Iheartcheese@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 03:47
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Maybe you shouldn’t have made it so shit
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
on 19 Jul 2024 03:51
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Cutting spending by 20% while not reducing output will definitely accomplish that, too!
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Jul 2024 04:46
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Maybe you shouldn’t have made it so shit
ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
on 19 Jul 2024 04:50
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Listen pal - Do you know how hard it is to make legs for a wii-like avatar?! We need another 8 billion.
Meron35@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 08:06
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They’re called miis 😤
barsquid@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 11:08
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Hello, I am a friendly ghost coming to attend your serious business meeting in the Metaverse. Did you know that this is going to be a massive industry? Buy your Metaverse real estate now, it’s definitely not a fake digital asset that Facebook can create and delete at will.
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 06:13
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The tech in general just isn’t good enough to do that much more. It’s like having a coal powered steam engine and then saying you’ll build a formula 1 car with it. They thought that with throwing enough money at the wall, a few breakthroughs in tech would fall out, but it doesn’t work like that. If you’re very lucky you hit one breakthrough, but they needed a few.
Meh, the problem will always be that Meta will use its VR platform as a data vacuum first and foremost, which makes it a nonstarter (at least for me)
einlander@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 04:21
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Well, if I didn’t have to make a face book log in to use one. If not for that I would consider one to play in steam. Even if I had to have it tethered.
tias@discuss.tchncs.de
on 19 Jul 2024 04:29
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I think they don’t require that anymore. It’s a “Meta login” which can be separate from Facebook. At least for Quest devices.
TragicNotCute@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 04:44
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Call it what you want, but this requirement prevents me from buying their products too. I use no Meta services. Don’t wanna start.
Welcome to the classic social media 100m dash. Become a popular dunk target on socials > get people to call such and such choice as a dealbreaker > stop doing such and such > it is now "not enough", or "they'll enshittify it later" or "a slippery slope".
Which fine, whatever. I'm not saying Meta are "good guys" (no corporation is, honestly). What I will say is a) that is not a particularly productive or functional way to engage with pretty much anything, especially when there is no comparable alternative to a product, and b) this is a remarkable incentive to NOT acknowledge criticism. I mean, if I'm Meta and I see this often, what is the incentive to not just force everybody to EULA away as much as possible? People will give me crap for it regardless, so I may as well get to sell some sweet, sweet data.
FWIW, I'm skeptical of the ability of Meta to turn around the VR market as a whole, I don't like many of their privacy and content moderation practices and I no longer use Facebook, Instagram or Threads. But hey, I do have a Whatsapp account because it's pretty much mandatory to exist in society, and I do have a Quest headset, which I agree is the best price to performance you can buy and works flawlessly with PC VR both wired and wirelessly.
mipadaitu@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 06:08
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I don’t need to log into my computer monitor, why should I log into my VR goggles?
Don’t give them thanks for only half vacuuming your personal privacy, keep bitching until they do it right.
I mean, in this case because it's a standalone device, so... for the same reason you log in to your PlayStation. Also, you already had to log in to it when this was a Oculus thing, the "I don't want a Facebook login" complaint only became a talking point after they transitioned from the Oculus login over to the Facebook login, so the intellectual honesty in moving the goalposts based on this argument seems dubious.
In any case, I could see you getting uppity about logging in to use it wired. Maybe. There are a ton of hardware settings and configuration that are handled within the Quest's software directly, so I bet that would be way less trivial to deploy than people imagine. There is certainly no way I can envision where this thing would be usable wirelessly without a software login. You need to run an app to link to your PC, be it the Oculus or the Steam Link app. For security reasons alone you don't want a logless device that streams what's on your desktop monitor at will.
EDIT: Also, for the record, there are a bunch of monitor manufacturers that do ask for a login. Hi, ASUS Armoury Crate, you suck and have always sucked.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 06:58
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Show me these monitors you speak of that force you to log in before they work.
E: I’ll interpret your downvote and lack of answer as “there aren’t any”
I did not downvote you and I genuinely just saw your post now, chill your bits. Some of us have a job or a life beyond refreshing social media constantly (and I'm already pretty bad on that front).
So to your question, I didn't say "force you to log in before they work", I said "ask for a login". Which my ASUS display in fact does to deliver updates and control lighting. In fairness, their dumb app also covers the keyboard, mouse and motherboard RGB, but account login it has. So does my Logitech mouse, by the way. My other Alienware monitor is interesting, because it doesn't have a login, but it does ask to collect your data, including it scrubbing your games library and constantly monitoring your controller with no opt-out for some reason. I think I would have preferred a login. Still better than Armoury Crate, though.
And of course that assumes we're only talking about PC monitors. Every single one of my TVs requests a login as part of the first time setup process, whether you use them stand-alone or as a PC output. The trophy to most annoying spyware on that front has to go to LG, whose WebOS device allows me to log out after creating an account if I want, but then it will stop updating some of my apps, so each time Max decides to change its name or Disney wants to change the background on its Disney Plus app I have to manually log in, update, then log out again. Fun!
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 09:53
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So you brought up an optional piece of software with an email log in and treated it the same as enforcing a log in. Cool.
Asus having software you can optionally use to control your display and other Asus peripherals/components is very different to enforcing a Meta/Facebook account to use a display.
That is not the same and the comparison is ridiculous.
If Facebook said that accounts were completely optional and only used to access their store or whatever then there would be zero issue.
But that’s not what they do. You have to log in and create an account just to have an HDMI signal and basic gyroscope functionality.
No, I made a passing comment about how the comparison the OP made isn't particularly effective and, in the social media 200m obstacles you have decided to create a tangent nitpicking that caveat to death because you think it scores points instead of being an obnoxious stalemate.
So no, it's not "the same", what it is is relevant to note that pretty much every piece of hardware you buy does at least request that you log in to a service and, of course, the part you're actively ignoring, which is that all dedicated hardware and software platforms in the market, VR or not, do require a mandatory login.
So can we get back to the point or do you want to keep litigating your deliberate misrepresentation indefinitely? I see you have plenty of time, given you got so antsy about waiting 30 minutes for a response.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 10:52
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No.
In reply to someone complaining that a head mounted display forces you to have a Facebook/Meta login in order to use it at all, you brought up that “a bunch” of monitors also “ask” that you do the same.
But:
asking is not the same as forcing.
monitors don’t do that anyway, your argument is a lie.
I have never seen a monitor’s OSD popping up and pestering you to sign in.
all dedicated hardware and software platforms in the market, VR or not, do require a mandatory login.
That's why I didn't just say that monitors also ask for your login and that was just a minor postcript throwaway at the end of the post.
But by all means, please do provide a counterexample of a standalone software or hardware platform that doesn't request a login. I am waiting with bated breath. Can't wait for somebody trying to actually define this grudge beyond amorphous rage to see the scope of what's being requested.
So yeah, please, do go on.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 15:05
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Yes.
No.
That’s why I didn’t just say that monitors also ask for your login
Yes you did. Scroll up.
that was just a minor postcript throwaway at the end of the post.
I’m sorry, does your lie being at the end of a post rather than at the start somehow mean it doesn’t count?
But by all means, please do provide a counterexample of a standalone software or hardware platform that doesn’t request a login. I am waiting with bated breath.
Stop moving the goalposts. You said they force you. Now you’re saying request.
Don’t you remember saying that they force you? Here’s your quote:
“all dedicated hardware and software platforms in the market, VR or not, do require a mandatory login.”
And for that I could name a bunch of examples. You don’t have to make a Google account to use an Android phone. You don’t have to make a Nintendo account to play on a Switch. You don’t need an account to play play Blu-rays on a Blu-ray player. My smart TV doesn’t need a Google account or a Sony account. You don’t need an account to watch YouTube. Etc. Those are all hardware, software, or both ecosystems.
How aren’t you understanding that asking (or in the case of monitors, not even asking - to be very clear, you lied about that) for a login and requiring it aren’t the same?
Nobody has an issue with Facebook/Microsoft/Google asking you to sign in. But they absolutely have a problem with it being enforced. Particularly when it’s for something as basic as displaying an HDMI signal.
Well, we do know that you want to litigate the misrepresentation indefinitely.
So you're lying about what I said. Which always weirds me out because... well it's still there, you can look at it. Here's what I said:
EDIT: Also, for the record, there are a bunch of monitor manufacturers that do ask for a login. Hi, ASUS Armoury Crate, you suck and have always sucked.
You will notice the word "have" is not in fact in that piece of text (well, except for "you have always sucked"). The word "ask" is in that piece of text. If you have questions about the meaning of those words please feel free to look them up.
Now, about your other absurd lie.
You HAVE to make a Google account to use the Google Play store, which is the platform (Android is just the OS). You HAVE to make a Nintendo account to use the eShop, although I do give you partial credit on that one, if you stick to physical media only you can still play some games on it.
Meanwhile, you DO need an account to use, in no particular order: Steam VR, PSVR, Playstation in general, Xbox in general, Apple Vision Pro, an iPhone, GOG, EA Play, and since you're willing to include services beyond gaming and software, also Kindle, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Netflix, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, the LG, Samsung and Sony free streaming services, Plex, Spotify, Tidal and so, so many more.
Oh, and Lemmy.
So if Microsoft MAKES you log in to use an Xbox and Sony MAKES you log in to use a PlayStation and Steam MAKES you log in to use... well, Steam and Steam VR, then why are you singling out Meta?
That's rethorical, by the way, it's because this was a legitimate issue back in 2020 when they briefly enforced a Facebook log in for both new and existing users and people were legitimately mad for a bit, and then they changed policy after all the backlash but people didn't want to stop being mad at them for other reasons so here we are. Having to endure the absurd dance of somebody pretending that a company with a closed platform containing a store and a digital distribution service would require a login to operate just like everybody else.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 17:51
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Well, we do know that you want to litigate the misrepresentation indefinitely.
I’m just calling out a lie. I like to do that. I’m sorry that offends you.
So you’re lying about what I said.
Nope.
EDIT: Also, for the record, there are a bunch of monitor manufacturers that do ask for a login. Hi, ASUS Armoury Crate, you suck and have always sucked.
And they don’t. No monitor asks you to sign in before (or after) using it.
Now, about your other absurd lie.
I haven’t lied once, that’s all on you.
You HAVE to make a Google account to use the Google Play store
Yes? Who said otherwise? The play store isn’t required for you to use your phone.
which is the platform (Android is just the OS).
Please don’t take offence at this, but are you mentally deficient? Of course Android is a platform. In every sense of the word. It’s a platform for apps, it’s a platform for development, it’s a platform for all kinds of things.
Let’s look at the Cambridge definition:
Platform, noun. (Computing)
"the type of computer system or smartphone you are using, in relation to the type of software (= computer programs) you can use on it:
This new personal banking software can be used with any Windows platform.
Both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile platforms now have emoji keyboards built into their software."
You HAVE to make a Nintendo account to use the eShop
Again, you don’t need the eShop to use a switch.
I also see you ignoring that I mentioned YouTube. Is that not a platform in your confused mind?
Oh, and Lemmy.
Wrong.
So if Microsoft MAKES you log in to use an Xbox and Sony MAKES you log in to use a PlayStation and Steam MAKES you log in to use… well, Steam and Steam VR, then why are you singling out Meta?
Because:
This submission is about Meta. Of course I’m talking about Meta.
It’s a fucking display and gyrometer. It has zero reason to enforce using an account, unlike a storefront/game platform such as steam, which can’t really work without accounts.
That’s rethorical, by the way
I don’t care. I’ve addressed your nonsense regardless.
It’s because this was a legitimate issue back in 2020
Was and still is.
legitimately mad for a bit
Still are, and for good reason.
people didn’t want to stop being mad at them for other reasons
Nope. For the same reason. They enforce a Facebook/Meta login.
Having to endure the absurd dance of somebody pretending that a company with a closed platform containing a store and a digital distribution service would require a login to operate just like everybody else.
No.
Please STOP with these brazen lies.
NOBODY, and I do literally mean nobody, ever, anywhere, in any capacity, has an issue with Facebook requiring an account to use their storefront.
People do have an issue with Facebook requiring a log in to use a bloody HDMI port on a head mounted display they sell.
You know this, because you’ve already been told, you are just purposely being contrarian because you get off on it or something, I don’t know.
Eh... you don't seem to know how any of this works.
A Quest isn't a HMD, it's a self-contained system. It has its own OS (and Android variant, I believe), it has its own built-in store, it runs its own software right on the SoC built into the device. It very much isn't "displays and gyrometers". You can't even use it as a HMD for a separate computer without booting the OS first and running software on both ends. It operates like a Steam Link (which also requires logging in, by the way).
So... I'm sorry if this frustrates your vitriol, but you are factually wrong about how this operates. I've worn my Quest today. I am not lying to you.
As I am not lying to you when I tell you Meta gave up the Facebook login requirement years ago. You can just make a separate Quest account if you want. You can in fact detach your old Facebook account if you had it linked. You can also make multiple accounts on the same device and use them offline. I know because I have that exact setup on my Quest right now.
Don't think I don't notice that you're trying to squirrel out of having lied here by flipping to "a Facebook/Meta account". It won't fly. The issue people had was having to tie their headsets to Facebook and their social media ID. Meta accounts can be made freely with just a burner email, just like a PSN or an Xbox account, you don't need to associate it to anything else. It's not the same.
Also, please, if you're just going to respond with factually incorrect monosyllables don't bother with the quotes, it's a waste of space.
I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're speaking from ignorance here. I am less willing to forgive the sheer amount of rage given how wrong you are on the verifiable facts. Much as you're in character for a Ferengi, you may want to consider holding back some of that anger for an issue you actually care about. You're gonna run out.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 19:34
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Look, you clearly have way more time on your hands to simp for Facebook than I do to figure your lies, so I’m only going to cover the first few lines of your comment. I’m not even going to bother reading the rest of your comment. It’s probably just more lies anyway.
Eh… you don’t seem to know how any of this works.
The irony.
A Quest isn’t a HMD, it’s a self-contained system.
No shit. I alluded to that myself, when I said it has a storefront. That’s obviously not something a monitor could run itself.
I’m going to put this in bold, italics, and in caps, maybe then it’ll get through to you:
FACEBOOK’S QUEST DEVICES REQUIRE YOU TO HAVE AN ACCOUNT JUST TO USE IT AS A BASIC DISPLAY. I DON’T FIND ENFORCING A FACEBOOK/META ACCOUNT TO USE AN HDMI PORT/DISPLAY TO BE ACCEPTABLE. NEITHER DO MANY OTHERS. STOP TRYING TO MISREPRESENT WHAT I AND OTHERS ARE SAYING.
Did that get through? Do you understand?
Now, maybe you’re fine with jumping through whatever hoops Facebook wants to put in place. Maybe you think it’s a good thing. Maybe you have posters of Zuckerberg up in your bathroom so he can watch you piss. I’m not really interested.
If you like signing in with a Facebook account, good for you. You enjoy your quest. I’m ecstatic with joy for you, YOU DO YOU KING. But not everyone wants to be forced into signing in with a Facebook/Meta account to use a display output.
I don't sign in with a Facebook account. I decoupled that stuff because it is something you now can do after Meta caved to the pressure.
Which I've noticed you're no longer claiming didn't happen, so I guess for all the bold all-caps Internet yelling we're making progress. But still, that's what this thread was about, before you got here all yelly and screamy and weird latching onto some random comment about monitors.
Now, what you're saying is confusing because you seem confused about what you're angry about. One, Oculus (not Meta, this was pre-Facebook) backed off on its pre-release claims that it would not require a separate store to use the device and deployed the Oculus store with no cross-purchase options with Steam. And yes, that meant you needed to log in to Oculus (not Meta) to use the Rift and the Rift S. That sucked because the app sucked and it didn't always play nice with Steam VR and was basically bloatware. That remains in place, although Meta has shifted to being all Quest-first, so it's pretty residual.
