Every interview I've watched with Neal lately I feel like he's tired of talking about a concept from his 2nd (technically third but we don't talk about that) book 30 years ago. He's written so much better stuff since then and I would love to hear him talk about basically any of that.
I went to a book signing (Fall, or Dodge in Hell) and you could tell he was so worn out over discussing Snowcrash, and that was five years ago. Otherwise a very thoughtful Q&A session, though. A stark contrast from the Neil Gaiman thing I attended. I did find his vision of the internet being a dystopia of so much false information that people were hiring personal moderators to filter it very depressing and prescient. The book was a challenge, but by god I spent my money so I was finishing it. Felt like he had just discovered the book of Genesis and wanted a modern repeat of it. Always felt like you took a deep dive into Wikipedia when reading his books.
> Felt like he had just discovered the book of Genesis and wanted a modern repeat of it
Agree and I actually really enjoyed that part of it. He kind of seveneves'd it but I think the back half of them are fun. Wrapping up a story is never his strong suit. Lot of "and everyone sat down for a nice dinner. The end". Always worth it though.
Many well-known artists have this problem. Heck, my gf went to a K&D concert recently, and she described the same phenomenon. People were ok while the new stuff was being played. And since everyone was obviously waiting for it, they played their hits around the end, which is where the people were most excited. And thats justa a recent example. Some of the really good guys usually play over it, and reinvent themselves, ignoring what their fans want to hear.
That said, I personally also prefer his earlier books. Granted, snowcrash was a young mans fever dream, and you kind of grow out of it. A young ladies illustrated primer? That was kinda cool. Quicksilver? Yeah, an unexpected history lesson woven into a pretty long story. Liked it. But seven eves? No. That one kind of killed my love for his work. I dont know why, but he kind of overdid the long-story-arc thing there.
For me it was Termination Shock that finally convinced me to stop reading his books. He just likes to write really long, repetitive and wildly overly detailed books. I was entertained by SevenEves and Reamde but I'm open to the possibility that I might very well react as I did to Termination Shock if I tried rereading them.
Edit: I've read and very much enjoyed a ton of Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem) but his recent stuff is tailing off for me. I don't know if it's me or him.
> But seven eves? No. That one kind of killed my love for his work. I dont know why, but he kind of overdid the long-story-arc thing there.
The first and the second part of the book (which constitute most of the book) stand on its own. I think it's better to pretend the 3rd part doesn't exist (which is IMHO rather easy since it's just unnecessary) than to discount the whole book.
I am just here to thank HN for introducing me to Neal Stephenson. My life has been made better by reading his books.
It's so nice that someone writes books for smart people.
All and every book I read before were for the lowest common denominator level of people. Sure, smart, educated, cultured, wise people could get more out of some of them (like Anna Karenina), but the books were written to be made accessible to each and every human.
Getting to know Neal's works has brought in a paradigm shift in my reading and thinking, and now I read other authors like Greg Egan, too.
Thanks to Neal for being himself. And thanks to HN for suggesting his works on books threads.
I am reading Quicksilver right now, and read Anathem, Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age before. Loved each one.
If you are reading this comment, feel free to suggest me other authors or works, although not from Neal, as I will read ALL of his works, anyway.
> It's so nice that someone writes books for smart people.
I've read a lot of Stephenson and I don't mean this as a knock against him exactly, just an observation: he writes in a way that is inclined to make the HN crowd (myself included) feel smart because we are the target audience.
If you look at a lot of the protagonists, many of them are startup founders and game designers and coders and cryptographers and mathematicians, going on "heroes' journeys" where they save the world and/or get the girl. Nerds (aka hackers) who save the day. It's almost like it's engineered to stoke the egos of technologists.
Stephenson (who - again - I have read a lot of, and admire in a lot of ways) will always feel to me like a bit of a relic from early Internet culture, where a sort of persona was idolized. The startup founder / hacker / clever man (it was always a man).
I disagree. Neal's characters are mostly weak and forgettable. Even the storylines often seem to be playing second fiddle. The real power is in his imaginative and thought-through world building. I have close to zero recollection who was the hero in Anathem, instead I often come back mentally to the ideas around the concents and avout society.
You may also like Philip K Dick. There seems to be a decent intersection between fans of each, and while they’re radically different authors, they have the same heavy cerebral load - Dick makes you put the book down, stare into the middle distance, and go “whoa”. The kinds of books that leave a lasting imprint on your mind.
Oh, and Iain M Banks. More accessible, I’d say, but no shortage of Big Ideas.
