I am still surprised that they thought they'd see success with the extremely low quality version they shipped at launch. Just awful models and missing features along with a completely lackluster and shallow vision for what any sort of VR world could be.
Like, how did Zuck look at what was being demoed and think "yes, this is worth shipping" at a time when the closest analogue, 3D games and CG movies, were delivering fidelity that was ~4 hardware generations ahead, in implementation and in design.
To be impressed by and willing to sell the world on his metaverse implementation in that state... it felt like the dude hadn't seen any digital 3d entertainment since 2002.
Cause he doesn't actually want to spend time in a VR world, and has no idea what a good or bad one would be. He just was hoping it was the next smartphone and he'd own the platform.
We've all forgotten the facebook phone failure but I doubt Mark has. He wants control further up the stack. Breaking into OSes is very hard but if you squinted just right VR kind of sort of looked like a green field that was ripe for the taking.
Zuck never seemed to actually articulate how this was any different or newer than a sterile corporate vr version of second life. Then VRChat got big and seemed to be better than Horizon Worlds for... everything.
I feel like the main possible benefits that these digital spaces bring, for consumers, are kinda the opposite of things that any Big Corporate Entity would ever want to be involved in.
Zuck just goes 'all in' on every hype and blows billions, because he doesnt want to miss out on anything. What is a few 10s of billions here and there for a company with a money printer.
Blame/lawsuit avoidance is a powerful motivation to keep things the same. But there's also a very strong drive to reduce costs, and this would be a very enticing cost center, for better or worse.
GitHub itself was reorged under the CoreAI division recently, I think.
For the stability issues, I see it more as a potential tenuous link between having to hyper accelerate the Azure moves with a "you have no excuses because AI makes everything easier" sentiment from above, and then the more obvious literal situation of devs maybe vibecoding infra changes.
No evidence of the latter, just the likelihood, given the incentives.
There are probably enough regions where it is required or will be required soon, that it makes sense to just get it over with.
The Internet is more or less becoming a locked down, controlled and fully observed thing for end users and citizens, so adapting to that world sooner and working within it is just sensible future-proofing.
This also lets them more safely target older users with ads, purchase requests, etc. and new integrations for gambling and other high ROI systems.
GeoIP this nonsense. Legal liability is solved as a "good-faith effort" and those living in jurisdictions where this doesn't apply (or use a VPN) don't need to be stripped of privacy.
There is a bit of an arms race between id verification systems and users bypassing them when AI gen. Which is really just ai generated images vs. AI generated image detection.
In practice, nothing will stop it, the tooling will gradually get better at detecting prior fakes and banning those users while the newer fakes will go undetected for longer.
Putting up the requirement satisfies their CYA requirements here. The race between AI fraud vs. detection is something they can just ignore and let happen on its own.
Another way to think of it is: paying $1 to have your pr and concerns elevated above the supermajority sea (that which will be ai driven contributions). For that cost, it's a steal of the deal.
Then, from the perspective of "it's a donation to a project you care about" it becomes even more rational. But the project itself getting the money has all the problems others have outlined already, so that idea's a bit bust.
But I'm already donating my time by creating a PR, it definitely would disincentivize me to make PRs if I had to also pay in addition to already doing the actual work. Just always such a shame that the good people have to suffer because of the actions of the shitty people...
If that's actually the opinion of the maintainer, why even accept PRs at all? At that point, just categorically deny any. I was thinking more of actual community projects that _want_ community PRs. Those seem to have welcomed my contributions in the past, but of course they were not just AI slop or other low effort PRs.
Like, how did Zuck look at what was being demoed and think "yes, this is worth shipping" at a time when the closest analogue, 3D games and CG movies, were delivering fidelity that was ~4 hardware generations ahead, in implementation and in design.
To be impressed by and willing to sell the world on his metaverse implementation in that state... it felt like the dude hadn't seen any digital 3d entertainment since 2002.
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