There is literally no world where I take any organizations which has been strong armed by fucking Pete Hegseth seriously lmao. Thank you Anthropic both for building the best models for general engineering and for having a fucking backbone.
A disproportionate amount of the best hardware and firmware engineers I know have pilots licenses and are very interested in the mechanics and technical details of flight. Seems perfect for HN.
I always thought part of what made Tarantino films so fun is that he’s basically doing the film equivalent of what the audio world calls sampling a lot of the time. Not just doing it but really nailing it. Watch Lady Snowblood and then Kill Bill or Django Unchained back to back. Some shots are basically identical but the context is very different. As in music, (and many other areas I’m sure) a knowledge of the base material really adds to the enjoyment of newer work.
I think this is partially right. The difference is Apple made the Mac. Microsoft made Windows. Facebook was the thing and then Facebook (the thing) made Facebook, the company. The relationship between owner and intention is something like retroactive. If Facebook could have called Instagram “Facebook” at the very moment of acquisition and got away with it I’m sure they’d have been thrilled. But that was similarly never the way of things. Facebook the company has always been trying to convince everyone that Facebook (the originating product and all it’s ill-gotten marvels) is a product of the thinking. But it’s the source. A tiny homebrew app for gossip didn’t suddenly will into existence Instagram and WhatsApp. The nature and timing of the product put the resulting company in a financial position to encourage us all to play along and believe they had anything to do with the purpose and utility of those things. Oculus was similar. The promise of infinite cash for the problem. Make it better faster. Fastest. The product existed, now please believe Facebook is why. Call it meta. The meta is why. Sure it’s a little on the nose, but is just here to assemble the pieces anyway, so who cares what it’s called. Now the carnivorous beast built of such crudely stitched limbs it so desperately tried to integrate has donned a hat. A hat on a hat. Unsurprising, yes.
I’m imagining it somewhere deep in the unceremonious middle. It’s unfortunate. Are they too big to die? I’m not super-rooting for that, but where is the reality check of the 90s? Where’s the actual disruption? The actual non-Facebook metaverse is a concept I don’t see them nearing. Huge tech != meaningful longevity. Are these companies surviving on market growth alone? Not actual market growth, but literally just access across the planet? Countries from the distant electronic past coming into digital yesterday? It’s free users for a system that is literally not innovating outside of FRL. Are they? What is the offering to humanity? On what merit dare they claim dibs on what they guess is the next plane of reality? Use Facebook messenger on Instagram? Now you don’t have to use Facebook? What a 2021 we’re having! I absolutely love the tech demos, but the ability to have a photorealistic avatar is not what is holding the metaverse back. Are we really just waiting around for a 1:1 representation of our physical identities? Think of the security you could have if we built the privacy in! Should I thank Facebook for having the money to fund the development that everybody else wants to have the money to do? Walkabout Minigolf is literally the most engaging and dynamic social experience I’ve had in VR. It’s low-poly minigolf. Did all the Facebook thinking stem from “how do we own the next App Store?” Because it really feels that way. Is that how we got the App Store?
“Meta Unceremoniously Kills Off Oculus Brand” - Meta: The New Meta. Facebook pretending to be self-aware is the new meta. No that’s old-meta. What’s the take? Hmm. Pick a New Name: The Easiest Meta. Introduce Meta to the popular discourse. Let the masses use it freely. Embrace the freedom of missed interpretation. It’s not Fake, it’s Meta. It’s not Facebook, it’s Meta. You wouldn’t understand, it’s too meta. How cool would it be if we just called it Meta? Metacognition. Meta-engineering. Meta-reality: it’s the business we’re already in! Have you seen the new Meta branding? It’s like the universe, but meta, and now we own it. It was so simple! The new meta, endlessly cyclical, and quite a long way from advice dog. Rush B. Trust Me.
I am there for 9/10 cases, but needing to have a browser session logged in to Reddit at all times so that it defaults to old.reddit.com is pretty obnoxious on mobile. Apollo also surfaces far more functionality with far more immediacy than I can normally be bothered to interact with in a (mobile especially) browser session. I’m actually using the Hack app by Pranoy Chowdhury for Hacker News for many of the same reasons.
For anyone on iOS, Apollo is really essential if you want to use Reddit. Especially now with safari extensions, you can just set Reddit links to automatically open in Apollo.