Neal's particular strength is in a detailed world-building. Dick created wild worlds, but they are not particularly fleshed out, kinda dream-like in their vagueness, therefore for me not "convincing" in the same way as Neal's worlds are.
With Banks, the worlds (Culture being a major one) are more fleshed out, but somehow to me not as interesting. I've read several of his books, but somehow didn't enjoy the Culture ones a lot (read Player of Games, Use of Weapons and Excession). I did like the A Song of Stone a lot, but that's not even sci-fi. I'm aware my opinion is quite unpopular regarding Banks.
I always found most of PKD’s short stories quite excellent, but all of his full-length books that I have read have been a slog. It’s quite telling that almost all of the movies based on his works have been based on his short stories, not novels.
If you feel this way about the works of Neal Stephenson, might I suggest Cixin Liu?
Though well-done in it's own right, the 3-Body Problem Netflix series does not quite do justice to the intricacy of Liu's writing in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. You might find the change of pace to be somewhat jarring in comparison to Stephenson but it fulfills a similar enjoyment of Science Fiction.
I enjoyed 3 body problem. I found the sequels more of a collection of sci fi tropes than a good coherent story. You will get better original thoughts from David Brin, Stephen Baxter and Vernor Vinge
Is that anywhere close to the Quantum Thief series in research quality/accuracy? I've read physicists who say they can't get time travel to work even in fiction, it's just that incompatible with everything else.
I read Embassytown and Daemon and Freedom(tm) by Daniel Suarez close together. I find they have an interesting theme throughout regarding the role of truth and manipulation. I would not recommend the sequels to 3 body problem. If you like big picture space opera, Existence by David Brin and Exultant by Stephen Baxter are better.
In the same vein as Vernor Vinge, I would recommend Stephen Baxter. Stephen's writing always gives me the same feeling as when I look at the stars at night and am reminded that where I am is just a small part of everything. The manifold trilogy as well as the long earth series he did with Terry Pratchett are very good. The first is not anthropocentric, which I found was a refreshing change.
> I think that it takes a lot of discipline in the minds of technologists to separate the good from the bad of crypto. There is actually a great deal of good in the technology, separate from the bad uses of it that we've seen over the past, and I think we should be open-minded to the learnings to be made from there.
It's so hard to get past this, and it's intuitive and understandable to me why that's the case - given the state of "web3". IMO he is correct in that there are extremely interesting things going on there, but I think for many it's easier to dismiss it altogether.
I have always believed that the Metaverse is whatever modern computing (especially the Internet) has evolved into. It has nothing to do with VR googles. You don't need AAA graphics to make an immersing world -- in fact, some text adventure games are quite immersive, and by the same principle you don't need VR to enter the Metaverse.
Metaverse is escapism and alternative socializing in capital letters. For me, Metaverse in the 80s is me typing BASIC programs, playing Alley Cat, and watching a friend play Prince of Persia (in reality, not VR). Metaverse in the 90s is me borrowing pirated games from a friend and logging into BBS talking trash till early morning. It has always been here. It never left. It IS immersive. It doesn't need some VR devices to be "more" immersive. In fact, the more "modern" we become, the LESS immersive it seems to be, with all those online ads and other shits.
For a minute there I thought I had written your message and forgot about it. It resonates strongly with how I feel.
Infocom, the leading maker of the text adventures you talk about, used to advertise that the brain is the most powerful graphics technology (https://thedoteaters.com/?attachment_id=6312). When playing their games as a kid, I remember the sense of wonder with what then felt like an entire universe contained inside the computer. I tried to "trick the computer" into letting me go places that weren't technically part of the game!
When thinking about the games back then - and I say that not with a sense of nostalgia, but simply remembering how I felt about these games before I understood how they worked - I wanted to go to every house in the scenery, every city building I was driving by. I wanted to see if I could go there, knock on the door and there would be people and adventures waiting for me everywhere.
That dream was the metaverse indeed. Great graphics of course helps a lot, but they are not the main characteristic of this immersion. It's depth, content, the sense that every couch in the room could have a long lost and forgotten receipt under it.
Adding people often breaks the immersion, especially in Free to Play games. When you are in a medieval world and suddenly a player called "Memes4Ca$h" dressed in a pink armor shows up, it breaks the immersion. The ideal environment would either need true human role players or AGI-managed characters.
Stephenson and Sweeney mean something else: User-generated 3D worlds where people interact with their avatars, e.g. to play games. Roblox and Fortnite are semi-early examples. VR is not required.
