Really not a smart idea for OpenAI to do this when one of the top Congresspeople represents the Hollywood area, is about to be elected Senator, and already has a bill ready to require AI companies to abide by copyright:
I was struck how much this reminded me of the Tax Revolt in Second Life forever ago. In the same way Helldivers' fans used the game's theme to shape the protest, in SL the protest took on American revolution / tea crate rebellion themes:
Well, both allowing kids to monetize and taking almost all the revenue are a problem.
The wild thing is Second Life's 600K MAU players monetize better than Roblox's 350M MAU players -- both for the company (it's still not profitable despite huge revenue) and for the creator community:
I feel like that's kind of an apples-and-oranges comparison, given that Second Life's going to have a, by comparison, massive lean towards well-off older adults with long-term investment in the SL social ecosystem.
If anything I would look at VRChat for comparisons instead (a young demographic, especially on standalone headsets, and an ecosystem that's still very Wild West in many ways), though measuring numbers there would be much, much harder since most of the creator ecosystem happens outside of the app itself on Gumroad, Booth, etc (content subscriptions through VRChat itself are still only in beta).
I expect the vast majority of Roblox players to be under 10 with low spending power. In contrast, someone still playing Second Life has more discretionary income.
With one kid just becoming a teen and other kid being half the age - I'm somewhat biased.
I know a dozens of early teens (friends/classmates of my kid, kids of friends/colleagues ...etc) that are (still) playing Roblox.
I even know one of those older teens (friends kid) that is earning enough money from Roblox games - that it doesn't make sense for him to do a typical Dutch teenager job of stocking shelves in stores/markets.
From ages 6/7 and higher it's common for kids to say to each other "Don't need toy type of birthday present as I would prefer Roblox (or once they are a bit older Fortnite or other similar) gift card".
More than once our kid got so many that we had to "throttle" their "use" over weeks/months.
Anyway - yeah developers getting only 30% and Roblox keeping 70%, especially with all the fuss about the likes of Apple/Google/Unity getting into trouble for 70/30 split the other way - doesn't make sense.
Sure - there are bigger operational costs for Roblox actually running game servers (instead of just the store) - though not that much bigger, right?
As Bar-Zeev mentions (and Avi was a lead designer on Vision Pro), even a mixed reality experience can cause nausea.
Far as being "flippant", when I asked Carmack about the topic while CTO at Oculus, he told me that wasn't his department (!). Dude, that your device tends to get half the population sick isn't your problem?
> even a mixed reality experience can cause nausea
Absolutely! I was just trying to paint a picture of the extremes available on the AVP from "safest" to worst case. But even "safest" will not be usable/comfortable for 100% of the population.
Anytime someone sends me something generated by ChatGPT, I think about how AI expert Hilary Mason puts it: "By design, ChatGPT aspires to be the most mediocre web content you can imagine."
This resonates with my experience using Copilot. It generates lowest-common-denominator code, and displays a stunning unawareness of language and library features. Some understandable due to training cutoff (but still very frustrating), but it also refused to use Pillow functions that seem to have been around for a decade, instead crufting together some shitty pipeline by hand.
I sometimes need this. It’s nice to get an average of all mediocre content summed up as a bullet list sometimes.
Sometimes I want the average tourist guide, the average recipe or the average answer. Now I get it instantly without sifting through ad-infested shallow content. ChatGPT made it so much easier to be curious about new things. It’s a good trailhead for curiosity.
Nope, copyright strictly depend on whether the infringer makes money from it. By that logic, Neo-Nazis can print up pictures of Batman wearing a swastika and start giving them away for free, and there's nothing Warner Brothers / DC can do.
Right, but technically OpenAi (or Midjourney) isn't the one explicitly generating the copyrighted image. Their tool is, but not based on their own intentions, and it seems that responsibility is on the user who generated the prompt. I don't know much about the copyright laws, but it seems generative AI can be classified as an artistic tool.
Even if I don't necessarily agree with this piece, I really like his photography. Michael Kenna and to a lesser extent New Topographics influences. It shows he put a lot of work he put into it. Lovely. Thanks for sharing.
"is" might not be the case so much any more. He left journalism over a decade ago and has been in VC since. He's also one of a certain subset of writers who find it exceptionally difficult to write anything even mildly negative about Apple.
He also wrote gushingly that the Vision Pro will revolutionize movies and we'll consume Hollywood content by sitting on the couch together, all watching our own Vision Pros. Hmm.
It’s not a comprehensive review but an exciting feature he’s experienced that, based on his experience as a photographer, he thinks will be a huge deal.
Yes, though the Metaverse in "Snow Crash" very much looks and acts like a (mostly) walled garden. With Lamina1 I suspect NS is trying to connect what he envisioned with SC with the crypto/blockchain movement that was inspired by "Cryptonomicon". (Which hasn't proven to be a good fit.)
Wow, interesting point. Read Cryptonomicon so long ago, didn't clue in to the connection with crypto/blockchain.
I think my take on it was more just that he called the virtualverse "metaverse", where 10 years before the idea behind it was in "True Names" by Vinge, as the "Other Plane", and Gibson's "Neuromancer" with "matrix"
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2024/04/adam-schiff-ai-video-games...