And then there's the Quest, which is, again, a self-contained platform and has the same login requirements from any other self-contained platform. It also happens to have software support to be used as a PC display wired and wirelessly. Wirelessly this is pretty straightforward: you simply do not want to wirelessly stream your display to ANYTHING that isn't locked out from public access. That is a big duh.
For wired display your mileage may vary a bit more, but it's very likely not trivial to use the device as a HMD without going through the device, just technically. It definitely seems like a disproportionate amount of rage, though, considering that a) there are plenty of alternatives for "dumb" HMDs, and b) Meta is famously subsidizing the crap out of the Quest (which is, again, the point of this thread), so it's a bit weird to be screamy mad about them not engineering a way to use it while it's turned off as a simple HMD.
That is so far above and beyond the original reason people were mad about it's absurd. It no longer is "Oculus backed down into not having its own exclusive store purchases", it no longer is "Meta backed down on not forcing to link the Quest with Facebook accounts", it is now "Meta should let me use its heavily subsidized device without ever interacting with its OS to repurpose it as a cheap HMD for a different device". Not only are they not alone in doing that (Sony is only now allowing the PSVR 2 being used on PC, and that requires an additional purchase), but it's so above and beyond of a fringe use case it warrants exactly zero anger. Go buy a device that... you know, doesn't have an Android OS and a SoC in it. What are you mad at Meta about?
And for the record, I do NOT like Meta at all. I actively avoid most of their products any time I can. If I have to interact with anything Meta in my browser I put it on a Firefox container with nothing else. I actively believe they should be split up. They are a big part of a larger dynamic around social media eroding the very concept of liberal democratic statehood.
But also... that's enough to get mad at them? Like, I don't need to make up additional, random, factually incorrect, entirely unreasonable entitled customer whiney crap to be mad about. There is plenty of reasonable stuff that doesn't make me sound like ranting lunatic on the Internet, and if they want to sell me VR hardware at half price or whatever I feel no need to do mental gymnastics to avoid it. I will ride that train and suckle on that teat for as long as good old Zuck wants to give me cheap hardware. Believe it or not, it's entirely possible to hold those two stances at the same time.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 07:48
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That’s a whole lot of text for justifying Facebook requiring an account to use a display and HDMI port.
Can you please stop repeatedly lying? It’s so easy to not lie.
Not a lie, not an HDMI port. You can keep repeating it, doesn't make it true and it's immediately obvious to anybody who has touched the device for more than thirty seconds. I don't need to argue, reality is what it is.
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
on 19 Jul 2024 21:09
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I honestly don’t put it past Samsung. Their TVs already do. I have an old monitor, and I’m currently using what will probably be my last smartphone from them. They make good hardware, but I’m tired of them insisting on knowing everything I do to use it.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 21 Jul 2024 07:22
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They do not ask you to login to use your monitor.
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
on 21 Jul 2024 13:17
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Yet. Their TVs, on the other hand, will do everything in their power to go online. Their phones just had an update to their software where the privacy policy is basically “We need access to all your data if you want to use anything beyond the base functionality.” So, given the trends, no, I don’t put it past them.
lurch@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Jul 2024 07:07
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You didn’t have to log into PlayStations back in the day btw… It just worked. Idk how it is now. (I switched to playing free games on PC and use my gaming budget to gamble on the stock market instead.)
My point is: Login doesn’t need to be a requirement for standalone devices.
Hold on, the last time you didn't have to log in to use a PS console was... what, 2005? And you are seriously claiming in public with a straight face that you don't use any gaming services that need a log in on PC? So... you use none of them? Not Steam, not Gog, not Epic, not Xbox, not EA Play or whatever Origin is called... none of those.
Well, I mean, bully for you, but I'm gonna guess that Meta is after a different demographic than... you know, people who don't buy videogames on their videogame systems. Login absolutely has been a requirement for standalone gaming devices for the past twenty years, with no meaningful exceptions.
Specifically, though, what VR device do you use with no login? Because last I checked, all the places that deliver VR software have their own. The Oculus app does. Steam does. PSVR does. Apple sure does.
So... what type of mythical beast are you to be using this rawdog VR device with no login involved? Are you just beaming I Love Lucy to an HMD using the power of imagination?
Valmond@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 08:49
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Wow, the old “the others are doing it too!!” defence.
So lame.
You’re just a corporate bootlicker lol 😆, did you buy their VR set or what?
Yes, the old "standard practices for the past 20 years should probably not be the reason you stay away from one product over another if both products are doing the same thing".
The bootlicking is off the charts.
For the record, I did buy one of their headsets. I also bought one of Valve's and one of Sony's. Turns out this VR thing has been going on for a while and I find it quite interesting.
I did make a login with all three of those companies.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 10:37
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Hold on, the last time you didn’t have to log in to use a PS console was… what, 2005?
Oh, SW RotS on PS2 with friends at summer, and SW BFII, and Gran Turismo
Hey, I miss being young, too, but if I'm going to argue for the good old days of actually having friends over to play games I'm not gonna do it over the budget VR headset. People didn't get mad when Xbox Live happened and now this is the world we have.
LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org
on 19 Jul 2024 14:53
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I will just say that I don’t think Steam et al. are equivalent to logging onto your device. The account I use on my computer is… just that, a local account for my computer. So, if the Quest requires some sort of authentication, why can’t it be local too?
I have the same argument with consoles as well, but at least with the Xbox One, login still isn’t required unless you’re playing digital games. You can play all the disc games you like without any account.
This is not right. The Steam login is very much an online login, you can't create an account offline or a local-only account. Your login status is used for DRM and rich presence, among other things. Steam does allow a temporary offline mode for travel and so on, but it's not just a local account. This applies to the Steam Deck as well.
I'm pretty sure you do need an account on Xbox to play at all, including physical media. I don't think a local account will do, but I could be wrong on that one, there's been some argument about how to use consoles in Antarctica and whatnot, so the details are fuzzy.
Also, pretty sure the current Oculus account system works the exact same way. You can definitely play offline as well. You made me go check because at this point it's borderline gaslighting and yeah, you can absolutely turn off the Quest's Wi-fi and play offline.
The reason you kinda remember it working differently than the Xbox and all the others is probably the half-remembered outrage from the one year when it did work differently that everybody forgot to get over because Meta is Meta and dunking on Meta is never not fun.
Which is fair enough, but for Carmack's sake, if you do want an affordable HMD you can use both standalone and with your PC don't hesitate just because of a half-remembered grudge, it's okay to at least research it and give it a fair shake.
LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org
on 19 Jul 2024 15:59
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No no, I was saying the account for my computer is local only. Steam, being a separate application, makes sense to have a separate login.
And I don’t remember anything differently… I don’t really have a horse in this race, just playing devil’s advocate.
Fair enough, substitute "the general consensus" there. I don't mean you as an individual specifically. You all. English really needs an official plural for the second person pronoun.
Your computer having a local account is fair enough, although MS is trying to kill that too and I genuinely am not sure if it's mandatory on Macs. In any case, the comparison here is with gaming consoles or, yeah, with Steam itself, in that the Quest isn't a display device, it is a full-on integrated platform. There's a store in there, it's digital only, so you can't really do much with it without a login, just like you can't do much with a PSVR or an Index without a login.
Again, people are displacing the old rage about there being a unified Facebook login tied to your real name, which was fair, with there being a login at all, which was never the point. Oculus required a login before Facebook stepped in and there is currently a separate login for Quest devices.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 00:54
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FYI, you can use a PSVR headset (at least the OG one) on a PC using third party software and not only do you not even need to log in to a Playstation account, you don’t even need a Playstation.
barsquid@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 11:26
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I read some of your other comments. Your mouse wants you to log in? I think part of the problem is you.
But I am worried about, for example, finding a TV that isn’t a piece of shit. It does seem to be creeping in more and more product categories.
I wish people would quit buying that shit. Collective refusal to log in to our monitors would eventually end the begging. Too bad some people are desperate for RGB lighting I guess.
The problem is indeed me in that I use an ergonomic Logitech mouse because RSI is a bitch.
And that mouse absolutely demands that you use Logitech's annoying peripheral controller software, which also insists on updating with game button profiles every time you reboot your PC. Welcome to the future.
Hey, I agree that it's bad and annoying and quite ridiculous for a mouse or just to use RGB lights. I really hope that MS's centralized RGB management will replace most of it. My current keyboard already supports it and it's great to have it right in the OS settings instead of being bloatware.
But my point isn't that endless superfluous apps are a good thing, it's that being big mad about a software and gaming platform requesting you to log in to it is at best anachronistic and at worst not a thing you want, given you are using your credit card and streaming your desktop through it.
barsquid@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 11:52
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It sucks that Logitech is one of the few competitors in that space, yeah. I’ve got a vertical mouse. I’m not going to install their garbage software, and luckily it behaves itself normally out of the box. I honestly should have returned it though.
I have a Steam account, sure, having a login to associate purchases with makes sense. A peripheral, though, absolutely not. I’m viewing the VR headsets in more of the monitor category. It shouldn’t be connected to the wifi on its own to be able to forward the desktop. It should be like a GPU, drivers in the kernel and a software layer that exposes a more uniform API for developers.
It’s exhausting. I just bought a monitor and there were all sorts of “smart” monitors I had to filter out. Even then I had to look all inputs to make sure it had a regular C14 power connector so I don’t have dumb power brick garbage all over.
Yeah, but that's my point. People rage at Meta for requiring a Facebook login out of pure reflex. The Quest isn't a peripheral, it's a standalone computing device. It boots into an OS when you turn it on, using it with a PC is an added feature.
Nobody complained about this specifically when Apple did it with the Vision. Nobody complains about needing to log in to use the PSVR headset on a PlayStation.
If you are more than superficially interested in this space you may remember that the reason why there's all this residual rage is that when Oculus got acquired they already had a login system and there was a lot of back and forth and backtracking from Meta, first saying the Oculus login would stay in place and then enraging people by putting the Quest under their unified "login with Facebook" login manager.
That was legitimate. They were doing things they said they wouldn't do, it was impractical to sync to an account bearing your real name as a demand of the EULA, and this wasn't the first time Oculus had reneged on promises.
At this point, though, a couple of hardware generations down the line, years after they reversed that policy and with a well established ecosystem that works pretty much exactly the same way an Xbox does? This is purely reflexive "Meta bad" stuff that is disconnected to whether the login requirement makes sense, is convenient, does anything untoward or any other practical consideration.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 00:53
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I’m just sitting here with my WMR headset which works perfectly well for all my games and software without needing an account from anybody. The only bugbear is that it’s tied to Windows (for now), but what else is new?
Cause I know this is a huge mess of a thread, but the point was whether the Quest is a good entry level headset. Last I checked the Quest 2 starts at 250 bucks. Is there a WMR device for under twice that?
Also, do you have a Steam account or are those games and software being delivered by mail?
I don't think the Quest is the only option that makes sense, but it's certainly the entry point no-brainer, even if that's relying on Meta spending a ton of money to keep people within their ecosystem.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 12:17
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About $400, and remember that at the time I bought it the Quest 3 wasn’t even announced yet. The Quest 2 was the new hotness from Facebook and the Reverb G2’s resolution is superior which was also an important attribute for me. 1,832 × 1,920 per eye vs. 2160 x 2160. And at that time the cheapest Quest 2 was not $250, it was $299.
A Steam account is irrelevant. You’re building straw men to ignore the fact that a WMR headset itself physically works without any account requirement whatsoever tied to the hardware. But if you insist that ever having to type in a password for anyone is some kind of “gotcha,” which it isn’t, my Reverb G2 absolutely does work with every game that natively supports VR in Windows that I’ve tried which includes Elite: Dangerous, No Man’s Sky, MS Flight Sim, Asetto Corsa, Project Cars/2, etc. All of these games can be had outside of the Steam environment. Yes, it even works with pirated games. You don’t even need a Microsoft account to download and play free (not paid) VR games and “experiences” from the Windows store! If you absolutely insist, you can even play Oculus titles on it using ReVive.
There is no technological reason any of Meta/Facebook’s hardware products need to force you to sign in with a Facebook account just to work. A lot of people, myself included, will never buy a Meta VR product no matter how shiny or cheap they make it because of that reason, and where it comes from.
No, I'm not building a straw man. The argument that having to use a log in at all is a dealbreaker has been made here repeatedly. You do not need a Steam account to use a Quest, you are just as gated in both cases. There is only duplication at play if you use the Quest as both a standalone device and a HMD. And all the major platforms where you'll get content delivered for your device make you log in to digitall distribute the software.
Outside of the context of the history of people getting mad about the Facebook account requirement while that was in place no reasonable person would understand the virulence at play here. It makes no sense. Why would people be so fundamentally angry, furious at the idea of having to have an account to use a gaming platform. Nobody cares on PlayStation, Xbox Live was hailed as a major innovation despite introducing not just a login but also a fee to play online. Steam introduced digital distribution and DRM into the PC market and it's widely considered a net positive for the gaming industry.
So why is the Quest so much worse than those?
The answer is, of course, it isn't. It's a heavily subsidized platform with a first party store requirement, just like Xbox, PlayStation or the Switch. The anger is a carryover from a previous incident that is no longer applicable but people don't want to let go, partially because it blends with other complaints about the brand.
By the way, you seem to have gotten a deal for that Reverb G2, my understanding is it launched at 600, not 400, and that was one of the more affordable options in that space at the time. I feel that if you're going to nitpick the 50 bucks discount I get to call you out on the 33% discount there.
Look, I think you're being honest about your impressions here. I believe you when you say that you just won't buy a Meta VR product because it's from Meta regardless of how cheap or good it is. That's one of the most sincere takes I've seen in this mess of a dogpile so far. And it's your prerogative. I'm not here to sell Quests to people. Presumably giving them out for peanuts did that well enough, if the reported numbers are to be believed.
I do reserve the right to my opinion that this is a very unreasonable stance that ignores the places where Meta did respond to community demands and that newcomers with no horse on that race for purely emotional or ideological reasons should probably consider it as an entry point. If you want to be mad about it, be mad about it, but that seems like a reasonable take that shouldn't be particularly offensive.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 00:50
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?
FWIW, I use a Logitech G502 Hero mouse and a G512 Carbon keyboard and I do indeed use their “G Hub” applet to reconfigure the buttons and RGB shit, and all. I have never, not once, ever created or signed into an account to use it and this has not precluded me from using any feature I’ve ever wanted to. I have no idea why Logitech even offers the option to create an account to use for their app other than probably some idiot with an MBA at Logitech read about it and got the idea from his 2014 copy of “Techbro for dummies.”
KillerTofu@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 10:29
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I have never needed to use WhatsApp. Do I not exist in society?
It depends on where you live. Over here my last Covid vaccine appointment was given over WhatsApp and the guys that came to install fiber in my apartment did the whole thing over WhatsApp as well. Every single chatgroup I have with friends and family is on WhatsApp. I've tried to surface the notion of Telegram and Signal being things at points and it's an absolute no-go. People don't say "I'll text you", they say "I'll WhatsApp you".
My mom calls it "sending a Whats" and I have never hated anything more in my life.
So yeah, very regional, but in the places where it's the default, it's the default hard, both on Android and iPhone. People in the US Apple bubble severely misunderstand to what extent Meta won the social media race. I don't like it, but it is what it is.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 20 Jul 2024 21:29
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Over here my last Covid vaccine appointment was given over WhatsApp and the guys that came to install fiber in my apartment did the whole thing over WhatsApp as well
If you want to roleplay this, then you may get a look, considering it comes preinstalled in both iPhones and pretty much every Android phone.
