Second... ALL money SV has ever made has been off other people's work.
Same as *everybody else*. Or say, a plumber fixing a toilet, is not benefiting from someone else installing that toilet, or the pipes, or building the machinery that allowed him to buy a cheap wrench?
That's the way economy works.
Facebook/Meta has repeatedly failed at everything it's tried to build itself, other than Facebook proper. Why would you expect their AI to be anything but a steaming pile?
Why don't you check it out?
crime went up, but not in my neighborhood, so I don't care, NIMBY fools.
You made the first stat up. Do you have any evidence to back it up?
And yes, wanting to get rid of crime in your neighborhood is absolutely rational.
I think zuckerburg was working on this from the end backward. He saw VR as a way to have 100% of the person's attention and therefore a way to be even more effective to manipulate them and convince folks to buy ads. A completely captive audience. But the reality is there is no compelling reason to want that and for a lot of people it is a hell no to willingly sign up for it.
You're wrong. Thsi is not about attention or captive audience.
It's about controlling the next big platform end to end. Or putting it another way: Making sure that Google and Apple can't crush the company whenever they want.
Whether VR is the next big platform remains to be seen. It's a bet.
Its time an adult had a quiet word with Zuckerberg and told him that not enough people are interested in immersive VR for any length of time and if they were then Linden Lab would have been one of the biggest tech companies on the planet by now because of Second life.
As soon as someone mentions Second Life as an example of a prior version of the Metaverse I know they have zero experience with the Quest headsets.
Meetings in VR are actually better than in zoom. Much better, really. Yes, you don't want to wear a headset for hours, but then you also don't want to be in Zoom for hours: But the experience in VR, except for ergonomics (obviously), is better - proper screen sharing (of both real and virtual screens), a nice whiteboard, an environment that is actually nice to look at...
Then there's gaming. Have you actually played a bit?
So, workers with remote positions achieve the same collaboration, relationships and culture without even going 3 days a week? Because I don't think Meta will imply that those remote workers do not do their best work.
Meta is just honoring the terms of the agreement with those specific people who were hired on the premise that they would work remotely.
That's not the case of most employees - they were not hired to be remote, and they have a salary for the Bay Area.
Whenever a company lays off that many people, the very first thing that should happen, immediately, is the CEO should be fired for being grossly incompetent.
Who would you replace Zuck with, and why?
You can say what you want about him, but his track record speaks for itself.
The only difference between this company and any other company letting people go is the scale and the media impact.
competitors... others are doing this no checkout thing?
Yes, there's a few of them.
For example, standard.ai in the US. And there's one in Israel, I don't remember the name. And another in Italy, but I think that one already folded.
Cameras, GPU power and networks are all far cheaper than paying even a single minimum wage employee
They're not. You don't need one camera or one GPU. You need a lot of them (and installation is not cheap, by the way). In the case of amazon, also custom shelves with scales. And then you need room to keep everything. Not any room - it has to be cooled and sound proofed.
There's also the fact that many products are not priced by units but by weight (such as produce) so you can't even sell anything you want. You need to adapt your store to what the tech allows.
The reality is that these stores are extremely expensive to setup and operate and still they can't replace humans.
Maybe they are closing for the same reason Walmart is pulling the last of its stores from Portland. Theft.
No, it's just that these stores are extremely expensive to operate. All the cameras, GPUs, power, network, etc... the economics just don't work. And on top of that, in order to make the customer believe they never fail, they do have manual checks (which is why sometimes you get the receipt immediately and some times it takes 15 minutes).
Also, they (same with competitors BTW) never got them to work at scale, and I by scale I mean number of people that can be at the store at the same time, square meters or even number of SKUs.
I worked at one of their competitors for a while, BTW, so I saw some of the problems first hand.
Hell, if I'd been pulling the kinda money in for 15years, I'd not only not be complaining, I'd not be working at all anymore...I'd be retired and enjoying life, friends, family and hobbies.
Sounds like you live in a low cost of living area when there are no such jobs.
Near San Francisco, unless you came 20 years ago and got into a rent controlled apartment or are sharing an apartment, that money will let you have a decent living, but forget about retiring in 15 years.
"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android
