Meta's survival is fascinating to me. They dumped money in VR, their AI is not as good as their competitors and now they are dumping money on this glasses thing. They keep on getting caught doing shady things too.
Along with small Indies as stated, a lot of the ad market is controlled by large agencies like WPP.
State departments are also one of the biggest spenders (some say that's how the 'deep-state' maintain control of the media...). All those 'stop smoking' and other health ads all add up!
i think honestly it’s the opposite. it still confuses me why meta invested so much in their pointless experiments (think any of their AR ventures) when their main source of revenue was, and continues to be, their boring advertising on consumer apps
It's one of Microsoft under Ballmer biggest victory, and one that's proving to be harder than you would think for tech behemoth: when you have one product that's so overwhelmingly dominating and raking unlimited money, diverting into other product lines seems to be almost impossible, either they don't make enough money, or you don't have enough focus, or enough need for survival and such need for it to succeed.
Despite everything Google is still the Google Ads company, Meta is still the FB/Insta company, etc ... I would even add Intel in there, they're where they are in part because every new thing they made they killed off right away because it wasn't "a money printing large margin xeon with no competition".
Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are the big ones that got out of that trap. Though with Apple I would say it's more limited than it looks, it's just that their "product" is the ecosystem they build around, so while they have lots of lines they're all linked together and feed off each other with iPhone at the core.
On the other hand some would say, Ballmer decoupled Microsoft survival from Widnows survival so much that it leads to what's happening to windows those past 5-8 years, and that's not a plus for its users.
Why person in their right mind would voluntarily walk around with "meta" or Google or Apple or any other surveillance camera and pay for doing so is beyond me. It feels like something straight out of the initiation scene in National Lampoon's Animal House where the pledges bend over, get whacked in the arse with a cricket bat and say "thank you sir, can I have another one" upon which they get whacked again.
These companies are so unlikable, I don't understand why they think people want to permantly mount their data collection systems right in front of their eyes. You couldn't give me one of those for free. Its like someone breaking into my car and leaving 2 copilot licenses on the seat: a nightmare
It's interesting that people seem to have forgotten/gotten over the whole Glasshole "rejection/anger" against Google glasses ~10years ago. Maybe it would have been more socially acceptable even back then if they hadn't made them look sci-fi and instead like regular glasses.
Or is it just that we haven't seen Scoble using these in the shower? :-D [1]
I think it was an old issue of National Lampoon (and I have no idea what they would be parodying) that showed an old-timey cathedral-style radio in a child's pull-wagon, like some kind of advert from the 1920's. "Portable Radio is Here!" or similar for the caption…
(Sometimes you have to recognize that the tech is not ready for the intended form factor.)
It was 10 years ago. Today's preteens were infants then. Today's university students were preteens. Today's parents of infants were university students. Things change. Time destroys everything.
...which has not been declared taboo through religious or cultural institutions. Time for those institutions to step up and declare a ban on networked surveillance devices. As long as the processing is all local and none of the gathered intel is shipped out to the mothership or the highest bidder (viz. Gargoyles from Snow Crash) they're fine but it should be legal to punch anyone in the nose who wears corporate spy-eyes.
Something doesn’t add up. According to what the article is saying about Meta’s help article, there is no price tier which allows unlimited conversation mode 720 hours/month. Even the highest paid tier can only get 15 hours.
But the article says this is an on-device feature. So there should be no overhead to Meta at all, aside from them storing the conversations I assume.
> Meta’s rate limit is ridiculous. [...] feature [...] doesn’t use Meta’s servers. It runs on-device, using the chips inside the glasses [...] I turned off my internet, and it kept working.
Well, of course it's getting rate limited behind a subscription. Someone has to pay for all the additional compute and storage required to datamine your conversations.
For example, a musician would probably rather have the audience wearing recording glasses and actually watching then recording on phone and watching the phone screen.
The 'creepy pick up artists' and other social media types have become synonymous with it unfortunately
I'm sure many vision impaired people find these to be life changing. Very ableist mindset to ban these, instead of establishing stronger privacy protections around data and usage.
I don’t think it should be banned but instead regulated and I think Apple has a unique opportunity here that will make them win this product category in fashion & social acceptability: Make the glasses glow. Have the top horizontal frame of the glasses illuminate when it’s recording and be able to glow on command
By making the glow a fashion aspect of the glasses, the fact that it should glow loudly will become a socially known part of the glasses. Because it’s Apple and because a good chunk of the frame needs to glow it’ll have a distinct look that’ll be easy to spot and if anyone has tampered with them to disable it, they can be asked to verify that it hasn’t by making it able to glow on command “Hey Siri, glow/party”.
Mild tangent: are there smart glasses out there without camera, without needing internet access, and with custom app support? All my neck and back want is a way for me to look up instead of down whenever I'm bored and smart glasses would be one possible solution for that.
You can look for smart glasses (hey cyan) in aliexpress, and use claude/codex to reverse engineer. There's a guy who put an sdk on github. All you need is bluetooth to your phone, and of you go. You can build an app that does whatever you want within the firmware limitations of the glasses.
They are actually selling really well. But sadly, they are selling because you can drill out the 'recording' indicator light and use them to secretly record people to make creepy TikToks.
Thats a good candidate for a closed fist falling at non-walking speeds at somebody's ugly face. Do that around my kids and you are automatically a pedo that will get adequate treatment.
Also, where I live its against the law to record people without their consent so if I would be feeling very nice I would just hold you against the ground till cops come.
You wear them = you film with them. Get your shit together kids, this ain't some harmless fun.
It seems to mostly just be a problem if you’re caught (aka if you’re being obnoxious or using a tripod) or if you try to use the subsequent footage for anything other than private viewing.
In many places you’re allowed to take wide shots where people might be captured incidentally, though not everywhere, as some places don’t allow photos of “copyrighted” buildings and landmarks.
I mean technically if you do it for no reason (it not actually recording), they have no video evidence, and if they did actually record and use it as evidence, well, it shows you were in the right. Not sure what punishment is for creeping on someone's kid vs getting a slap in the face tho
Typical of any new product/service these days. The first few weeks/months are "free" (or included) and then they start locking up things behind a paywall (i.e.,. subscription).
I get that recurring revenue is needed for hardware development. It'd be easier to stomach if they flat out had that subscription pricing locked in early on instead of rolling it out after hundreds/thousands of unit sales. Yes, I know it's "smart business". I say it's anti-consumer practice.