People are still aware of phone numbers existing, so they'll figure it out. But like having an email address or a mobile phone, the default assumption is you have a WhatsApp account associated to your phone number and it makes a number of things more convenient.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 20 Jul 2024 21:36
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I “roleplay” it all the time with phone numbers, names, emails, etc.
Enter fake ones or just refuse and they say “okay”.
I don't want to not have people reach me through the most convenient means.
I would very much prefer that not to compromise more of my privacy than absolutely necessary, for sure. But I do want a service like WhatsApp that everybody I know is also using. That's a good thing. If Line was the thing everybody uses I'd be on Line. Back when it was MSN Messenger (because that's what we had, ICQ was never a thing), I was on that.
I don't aim to not use WhatsApp, I expect regulation to make it safe, just like it does for food and medicine and roads and everything else.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 20 Jul 2024 21:45
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I don’t aim to not use WhatsApp, I expect regulation to make it safe
That’s a naive and ignorant position. That’s never going to happen.
As long as you continue to not push against this sort of thing, it will continue to be pushed upon you.
There are federated, interoperable, and open-source alternatives. Make them use them.
Ah, yes, that's why I keep my walls unpainted. Can't trust big paint with the not putting lead in that. Never going to happen.
You're not pushing back against anything, you're arguing about Meta's nichest product on the nichest social media of them all. At some point one will have to assume the arguing is the point, more than enacting any change.
Between regulation of the techbro oligarchy or... whatever this thread is, I know where my money goes. The opposite is straight up libertarian talk.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 20 Jul 2024 22:13
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Ah, yes, that’s why we can trust the big banks not to tank the global economy, because the government regulates them and because they’ll punish anyone who tries. They certainly wouldn’t just fill their pockets and reward them instead while punishing absolutely no one responsible, right?
Libertarian talking points again. Every instance of a government failing to do their jobs is an indictment on the concept of governments.
There are two things you need for effective governance: effective people in government and effective design of government.
If you don't have those, your only priority is to get those (so get to it, Americans). If you do have those, your job is to oversee them doing their job.
Neither of those tasks particularly requires getting into spats with random Internet people in obscure corners of social media to flaunt how much you dislike anything associated with a particular brand you've chosen as an arbitrary avatar for a specific issue. One could argue for an organized boycott, but that's not what's happening here, and if it was it'd be the most ineffectual example of one on record.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 20 Jul 2024 22:31
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Libertarian talking points again
My guy, do you know what a Libertarian is? If I were a Libertarian I would be celebrating the global recession as a victory of government apathy. I’m not saying they shouldn’t do that, I’m saying they’re not going to, and depending on that is naive and ignorant.
One could argue for an organized boycott, but that’s not what’s happening here
I do argue for that on a regular basis. I can’t control the government and I can’t control Meta. I can only control me, as you can control you. You can choose to participate in the enshittification of the world or you can abstain from it and resist it. It’s up to you.
No, I get it, I'm not saying you're doing it on purpose. I'm saying the cynical right wing anti-regulation talking points have seeped so deep into the fabric of social disenchantment that they are parroted universally now.
No, artificially crippled regulation being bad at regulating doesn't change the need for regulation or the collective onus on regulating abusive corporate behavior. No, you don't just control you. You take collective action. Individual action means squat and does nothing. Nobody has ever "voted with their wallet". You vote with your votes, and if that isn't allowed or is rendered ineffective you vote with something pointier.
So no, you don't -can't- abstain from participating in that process as a political act. You engage in political action. Especially if the performative pantomime of activisim is arbitrary and driven by false premises and misconceptions.
Look, social media is fundamentally harmful. Including this site. Meta invented a good chunk of it and monetized most of it using anticompetitive practices and abdicating their responsibilities. And they should be broken apart into manageable chunks and regulated within an inch of their lives.
None of which has any bearing on them spending their considerable resources on subsidizing some gaming-focused VR headset. And even if the perceived slight on that particular product was offensive, it certainly isn't more offensive than what Google does with Gmail. Or what Unilever does with pretty much everything you buy that has some chemicals in it, or whatever else.
I don't care or want to be an online vigilante, taking valiant ranting action against whatever company is unlucky enough to have been part of an article I read once. I want to pay my taxes, vote in conscience, unleash the hellhounds of the hard end of the social contract and get to buy whatever cool shit I think is cool without having to bear the burden of moral judgement from highly ineffective keyboard warriors. Or, you know, at least only bear the judgement that is based on actual facts, not made up grudges.
helenslunch@feddit.nl
on 21 Jul 2024 00:16
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artificially crippled regulation being bad at regulating doesn’t change the need for regulation or the collective onus on regulating abusive corporate behavior
I don't thin anyone believes that when you put it that way, but... that's kinda what is being said, yeah.
hypnicjerk@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 11:40
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b) this is a remarkable incentive to NOT acknowledge criticism. I mean, if I’m Meta and I see this often, what is the incentive to not just force everybody to EULA away as much as possible?
how incredibly fucking dishonest. profit motive is more than enough incentive for them to continue to do what they’ve already been doing for close to two decades.
“don’t boycott exceptionally shitty companies or you’re responsible when they just get worse” is possibly the worst take i’ve seen so far on lemmy.
That would sure be a bad take. Let me know when somebody makes it.
In the meantime I continue to argue that if you boycott people on the basis of their reputation without reversing that stance when they reverse their behavior then you're not "boycotting" anything, you're just removing yourself from the pool of possible customers altogether.
My issue isn't with the notion of boycotting companies, my issue is with the moving of goalposts when the companies do cave to the pressure just to extend the online ragefest. I get that it'd be easier to argue with the imaginary opponent in your head, but if you want to argue with me instead I'd appreciate addressing the actual issue.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 19:55
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In the meantime I continue to argue that if you boycott people on the basis of their reputation without reversing that stance when they reverse their behavior then you’re not “boycotting” anything, you’re just removing yourself from the pool of possible customers altogether.
Dude, Meta has been and continues to be fucking terrible. If you don’t understand why then i guess you’ve been living in your closet in a VR headset for the last two decades.
No, I understand the ways in which Meta is terrible.
I also understand the ways in which they're not because I'm an adult who is capable of holding semi-complex concepts in my mind.
Meta sucks, their role in social media has been a massive net negative for society and they are at best in denial about that, and at worst a deliberate bad actor.
But they're also a huge corporation, so if their dumb chat app is the standard for communication or their VR headsets are great and dirt cheap I will interact with them, just like I interact with Apple, Microsoft, Netflix and a bunch of other corporations I fundamentally disagree with on key issues.
I hate this notion that money is support. It is not. That is a stupid ass ultracapitalist fallacy to make people feel good for ineffectually buying one brand of cereal over another. I don't take a political stance on Meta by not buying their cheap stuff, I do so by supporting political actors who are willing to break apart oligopolistic media companies and regulate their role in society.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 20:22
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I hate this notion that money is support. It is not.
Lol, that’s not a “notion” at all, it’s reality.
Even with the case of them providing a cheap headset, they’re betting (and they’re often correct, and always correct in aggregate) that you will make it up to them in other ways (e.g. your data, software purchases, etc.).
Well... yeah. They didn't invent that scheme, that's been how most gaming systems are deployed since the Sega of the 90s at least.
And yes, it's a "notion" that is extremely anglocentric and intrinsically capitalist. It assumes that money is self-expression and speech and puts the onus of holding corporations accountable on individual consumers as opposed to regulators. It's half a step away from "ban plastic straws" in the list of ineffectual guilt dispersal schemes meant to avoid addressing any real issues.
Hate to break it to you, but corporations behaving semi-functionally as opposed to destroying everything they touch is not down to your brave refusal to purchase superfluous consumer products for your own entertainment. You're no superhero for not buying a thing you don't need anyway. It's governments that are supposed to have the power to hold them to account, not some magic hand bullcrap where the forces of the free market tend to a morally superior outcome. Can't believe this is so widespread on supposedly leftie circles.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 20:38
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You’re no superhero for not buying a thing you don’t need anyway.
And you’re no superhero for writing several thousands of words on lemmy about how we should make completely optional purchases of products from companies we hate and that make us angry.
You’re just a corporate apologist.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Jul 2024 20:41
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They haven’t reversed any behavior.
There is no circumstance that justifies having any account with anything Facebook owns, and stealing other company’s names to try to trick people into thinking they’re a different company doesn’t change that.
Well, thanks for passing judgement on... let me check here... two billion people, as it turns out.
They have, in fact, reversed the policy that required linking your Quest account to a live Facebook account, though. That is a fact, perceived moral failings of a significant chunk of humanity or not.
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
on 19 Jul 2024 20:56
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Okay, but what does any of that have to do with Meta?
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 19:52
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But hey, I do have a Whatsapp account because it’s pretty much mandatory to exist in society,
I’ve never encountered a situation in which I’ve needed to use WhatsApp for anything. Today i guess i learned that i don’t “exist in society” or something. 😆
Go find the other response I gave to someone else who made that exact joke.
TLDR, I'm guessing you're American and just don't realize to what extent WhatsApp has entirely replaced texting in many, many places around the world, regardless of whether you use Android or iPhone.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 20:25
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Who cares?
Why does a texting app have a network effect for you? Is SMS completely unavailable on people’s phones in your country? Or are you just afraid of seeming a little bit different from the pack?
Because, see if you can follow this logic, sometimes my mom wants to tell me things. Also my doctor. And my government. And the plumber. And delivery guys.
It's not a "pack", it's a society and a family. And it's not about "being different", it's about not having to explain to every single person in my life that they need to talk to me through a different device than they use for literally everything else.
Nobody I know has sent a SMS since the 2010s. You do not realize how detached from reality that sounds. I just checked my phone, the last time I received a legit SMS that wasn't an automated notification was February 2022, when a seller from an eBay-like service wanted to ask me a thing about a delivery.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 20:42
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So you’re saying sms does work on your phones, but it’s not commonplace so…guess if everyone’s using Satan’s butthole app instead might as well join the pack?
You have no idea how delusional you sound, this is like oh nobody makes phone calls anymore, instead they call through evilcorp ringytimes in my country so i guess i just have to give them all my personal information and offer up my first born, and it’s actually the fault of you guys…who don’t use this that evil corp requires that!
Oh, they call through Whatsapp, yeah. About 50% of the time, I'd say.
No, for real. A lot of my audio calls are through WhatsApp as well, they just show up as normal calls, and since that goes through wifi a lot of people on prepaid phones prefer that, especially if they have relatives in other countries that would trigger roaming charges. After a while it becomes habit.
You really, really, REALLY don't have a picture of the scale of penetration into society of this particular application. I'm not shocked, I've seen it before. The slow realization is kinda funny, actually. If it makes you feel better, I keep hearing "blue bubbles" as something that full-on political parties have opinions about and I don't see the point, either.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 20:58
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There’s not going to be any slow realization for me. Nobody in my country uses this shit at all and even if they did I still wouldn’t.
Part of the problem with your point of view is that you think everyone gives a shit about controlling or intends to control the behavior of these companies through purchasing and usage patterns. Maybe some people do intend that. I don’t, and I’m sure there are others that don’t either.
I don’t purchase this shit from these corporations or use their bullshit because it improves my life not to.
Okay, so does that mean if it improves your life to do so by, say, allowing your friends and family to get in touch with you without needing a tutorial first each time, you would use their services?
Because I have big news about what that would mean if you were to live somewhere else.
Look, I'm gonna try to be as gentle as possible here, but your argument that you don't care because you're too American to be concerned about how people do things elsewhere is not as good of a look as you may have thought it was when you wrote it. And your claim that your performative anger isn't about making a point, but rather to "improve your life" doesn't quite line up with your ardent defense of the idea that you express or withdraw support by using money.
That's fine, we can move on from this tangent, but hey, at least respect my intelligence a teensy bit. Not even that much, just the bare minimum.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 21:21
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And your claim that your performative anger isn’t about making a point, but rather to “improve your life” doesn’t quite line up with your ardent defense of the idea that you express or withdraw support by using money.
Performative anger? WTF are you even talking about?
Money just is a form of support, and that’s not a notion. They even call payment to your children fucking “child support”.
your argument that you don’t care because you’re too American to be concerned about how people do things elsewhere is not as good of a look as you may have thought it was when you wrote it.
It isn’t an argument. It’s reality. Also i frankly don’t give a shit what it looks like.
I mean, not that anybody is reading this but us this deep into it, but if they were I'd just point at that post and shrug, and I'd feel pretty good about that.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 21:29
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Lol whatever. Stop caping for evil ass corporations and then trying to couch your positions in pseudo leftist bullshit.
It’s completely fine actually for someone to be like i ain’t buying that fucking optional doodad because i don’t want to deal with the corporate overlord that owns it.
Yeah. That's perfectly fine. Zero issue with that on my end.
More of an issue with "it's morally wrong of two billion people to even consider having a Meta account of any kind", or claiming that Meta is doing things it is not doing, or moving the goalposts of acceptability if and when Meta caves to pressure.
Like, not a big issue, as you say this is an expensive toy for nerds, so not a major dealbreaker. Just a bit of a shame and mild frustration at the unreasonableness.
Well, that was like sixty posts of dogpile ago. Now it's mild annoyance at online behavior in general. Although I'm honesly relatively proud of myself for not being angrier about this nonsense at this point.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 21:54
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More of an issue with “it’s morally wrong of two billion people to even consider having a Meta account of any kind”,
I didn’t read that anywhere, but it could be here and if it was i wouldn’t agree with it at all.
I feel like this hits a nerve for you in some way it shouldn’t. You aren’t anything for having a Meta account besides someone that has a Meta account.
SMS is still expensive in other countries, internet access is cheap and WhatsApp is free. For example, it’s the only way my mom can keep in contact with her family in South America.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 20:43
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See this makes a bit more sense than the weirdo wall of text I got.
The sheer drama. I will keep all three sentences in a single paragraph next time. Honestly, full stops don't deserve the hate.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 21:23
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Can you count?
awesomesauce309@midwest.social
on 20 Jul 2024 20:24
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I’m not reading anymore of this thread, but go move to the EU and request all the data those companies you mentioned have on you. You will see a truly staggering amount of your day to day info from some of them. Facebook and google are just advertising companies trying to get their thumbs in every pie they can convince enough people to buy into. Part of that is designing their products to require phoning home. The issue isn’t signing in. Signing in is just the trojan horse to make sure every bit of data they pull from you is tied to the right advertising account ID. They shouldn’t be allowed to continue to do that, even if they have enough money to lobby for its legality. Even if every single company on earth was freely doing it to the same degree people should still push for a change.
The business world is truly a slippery slope. Google made unethical digital advertising into a major market, and now even if they close shop somebody else will come fill the gap. The only way to put the power back in people’s hands is to regulate them out of existence but that will never happen if most people don’t even know it’s happening because you can’t even fucking complain about it on the internet without a hundred reply thread jfc
No, hold on, get it right, the 100 post thread is about somebody defending something tangentially related to them. Thread was nice and short with just complaining, it was when somebody pointed out that the requirement people were complaining about had been removed that the massive dogpile started.
And yes, by the way, I do know what data these companies have on me. I pulled all my Google data just last week, all 50 gigabytes of it. I agree that regulation is the answer to this. Absolutely. Everybody knows that, nobody is finding that via a rant about factually incorrect anecdotes about Meta's VR headset, of all things.
But also, I have an Android phone. With a Google account on it. Do you not have a phone? Nobody is saying to not complain about abusive data mining or breaches of privacy, but you don't have to performatively pretend to never engage with them or that the reason they get away with it in absence of regulation isn't that they do make things people want or need.
