I've watched quite a lot of Shark Tank and only know him from there, where he portrays himself as a high-culture Scrooge McDuck character with the nickname "Mr. Wonderful".
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
Born too late to do a colonialism? Angry all the good land is taken and you’re being oppressed instead of being the oppressor? What if you could get in on the ground floor of the real estate scheme? Decentraland is for you!
I dunno, I have a beautiful little parcel along a Second Life roadside with water access for boating, right next to a noob help centre. Once in awhile someone asks me for help from the centre, or someone stumbles over and says hello. We chat a bit. I've had two blithering dolts come by in a decade. It's two clicks to eject and ban.
My other neighbours are lovely.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
Born too late to do a colonialism? Angry all the good land is taken and you’re being oppressed instead of being the oppressor? What if you could get in on the ground floor of the real estate scheme? Decentraland is for you!
Finally got around to watching this video. Decentraland looks terrible, like Everquest is a better Metaverse.
Speaking of which, back when it was released, I got Synthetic Worlds by Edward Castronova for my Dad (he liked various MMORPGs, played Everquest and a few others), I remember finding it interesting, but more because it was asking interesting questions than having any accuracy predicting the future. I don't remember much about it, and I doubt it's very useful now.
I will probably not be in the Metaverse, ever. I like playing solo games, not online multiplayer ones, and when I joined these MMORPGs, I had a tendency to only play with family.
This sounds oh so familiarly like the Video game grading con that collapsed last year, after it was discovered that the grading company was financing the insane auction prices of ‘rare’ games graded by them to trick whales into buying cheap games and to convince game owners to pay them to grade their games in hopes of finding a rare gem that auctions for millions.
I swear one of the reasons libertarians push for deregulation is so they can use the same scam in different markets.
Born too late to do a colonialism? Angry all the good land is taken and you’re being oppressed instead of being the oppressor? What if you could get in on the ground floor of the real estate scheme? Decentraland is for you!
Finally got around to watching this video. Decentraland looks terrible, like Everquest is a better Metaverse.
Speaking of which, back when it was released, I got Synthetic Worlds by Edward Castronova for my Dad (he liked various MMORPGs, played Everquest and a few others), I remember finding it interesting, but more because it was asking interesting questions than having any accuracy predicting the future. I don't remember much about it, and I doubt it's very useful now.
I will probably not be in the Metaverse, ever. I like playing solo games, not online multiplayer ones, and when I joined these MMORPGs, I had a tendency to only play with family.
I think the hardware technology just isn't there. There's too many annoying things you have to do to hop into virtual reality. The headsets are too bulky, the controls kind of suck, and the overall processing power you get for the price isn't worth it, our battery technology isn't good enough to make them highly mobile. All these little barriers prevent mass adoption.
I will say every time I've tried VR has been ridiculously immersive even if I'm playing a shitty basic game or something. If it was more convenient to use VR tech and there was an actual productive reason to use it over a PC or cellphone, it could catch on.
I think Apple made a really good move with the Apple Vision Pro, and when that releases, it might push more mass adoption of VR tech in general. With Apple Vision they're really emphasizing AR and a big part of that was showing how easy it is to do all the things you already do now, except it's way fucking cooler and in many cases (according to their marketing), even better than using a regular PC or cellphone. In their launch showcase, they showed how Apple Vision can potentially replace ALL of your devices. We already have PCs and cellphones and other gadgets. Adding another bulky annoying VR device that is a toy that doesn't do anything useful is too cumbersome and annoying.
The marketing for other headsets has been pretty shitty and there's no obvious ecosystem to connect it with your other devices, and if there is, then marketing needs to do better and show me.
I think Meta messed up with the price point too. $500 is of course not going to get you any kind of powerful computing device, so you end up in the mEtAvErSe except it's a joke because the graphics look like some dogshit from 2003. Apple is the right company to take over with an AR/VR device because they can get away with selling a $3500 gadget without anyone flinching, and because the device is so much more expensive, they can put in very good hardware that can actually do useful things.
I'm actually planning on buying one once the technology is a little better (whatever version 2 will be) because they showed how you can do coding in AR with multiple virtual displays which looked like some incredible sci-fi shit. The flexibility of virtual displays, potentially collaborating with multiple people that are using an Apple Vision nearby could greatly increase productivity instead of being just a gimmick. And at $3500, I know the device will be able to handle that.
Have we talked about Michael Lewis yet? He's got a new book out now, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon only it's surprisingly positive on Bankman-Fried and the FTX fraud. It seems that Lewis started this book before the collapse, shadowing him for a time in the Bahamas and drinking the Rum Punch.
Interesting. I wonder if the proximity to absurd wealth has corrupted him.
On the topic of crypto-related books, I read The Politics of Bitcoin, by David Golumbia, and it was a good analysis of the right-wing politics foundational to crypto.
From Amazon's blurb:
Quote:
Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right political thought. The Politics of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and political thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists.
The most egregious statement is “What you’re doing is possibly losing some money that belonged to crypto speculators in the Bahamas.” This is just false, I don't know how he got that line, but it's truly awful.
Re: Blockchain, NFTs, and Web 3.0
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