Android isn't AOSP, and Android isn't open source.
It's safe to assume that every large tech company is spying on everything you do - including Apple. (Remember they're legally required to do so in the UK, and probably in more countries but it only leaked in the UK)
Android is more trustworthy not because of that but because it lets you install apps that haven't been approved by corporate overlords first.
I don’t blindly trust Apple either, but I believe enough of what they say and consider the gaps when they don’t say something. They fight things like the UK E2E encryption requests… but also, having owned both Android and Apple devices, and managing my own iOS devices and the Android devices my parents own, I definitely feel like the iOS devices are more secure and less prone to bad actors via App Store. I think safari is more anonymizing than chrome.
The (US) government already has too much access to us, and I think Android is more open to them than iOS. The government has cameras in public and access to our banking data, I’m not gonna protect myself from them by choosing one platform more than the other, or one bank more than the other.
What I don’t want, though, is to be annoyed to death or scammed. My choice is more front loaded by that consideration. If I find out that Apple accedes to backdoors though, I’d have to live without both Android and iOS.
I've been using mail-in-a-box for 5 years and I couldn't be happier. For me, stability is the #1 concern for an email server, and mail-in-a-box is really set it and forget it. I also like that it includes CalDAV and CardDAV, so it served as a complete substitute to Google Mail+Contacts+Calendar.
I don't think that was due to Mozilla pushing Google. I have Firefox configured with DuckDuckGo on all my devices and this has never happened to me on an update.
For me, that Reality Labs is the division beating estimates drives home that Meta's bet on XR is going to pay. Ad revenue might be down because of changes in Apple and Google mobile policies, but they are going to control the platform of the future and set their own rules.
I bought a Quest 2 out of curiosity, and am amazed by it. Zuckerberg apparently says they're still 5-10 years away from where they want to be with the technology, so I'm guessing what's coming down the pipeline is going to be pretty impressive.
I think people are really underestimating how much impact these technologies are going to have. People thought the first iPhone was only good for fart apps. I think this will be a similar story.
I loathe Facebook, and use their products only when absolutely necessary.
But after reading a comment on HN about value the Quest 2 delivers for exercise, I decided to give it a go. I had and used the Oculus DK1 but had done zero VR since.
> I think people are really underestimating how much impact these technologies are going to have.
Unquestionably. People are totally underestimating VR/AR.
> I just hope someone can compete with FB.
I think FB will be competing with Snap, Samsung/Microsoft and others for the Android market.
If you use the Oculus in a room with Siri enabled (via homepod / smarthome stuff like fans / lights) it becomes obvious the experience must stretch beyond the headset.
Facebook has neither the privacy track record nor smarthome footprint needed to support this. Though Oculus will have existed first, and FB may get an improved headset to market out in the meantime, Apple will create the market expectations for VR/AR
Current generation VR just doesn't excite or interest me.
But I am excited for what's going to come, now that VR is getting some serious investment.
My wishlist:
- no motion sickness or headaches (not sure if this is going to be possible for 100% of people)
- lighter, less bulky, less ridiculous looking, more comfortable headsets; the dream would be something like a pair of regular glasses, or goggles
- higher resolution
And, with time, I'd like to see hardware become less expensive, giving it a chance to become more mainstream.
- A computer that can output 144 fps consistently without drops.
- Well-positioned lighthouses.
- Software that only moves the virtual world in response to the player moving in the real world (except via blink teleportation).
Unseen Diplomacy, The Lab, and Half Life Alyx, when played with the right settings or hardware, should make basically no one motion sick.
Unfortunately, people don't like blink teleportation because it usually sucks. Games like Unseen Diplomacy are able to create large spaces without teleportation, but have pretty large play space requirements. IMO, there's room for more creativity in this space. Budget Cuts, for example, manages to make blink teleportation really work.