This conversation boils down to whether it's a moral imperative to turn your chosen cause into your entire personality at the expense of reality and beyond any nuance whatsoever. And honestly, in the current sociopolitical context, and despite being just about the most superfluous demonstration of this imaginable... man, it's such a bummer.
awesomesauce309@midwest.social
on 19 Jul 2024 04:47
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Not separated enough for me. I know all the big companies are bad, but I won’t touch google/fb hardware.
NegativeInf@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 05:09
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The same jerks with a new name get the all your data. Bootlick harder.
hypnicjerk@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 11:38
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do you struggle to play peekaboo? how do you not grasp that they’re feeding into the same software ecosystem and your data is being stored in the same database?
Yeah, that’s the entire deal of it. And why it’s lame.
barsquid@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 10:59
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Same sentiment except additionally I will never buy anything from Facebook because they are radicalizing people.
Not going to buy an Apple Vision either if it won’t behave as a generic screen for any OS.
I am utterly sick of the account requirement and proprietary connector bullshit from every company.
vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.works
on 24 Jul 2024 15:51
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I am still so incredibly salty that my quest 1 is a paperweight because of this requirement.
It did not exist when I purchased the product. Full Stop.
When they introduced to that requirement with the quest 2 you were able to use the quest one without it with no issue. Sometime last year we tried to hook our quest one up to Steam Link and were met with a Meta Account requirement. There was no way within the UI to get around it.
In a moment of frustration, wanting to play some Beat Saber with the family, I went ahead and started the process of making a meta account only to be stopped several times along the way by various privacy layers on our network. It was insane. My PiHole about caught fire.
30 minutes in I gave up and dug out the Vive Cosmos and all 20 wires it needed. So disappointed meta is the only wireless headse with decent battery life. They ruined VR adoption for me.
chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 05:06
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u/chemical_cutthroat Reportedly Happy With How Much Money Meta’s VR Division Burns
kinkles@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Jul 2024 05:41
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Lemmy hates Meta but honestly the Quest 3 is a fantastic headset. I use mine semi-regularly for wireless Steam VR.
dubyakay@lemmy.ca
on 19 Jul 2024 05:45
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Too bad that it will turn into a brick once meta decides to axe their VR department.
Why would it? It’s just an android device. LG didn’t brick all their smartphones when they pulled out of that market.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 07:01
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I don’t think anybody is under the impression that their engineers are stupid or that they can’t make decent hardware when they want to.
They just rightly think that Facebook is an absolutely evil company.
Klear@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Jul 2024 08:12
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A lot of clueless people here are calling the Quest shit product tho. I can understand not wanting to give money to facebook but the tech is incredible.
taiyang@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 09:37
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I couldn’t go back after using the Valve Index, though. Wireless or not, it’s too much of a compromise on quality.
Edit: sleepy typo
Deceptichum@quokk.au
on 19 Jul 2024 10:35
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What about the Index is an improvement over the Quest 3 in terms of quality? Looking up the specs, the Quest 3 seems to be handily beating the Index, a 5 year old headset. Pancake lenses alone are such a massive jump in visual clarity that it’s hard to consider buying a headset that still uses fresnel lenses.
I would agree with you if we were comparing the Index against the Quest 2 for sure, but the Quest 3 sets quite a high bar.
RaoulDook@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 21:51
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It’s better because it’s not from Facebook, and it does VR extremely well overall.
For me, it’s actually the FOV, it covers more ground (130 degree vs 110). Going back to less FOV sucks. It’s also perfectly fine for clarity and frame rate, although I’d like an index 2 for sure. I’ve heard it also tracks better although I’ve never noticed the difference (I only used quest 3 at other homes).
Still surprised it’s been 5 years, though. But it’s not about what tech is available so much as the priorities valve put into their headset. They wanted it to be comfortable for a long play sessions. Just wish it wasn’t tethered, but it’s probably another reason why it still out performs in things like stability.
Thank you that’s definitely something to consider! I’ve had opportunities to use the Quest 3 at this point but not the Index yet. I’ve used other fresnel lens headsets in the past like the Vive and Quest 2, but neither has that kind of FOV.
I was very impressed by the way the pancake lenses can keep the entire image in focus instead of having to find the sweet spot and stare straight ahead into it, but an extra 20° of FOV is going to definitely make me question which I value more. I’ll have to find a place to try the Index so I can see.
No worries, I wish it had pancake lenses too but at least it’s not as bad as the vive. No screen door effect, but yes to the sweet spot thing. There’s a few other things going for the index, like those cool speaker headphones, but yeah… 5 years old, I guess valve is getting distracted by it’s steam deck success.
I haven’t looked into it, but I think there might be a mod to make it wireless now, too, but I haven’t looked into it since having kids. No time for VR when you have self destructive little ones existing in your vicinity.
give me one billion period and ill build you a kickass vr set without bullshit, and ill probably have money spare for me and possibly descendants to retire. people underestimate how much money one billion actually is.
People underestimate how much a fucking Million is! It’s like a lifetime salary (3k/m for 27.8 years).
We should call billions thousand millions.
hagelslager@feddit.nl
on 20 Jul 2024 10:27
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In a lot if countries a thousand million is a milliard and a million million is a billion. But somehow US English skipped the -liard numbers and it’s influencing UK English these days as well.
leopold@lemmy.kde.social
on 21 Jul 2024 00:20
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These are known as the short scale and long scale systems respectively. Though the United States was indeed the first English-speaking country to switch to short scale, pretty much all English-speaking countries have used short scale almost exclusively for a long time, including the United Kingdom. Saying that it’s simply being influenced is an understatement. From Wikipedia:
British usage: Billion has meant 10^9^ in most sectors of official published writing for many years now. The UK government, the BBC, and most other broadcast or published mass media, have used the short scale in all contexts since the mid-1970s.^[12]^^[13]^^[43]^^[15]^
Before the widespread use of billion for 10^9^, UK usage generally referred to thousand million rather than milliard.^[16]^ The long scale term milliard, for 10^9^, is obsolete in British English, though its derivative, yard, is still used as slang in the London money, foreign exchange, and bond markets.
I’ve never actually seen the word milliard used in English outside of discussions about the long and short scale systems. However, many other languages do mainly or exclusively use long scale. For instance, my native language French.
Buffalox@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 11:36
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Not a drop in the bucket of their revenues, though. This is really about someone feeling angst that they can’t get an extra quarter percent increase in profits for the quarter so that the dividends go up just so slightly.
IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 08:53
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Y’all are pissy at Meta, but I hope they are successful. A virtual reality social network is a fantastic idea and I hope they can figure out a way to bring a cool communication app to the masses. That camera that followed you was a great idea that got lost in the Facebook hate.
fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
on 19 Jul 2024 09:17
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I’m absolutely ready to admit that I’m probably just too old to embrace this cool new thing but I’ve just never really been that excited about it.
To be absolutely honest, the idea that a corporation can control what I’m seeing in some altered or virtual reality just makes my skin crawl.
I understand that most people won’t feel the way I do. I understand that my preferences may be unusual.
It’s just not my thing.
thorbot@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 09:19
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Nice try, cuckerberg
DarkThoughts@fedia.io
on 19 Jul 2024 10:02
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If there's anything we've learned over the past couple decades, then that any sort of social network by this company is a terrible idea.
No idea what camera you're talking about, but we need less cameras, not more. I don't want to get recorded or live streamed by some strangers either, especially not if it is some stupid as drone that causes even more noise pollution.
IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 10:17
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I think you speak for the minority. Video calling is quite popular and there is a healthy market behind it. I love the communication that’s possible with family. Being able to have a multi room conversation that followed me while I clean and cook would be fantastic.
DarkThoughts@fedia.io
on 19 Jul 2024 10:24
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If you think the majority of people do frequent video calls then you're even more delusional than I thought. But that has nothing to do with flying cameras or the disinformation cesspools that Facebook social media platforms are anyway.
IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 10:39
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statista.com/…/mobile-video-calling-age-gender-di… and it’s only getting more popular. My daughter is growing up using these services to speak with her family. You think she’s going to suddenly think, let’s step back 30 years?
People are certainly not asking for less cameras on their devices either.
🤷♂️
DarkThoughts@fedia.io
on 19 Jul 2024 16:59
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I don't know what you think your numbers show, but it clearly proves my point of it being a minority - so it is you who speaks for the minority, not me.
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
on 19 Jul 2024 21:16
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I only do phone calls when I’m in a situation where I can’t look at a screen, such as driving. Otherwise, if it’s not in person, it’s text or video. And, given my personality, it’s usually text for most people.
MonkderDritte@feddit.de
on 19 Jul 2024 09:08
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Do VR/AR glasses like in the picture actually exist?
fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
on 19 Jul 2024 09:12
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No.
JeffreyOrange@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 09:51
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MonkderDritte@feddit.de
on 19 Jul 2024 10:47
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Cool, thanks!
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 19 Jul 2024 11:35
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meta: makes vr division
also meta: is shocked it bleeds money
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
on 19 Jul 2024 14:36
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keep in mind meta didnt make occulus, they bought it out. Oculus is just on the list of silicon valley startups that suceeded in getting bought out and profited from. (of the 10x more that fail)
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 19 Jul 2024 17:09
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Is this supposed to be better somehow? Personally it doesn’t make much difference to me if Meta created their own shitty VR or bought a decent VR then made it shitty… The result is the same.
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Jul 2024 08:06
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They didn’t make shit. They did what Google loves to do and they bought a highly successful, incredibly progressive company. And now it’s shit, just like alllll the others that got bought out by big names.
OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
on 19 Jul 2024 11:40
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Damn. Sorry to hear about that emotion a soulless corporation is having.
curiousaur@reddthat.com
on 19 Jul 2024 11:49
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You could have, you know, not bought and ruined oculus, and destroyed the VR ecosystem.
I was at GDC the year of the acquisition. There were Facebook suits walking around the showroom floor writing checks to sign exclusivity deals with anyone showing off a VR game.
That is a way more legit reason to still be mad, in my book, and it predates the Facebook acquisition. Oculus had made all that noise about how their devices would be platform agnostic and they wouldn't try to railroad you into buying games through their platform and the moment there was money buzz around the idea Luckey dropped that stuff like it was red hot and we ended up with the travesty that is the PC Oculus store.
I don't think VR was ever going to be mainstream, but imagine what the software ecosystem would be if techbro Smeagol hadn't gotten greedy for that precious, precious investment money.
Yeah, well, don't tell the local patrons, I'm in like post a hundred below of "how dare you acknowledge anything remotely serviceably about a Meta-related product".
But yeah, no, you're pretty much right. They're subsidizing a huge chunk of that entire corner of tech. I don't think it's a mainstream type of device, but I'm glad we all got to spend a few years messing with it as a semi-viable consumer product, even if it's just a bit of an overengineered novelty thing.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 21:40
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Facebook flooded the market with cash, but failed to secure any Killer App to get people on their product. I wouldn’t say they ruined Oculus so much as it continues to be an unsolved technology that wasn’t ready for this level of exposure. I still can’t use the damned thing for more than an hour without feeling nauseous, and Meta was trying to gear up Oculus headsets for mass adoption by office workers.
The games market isn’t what they’re fixated on. They want this to be standard hardware for excel-book jockeys.
stoly@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 21:57
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I suspect that we’ll end up not with the gaming market being where this sticks, but entertainment. Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 22:08
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Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
My neck is already hurting from craning all the time. And I’m guaranteed to miss the best part of the movie because I was looking in the wrong direction.
TunaLobster@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 22:01
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Moto X (2013) has a 360 demo movie on it. It was alright and neat to spin around in your chair to follow the action, but at the same time I could have sat still and the camera moved.
downhomechunk@midwest.social
on 20 Jul 2024 03:29
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My crippling adhd would like a word
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Jul 2024 08:06
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Truly a solution looking for a problem.
Coreidan@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 13:16
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VR is over rated as fuck. It will never be mainstream.
theangryseal@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 14:58
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Part of me agrees and part of me doesn’t.
I don’t know a kid who doesn’t have at least a Quest 2. I have four brother in laws aged 11-16 and every time I go over there at least two of them are in the basement rocking the headset. My neighbor is on his every day. My daughter has the Quest 2, full body trackers, and a beefy gaming PC almost exclusively dedicated to VR. The kids are all in, seriously.
I’m 38. I have a Quest 2 but I also have two toddlers and an infant (in a couple weeks anyway). I haven’t turned my Quest on in about a year. I got pretty heavy into Pavlov for a while, but here’s where the failure comes in for VR being mainstream and widely adopted. I can’t play and watch my children. I have to ask my wife to take on all of the responsibility just so I can play, and I don’t feel good about that so I just don’t play.
It isn’t the same as something like a Steam Deck. I can put it down and get back into it easily while also keeping an eye on the world around me. I can put my kids on my lap and they can watch me play if they want to. You just can’t do that in VR. It completely disengages you from your surroundings. It isn’t easy to jump in and out of it because you have to be trapped to a dedicated space with your eyes turned off to the world.
I love VR, but not enough to pull myself entirely out of my life to play. I think most people face that issue.
It’s a nonissue when you’re a teenager on summer break with no responsibilities. There’s just no room in a busy life for VR.
I’d like to see it succeed. I’d like to see it come to a point where you can somehow keep your real space visible, if only on a monitor in the corner of a high res display. I love it, I just can’t use it.
negativeyoda@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 15:18
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My 6 year old has never played or seen a video game.
I take her to the beach, playdates at the park with friends, we go mountain biking, etc. Hearing your stories makes my flesh crawl
theangryseal@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 18:18
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I mean, you do you. I personally love video games and I’ve loved them all of my life. It’s something I can do with my kids that allows us to connect. I didn’t grow up in a world with access to anything else. There’s no beach trip in a world where your shoes have holes in them and you’re living on brown beans. My mom always found a way to scrounge up an old video game console for us and we’d borrow games from friends who had it better or had stopped playing their older games. Hell, when we stayed in a women’s shelter once for weeks, all the kids who were stuck there got by on the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo in the tv room. We were able to bond and make friends in that horrible place with that shared horrible experience because of video games.
I had adventures that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. I had fun that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. It’s hard for me to understand why you feel the way you do, but I guess we’ve had very different experiences and you feel the same way on the opposite side of it.
My grandmother just passed away, and when I stood there at her casket I remembered very fondly sitting in the floor with her and beating all of the Donkey Kong Country games. She wasn’t physically able to do much and video games brought us together and made us connect and enjoy life together. I remember the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1998 when my mother and I would sneak and open the only present I had under the tree (Zelda, Ocarina of Time) when my dad would go to sleep.
I’m happy that what you do with your kid makes you happy. I don’t understand why you’ve had such an extreme reaction to what we do though when it really doesn’t matter. People like what they like.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 19 Jul 2024 17:11
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“VR” at its heart is just 3D goggles, motion sensors, software, etc. So yes it’s overrated but I don’t see any tech reason why it couldn’t be mainstream. It takes a really dumb and shitty company to fuck it up.
woelkchen@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 09:28
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It requires its users to wear special equipment and the mainstream doesn’t want that. 3D Blu Ray died for the same reason. The only company that cracked the mainstream with anything remotely in that direction was Nintendo with its 3DS.
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 15:33
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But the worst part is how they affect me personally. With my big glasses 🤓 I am no longer allowed at places of personal interest such as science and engineering events, nudist beaches, orgies at friends houses and gangbang dates.
alienanimals@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 17:25
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[Publicly traded company] unhappy with how much money [division] burns. Suggests putting the money into stock buybacks.
Wow, this is some hard- hitting journalism that couldn’t possibly write itself!