I remember an anecdote I heard when I was in high school. A teacher recounted how they had been listening to a radio talk show, and on the talk show, the presenter was interviewing an elderly lady about why she eschewed TV and preferred to listen to fiction shows on the radio. Her answer, apparently, was "because the pictures are better."
I'm going to plug my open-source metaverse - Substrata (https://substrata.info/) - and talk about it a bit, since it seems relevant to a lot of the topics in this article.
A single world: There is a single main Substrata world, which is filled with user-generated content and scripts. Rendering this and running physics for it is such a difficult technical problem that most other metaverses don't even try! Instead they tend to have lots of separate worlds / rooms. A single main world was important for me, partly as a result of reading Snow Crash.
Technology sharing:
I recently added Luau scripting, which is a fantastic Lua fork from Roblox. It allows sandboxed script execution, has a JIT mode, and has all the usual benefits of Lua (easy binding code etc.).
Substrata also imports standard formats like GLTF. GLTF actually allows pretty good reuse of assets between metaverses.
Crypto: Substrata optionally uses Ethereum NFTs for land - people can pay for land in Fiat, and then optionally mint the land as NFTs.
The big advantage of using NFTs here is that allows land to be traded on the 'secondary market', without me having to do anything, and without my permission and involvement.
If I didn't use crypto then i would need to implement some kind of marketplace myself, perhaps with an escrow system for land transfer etc, and have to deal with fraud and chargebacks etc.
The Metaverse is something companies want to happen (and monetize) more than any users actually want it. VR is a niche. Wearing a clumsy headset will I think pretty much always be a niche. I didn't realize Sweeney was so bullish on it.
The Metaverse is a bit like federated services: it springs from some idealism rather than giving users anything they actually want or need.
The Apple lawsuit, in hindsight, I think was a serious miscalculation. I think Apple's (and Google's) monopolies will end but they won't let them go willingly and it'll be worse for both companies because it'll be Congress and the EU who will decide how that works.
A court action is a way to force the issue earlier under existing legislation but only if you win. And Epic most clearly did not. So Apple is emboldened. There should be no reason that Netflix or Amazon or Epic should have to pay the Apple 30% tax (it's probably less by some agreement they have) on digital purchases purely through their existing payment platforms. That seemed like the most natural way to attack the monopoly (which is both a monopoly on distribution and payments).
Anyway, I put the Metaverse in the same category as the Star Trek transporter except a transporter would have utility.
Roblox is a hit and that's what they wanted to replicate: you would be able to take items from game to game, but in reality that doesn't happen since 9 times out of 10 it would clash with the game's art style or reduce the value of the game's own cosmetics. Being able to create marketplace-style item trading would be a big cash cow (see: steam's fee on marketplace sales).
But it's obvious why it's mostly under 18 who play it and spend money on the hats specifically to look cool or to impress others. At a certain point you realize there's not much value in it unless you enjoy specifically seeing those hats yourself whenever you use the product.
In addition, roblox a third-person game, so you see your own character constantly - while a lot of value is lost in a first-person title without getting creative (e.g. weapon skins in shooters).
What I find especially frustrating with all the Metaverse stuff is that everybody aims for the pie-in-sky solution (VR, realtime 3D worlds, etc.) instead of fixing the main problem with the Internet first: Computers can't talk to each other directly due to NAT.
That's the root of so many issue with the modern Internet, but every "solution" is just more cloud nonsense, instead of addressing the core connectivity issue.
I don't need virtual reality when even just the act of moving a file from one computer to another is already such a dysfunctional mess.
I'm kind of shocked Stephenson would associate with the kind of person that runs a company like Epic. I guess Epic's unethetical behavior is just not widely known. Epic bought Psyonix, makers of Rocket League, promised not to change anything, then 6 months later they stole the game from people who bought it for mac and linux. Now on those platforms there are no native clients for multiplayer.
> I'm kind of shocked Stephenson would associate with the kind of person that runs a company like Epic.
A person with one of the very longest runs in history as CEO of a tech company? A tech company CEO who is also involved in all the company's engineering and knows what he is talking about?
> Epic bought Psyonix, makers of Rocket League, promised not to change anything, then 6 months later they stole the game from people who bought it for mac and linux.
Didn't they stop developing the macOS and Linux versions and give those players their money back?
What a monster. I can see why people wouldn't want to be in the same room as him for some reason.