Plenty of low end titles also have good comfort options without requiring top tier GPUs to achieve stable framerates, my personal picks are Rec Room for a social experience and "Garden of the Sea" for a chill single player experience. Both have snap-turn and teleportation as first-class movement option.
I wanted to go deeper (esp. with VRChat) so I eventually caved in to free movement. It was very motion sickness inducing at first, but doing it bit by bit you get used to it after a while.
Personal recommendation for any VR experience: I have a bar stool in my VR space where I can lie on or just sit. The difference from a chair is that it doesn't offset you vertically when you lie/sit, which tends to mess with games.
> Both have snap-turn and teleportation as first-class movement option.
Tiny note, snap turn can cause motion sickness! (And even personally, I have friends who get motion sick from it.) It's obviously better than "smooth turning", but just changing the direction can be disorienting. There's really no replacement for 360 degree tracking.
There was never any moment where the iPhone was a fart app novelty. It was immediately and obviously wildly better and more useful than every phone than came before it.
You may have had more vision than others, because I definitely remember the fart app and the tip-to-pour-a-beer-app and people just kind of laughing at them. I'm not saying that stage lasted a long time, but that was what I saw of it in the very early days.
I have multiple Quests, and got Vive a while back too. VR is always amazing at first but it hasn’t had a lasting use case for most people I own that own it.
Furthermore, Apple is really well positioned for AR, which may be more adoptable than full on VR. iPhones already have had pretty good AR capabilities built in and Apple has really just been developing the technology probably to ultimately integrate it into the rumored headset.
> VR is always amazing at first but it hasn’t had a lasting use case for most people I own that own it.
Fair, but I was meaning more of what's coming down the pipeline. Five to ten years of Meta money committed to the "metaverse" - the might address some of those issues ("no-one else is on it" probably being one of them)
> Furthermore, Apple is really well positioned for AR, which may be more adoptable than full on VR
Maybe? No-one's seen their rumoured device. Meta's way ahead in terms of actual adoption today (even if it's VR and not AR). I hope Apple does something awesome, but it remains to be seen. And it's hard to imagine the Oculus team at Meta couldn't do AR if they were asked to.
I bought one and I can’t stand it. Too heavy and uncomfortable. The UI is annoying and confusing. I tried to find some games for my kids (ages 7-9) but they either couldn’t figure them out or they were boring. What’s up with that start area, why can’t I explore it? It’s collecting dust for me. I see the potential but it seems a ways off.
While many apps (social ones) are not safe for kids yet (funny enough it's usually unsafe because of other kids - teenagers), there are still many apps that work really well for kids. The Guardian article is quite sensationalized (primarily about VRChat and maybe RecRoom, but the Oculus has more).
Nobody should be letting their kids play any multi-player games. Not only for their sake (people say some fucked up shit on there), but for the sake of all the other adults playing those games.
Unfortunately, many people are letting their kids (young teens, pre-teens) do that. (Where "letting them" simply means, not actively stopping them, being unaware etc).
Which is half the problem. The other half of the problem is that Facebook is actively pushing developers to social-enable their games by integrating Facebook based social features into them (hence the mandatory Facebook account). So even games that have no reason to be using those features are seeing them added.
Headphones are a well established market with pretty much no growth upside. Apple captures share from incumbents. RL is building out an entirely new market.
it's going to take a lot of marketing to get people to accept VR in large numbers, too much dystopian sci-fi that instantly makes people not interested. When I look at those headsets I instantly think some combination of The Matrix and Brave New World.
But maybe Zuck knows about some forthcoming propaganda campaign to focus on getting people to use VR to distract from income inequality, putting the majority of the population into the digital world seems like the best way to distract from real world issues
Because while the adults are all busy pooh-poohing it, this tech is rapidly penetrating in that market. Which is to say, something like 80% of my kids friends have access to / use VR routinely. And it's 100% Oculus/Meta.
I have no doubt that kids (and the young at heart) are having a ball playing VR games, but the real question is whether there's compelling use cases outside of that, of the sort that Meta is constantly trying to highlight. Meta is banking that there is.