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
on 19 Jul 2024 21:37
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Even the buybacks are getting crazy when the P/E of these firms is on the order of 30-50. The big financial institutions just assumes these big companies have the growth potential of tiny startups and that they will forever and ever and ever.
Atm, Meta’s actually looking not-terrible with its 27 P/E ratio and $40B/year advertising income stream. So they’ve got plenty of room to fuck around and find out with VR and AI. But eventually, the fact that nobody is advertising on this shit (because nobody is using it) means they have to explain why they’re sinking hundreds of millions into a dead end.
That’ll force them to pivot to some other speculative source of infinite growth. Which will reignite the hype cycle for the Next Big Thing. But, in the end, its the steady monopolization of ad dollars in their existing franchise markets that they care about.
Incidentally, also why they need to shut TikTok down before it eats into their market share even further.
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Jul 2024 08:03
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Good. Learning Facebook bought Oculus was fucking depressing as shit.
What they’ve done to it since has been worse than what most (if not all) of us expected.
Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 09:39
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Oculus was created by Palmer Lucky.
Palmer Lucky’s new company is making AI drones and roboos for the military.
Add a new VR headset to that list. Since the FTC has done away with non compete clauses the man went ahead and announced he will show off his new headset this August (I think it has a military focus as well). So many VR influencers were salivating in the comments of his post.
I find it frustrating that people give this man credit for jumpstarting VR when if he hadn’t Sony probably would have. They were expetimenting with VERY similar tech around the time he was.
If anything we should attribute Luckey to the contamination of the industry. If it wasn’t for his choice to sell to facebook the landscape might have been a little bit greener. Most definitely more growing pains for the tech but I do think we would have seen more open hardware. Hell, maybe Valve would have found it necessary to pick up the reigns. It’s been said the Deckard may not release because they don’t find it necessary with steam link on quest. (Not confirmed obviously).
Fuck Anduril.
expr@programming.dev
on 21 Jul 2024 01:20
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Yeah. Anduril has tried to hire me multiple times as well as well as a number of people I know (their software is written in Haskell, which is a somewhat niche skill set).
Every time I’ve told them absolutely not.
hark@lemmy.world
on 20 Jul 2024 19:17
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It felt better when VR was the hot new buzzword, right? Oh well, there’s the AI division also burning money, but at least it’s the current buzzword!
darkmogool@feddit.de
on 21 Jul 2024 07:14
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threaded - newest
Maybe you shouldn’t have made it so shit
Cutting spending by 20% while not reducing output will definitely accomplish that, too!
Listen pal - Do you know how hard it is to make legs for a wii-like avatar?! We need another 8 billion.
They’re called miis 😤
Hello, I am a friendly ghost coming to attend your serious business meeting in the Metaverse. Did you know that this is going to be a massive industry? Buy your Metaverse real estate now, it’s definitely not a fake digital asset that Facebook can create and delete at will.
The tech in general just isn’t good enough to do that much more. It’s like having a coal powered steam engine and then saying you’ll build a formula 1 car with it. They thought that with throwing enough money at the wall, a few breakthroughs in tech would fall out, but it doesn’t work like that. If you’re very lucky you hit one breakthrough, but they needed a few.
Sounds like the intial pitch probably went something like this, except they weren’t realistic about the timeline.
Can’t watch the clip in my country, but it’s a common enough theme with tech bros. Theranos also comes to mind.
90% of technology companies quit before making a hit VR product. We should encourage Meta to spend more.
Let’s hope Meta sinks every last dime of their profit into “the next big thing” that is their VR division
I’d much rather see meta burn money into the fun project that is VR rather than AI or crypto.
Meh, the problem will always be that Meta will use its VR platform as a data vacuum first and foremost, which makes it a nonstarter (at least for me)
Well, if I didn’t have to make a face book log in to use one. If not for that I would consider one to play in steam. Even if I had to have it tethered.
I think they don’t require that anymore. It’s a “Meta login” which can be separate from Facebook. At least for Quest devices.
Call it what you want, but this requirement prevents me from buying their products too. I use no Meta services. Don’t wanna start.
Welcome to the classic social media 100m dash. Become a popular dunk target on socials > get people to call such and such choice as a dealbreaker > stop doing such and such > it is now "not enough", or "they'll enshittify it later" or "a slippery slope".
Which fine, whatever. I'm not saying Meta are "good guys" (no corporation is, honestly). What I will say is a) that is not a particularly productive or functional way to engage with pretty much anything, especially when there is no comparable alternative to a product, and b) this is a remarkable incentive to NOT acknowledge criticism. I mean, if I'm Meta and I see this often, what is the incentive to not just force everybody to EULA away as much as possible? People will give me crap for it regardless, so I may as well get to sell some sweet, sweet data.
FWIW, I'm skeptical of the ability of Meta to turn around the VR market as a whole, I don't like many of their privacy and content moderation practices and I no longer use Facebook, Instagram or Threads. But hey, I do have a Whatsapp account because it's pretty much mandatory to exist in society, and I do have a Quest headset, which I agree is the best price to performance you can buy and works flawlessly with PC VR both wired and wirelessly.
I don’t need to log into my computer monitor, why should I log into my VR goggles?
Don’t give them thanks for only half vacuuming your personal privacy, keep bitching until they do it right.
I mean, in this case because it's a standalone device, so... for the same reason you log in to your PlayStation. Also, you already had to log in to it when this was a Oculus thing, the "I don't want a Facebook login" complaint only became a talking point after they transitioned from the Oculus login over to the Facebook login, so the intellectual honesty in moving the goalposts based on this argument seems dubious.
In any case, I could see you getting uppity about logging in to use it wired. Maybe. There are a ton of hardware settings and configuration that are handled within the Quest's software directly, so I bet that would be way less trivial to deploy than people imagine. There is certainly no way I can envision where this thing would be usable wirelessly without a software login. You need to run an app to link to your PC, be it the Oculus or the Steam Link app. For security reasons alone you don't want a logless device that streams what's on your desktop monitor at will.
EDIT: Also, for the record, there are a bunch of monitor manufacturers that do ask for a login. Hi, ASUS Armoury Crate, you suck and have always sucked.
Show me these monitors you speak of that force you to log in before they work.
E: I’ll interpret your downvote and lack of answer as “there aren’t any”
I did not downvote you and I genuinely just saw your post now, chill your bits. Some of us have a job or a life beyond refreshing social media constantly (and I'm already pretty bad on that front).
So to your question, I didn't say "force you to log in before they work", I said "ask for a login". Which my ASUS display in fact does to deliver updates and control lighting. In fairness, their dumb app also covers the keyboard, mouse and motherboard RGB, but account login it has. So does my Logitech mouse, by the way. My other Alienware monitor is interesting, because it doesn't have a login, but it does ask to collect your data, including it scrubbing your games library and constantly monitoring your controller with no opt-out for some reason. I think I would have preferred a login. Still better than Armoury Crate, though.
And of course that assumes we're only talking about PC monitors. Every single one of my TVs requests a login as part of the first time setup process, whether you use them stand-alone or as a PC output. The trophy to most annoying spyware on that front has to go to LG, whose WebOS device allows me to log out after creating an account if I want, but then it will stop updating some of my apps, so each time Max decides to change its name or Disney wants to change the background on its Disney Plus app I have to manually log in, update, then log out again. Fun!
So you brought up an optional piece of software with an email log in and treated it the same as enforcing a log in. Cool.
Asus having software you can optionally use to control your display and other Asus peripherals/components is very different to enforcing a Meta/Facebook account to use a display.
That is not the same and the comparison is ridiculous.
If Facebook said that accounts were completely optional and only used to access their store or whatever then there would be zero issue.
But that’s not what they do. You have to log in and create an account just to have an HDMI signal and basic gyroscope functionality.
No, I made a passing comment about how the comparison the OP made isn't particularly effective and, in the social media 200m obstacles you have decided to create a tangent nitpicking that caveat to death because you think it scores points instead of being an obnoxious stalemate.
So no, it's not "the same", what it is is relevant to note that pretty much every piece of hardware you buy does at least request that you log in to a service and, of course, the part you're actively ignoring, which is that all dedicated hardware and software platforms in the market, VR or not, do require a mandatory login.
So can we get back to the point or do you want to keep litigating your deliberate misrepresentation indefinitely? I see you have plenty of time, given you got so antsy about waiting 30 minutes for a response.
No.
In reply to someone complaining that a head mounted display forces you to have a Facebook/Meta login in order to use it at all, you brought up that “a bunch” of monitors also “ask” that you do the same.
But:
asking is not the same as forcing.
monitors don’t do that anyway, your argument is a lie.
I have never seen a monitor’s OSD popping up and pestering you to sign in.
That is not true either.
Yes.
That's why I didn't just say that monitors also ask for your login and that was just a minor postcript throwaway at the end of the post.
But by all means, please do provide a counterexample of a standalone software or hardware platform that doesn't request a login. I am waiting with bated breath. Can't wait for somebody trying to actually define this grudge beyond amorphous rage to see the scope of what's being requested.
So yeah, please, do go on.
No.
Yes you did. Scroll up.
I’m sorry, does your lie being at the end of a post rather than at the start somehow mean it doesn’t count?
Stop moving the goalposts. You said they force you. Now you’re saying request.
Don’t you remember saying that they force you? Here’s your quote:
And for that I could name a bunch of examples. You don’t have to make a Google account to use an Android phone. You don’t have to make a Nintendo account to play on a Switch. You don’t need an account to play play Blu-rays on a Blu-ray player. My smart TV doesn’t need a Google account or a Sony account. You don’t need an account to watch YouTube. Etc. Those are all hardware, software, or both ecosystems.
How aren’t you understanding that asking (or in the case of monitors, not even asking - to be very clear, you lied about that) for a login and requiring it aren’t the same?
Nobody has an issue with Facebook/Microsoft/Google asking you to sign in. But they absolutely have a problem with it being enforced. Particularly when it’s for something as basic as displaying an HDMI signal.
Well, we do know that you want to litigate the misrepresentation indefinitely.
So you're lying about what I said. Which always weirds me out because... well it's still there, you can look at it. Here's what I said:
You will notice the word "have" is not in fact in that piece of text (well, except for "you have always sucked"). The word "ask" is in that piece of text. If you have questions about the meaning of those words please feel free to look them up.
Now, about your other absurd lie.
You HAVE to make a Google account to use the Google Play store, which is the platform (Android is just the OS). You HAVE to make a Nintendo account to use the eShop, although I do give you partial credit on that one, if you stick to physical media only you can still play some games on it.
Meanwhile, you DO need an account to use, in no particular order: Steam VR, PSVR, Playstation in general, Xbox in general, Apple Vision Pro, an iPhone, GOG, EA Play, and since you're willing to include services beyond gaming and software, also Kindle, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Netflix, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, the LG, Samsung and Sony free streaming services, Plex, Spotify, Tidal and so, so many more.
Oh, and Lemmy.
So if Microsoft MAKES you log in to use an Xbox and Sony MAKES you log in to use a PlayStation and Steam MAKES you log in to use... well, Steam and Steam VR, then why are you singling out Meta?
That's rethorical, by the way, it's because this was a legitimate issue back in 2020 when they briefly enforced a Facebook log in for both new and existing users and people were legitimately mad for a bit, and then they changed policy after all the backlash but people didn't want to stop being mad at them for other reasons so here we are. Having to endure the absurd dance of somebody pretending that a company with a closed platform containing a store and a digital distribution service would require a login to operate just like everybody else.
I’m just calling out a lie. I like to do that. I’m sorry that offends you.
Nope.
And they don’t. No monitor asks you to sign in before (or after) using it.
I haven’t lied once, that’s all on you.
Yes? Who said otherwise? The play store isn’t required for you to use your phone.
Please don’t take offence at this, but are you mentally deficient? Of course Android is a platform. In every sense of the word. It’s a platform for apps, it’s a platform for development, it’s a platform for all kinds of things.
Let’s look at the Cambridge definition:
Platform, noun. (Computing)
"the type of computer system or smartphone you are using, in relation to the type of software (= computer programs) you can use on it:
This new personal banking software can be used with any Windows platform.
Both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile platforms now have emoji keyboards built into their software."
Again, you don’t need the eShop to use a switch.
I also see you ignoring that I mentioned YouTube. Is that not a platform in your confused mind?
Wrong.
Because:
This submission is about Meta. Of course I’m talking about Meta.
It’s a fucking display and gyrometer. It has zero reason to enforce using an account, unlike a storefront/game platform such as steam, which can’t really work without accounts.
I don’t care. I’ve addressed your nonsense regardless.
Was and still is.
Still are, and for good reason.
Nope. For the same reason. They enforce a Facebook/Meta login.
No.
Please STOP with these brazen lies.
NOBODY, and I do literally mean nobody, ever, anywhere, in any capacity, has an issue with Facebook requiring an account to use their storefront.
People do have an issue with Facebook requiring a log in to use a bloody HDMI port on a head mounted display they sell.
You know this, because you’ve already been told, you are just purposely being contrarian because you get off on it or something, I don’t know.
Eh... you don't seem to know how any of this works.
A Quest isn't a HMD, it's a self-contained system. It has its own OS (and Android variant, I believe), it has its own built-in store, it runs its own software right on the SoC built into the device. It very much isn't "displays and gyrometers". You can't even use it as a HMD for a separate computer without booting the OS first and running software on both ends. It operates like a Steam Link (which also requires logging in, by the way).
So... I'm sorry if this frustrates your vitriol, but you are factually wrong about how this operates. I've worn my Quest today. I am not lying to you.
As I am not lying to you when I tell you Meta gave up the Facebook login requirement years ago. You can just make a separate Quest account if you want. You can in fact detach your old Facebook account if you had it linked. You can also make multiple accounts on the same device and use them offline. I know because I have that exact setup on my Quest right now.
Don't think I don't notice that you're trying to squirrel out of having lied here by flipping to "a Facebook/Meta account". It won't fly. The issue people had was having to tie their headsets to Facebook and their social media ID. Meta accounts can be made freely with just a burner email, just like a PSN or an Xbox account, you don't need to associate it to anything else. It's not the same.
Also, please, if you're just going to respond with factually incorrect monosyllables don't bother with the quotes, it's a waste of space.
I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're speaking from ignorance here. I am less willing to forgive the sheer amount of rage given how wrong you are on the verifiable facts. Much as you're in character for a Ferengi, you may want to consider holding back some of that anger for an issue you actually care about. You're gonna run out.
Look, you clearly have way more time on your hands to simp for Facebook than I do to figure your lies, so I’m only going to cover the first few lines of your comment. I’m not even going to bother reading the rest of your comment. It’s probably just more lies anyway.
The irony.
No shit. I alluded to that myself, when I said it has a storefront. That’s obviously not something a monitor could run itself.
I’m going to put this in bold, italics, and in caps, maybe then it’ll get through to you:
FACEBOOK’S QUEST DEVICES REQUIRE YOU TO HAVE AN ACCOUNT JUST TO USE IT AS A BASIC DISPLAY. I DON’T FIND ENFORCING A FACEBOOK/META ACCOUNT TO USE AN HDMI PORT/DISPLAY TO BE ACCEPTABLE. NEITHER DO MANY OTHERS. STOP TRYING TO MISREPRESENT WHAT I AND OTHERS ARE SAYING.
Did that get through? Do you understand?
Now, maybe you’re fine with jumping through whatever hoops Facebook wants to put in place. Maybe you think it’s a good thing. Maybe you have posters of Zuckerberg up in your bathroom so he can watch you piss. I’m not really interested.