I have my doubts. For example, he claims that they won't support Linux because it's too niche but Linux has been (slightly) ahead of MacOS in the Steam survey for a while now (context: Fortnite is available on MacOS). Making is mistake is human, but he's sticking to his guns despite objective metrics to the contrary - I would expect more from a renowned CEO.
They also moved the servers from Steam to Epic around the same time, and it's unmitigated rubbish ever since. Match-ups are a joke. People with a lower ping than you basically have superpowers. With the addition of machine-learning bots becoming popular just after all that, it's made the game pretty hard to like these days.
Epic's behavior has been consistently ethical as long as I can remember (and I've been following them since the 90s). The reason Sweeney is an interesting person is that he has been developing the industry (not just his company) for the past 30 years, and has interesting things to say based on that experience because he has a strategic vision and also continues to be deeply technically involved (he was the original architect of the Unreal Engine and continues to personally design tools and entire languages/frameworks for game engines). He was a technical founder role model long before pretty much every operator on scene today even started their career.
I fully agree with him on Apple. The current App Store rules are insanely anti-competitive. It is as if Microsoft would launch Windows 12 where all software, I mean apps, had to be downloaded and purchased (30% goes to MS) via the Microsoft store. Valve's Steam would be forbidden, browsers other than Edge as well.
Could be Apple contributed if it was around the time they dropped 32bit support. I'm kind of amazed the new Doom+Doom2 re-release doesn't support even Intel Macs, despite moving to Kex. IDK whose at fault but it's lame if they let support drop and don't at least offer refunds to recent purchasers.
This was a great answer:
"Stephenson: My overarching answer is that the actual market and actual users find ways to do things that we don't necessarily imagine in advance, just with our own limited perspective. And so cyberpunk had a whole aesthetic about it and still does, which to a large extent, revolved around having cool shit on your face. Mirror shades. Actually, one of the original anthologies of cyberpunk fiction was called Mirror Shades. And it was easy to assume back then that in order to truly experience a three-dimensional environment in an immersive way that you needed stereoscopy, you needed to have a different image slightly in each eyeball to give you a fully three-dimensional effect.
And so there's always been this linkage in people's minds between cyberspace, the Metaverse, and goggles. What we've learned is way more nuanced and interesting than that. The year after Snow Crash came out was when Doom was released, and Doom is the ancestor of all games that are set in immersive environments [Note: Tim is nodding]. And it didn't require stereoscopy. It was all in a screen - very low resolution by current standards - and yet, the magic of the illusion was that you were running around in this three-dimensional persistent environment. And then since then, that kind of experience has only gotten better. And in the meantime, we've been learning things about goggles, about headsets and what they are and are not good at. And it took a long time for them to get to the point where [input/output] lag was acceptable. And so there's kind of this long period of time during which video games on screens were getting much, much, much better, but the acceptance of headsets was [falling] behind, because if lag is bad, you're more prone to get sick.
One of the things that I became aware of when I was working at Magic Leap on AR headsets is that stereoscopy isn't enough. That your brain actually uses a lot of other cues other than stereoscopy to build a map of the three-dimensional world around you. And so people with one eye, one-eyed people can still perceive three-dimensionality, for example, because of these other mechanisms.
This is a kind of a long-winded way of saying that the reality we've ended up with, which didn't seem plausible in 1990 when I was writing [Snow Crash], is that we've got billions of people fluently navigating highly realistic, immersive, three-dimensional worlds using flat screens and keyboard and mouse."
Readit News
I finished it, but it was a slog. I could recommend reading the first half and then switching to the Wikipedia summary to see how it concludes.
Agree and I actually really enjoyed that part of it. He kind of seveneves'd it but I think the back half of them are fun. Wrapping up a story is never his strong suit. Lot of "and everyone sat down for a nice dinner. The end". Always worth it though.
That said, I personally also prefer his earlier books. Granted, snowcrash was a young mans fever dream, and you kind of grow out of it. A young ladies illustrated primer? That was kinda cool. Quicksilver? Yeah, an unexpected history lesson woven into a pretty long story. Liked it. But seven eves? No. That one kind of killed my love for his work. I dont know why, but he kind of overdid the long-story-arc thing there.
Edit: I've read and very much enjoyed a ton of Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem) but his recent stuff is tailing off for me. I don't know if it's me or him.
The first and the second part of the book (which constitute most of the book) stand on its own. I think it's better to pretend the 3rd part doesn't exist (which is IMHO rather easy since it's just unnecessary) than to discount the whole book.
There's a story that he only allowed that book to be reprinted so that people would stop paying hundreds of dollars for a copy on eBay.
It's so nice that someone writes books for smart people.
