SLHamlet

This outcome was totally foreseeable but somehow Zuck and Boz blew billions anyway.

Om was a mentor to me at GigaOM and while writing my first book, teaching me throughout how to understand the tech industry and cut through the bullshit and noise. But more than all that, Om was a very warm, lovely, generous guy.

He knew the business of tech, he was successful at the business of tech, so when he criticized tech, his punches were solid, precisely targeted, and unignorable. The first day I met him, he told me: "I know where all the bodies in Silicon Valley are buried," as he once told me. And he really did.

Tech journalism today is sorely missing fiery thoughtful voices like his.

RE Your predecessor

No one knows who he was, or what he was doing.

But his legacy remains hewn in the HR dock of Stonehenge.

Ah cool. So you replace NPCs with real players as they come in, or add them into the mix?

Kinda cool! What's the max concurrency?

The Internet is not really "divided" BTW, roughly 99% of Hawai'i locals who know about this seem super pissed off. If you're gonna slopify Hawaiian music at the airport, why not just slopify the entire Hawai'i experience?

Yep. It's wild how most reporters just copy/paste these claims without even asking for references.

Like few of them looked at Meta's own stock earnings reports -- which they CAN'T bullshit about, or they might go to prison -- where it was clear that the Quest was hardly selling.

Grateful I got to tell the NYT what I've been ranting about for years:

“They glommed onto the term ‘metaverse’ without really understanding the concept,” Wagner James Au, author of “Making a Metaverse That Matters,” said in an interview. “Their efforts on their metaverse strategy seemed completely indifferent to what previous platforms had learned.”

Gift link BTW: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/technology/mark-zuckerber...

"The US struck nearly 2,000 targets in the first 100 hours of the operation. That list was not generated on the fly but it was built months in advance. But managing, sequencing, and executing 2,000 targets simultaneously across multiple domains still requires algorithmic support that no human coordination chain can match unaided. More importantly: maintaining a database of 2,000+ target records and keeping every single one correctly classified is exactly the kind of task that gets delegated to automated systems..."

Last week’s new model was a version 2.0 update of Bytedance’s Seedance video generator. As always, one has the feeling that lies are travelling around the world twice before the truth has time to put its shoes on. So here I am for another debunk.

10 favorite products from the 90s and early 2000s, before pop-up ads, subscriptions and privacy issues became ubiquitous in our devices -- and our products still felt like they belonged to us.

"Here are a few theses: After 2.5 years of insane hype, there’s no evidence that current AI is making the design process faster. Good design comes from a broader process, not a one-off conversation – meaning the one-off chat paradigm is unlikely to generate good design for non-designers. AI architecture means it will continue to be worse at designs that are 'out of the training data' – the bold, the novel, designs with very tight constraints."

Update, 3:03pm PT:

Stephenson's Facebook account has been restored within the last 1-2 hours. (I've been checking since the morning.)

But the irony goes on forever.

That Facebook page is the one managed by his publisher.

He also has (had?) a personal one he used that just got suspended.

This is not an anomaly, by the way. I've interviewed many multiple Meta staffers (including senior leaders), and can find little evidence that leadership actually read "Snow Crash" and/or even cared about virtual worlds. Even after spending tens of billions claiming they were building the Metaverse.

Some background: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/05/horizon-worlds-meta-horizo...

"Today in 'you can’t make this stuff up,' Meta has suspended my Facebook account because they suspect me of impersonating someone noteworthy"

Schools now giving Chromebooks to Kindergarteners is some crazy unintentional dystopian shit.

"They have little badges, like they have their password on them, and they just wave it in front of the Chrome Chromebook [so] they don’t have to memorize all that early on."

!!!

I had no idea about this:

"To understand why PWM bulbs have so much flicker, imagine them being controlled by a robot arm flicking the on/off switch thousands of times per second. When you want bright light, the robot varies the time so the switch is in the 'on' mode most of the time, and 'off' only briefly. Whereas when you want to dim the light, the robot arm puts the switch in 'off' most of the time and 'on' only briefly."

I've been skeptical about XR headsets for years, but this post makes some really interesting points that I haven't seen discussed much, like:

"While XR devices like VisionPro do re-create home and office setups and allow for vast screen real estate, they lack a true sense of location. Evolution shaped our brains to operate differently depending on whether we’re traveling or at home. Researchers call this the encoding specificity principle—our memories link closely with the environment where they were first formed."

IE, even if the VisionPro wasn't as heavy as a sushi plate, it would still have fundamental problems!

This may the only time you ever see her talk about Meta on video, the company has enforced its NDA to prohibit her to do any publicity around her book.

Her actual testimony starts around 24:30

Like actual creative person Ted Chiang (who moonlights at Microsoft) put it, you might be able to get an LLM to churn out a genuinely original story, but only after creating an extremely long and detailed prompt for it to work with. But if you even need to write that long-ass prompt, might as well just write the story yourself!

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/09/ted-chiang-ai-new-yorker-c...

There's research that the difference happens at the hormonal level, i.e. it's probably not fixable on a certain level.

It's mind-boggling that the industry just generally isn't interested in looking into this. I asked five top ex-Meta folks about this for my book and they shrugged or didn't answer. You can't say VR is the Next Big Thing if it tends to make half the population literally want to spew chunks.

Wonder if they asked Iowa State University researchers about their NSF-funded study that VR makes women and girls twice as likely to get sick, because Meta sure didn't.

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/04/vr-nausea-study-iowa-nsf.h...

LOL thanks for the link!

The crazy thing is the co-founder of Second Life is the one who got Zuck to buy Oculus in the first fucking place! But they ignored what Cory told them about virtual worlds when building HW.

Yes, thanks. Eating is good!

The Metaverse doesn't require a VR headset; VR should only be one device option.

I get deep into this in [plug] my book [/plug] but Neal Stephenson himself changed his mind about it needing VR when he played Doom in the early 90s. Also, VR tends to make over half the population want to vomit, especially women and girls. Another thing Meta ignored, which is crazy!

Definitely agree about VRChat (and Minecraft to a lesser extent)!

This is a straw man understanding of the Metaverse. If you actually read how it was described in "Snow Crash", you roughly get this definition:

"The Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world simultaneously accessible by millions of users through VR and other devices, highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools. It is integrated with the real world economy and compatible with external technology."

I break it down here: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/02/sl-metaverse-stephenson-sn...

There are many multiple platforms which have most or all of these key features, including Roblox, Fortnite, VRChat, and a dozen more, which have over 700 MILLION active users.

You're describing META's version of the Metaverse, which is so confusing, Meta's own employees say they don't understand it:

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2023/01/meta-metaverse-blind-surve...