If you like signing in with a Facebook account, good for you. You enjoy your quest. I’m ecstatic with joy for you, YOU DO YOU KING. But not everyone wants to be forced into signing in with a Facebook/Meta account to use a display output.
I don't sign in with a Facebook account. I decoupled that stuff because it is something you now can do after Meta caved to the pressure.
Which I've noticed you're no longer claiming didn't happen, so I guess for all the bold all-caps Internet yelling we're making progress. But still, that's what this thread was about, before you got here all yelly and screamy and weird latching onto some random comment about monitors.
Now, what you're saying is confusing because you seem confused about what you're angry about. One, Oculus (not Meta, this was pre-Facebook) backed off on its pre-release claims that it would not require a separate store to use the device and deployed the Oculus store with no cross-purchase options with Steam. And yes, that meant you needed to log in to Oculus (not Meta) to use the Rift and the Rift S. That sucked because the app sucked and it didn't always play nice with Steam VR and was basically bloatware. That remains in place, although Meta has shifted to being all Quest-first, so it's pretty residual.
And then there's the Quest, which is, again, a self-contained platform and has the same login requirements from any other self-contained platform. It also happens to have software support to be used as a PC display wired and wirelessly. Wirelessly this is pretty straightforward: you simply do not want to wirelessly stream your display to ANYTHING that isn't locked out from public access. That is a big duh.
For wired display your mileage may vary a bit more, but it's very likely not trivial to use the device as a HMD without going through the device, just technically. It definitely seems like a disproportionate amount of rage, though, considering that a) there are plenty of alternatives for "dumb" HMDs, and b) Meta is famously subsidizing the crap out of the Quest (which is, again, the point of this thread), so it's a bit weird to be screamy mad about them not engineering a way to use it while it's turned off as a simple HMD.
That is so far above and beyond the original reason people were mad about it's absurd. It no longer is "Oculus backed down into not having its own exclusive store purchases", it no longer is "Meta backed down on not forcing to link the Quest with Facebook accounts", it is now "Meta should let me use its heavily subsidized device without ever interacting with its OS to repurpose it as a cheap HMD for a different device". Not only are they not alone in doing that (Sony is only now allowing the PSVR 2 being used on PC, and that requires an additional purchase), but it's so above and beyond of a fringe use case it warrants exactly zero anger. Go buy a device that... you know, doesn't have an Android OS and a SoC in it. What are you mad at Meta about?
And for the record, I do NOT like Meta at all. I actively avoid most of their products any time I can. If I have to interact with anything Meta in my browser I put it on a Firefox container with nothing else. I actively believe they should be split up. They are a big part of a larger dynamic around social media eroding the very concept of liberal democratic statehood.
But also... that's enough to get mad at them? Like, I don't need to make up additional, random, factually incorrect, entirely unreasonable entitled customer whiney crap to be mad about. There is plenty of reasonable stuff that doesn't make me sound like ranting lunatic on the Internet, and if they want to sell me VR hardware at half price or whatever I feel no need to do mental gymnastics to avoid it. I will ride that train and suckle on that teat for as long as good old Zuck wants to give me cheap hardware. Believe it or not, it's entirely possible to hold those two stances at the same time.
That’s a whole lot of text for justifying Facebook requiring an account to use a display and HDMI port.
Can you please stop repeatedly lying? It’s so easy to not lie.
Not a lie, not an HDMI port. You can keep repeating it, doesn't make it true and it's immediately obvious to anybody who has touched the device for more than thirty seconds. I don't need to argue, reality is what it is.
.
I honestly don’t put it past Samsung. Their TVs already do. I have an old monitor, and I’m currently using what will probably be my last smartphone from them. They make good hardware, but I’m tired of them insisting on knowing everything I do to use it.
They do not ask you to login to use your monitor.
Yet. Their TVs, on the other hand, will do everything in their power to go online. Their phones just had an update to their software where the privacy policy is basically “We need access to all your data if you want to use anything beyond the base functionality.” So, given the trends, no, I don’t put it past them.
You didn’t have to log into PlayStations back in the day btw… It just worked. Idk how it is now. (I switched to playing free games on PC and use my gaming budget to gamble on the stock market instead.)
My point is: Login doesn’t need to be a requirement for standalone devices.
Hold on, the last time you didn't have to log in to use a PS console was... what, 2005? And you are seriously claiming in public with a straight face that you don't use any gaming services that need a log in on PC? So... you use none of them? Not Steam, not Gog, not Epic, not Xbox, not EA Play or whatever Origin is called... none of those.
Well, I mean, bully for you, but I'm gonna guess that Meta is after a different demographic than... you know, people who don't buy videogames on their videogame systems. Login absolutely has been a requirement for standalone gaming devices for the past twenty years, with no meaningful exceptions.
Specifically, though, what VR device do you use with no login? Because last I checked, all the places that deliver VR software have their own. The Oculus app does. Steam does. PSVR does. Apple sure does.
So... what type of mythical beast are you to be using this rawdog VR device with no login involved? Are you just beaming I Love Lucy to an HMD using the power of imagination?
Wow, the old “the others are doing it too!!” defence.
So lame.
You’re just a corporate bootlicker lol 😆, did you buy their VR set or what?
Yes, the old "standard practices for the past 20 years should probably not be the reason you stay away from one product over another if both products are doing the same thing".
The bootlicking is off the charts.
For the record, I did buy one of their headsets. I also bought one of Valve's and one of Sony's. Turns out this VR thing has been going on for a while and I find it quite interesting.
I did make a login with all three of those companies.
Oh, SW RotS on PS2 with friends at summer, and SW BFII, and Gran Turismo
When PS meant something.
EDIT: 2007-2008 rather, but still
Hey, I miss being young, too, but if I'm going to argue for the good old days of actually having friends over to play games I'm not gonna do it over the budget VR headset. People didn't get mad when Xbox Live happened and now this is the world we have.
I will just say that I don’t think Steam et al. are equivalent to logging onto your device. The account I use on my computer is… just that, a local account for my computer. So, if the Quest requires some sort of authentication, why can’t it be local too?
I have the same argument with consoles as well, but at least with the Xbox One, login still isn’t required unless you’re playing digital games. You can play all the disc games you like without any account.
This is not right. The Steam login is very much an online login, you can't create an account offline or a local-only account. Your login status is used for DRM and rich presence, among other things. Steam does allow a temporary offline mode for travel and so on, but it's not just a local account. This applies to the Steam Deck as well.
I'm pretty sure you do need an account on Xbox to play at all, including physical media. I don't think a local account will do, but I could be wrong on that one, there's been some argument about how to use consoles in Antarctica and whatnot, so the details are fuzzy.
Also, pretty sure the current Oculus account system works the exact same way. You can definitely play offline as well. You made me go check because at this point it's borderline gaslighting and yeah, you can absolutely turn off the Quest's Wi-fi and play offline.
The reason you kinda remember it working differently than the Xbox and all the others is probably the half-remembered outrage from the one year when it did work differently that everybody forgot to get over because Meta is Meta and dunking on Meta is never not fun.
Which is fair enough, but for Carmack's sake, if you do want an affordable HMD you can use both standalone and with your PC don't hesitate just because of a half-remembered grudge, it's okay to at least research it and give it a fair shake.
No no, I was saying the account for my computer is local only. Steam, being a separate application, makes sense to have a separate login.
And I don’t remember anything differently… I don’t really have a horse in this race, just playing devil’s advocate.
Fair enough, substitute "the general consensus" there. I don't mean you as an individual specifically. You all. English really needs an official plural for the second person pronoun.
Your computer having a local account is fair enough, although MS is trying to kill that too and I genuinely am not sure if it's mandatory on Macs. In any case, the comparison here is with gaming consoles or, yeah, with Steam itself, in that the Quest isn't a display device, it is a full-on integrated platform. There's a store in there, it's digital only, so you can't really do much with it without a login, just like you can't do much with a PSVR or an Index without a login.
Again, people are displacing the old rage about there being a unified Facebook login tied to your real name, which was fair, with there being a login at all, which was never the point. Oculus required a login before Facebook stepped in and there is currently a separate login for Quest devices.
FYI, you can use a PSVR headset (at least the OG one) on a PC using third party software and not only do you not even need to log in to a Playstation account, you don’t even need a Playstation.
.
If I ever encounter a monitor begging me to log in, that is going directly back where it came from the very same day.
Cool. Look after the ones you have now, then.
I read some of your other comments. Your mouse wants you to log in? I think part of the problem is you.
But I am worried about, for example, finding a TV that isn’t a piece of shit. It does seem to be creeping in more and more product categories.
I wish people would quit buying that shit. Collective refusal to log in to our monitors would eventually end the begging. Too bad some people are desperate for RGB lighting I guess.
The problem is indeed me in that I use an ergonomic Logitech mouse because RSI is a bitch.
And that mouse absolutely demands that you use Logitech's annoying peripheral controller software, which also insists on updating with game button profiles every time you reboot your PC. Welcome to the future.
Hey, I agree that it's bad and annoying and quite ridiculous for a mouse or just to use RGB lights. I really hope that MS's centralized RGB management will replace most of it. My current keyboard already supports it and it's great to have it right in the OS settings instead of being bloatware.
But my point isn't that endless superfluous apps are a good thing, it's that being big mad about a software and gaming platform requesting you to log in to it is at best anachronistic and at worst not a thing you want, given you are using your credit card and streaming your desktop through it.
It sucks that Logitech is one of the few competitors in that space, yeah. I’ve got a vertical mouse. I’m not going to install their garbage software, and luckily it behaves itself normally out of the box. I honestly should have returned it though.
I have a Steam account, sure, having a login to associate purchases with makes sense. A peripheral, though, absolutely not. I’m viewing the VR headsets in more of the monitor category. It shouldn’t be connected to the wifi on its own to be able to forward the desktop. It should be like a GPU, drivers in the kernel and a software layer that exposes a more uniform API for developers.
It’s exhausting. I just bought a monitor and there were all sorts of “smart” monitors I had to filter out. Even then I had to look all inputs to make sure it had a regular C14 power connector so I don’t have dumb power brick garbage all over.
Yeah, but that's my point. People rage at Meta for requiring a Facebook login out of pure reflex. The Quest isn't a peripheral, it's a standalone computing device. It boots into an OS when you turn it on, using it with a PC is an added feature.
Nobody complained about this specifically when Apple did it with the Vision. Nobody complains about needing to log in to use the PSVR headset on a PlayStation.
If you are more than superficially interested in this space you may remember that the reason why there's all this residual rage is that when Oculus got acquired they already had a login system and there was a lot of back and forth and backtracking from Meta, first saying the Oculus login would stay in place and then enraging people by putting the Quest under their unified "login with Facebook" login manager.
That was legitimate. They were doing things they said they wouldn't do, it was impractical to sync to an account bearing your real name as a demand of the EULA, and this wasn't the first time Oculus had reneged on promises.
At this point, though, a couple of hardware generations down the line, years after they reversed that policy and with a well established ecosystem that works pretty much exactly the same way an Xbox does? This is purely reflexive "Meta bad" stuff that is disconnected to whether the login requirement makes sense, is convenient, does anything untoward or any other practical consideration.
I’m just sitting here with my WMR headset which works perfectly well for all my games and software without needing an account from anybody. The only bugbear is that it’s tied to Windows (for now), but what else is new?
Yeeeeah, how much did that cost?
Cause I know this is a huge mess of a thread, but the point was whether the Quest is a good entry level headset. Last I checked the Quest 2 starts at 250 bucks. Is there a WMR device for under twice that?
Also, do you have a Steam account or are those games and software being delivered by mail?
I don't think the Quest is the only option that makes sense, but it's certainly the entry point no-brainer, even if that's relying on Meta spending a ton of money to keep people within their ecosystem.
About $400, and remember that at the time I bought it the Quest 3 wasn’t even announced yet. The Quest 2 was the new hotness from Facebook and the Reverb G2’s resolution is superior which was also an important attribute for me. 1,832 × 1,920 per eye vs. 2160 x 2160. And at that time the cheapest Quest 2 was not $250, it was $299.
A Steam account is irrelevant. You’re building straw men to ignore the fact that a WMR headset itself physically works without any account requirement whatsoever tied to the hardware. But if you insist that ever having to type in a password for anyone is some kind of “gotcha,” which it isn’t, my Reverb G2 absolutely does work with every game that natively supports VR in Windows that I’ve tried which includes Elite: Dangerous, No Man’s Sky, MS Flight Sim, Asetto Corsa, Project Cars/2, etc. All of these games can be had outside of the Steam environment. Yes, it even works with pirated games. You don’t even need a Microsoft account to download and play free (not paid) VR games and “experiences” from the Windows store! If you absolutely insist, you can even play Oculus titles on it using ReVive.
There is no technological reason any of Meta/Facebook’s hardware products need to force you to sign in with a Facebook account just to work. A lot of people, myself included, will never buy a Meta VR product no matter how shiny or cheap they make it because of that reason, and where it comes from.
No, I'm not building a straw man. The argument that having to use a log in at all is a dealbreaker has been made here repeatedly. You do not need a Steam account to use a Quest, you are just as gated in both cases. There is only duplication at play if you use the Quest as both a standalone device and a HMD. And all the major platforms where you'll get content delivered for your device make you log in to digitall distribute the software.
Outside of the context of the history of people getting mad about the Facebook account requirement while that was in place no reasonable person would understand the virulence at play here. It makes no sense. Why would people be so fundamentally angry, furious at the idea of having to have an account to use a gaming platform. Nobody cares on PlayStation, Xbox Live was hailed as a major innovation despite introducing not just a login but also a fee to play online. Steam introduced digital distribution and DRM into the PC market and it's widely considered a net positive for the gaming industry.
So why is the Quest so much worse than those?
The answer is, of course, it isn't. It's a heavily subsidized platform with a first party store requirement, just like Xbox, PlayStation or the Switch. The anger is a carryover from a previous incident that is no longer applicable but people don't want to let go, partially because it blends with other complaints about the brand.
By the way, you seem to have gotten a deal for that Reverb G2, my understanding is it launched at 600, not 400, and that was one of the more affordable options in that space at the time. I feel that if you're going to nitpick the 50 bucks discount I get to call you out on the 33% discount there.
Look, I think you're being honest about your impressions here. I believe you when you say that you just won't buy a Meta VR product because it's from Meta regardless of how cheap or good it is. That's one of the most sincere takes I've seen in this mess of a dogpile so far. And it's your prerogative. I'm not here to sell Quests to people. Presumably giving them out for peanuts did that well enough, if the reported numbers are to be believed.
I do reserve the right to my opinion that this is a very unreasonable stance that ignores the places where Meta did respond to community demands and that newcomers with no horse on that race for purely emotional or ideological reasons should probably consider it as an entry point. If you want to be mad about it, be mad about it, but that seems like a reasonable take that shouldn't be particularly offensive.
?
FWIW, I use a Logitech G502 Hero mouse and a G512 Carbon keyboard and I do indeed use their “G Hub” applet to reconfigure the buttons and RGB shit, and all. I have never, not once, ever created or signed into an account to use it and this has not precluded me from using any feature I’ve ever wanted to. I have no idea why Logitech even offers the option to create an account to use for their app other than probably some idiot with an MBA at Logitech read about it and got the idea from his 2014 copy of “Techbro for dummies.”
I have never needed to use WhatsApp. Do I not exist in society?
It depends on where you live. Over here my last Covid vaccine appointment was given over WhatsApp and the guys that came to install fiber in my apartment did the whole thing over WhatsApp as well. Every single chatgroup I have with friends and family is on WhatsApp. I've tried to surface the notion of Telegram and Signal being things at points and it's an absolute no-go. People don't say "I'll text you", they say "I'll WhatsApp you".
