company around it. This is not something to ignore and dismiss, unless you think Zuck is a complete idiot. The value prop of crypto is economic freedom. This is why VCs are pivoting their entire portfolios around it and why more than a trillion USD have rushed into it. This is not something to ignore and dismiss, unless you think the entire alternative Internet-based financial system being developed around crypto is a bunch of hot air. At a minimum, for those technologies, they deserve steelmanning given how far they've run without dying. The hubris it takes to dismiss things as big as these, which as much potential to radically alter society, isn't just unfounded, but foolish, given that being on the wrong side of this trade in the direction of dismissiveness is hugely risky if you are a technologist.
I want to make one thing clear from the outset - I want to get it. I want to get it because I want to restore my enthusiasm for tech. I want to understand how crypto and AR/VR are not a gimmick, a barren offshoot of human creativity that will lead nowhere.
> The value prop of VR and AR is remote social presence on par with f2f and full sensory override
Full sensory override how? VR (and VR-facilitated AR) can't even create an immersive visual experience at this point. It hasn't yet cracked the "3 dimensions" chestnut. You talk of "full sensory override" as if plugging into the brain stem was right around the corner (and was going to bring about that override).
If you did have full-sensory override, you might be onto something, but the way things are today, with the tech so inadequate, it seems like a non-starter. Full-sensory override, if it will come, will likely come from a completely different direction. Think lucid dreaming.
> The value prop of crypto is economic freedom
The kind of economic freedom where even your ability to get involved in crypto at all is fully dependent on centralized exchanges, and their approval of you as a client? That, or rummage around in your attic trying to find a spare power plant that has to be there somewhere, so that you can enter the game via mining.
I am sorry. I really would like to believe. But these hot technologies seem to come with insurmountable design flaws that have been there from day one, were still present at day one thousand, and will be there at day ten thousand. I think that is the reason for the broad skepticism.
What are you drawing your conclusions re: VR from? Have you followed the research and used the hardware? It seems pretty clear we will have VR goggles that feel effectively indistinguishable from real life in terms of fidelity and optics relatively soon.
Also there are already decentralized exchanges within crypto assets (eg uniswap), but you do need to find a counter party to get out of fiat. It’s being worked on and centralized exchanges aren’t your only option. It would be worth catching up on DeFi.
Edit: btw I meant visual and auditory sensory override - I agree it is a ways off before you have full proprioception etc, if ever. Not necessary to beat face to face social presence tho.
> It seems pretty clear we will have VR goggles that feel effectively indistinguishable from real life in terms of fidelity and optics relatively soon.
Just out of curiosity, what about other senses? Smell, touch, temperature, taste?
How close are we to fully experiencing a dinner / concert / mountain hike in VR?
Teslasuit has some of these features (temperature and touch). It’s pretty expensive, but so are trips to mountains, I guess.
The key point is effectively, imo. If not completely real, there may be a line of deepdive that once you cross it, real trips will still feel “better quality”, but not as in vs “staring at the monitor in your room”. VR doesn’t have to be REAL or even resemble reality, it just has to be convincing.
In my view, there is no point in “walking around” with your real legs in VR, or having the human shape at all. Think of it as a PAL/NTSC converter from human to VR-entity which may or may not be human in different situations. There is no human dinner, concert or even mountain of importance in there. You may be e.g. a spaceship flying in the heat of a quasar, or a building bot with 360 view of its surrondings that moves along the eye focus and feels nearby constructions with its ”skin”. That’s what I was talking about in the root comment (that’s still naive and narrow-minded compared to what is to come). Sorry for this analogy, but most of comments against vr are like “we don’t need modern cities because these are not built for horses”. Yes, no horses, no haystacks, no blacksmiths. It doesn’t mean people will not rush into the city once it’s built with all the infra.
I think people are just responding to how much hype there is. Yes it is cool, immersion feels fun and different. Lifting up that jar and looking at the alien in the first room in Alyx was very cool.
But its just a new way of looking at pixels on a screen. You can't actually "do" anything that you can't already do now.
You can pretend to fly the moon. You can simulate going on an adventure. Its all just entertainment.
