Yeah, please leave the cultural analysis to anthropologists, sociologists, etc. The engineering-focused materialist way of looking at stuff like this makes my head and heart hurt.
Why gatekeep like this? If you had developed an interesting account of some engineering topic and were told to leave it to the pros, you would find it deflating
Whether monastic materialism or idealism is correct would be an unfalsifiable claim within the framework of natural scientific method. (That method is designed to help us make predictions; interpreting experimental outcome for a statement of objective truth is a misapplication of scientific method.) An existing natural-scientific model can be referenced in a philosophical argument, but the argument remains a philosophical statement. A philosophical argument can still be debated on other merits—e.g., which alternative grants magical objective existence to more arbitrary entities, or such.
The human concept of materialism appears to have been produced by historical humans who were also conscious, which at least sets an order. To call this into question is to render logical debate incoherent.
Materialism is a theory, not a reality, but its adherents can't tell the difference.
> To call this into question is to render logical debate incoherent.
Unfortunately there are quite a few things of that nature. In no case does it justify blindly picking one of the options and then following up with bold claims based on an arbitrary assumption.
Be advised this is not something that can be understood through intellectualization. At some point you have to put down the books and seek out the experience.
You can also use this to set yourself up for success at the end of the day by closing/zero-ing out everything, and then just starting the first thing you need to do the next day. Then when you start work the next day, you've already got a feeling of momentum because your space is clear, your focus is set, and you've already started the task.
TLDR excerpt:
- Top layer — the AI agent. The thing that actually executes the work.
- Middle layer — the SaaS UI. The dashboards, the workflows, the buttons you click.
- Bottom layer — systems of record. The databases, CRMs, and ERPs that store the real data.
Right now, value is getting sucked upward into the agent layer and downward into the data layer. Everything in the thin middle gets crushed.
Can someone explain the actual use cases for this that folks are excited about?
Nobody wants to be responsible for writing the film they're watching, as they watch it. Nobody wants to engage with a virtual world that has no story, narrative, meaning, purpose.
What is the actual use case for this, once we move beyond the tech demo stage?
The idea it will wholesale replace existing 3D graphics/rendering pipelines and processes any time soon seems so far-fetched to me (even just logistically) that I can't wrap my head around what people are thinking here.
This strikes me as a fancy parlor trick. Unless I'm mistaken, we need proper world models to do the things people are erroneously assuming this to be capable of one day.
Presumably others will write the prompts (or equivalent directing mechanism) that will steer the generation, such that you can act out whatever fantasies interest you.
I wish they would simulate the extremely slow load times to make it feel time-period accurate. You were waiting multiple seconds for images to appear before you even had any idea what you were looking at.
That’s a fair point. Reality Labs covers AR (Orion), neural interfaces, and the Ray-Ban partnership too.
But the 'Metaverse' was the governing thesis that justified that entire strategy and burn rate. Even if the breakdown is 50/50, we still have tens of billions spent on a VR software ecosystem (Horizon) that's nearly empty.
The specific dollar amount matters less than the ratio of 'capital invested' to 'consumer value created'. And there's a big gap between those.
