mike mcclintock

Thriving on chaos with A.I. in a decentralized vs centralized 25 year dog fight wave of Future Shock and awe. 5th500 & Little Tech

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

Forget the Browser Wars. Get ready for the Metaverse Wars.

Mark my words. The Metaverse Wars have already started. The battle for who gets to make the rules - to set the standard - is occurring right now.
And if you think that’s a trivial thing, you don’t know your history. The right to ‘set the standard’ was something Bill Gates was willing to nearly destroy Microsoft for.
He conjured up Internet Explorer as a brazen response to @pmarca at Netscape, and then used it to commit digital war.

In the process he got deposed by the US government, called ‘evasive and unresponsive’, and we got a glimpse of the true Bill Gates.
But, Microsoft survived and won the Browser Wars, and as a result, they ended up with a commanding position for the Web1 era - the benefits of which were felt across all lines of their empire. When you are the standard, you make the rules. Sure, other companies might also participate. But just as in the aristocracy, when a Duke was always ‘at home’ in any lesser nobleman’s house… the benefits of being the incumbent are real.
So with the stage set, let’s take a look at the emerging factions in the upcoming Metaverse Wars, their actions so far, their possible strategies, and the chances of their supremacy.

Let’s start with team Meta. Led by the brisket smoking, cage fighting Mark Zuckerberg, they were first to strike their colors, changing their company name to Meta, and spending billions on the Oculus Quest and Horizon Worlds.
Despite being first to the scene, with infinite money and a user base that includes literally everyone and their gran, so far their product appears to be a hot mess that no one really likes or uses. VR pioneer John Carmack left Meta citing slow progress and internal confusion.
Notable with Horizon Worlds, is the fact that you need to be logged into your Facebook account and using your Quest. It’s not browser based. Quite the walled garden - no doubt, it’s because Meta wants its 30% on all transactions done on its system. It's tithe, if you will.
While the general trajectory of Meta as a brand of late has been to get more byzantine, more filled with censorship and not better, only a fool would write them off.
They’re likely to strike an Unholy alliance with Unity, to make games for the Quest. They’ll be able to bring substantial entertainment force to bear, to create traction - plus the ability to target almost every person with a smartphone with their offers.
The Quest 3 drops later this year, which will offer blended ‘Mixed Reality’ experiences.But will that be enough to lure a critical mass to don expensive Oculus headsets and dwell in Zuck’s walled garden? We will have to wait and see.

Next, is Apple and their Alliance for Universal Scene Description. (My first thoughts - holy shit that’s a name as boring as the Bank of International Settlements, which means they’re not fucking around.)
And, just like the BIS, theirs has been a more guarded approach. At WWDC we had the launch of #SpatialComputing as a term- a strategic shot across Meta’s bows, presenting an alternative to the Metaverse concept.
Together with their high end Vision Pro headset (snorkel sold separately), Apple are presenting an initial offering aimed at those with the money to live futuristically.
What’s more significant, is who else is in the Alliance. Adobe? Autodesk?
If you’re a designer or creator reading this in your co-working space, sit up and take note.
Because my hunch is that before too long, you’re going to be recruited to join the Metaverse War on the side of the Alliance for Universal Scene Description (Glory be to USD! Hoo-ra)
Yes indeed. I imagine the USD will make a play for the creatives, the ones who grew up in Apple’s walled garden using Illustrator Photoshop and Autodesk, and enlist them to make the slickest Metaverse with glossy production values.
And honestly, that strategy might just work. If there is one walled garden that I still can’t quite quit, it’s Apple’s.
So expect to see Adobe updates that offer spatial computing functionality, as well as seamless cloud uploads to the USD compliant metaverse.
Will you be able to upload your work elsewhere? It remains to be seen, but my hunch is that it’ll be a lot less seamless, so just be a good creative and stick with your tribe.

We’ve explored the two emerging factions in the Metaverse War. We’ve conceded that both will have very credible offerings. But the one thing that neither faction will be able to truly offer?