So far I haven't seen a compelling mass market use case outside of games (which is a relatively niche market), but if you open up development tools well I suppose the hope is that someone will come up with something.
> whether there's compelling use cases outside of that
Indeed, this is the billion dollar question. It's very clear there are compelling use cases but the really obvious ones are niche industrial uses, commercial applications etc. So the real question is compelling mass market use cases.
The two mass market ones that are apparent at the moment are fitness and virtual office spaces. Fitness is already well on the way, virtual office use is still tenuous and really needs hardware improvements to get off the ground. Those improvements look likely in the next generation of hardware so it's going to be an interesting 24 months to see whether it takes off or not.
The elephant in the room, as you point out, is that neither of these match Faceook's supposed aspiration to create a Metaverse. So I see Facebook/Meta's ultimate success here being dictated heavily by how fast they can get over that and target the real mass market use cases as their primary focus.
Just look at the comment and you tell people are interested, If they can improve the quality on this. This will be a huge for sports fans, especially fans in different countries/states that can't go to the games.
Now expand this across music events and other events. You have a massive TAM.
Do you feel the same way about headphones? I think headsets are basically headphones for eyes. I can listen to low fidelity 2d sound from my laptop speaker, or I can put on headphones, noise-cancellation and immerse myself in 3d audio. I think eventually we'll come to see vr headsets as essentially the same
That entire segment makes two orders of magnitude less revenue than Meta's core business, so I'd still not consider a marginal beating of expectations to be too informative.
It's interesting that we are all waiting for the other shoe to drop in that Apple is forever "about to" release it's XR devices. Yet so far it hasn't happened. Apple is famous for waiting until quality hits a certain mark, but nonetheless, it tells me that what Oculus/Meta has achieved is more special than people think. This stuff is hard. It looks simple on the surface but watch any of John Carmack's talks and see how much complexity there is underlying it all.
I do think Meta is completely wasting its time with it's current approach of trying to re-invent Facebook inside the Metaverse. Hopefully they get past that sooner rather than later. But I have no doubt this is going to be an extremely important platform in the future and other than Apple if they ever show up, it's very hard to see anybody catching Meta.
I have a Oneplus 5T (dumpling) and get much less frequent updates (which puzzles me : I though they would have an automated build system i.e. that all supported devices would have exactly the same updates at the same time...)
I have been running lineage for more than a year in my OP5, I don't face any issues with it. I don't use microg. I have also rooted it with magisk, so that banking apps will work.
I do believe that fact-checking and identifying clickbait is important, but in this case I think you are nitpicking with no cause and adding no substance to the discussion.
The article mentions a sum of 6,751 deaths not including several countries (Philippines and Kenya), so "at least 6,500" is correct. The article also says "While death records are not categorised by occupation or place of work, it is likely many workers who have died were employed on these World Cup infrastructure projects", so the "constructing stadia for the World Cup", although a bit loosely, is also true.
I don't get what you were trying to open our eyes to with your comment. Even if only 1,000 workers were confirmed to be deaths directly related to building stadia it is just as horrible and needs to be known.
"Even if only 1,000 workers were confirmed to be deaths"...
thats the problem, you are just guessing, yes 1000 deaths on a construction project would be an awful lot - but the article makes zero claims about how many people died from the heat, from heart diseases from covid or even from the covid vaccine, or from the actual project - which is the implied cause, without citing any data - just listing a high number of deaths that happened in a population of people, after some other event occurred, means less than nothing.
Thats not 'nitpicking', that pointing out glaring laziness on the part of the author to imply a cause and effect, and provide ZERO data to back it up.
I was in this same situation a couple of years ago and easily managed to move to a comoletely Google-free life for 3€/month. I've documented it on my blog [0], but here's the summary:
- mail-in-a-box for email
- NextCloud (included in mail-in-a-box) for contacts, calendars, and files