My mom calls it "sending a Whats" and I have never hated anything more in my life.
So yeah, very regional, but in the places where it's the default, it's the default hard, both on Android and iPhone. People in the US Apple bubble severely misunderstand to what extent Meta won the social media race. I don't like it, but it is what it is.
“I don’t have WhatsApp”
If you want to roleplay this, then you may get a look, considering it comes preinstalled in both iPhones and pretty much every Android phone.
People are still aware of phone numbers existing, so they'll figure it out. But like having an email address or a mobile phone, the default assumption is you have a WhatsApp account associated to your phone number and it makes a number of things more convenient.
I “roleplay” it all the time with phone numbers, names, emails, etc.
Enter fake ones or just refuse and they say “okay”.
Yeeeah, we're not hearing each other.
I don't want to not have people reach me through the most convenient means.
I would very much prefer that not to compromise more of my privacy than absolutely necessary, for sure. But I do want a service like WhatsApp that everybody I know is also using. That's a good thing. If Line was the thing everybody uses I'd be on Line. Back when it was MSN Messenger (because that's what we had, ICQ was never a thing), I was on that.
I don't aim to not use WhatsApp, I expect regulation to make it safe, just like it does for food and medicine and roads and everything else.
That’s a naive and ignorant position. That’s never going to happen.
As long as you continue to not push against this sort of thing, it will continue to be pushed upon you.
There are federated, interoperable, and open-source alternatives. Make them use them.
Ah, yes, that's why I keep my walls unpainted. Can't trust big paint with the not putting lead in that. Never going to happen.
You're not pushing back against anything, you're arguing about Meta's nichest product on the nichest social media of them all. At some point one will have to assume the arguing is the point, more than enacting any change.
Between regulation of the techbro oligarchy or... whatever this thread is, I know where my money goes. The opposite is straight up libertarian talk.
Ah, yes, that’s why we can trust the big banks not to tank the global economy, because the government regulates them and because they’ll punish anyone who tries. They certainly wouldn’t just fill their pockets and reward them instead while punishing absolutely no one responsible, right?
Libertarian talking points again. Every instance of a government failing to do their jobs is an indictment on the concept of governments.
There are two things you need for effective governance: effective people in government and effective design of government.
If you don't have those, your only priority is to get those (so get to it, Americans). If you do have those, your job is to oversee them doing their job.
Neither of those tasks particularly requires getting into spats with random Internet people in obscure corners of social media to flaunt how much you dislike anything associated with a particular brand you've chosen as an arbitrary avatar for a specific issue. One could argue for an organized boycott, but that's not what's happening here, and if it was it'd be the most ineffectual example of one on record.
My guy, do you know what a Libertarian is? If I were a Libertarian I would be celebrating the global recession as a victory of government apathy. I’m not saying they shouldn’t do that, I’m saying they’re not going to, and depending on that is naive and ignorant.
I do argue for that on a regular basis. I can’t control the government and I can’t control Meta. I can only control me, as you can control you. You can choose to participate in the enshittification of the world or you can abstain from it and resist it. It’s up to you.
No, I get it, I'm not saying you're doing it on purpose. I'm saying the cynical right wing anti-regulation talking points have seeped so deep into the fabric of social disenchantment that they are parroted universally now.
No, artificially crippled regulation being bad at regulating doesn't change the need for regulation or the collective onus on regulating abusive corporate behavior. No, you don't just control you. You take collective action. Individual action means squat and does nothing. Nobody has ever "voted with their wallet". You vote with your votes, and if that isn't allowed or is rendered ineffective you vote with something pointier.
So no, you don't -can't- abstain from participating in that process as a political act. You engage in political action. Especially if the performative pantomime of activisim is arbitrary and driven by false premises and misconceptions.
Look, social media is fundamentally harmful. Including this site. Meta invented a good chunk of it and monetized most of it using anticompetitive practices and abdicating their responsibilities. And they should be broken apart into manageable chunks and regulated within an inch of their lives.
None of which has any bearing on them spending their considerable resources on subsidizing some gaming-focused VR headset. And even if the perceived slight on that particular product was offensive, it certainly isn't more offensive than what Google does with Gmail. Or what Unilever does with pretty much everything you buy that has some chemicals in it, or whatever else.
I don't care or want to be an online vigilante, taking valiant ranting action against whatever company is unlucky enough to have been part of an article I read once. I want to pay my taxes, vote in conscience, unleash the hellhounds of the hard end of the social contract and get to buy whatever cool shit I think is cool without having to bear the burden of moral judgement from highly ineffective keyboard warriors. Or, you know, at least only bear the judgement that is based on actual facts, not made up grudges.
Once again, no one is saying that.
I don't thin anyone believes that when you put it that way, but... that's kinda what is being said, yeah.
how incredibly fucking dishonest. profit motive is more than enough incentive for them to continue to do what they’ve already been doing for close to two decades.
“don’t boycott exceptionally shitty companies or you’re responsible when they just get worse” is possibly the worst take i’ve seen so far on lemmy.
That would sure be a bad take. Let me know when somebody makes it.
In the meantime I continue to argue that if you boycott people on the basis of their reputation without reversing that stance when they reverse their behavior then you're not "boycotting" anything, you're just removing yourself from the pool of possible customers altogether.
My issue isn't with the notion of boycotting companies, my issue is with the moving of goalposts when the companies do cave to the pressure just to extend the online ragefest. I get that it'd be easier to argue with the imaginary opponent in your head, but if you want to argue with me instead I'd appreciate addressing the actual issue.
Dude, Meta has been and continues to be fucking terrible. If you don’t understand why then i guess you’ve been living in your closet in a VR headset for the last two decades.
No, I understand the ways in which Meta is terrible.
I also understand the ways in which they're not because I'm an adult who is capable of holding semi-complex concepts in my mind.
Meta sucks, their role in social media has been a massive net negative for society and they are at best in denial about that, and at worst a deliberate bad actor.
But they're also a huge corporation, so if their dumb chat app is the standard for communication or their VR headsets are great and dirt cheap I will interact with them, just like I interact with Apple, Microsoft, Netflix and a bunch of other corporations I fundamentally disagree with on key issues.
I hate this notion that money is support. It is not. That is a stupid ass ultracapitalist fallacy to make people feel good for ineffectually buying one brand of cereal over another. I don't take a political stance on Meta by not buying their cheap stuff, I do so by supporting political actors who are willing to break apart oligopolistic media companies and regulate their role in society.
Lol, that’s not a “notion” at all, it’s reality.
Even with the case of them providing a cheap headset, they’re betting (and they’re often correct, and always correct in aggregate) that you will make it up to them in other ways (e.g. your data, software purchases, etc.).
Well... yeah. They didn't invent that scheme, that's been how most gaming systems are deployed since the Sega of the 90s at least.
And yes, it's a "notion" that is extremely anglocentric and intrinsically capitalist. It assumes that money is self-expression and speech and puts the onus of holding corporations accountable on individual consumers as opposed to regulators. It's half a step away from "ban plastic straws" in the list of ineffectual guilt dispersal schemes meant to avoid addressing any real issues.
Hate to break it to you, but corporations behaving semi-functionally as opposed to destroying everything they touch is not down to your brave refusal to purchase superfluous consumer products for your own entertainment. You're no superhero for not buying a thing you don't need anyway. It's governments that are supposed to have the power to hold them to account, not some magic hand bullcrap where the forces of the free market tend to a morally superior outcome. Can't believe this is so widespread on supposedly leftie circles.
And you’re no superhero for writing several thousands of words on lemmy about how we should make completely optional purchases of products from companies we hate and that make us angry.
You’re just a corporate apologist.
They haven’t reversed any behavior.
There is no circumstance that justifies having any account with anything Facebook owns, and stealing other company’s names to try to trick people into thinking they’re a different company doesn’t change that.
Well, thanks for passing judgement on... let me check here... two billion people, as it turns out.
They have, in fact, reversed the policy that required linking your Quest account to a live Facebook account, though. That is a fact, perceived moral failings of a significant chunk of humanity or not.
Okay, but what does any of that have to do with Meta?
I’ve never encountered a situation in which I’ve needed to use WhatsApp for anything. Today i guess i learned that i don’t “exist in society” or something. 😆
Go find the other response I gave to someone else who made that exact joke.
TLDR, I'm guessing you're American and just don't realize to what extent WhatsApp has entirely replaced texting in many, many places around the world, regardless of whether you use Android or iPhone.
Who cares?
Why does a texting app have a network effect for you? Is SMS completely unavailable on people’s phones in your country? Or are you just afraid of seeming a little bit different from the pack?
Because, see if you can follow this logic, sometimes my mom wants to tell me things. Also my doctor. And my government. And the plumber. And delivery guys.
It's not a "pack", it's a society and a family. And it's not about "being different", it's about not having to explain to every single person in my life that they need to talk to me through a different device than they use for literally everything else.
Nobody I know has sent a SMS since the 2010s. You do not realize how detached from reality that sounds. I just checked my phone, the last time I received a legit SMS that wasn't an automated notification was February 2022, when a seller from an eBay-like service wanted to ask me a thing about a delivery.
So you’re saying sms does work on your phones, but it’s not commonplace so…guess if everyone’s using Satan’s butthole app instead might as well join the pack?
You have no idea how delusional you sound, this is like oh nobody makes phone calls anymore, instead they call through evilcorp ringytimes in my country so i guess i just have to give them all my personal information and offer up my first born, and it’s actually the fault of you guys…who don’t use this that evil corp requires that!
Oh, they call through Whatsapp, yeah. About 50% of the time, I'd say.
No, for real. A lot of my audio calls are through WhatsApp as well, they just show up as normal calls, and since that goes through wifi a lot of people on prepaid phones prefer that, especially if they have relatives in other countries that would trigger roaming charges. After a while it becomes habit.
You really, really, REALLY don't have a picture of the scale of penetration into society of this particular application. I'm not shocked, I've seen it before. The slow realization is kinda funny, actually. If it makes you feel better, I keep hearing "blue bubbles" as something that full-on political parties have opinions about and I don't see the point, either.
There’s not going to be any slow realization for me. Nobody in my country uses this shit at all and even if they did I still wouldn’t.
Part of the problem with your point of view is that you think everyone gives a shit about controlling or intends to control the behavior of these companies through purchasing and usage patterns. Maybe some people do intend that. I don’t, and I’m sure there are others that don’t either.
I don’t purchase this shit from these corporations or use their bullshit because it improves my life not to.
Okay, so does that mean if it improves your life to do so by, say, allowing your friends and family to get in touch with you without needing a tutorial first each time, you would use their services?
Because I have big news about what that would mean if you were to live somewhere else.
Look, I'm gonna try to be as gentle as possible here, but your argument that you don't care because you're too American to be concerned about how people do things elsewhere is not as good of a look as you may have thought it was when you wrote it. And your claim that your performative anger isn't about making a point, but rather to "improve your life" doesn't quite line up with your ardent defense of the idea that you express or withdraw support by using money.
That's fine, we can move on from this tangent, but hey, at least respect my intelligence a teensy bit. Not even that much, just the bare minimum.
Performative anger? WTF are you even talking about?
Money just is a form of support, and that’s not a notion. They even call payment to your children fucking “child support”.
It isn’t an argument. It’s reality. Also i frankly don’t give a shit what it looks like.
Yeah, I'm gonna rest my case here, friend.
I mean, not that anybody is reading this but us this deep into it, but if they were I'd just point at that post and shrug, and I'd feel pretty good about that.
Lol whatever. Stop caping for evil ass corporations and then trying to couch your positions in pseudo leftist bullshit.
It’s completely fine actually for someone to be like i ain’t buying that fucking optional doodad because i don’t want to deal with the corporate overlord that owns it.
Yeah. That's perfectly fine. Zero issue with that on my end.
More of an issue with "it's morally wrong of two billion people to even consider having a Meta account of any kind", or claiming that Meta is doing things it is not doing, or moving the goalposts of acceptability if and when Meta caves to pressure.
Like, not a big issue, as you say this is an expensive toy for nerds, so not a major dealbreaker. Just a bit of a shame and mild frustration at the unreasonableness.
Well, that was like sixty posts of dogpile ago. Now it's mild annoyance at online behavior in general. Although I'm honesly relatively proud of myself for not being angrier about this nonsense at this point.
I didn’t read that anywhere, but it could be here and if it was i wouldn’t agree with it at all.
I feel like this hits a nerve for you in some way it shouldn’t. You aren’t anything for having a Meta account besides someone that has a Meta account.
Meh. Honestly it's the mob mentality more than anything else. That and the weird "I'd love to have a cheap HMD but screw Meta" reverse-FOMO thing.
The rest of the humongous thread is the same lack of self-awareness everybody has on places like these. Good old forum nerdrage.
SMS is still expensive in other countries, internet access is cheap and WhatsApp is free. For example, it’s the only way my mom can keep in contact with her family in South America.
See this makes a bit more sense than the weirdo wall of text I got.
It was three sentences, don't be dramatic.
Your response was paragraphs of bullshit.
The sheer drama. I will keep all three sentences in a single paragraph next time. Honestly, full stops don't deserve the hate.
Can you count?
I’m not reading anymore of this thread, but go move to the EU and request all the data those companies you mentioned have on you. You will see a truly staggering amount of your day to day info from some of them. Facebook and google are just advertising companies trying to get their thumbs in every pie they can convince enough people to buy into. Part of that is designing their products to require phoning home. The issue isn’t signing in. Signing in is just the trojan horse to make sure every bit of data they pull from you is tied to the right advertising account ID. They shouldn’t be allowed to continue to do that, even if they have enough money to lobby for its legality. Even if every single company on earth was freely doing it to the same degree people should still push for a change.
The business world is truly a slippery slope. Google made unethical digital advertising into a major market, and now even if they close shop somebody else will come fill the gap. The only way to put the power back in people’s hands is to regulate them out of existence but that will never happen if most people don’t even know it’s happening because you can’t even fucking complain about it on the internet without a hundred reply thread jfc
No, hold on, get it right, the 100 post thread is about somebody defending something tangentially related to them. Thread was nice and short with just complaining, it was when somebody pointed out that the requirement people were complaining about had been removed that the massive dogpile started.
And yes, by the way, I do know what data these companies have on me. I pulled all my Google data just last week, all 50 gigabytes of it. I agree that regulation is the answer to this. Absolutely. Everybody knows that, nobody is finding that via a rant about factually incorrect anecdotes about Meta's VR headset, of all things.
But also, I have an Android phone. With a Google account on it. Do you not have a phone? Nobody is saying to not complain about abusive data mining or breaches of privacy, but you don't have to performatively pretend to never engage with them or that the reason they get away with it in absence of regulation isn't that they do make things people want or need.
This conversation boils down to whether it's a moral imperative to turn your chosen cause into your entire personality at the expense of reality and beyond any nuance whatsoever. And honestly, in the current sociopolitical context, and despite being just about the most superfluous demonstration of this imaginable... man, it's such a bummer.
Not separated enough for me. I know all the big companies are bad, but I won’t touch google/fb hardware.
The same jerks with a new name get the all your data. Bootlick harder.
do you struggle to play peekaboo? how do you not grasp that they’re feeding into the same software ecosystem and your data is being stored in the same database?
That wouldn't be better for the company. They probably don't make money on selling the hardware.
Yeah, that’s the entire deal of it. And why it’s lame.
Same sentiment except additionally I will never buy anything from Facebook because they are radicalizing people.
Not going to buy an Apple Vision either if it won’t behave as a generic screen for any OS.
I am utterly sick of the account requirement and proprietary connector bullshit from every company.
I am still so incredibly salty that my quest 1 is a paperweight because of this requirement.