An actual Metaverse.

A true metaverse is a single, universal virtual world. Interconnectivity and open-ness is key to the entire thing. I don’t think that either Apple or Meta will be able to share users. Each of them views us as users on its system. It’s their turf, where they get to impose their tithes and their TOS. No matter how slick the package is, they will never be able to offer us the real deal. We’ll have to see how many of the dev community choose to bend the knee and swear fealty to one of these Centra-Metaverses. We certainly won’t be.

Which leads us to the third faction in the Metaverse War, and likely the one that the Boardrooms in Silicon Valley are most afraid of.

Us.

The Decentralized Metaverse. Built by struggling artist devs, doing it for the love, not the money. This Metaverse is more likely to be made using true universal standards for practicality’s sake.
It will use distributed peer to peer frameworks like @holochain from @artbrock to ensure democratic principles and data integrity are baked in, and without the tithe to the overlord.
To get there, we might well need to do some jerry rigging - (it’s possible to build an affordable browser-based VR headset these days ).
We might need to do without the Zuckerbucks, and without the slick production values us Apple / Adobe folk have come to require.
It’ll be hard, but it is so important that we make the effort early on, to create a decentralized and open Metaverse.
It’s a chance to restart the internet project, in line with the beautiful VR cyberdream we’ve all shared since the late 80s. A chance to throw off the yoke of Big Tech, who want us to rent their Metaverse like share-croppers, and use technology to mould and monitor us in ever-more intrusive ways.

This is a call to arms, and if you’ve got this far in the article there’s a good chance you already know which side to choose.

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@pmarca Who is @pmarca ?

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@typesfaster Get the endoscope, laser and basket procedure. Done it twice.

[David Cramer @zeeg]

Everyone is slowly coming to this realization, and I assure you, no one is running multitudes of agents overnight. No one that is doing anything of substance at least.

There _are_ people pretending to be scientists, or fully caught up in their drug infused AI overdose, that think their slop machines are changing the world. They're not tho, and they're just wasting a bunch of money and compute to create a lot of LoC that will just get thrown away.

The state of the art is still "can we even one shot a production quality patch that we wont regret later", and its rarer than you'd expect based on discourse.

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

Is @passpack down?

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@jeftovic So vague

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@Codie_Sanchez Thank you for this today.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

The most powerful passage from Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig:

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@pxl0101 Just wait until you try the abomination of Facebook to Occulus Quest to Insta to Ads. Medication required

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@AnnieAgar I’m afraid of the next post

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@zanehengsperger Hours of b roll with an Osmo. Use music and cut to the beat. You can borrow my Osmo.

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@DriftingWa91771 Yes, it is

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@morganisawizard That 2023 Michigan is wrong. There are no white blobs

[Alex Reno @alex_reno]

Why are NFC North teams making damn sure they won’t be able to stop the Lions’ run game, lol

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@sriramskota 👋 hi

[Lex Fridman @lexfridman]

Huge thanks to all the open source projects that've made a lot of the tech we rely on in the world possible:

Linux
Git
FFmpeg
PyTorch & TensorFlow
Apache & Nginx
MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite
Chromium & Firefox
GCC & LLVM
Docker & Kubernetes

Also, all the open-weight LLMs... and all the programming language interpreters, compilers, and frameworks.

I can list 100+ more "niche" open source projects I've used & loved (e.g., OpenCV ❤️). But I just wanted to give a continued big thank you to the open source community for everything you do for humanity 🙏

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@IceSolst @spaceodili @HSVSphere Zyn 😂

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@Every1HasAPryce @MLBONFOX You forgot Don Kelly

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@BitesByGrok @eggoslug This doesn’t really require a lot of dexterity.

[mike mcclintock @galtmidas]

@VladTheInflator The bank has the first lien on the house. You own the house and have the deed. You rent the money. If the value of the house goes up each year more than the cost of the interest, then you are the hedge fund in this story.