It did not exist when I purchased the product. Full Stop.
When they introduced to that requirement with the quest 2 you were able to use the quest one without it with no issue. Sometime last year we tried to hook our quest one up to Steam Link and were met with a Meta Account requirement. There was no way within the UI to get around it.
In a moment of frustration, wanting to play some Beat Saber with the family, I went ahead and started the process of making a meta account only to be stopped several times along the way by various privacy layers on our network. It was insane. My PiHole about caught fire.
30 minutes in I gave up and dug out the Vive Cosmos and all 20 wires it needed. So disappointed meta is the only wireless headse with decent battery life. They ruined VR adoption for me.
u/chemical_cutthroat Reportedly Happy With How Much Money Meta’s VR Division Burns
Lemmy hates Meta but honestly the Quest 3 is a fantastic headset. I use mine semi-regularly for wireless Steam VR.
Too bad that it will turn into a brick once meta decides to axe their VR department.
It’s just an android device, someone will make a bootloader unlock and custom rom for it if it comes to that
I wouldn’t rely on that. Those projects take a ton of time and aren’t always able to activate all the features.
we now have to count on companies going bakrupt and some volunteer picking it up and making it good 🥲
Why would it? It’s just an android device. LG didn’t brick all their smartphones when they pulled out of that market.
I don’t think anybody is under the impression that their engineers are stupid or that they can’t make decent hardware when they want to.
They just rightly think that Facebook is an absolutely evil company.
A lot of clueless people here are calling the Quest shit product tho. I can understand not wanting to give money to facebook but the tech is incredible.
I couldn’t go back after using the Valve Index, though. Wireless or not, it’s too much of a compromise on quality.
Edit: sleepy typo
You could?
What about the Index is an improvement over the Quest 3 in terms of quality? Looking up the specs, the Quest 3 seems to be handily beating the Index, a 5 year old headset. Pancake lenses alone are such a massive jump in visual clarity that it’s hard to consider buying a headset that still uses fresnel lenses.
I would agree with you if we were comparing the Index against the Quest 2 for sure, but the Quest 3 sets quite a high bar.
It’s better because it’s not from Facebook, and it does VR extremely well overall.
But how is the actual quality better than the Quest 3? That’s the part I don’t understand.
For me, it’s actually the FOV, it covers more ground (130 degree vs 110). Going back to less FOV sucks. It’s also perfectly fine for clarity and frame rate, although I’d like an index 2 for sure. I’ve heard it also tracks better although I’ve never noticed the difference (I only used quest 3 at other homes).
Still surprised it’s been 5 years, though. But it’s not about what tech is available so much as the priorities valve put into their headset. They wanted it to be comfortable for a long play sessions. Just wish it wasn’t tethered, but it’s probably another reason why it still out performs in things like stability.
Thank you that’s definitely something to consider! I’ve had opportunities to use the Quest 3 at this point but not the Index yet. I’ve used other fresnel lens headsets in the past like the Vive and Quest 2, but neither has that kind of FOV.
I was very impressed by the way the pancake lenses can keep the entire image in focus instead of having to find the sweet spot and stare straight ahead into it, but an extra 20° of FOV is going to definitely make me question which I value more. I’ll have to find a place to try the Index so I can see.
No worries, I wish it had pancake lenses too but at least it’s not as bad as the vive. No screen door effect, but yes to the sweet spot thing. There’s a few other things going for the index, like those cool speaker headphones, but yeah… 5 years old, I guess valve is getting distracted by it’s steam deck success.
I haven’t looked into it, but I think there might be a mod to make it wireless now, too, but I haven’t looked into it since having kids. No time for VR when you have self destructive little ones existing in your vicinity.
Quest is from Oculus, Metaverse is from Facebook, different management leads to different quality
$55 billion in losses over ~5 years? That’s a substantial amount.
Holy shit, give me just one billion per year and I’ll build you a sexier failure.
give me one billion period and ill build you a kickass vr set without bullshit, and ill probably have money spare for me and possibly descendants to retire. people underestimate how much money one billion actually is.
People underestimate how much a fucking Million is! It’s like a lifetime salary (3k/m for 27.8 years).
We should call billions thousand millions.
In a lot if countries a thousand million is a milliard and a million million is a billion. But somehow US English skipped the -liard numbers and it’s influencing UK English these days as well.
These are known as the short scale and long scale systems respectively. Though the United States was indeed the first English-speaking country to switch to short scale, pretty much all English-speaking countries have used short scale almost exclusively for a long time, including the United Kingdom. Saying that it’s simply being influenced is an understatement. From Wikipedia:
I’ve never actually seen the word milliard used in English outside of discussions about the long and short scale systems. However, many other languages do mainly or exclusively use long scale. For instance, my native language French.
Wow, that’s like half the total value of Nike!!!
finance.yahoo.com/quote/NKE/
Or about the same as Ford:
finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/
Not a drop in the bucket of their revenues, though. This is really about someone feeling angst that they can’t get an extra quarter percent increase in profits for the quarter so that the dividends go up just so slightly.
Y’all are pissy at Meta, but I hope they are successful. A virtual reality social network is a fantastic idea and I hope they can figure out a way to bring a cool communication app to the masses. That camera that followed you was a great idea that got lost in the Facebook hate.
I’m absolutely ready to admit that I’m probably just too old to embrace this cool new thing but I’ve just never really been that excited about it.
To be absolutely honest, the idea that a corporation can control what I’m seeing in some altered or virtual reality just makes my skin crawl.
I understand that most people won’t feel the way I do. I understand that my preferences may be unusual.
It’s just not my thing.
Nice try, cuckerberg
If there's anything we've learned over the past couple decades, then that any sort of social network by this company is a terrible idea.
No idea what camera you're talking about, but we need less cameras, not more. I don't want to get recorded or live streamed by some strangers either, especially not if it is some stupid as drone that causes even more noise pollution.
I think you speak for the minority. Video calling is quite popular and there is a healthy market behind it. I love the communication that’s possible with family. Being able to have a multi room conversation that followed me while I clean and cook would be fantastic.
If you think the majority of people do frequent video calls then you're even more delusional than I thought. But that has nothing to do with flying cameras or the disinformation cesspools that Facebook social media platforms are anyway.
Edit: Oh. You're that dingus that said the ban of menthol cigarettes is the cause of the rise of fascism in America. It all makes sense now.
statista.com/…/mobile-video-calling-age-gender-di… and it’s only getting more popular. My daughter is growing up using these services to speak with her family. You think she’s going to suddenly think, let’s step back 30 years?
People are certainly not asking for less cameras on their devices either.
🤷♂️
I don't know what you think your numbers show, but it clearly proves my point of it being a minority - so it is you who speaks for the minority, not me.
I only do phone calls when I’m in a situation where I can’t look at a screen, such as driving. Otherwise, if it’s not in person, it’s text or video. And, given my personality, it’s usually text for most people.
Do VR/AR glasses like in the picture actually exist?
No.
www.ray-ban.com/germany/…/RW4006ray-ban |%20meta%20wayfarer-schwarz/8056597988377
Yes they do
Those are just smart glasses, I don't see any mentioned of AR / integrated displays.
I think the closest were the prototypes like Google Glass but even they canned it.
The Xreal Air~, or the just-being-released Xreal Air 2 Ultra, is potentially that.
Oled displays and cameras for tracking objects and hands.
Edit: also just saw this
Cool, thanks!
meta: makes vr division
also meta: is shocked it bleeds money
keep in mind meta didnt make occulus, they bought it out. Oculus is just on the list of silicon valley startups that suceeded in getting bought out and profited from. (of the 10x more that fail)
Is this supposed to be better somehow? Personally it doesn’t make much difference to me if Meta created their own shitty VR or bought a decent VR then made it shitty… The result is the same.
They didn’t make shit. They did what Google loves to do and they bought a highly successful, incredibly progressive company. And now it’s shit, just like alllll the others that got bought out by big names.
Damn. Sorry to hear about that emotion a soulless corporation is having.
You could have, you know, not bought and ruined oculus, and destroyed the VR ecosystem.
I was at GDC the year of the acquisition. There were Facebook suits walking around the showroom floor writing checks to sign exclusivity deals with anyone showing off a VR game.
That is a way more legit reason to still be mad, in my book, and it predates the Facebook acquisition. Oculus had made all that noise about how their devices would be platform agnostic and they wouldn't try to railroad you into buying games through their platform and the moment there was money buzz around the idea Luckey dropped that stuff like it was red hot and we ended up with the travesty that is the PC Oculus store.
I don't think VR was ever going to be mainstream, but imagine what the software ecosystem would be if techbro Smeagol hadn't gotten greedy for that precious, precious investment money.
At least we have some pretty amazing hardware with a decent variety to choose from.
Yeah, I wish more quality content was made for VR, but it’s still pretty mind blowing even with what we have.
Yeah, well, don't tell the local patrons, I'm in like post a hundred below of "how dare you acknowledge anything remotely serviceably about a Meta-related product".
But yeah, no, you're pretty much right. They're subsidizing a huge chunk of that entire corner of tech. I don't think it's a mainstream type of device, but I'm glad we all got to spend a few years messing with it as a semi-viable consumer product, even if it's just a bit of an overengineered novelty thing.
Facebook flooded the market with cash, but failed to secure any Killer App to get people on their product. I wouldn’t say they ruined Oculus so much as it continues to be an unsolved technology that wasn’t ready for this level of exposure. I still can’t use the damned thing for more than an hour without feeling nauseous, and Meta was trying to gear up Oculus headsets for mass adoption by office workers.
The games market isn’t what they’re fixated on. They want this to be standard hardware for excel-book jockeys.
I suspect that we’ll end up not with the gaming market being where this sticks, but entertainment. Imagine an immersive movie with 360 views.
My neck is already hurting from craning all the time. And I’m guaranteed to miss the best part of the movie because I was looking in the wrong direction.
Moto X (2013) has a 360 demo movie on it. It was alright and neat to spin around in your chair to follow the action, but at the same time I could have sat still and the camera moved.
My crippling adhd would like a word
Truly a solution looking for a problem.
VR is over rated as fuck. It will never be mainstream.
Part of me agrees and part of me doesn’t.
I don’t know a kid who doesn’t have at least a Quest 2. I have four brother in laws aged 11-16 and every time I go over there at least two of them are in the basement rocking the headset. My neighbor is on his every day. My daughter has the Quest 2, full body trackers, and a beefy gaming PC almost exclusively dedicated to VR. The kids are all in, seriously.
I’m 38. I have a Quest 2 but I also have two toddlers and an infant (in a couple weeks anyway). I haven’t turned my Quest on in about a year. I got pretty heavy into Pavlov for a while, but here’s where the failure comes in for VR being mainstream and widely adopted. I can’t play and watch my children. I have to ask my wife to take on all of the responsibility just so I can play, and I don’t feel good about that so I just don’t play.
It isn’t the same as something like a Steam Deck. I can put it down and get back into it easily while also keeping an eye on the world around me. I can put my kids on my lap and they can watch me play if they want to. You just can’t do that in VR. It completely disengages you from your surroundings. It isn’t easy to jump in and out of it because you have to be trapped to a dedicated space with your eyes turned off to the world.
I love VR, but not enough to pull myself entirely out of my life to play. I think most people face that issue.
It’s a nonissue when you’re a teenager on summer break with no responsibilities. There’s just no room in a busy life for VR.
I’d like to see it succeed. I’d like to see it come to a point where you can somehow keep your real space visible, if only on a monitor in the corner of a high res display. I love it, I just can’t use it.
My 6 year old has never played or seen a video game.
I take her to the beach, playdates at the park with friends, we go mountain biking, etc. Hearing your stories makes my flesh crawl
I mean, you do you. I personally love video games and I’ve loved them all of my life. It’s something I can do with my kids that allows us to connect. I didn’t grow up in a world with access to anything else. There’s no beach trip in a world where your shoes have holes in them and you’re living on brown beans. My mom always found a way to scrounge up an old video game console for us and we’d borrow games from friends who had it better or had stopped playing their older games. Hell, when we stayed in a women’s shelter once for weeks, all the kids who were stuck there got by on the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo in the tv room. We were able to bond and make friends in that horrible place with that shared horrible experience because of video games.
I had adventures that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. I had fun that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. It’s hard for me to understand why you feel the way you do, but I guess we’ve had very different experiences and you feel the same way on the opposite side of it.
My grandmother just passed away, and when I stood there at her casket I remembered very fondly sitting in the floor with her and beating all of the Donkey Kong Country games. She wasn’t physically able to do much and video games brought us together and made us connect and enjoy life together. I remember the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1998 when my mother and I would sneak and open the only present I had under the tree (Zelda, Ocarina of Time) when my dad would go to sleep.
I’m happy that what you do with your kid makes you happy. I don’t understand why you’ve had such an extreme reaction to what we do though when it really doesn’t matter. People like what they like.
“VR” at its heart is just 3D goggles, motion sensors, software, etc. So yes it’s overrated but I don’t see any tech reason why it couldn’t be mainstream. It takes a really dumb and shitty company to fuck it up.
It requires its users to wear special equipment and the mainstream doesn’t want that. 3D Blu Ray died for the same reason. The only company that cracked the mainstream with anything remotely in that direction was Nintendo with its 3DS.
But the worst part is how they affect me personally. With my big glasses 🤓 I am no longer allowed at places of personal interest such as science and engineering events, nudist beaches, orgies at friends houses and gangbang dates.
[Publicly traded company] unhappy with how much money [division] burns. Suggests putting the money into stock buybacks.
Wow, this is some hard- hitting journalism that couldn’t possibly write itself!
Even the buybacks are getting crazy when the P/E of these firms is on the order of 30-50. The big financial institutions just assumes these big companies have the growth potential of tiny startups and that they will forever and ever and ever.
Atm, Meta’s actually looking not-terrible with its 27 P/E ratio and $40B/year advertising income stream. So they’ve got plenty of room to fuck around and find out with VR and AI. But eventually, the fact that nobody is advertising on this shit (because nobody is using it) means they have to explain why they’re sinking hundreds of millions into a dead end.
That’ll force them to pivot to some other speculative source of infinite growth. Which will reignite the hype cycle for the Next Big Thing. But, in the end, its the steady monopolization of ad dollars in their existing franchise markets that they care about.
Incidentally, also why they need to shut TikTok down before it eats into their market share even further.
Good. Learning Facebook bought Oculus was fucking depressing as shit.
What they’ve done to it since has been worse than what most (if not all) of us expected.
Oculus was created by Palmer Lucky.
Palmer Lucky’s new company is making AI drones and roboos for the military.
Nothing of value was lost.
Add a new VR headset to that list. Since the FTC has done away with non compete clauses the man went ahead and announced he will show off his new headset this August (I think it has a military focus as well). So many VR influencers were salivating in the comments of his post.
I find it frustrating that people give this man credit for jumpstarting VR when if he hadn’t Sony probably would have. They were expetimenting with VERY similar tech around the time he was.
If anything we should attribute Luckey to the contamination of the industry. If it wasn’t for his choice to sell to facebook the landscape might have been a little bit greener. Most definitely more growing pains for the tech but I do think we would have seen more open hardware. Hell, maybe Valve would have found it necessary to pick up the reigns. It’s been said the Deckard may not release because they don’t find it necessary with steam link on quest. (Not confirmed obviously).
Fuck Anduril.
Yeah. Anduril has tried to hire me multiple times as well as well as a number of people I know (their software is written in Haskell, which is a somewhat niche skill set).
Every time I’ve told them absolutely not.
It felt better when VR was the hot new buzzword, right? Oh well, there’s the AI division also burning money, but at least it’s the current buzzword!
“meta unhappy” good…