All and every book I read before were for the lowest common denominator level of people. Sure, smart, educated, cultured, wise people could get more out of some of them (like Anna Karenina), but the books were written to be made accessible to each and every human.
Getting to know Neal's works has brought in a paradigm shift in my reading and thinking, and now I read other authors like Greg Egan, too.
Thanks to Neal for being himself. And thanks to HN for suggesting his works on books threads.
I am reading Quicksilver right now, and read Anathem, Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age before. Loved each one.
If you are reading this comment, feel free to suggest me other authors or works, although not from Neal, as I will read ALL of his works, anyway.
I've read a lot of Stephenson and I don't mean this as a knock against him exactly, just an observation: he writes in a way that is inclined to make the HN crowd (myself included) feel smart because we are the target audience.
If you look at a lot of the protagonists, many of them are startup founders and game designers and coders and cryptographers and mathematicians, going on "heroes' journeys" where they save the world and/or get the girl. Nerds (aka hackers) who save the day. It's almost like it's engineered to stoke the egos of technologists.
Stephenson (who - again - I have read a lot of, and admire in a lot of ways) will always feel to me like a bit of a relic from early Internet culture, where a sort of persona was idolized. The startup founder / hacker / clever man (it was always a man).
A similar author to me is Andy Weir.
But if I spelled out all nuances and caveats, then that wouldn’t be a comment, right?
Neal's books aren’t for smart people like Quantum Mechanics books are. I know.
But then again, what is smartness? Isn't a lot of what smartness is, is having the right background and preparedness?
All caveats and nuances can't be included everywhere, right?
I read Andy Weir's Peoject Hail Mary. It's something that I liked, yeah, but would have much more appreciated when I was 17. Not right now.
Now I like my books to be more wide, covering multiple aspects of reality.
E.g., when you read Permutation City, it is not only some SciFi, but it enables you to think deep and hard about consciousness and self.
I am yet to read Dune, but I think it is also a "deep" book.
Oh, and Iain M Banks. More accessible, I’d say, but no shortage of Big Ideas.
With Banks, the worlds (Culture being a major one) are more fleshed out, but somehow to me not as interesting. I've read several of his books, but somehow didn't enjoy the Culture ones a lot (read Player of Games, Use of Weapons and Excession). I did like the A Song of Stone a lot, but that's not even sci-fi. I'm aware my opinion is quite unpopular regarding Banks.
Therefore, I always recommend that people start reading his short stories, and avoid his books. See also: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8805118>
100% solid agree. That's what makes a book worthwhile to read.
I saw The Man in the High Castle series when I had time for webseries, and while it was kinda mid, it had some great aspects.
Suggest more if you can. Need not be Sci Fi.
Though well-done in it's own right, the 3-Body Problem Netflix series does not quite do justice to the intricacy of Liu's writing in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. You might find the change of pace to be somewhat jarring in comparison to Stephenson but it fulfills a similar enjoyment of Science Fiction.
While not very high quality as literary works, the books are products of originality, and deep thought.
I just appreciate that these books were written down.
I kind of liked Exhalation by Ted Chiang.
I have planned to read other works by Cixin Liu, and check out Ken Liu's works.
Great suggestion, by the way.
It's so hard to get past this, and it's intuitive and understandable to me why that's the case - given the state of "web3". IMO he is correct in that there are extremely interesting things going on there, but I think for many it's easier to dismiss it altogether.
Metaverse is escapism and alternative socializing in capital letters. For me, Metaverse in the 80s is me typing BASIC programs, playing Alley Cat, and watching a friend play Prince of Persia (in reality, not VR). Metaverse in the 90s is me borrowing pirated games from a friend and logging into BBS talking trash till early morning. It has always been here. It never left. It IS immersive. It doesn't need some VR devices to be "more" immersive. In fact, the more "modern" we become, the LESS immersive it seems to be, with all those online ads and other shits.
Welcome to the Metaverse.
Infocom, the leading maker of the text adventures you talk about, used to advertise that the brain is the most powerful graphics technology (https://thedoteaters.com/?attachment_id=6312). When playing their games as a kid, I remember the sense of wonder with what then felt like an entire universe contained inside the computer. I tried to "trick the computer" into letting me go places that weren't technically part of the game!
When thinking about the games back then - and I say that not with a sense of nostalgia, but simply remembering how I felt about these games before I understood how they worked - I wanted to go to every house in the scenery, every city building I was driving by. I wanted to see if I could go there, knock on the door and there would be people and adventures waiting for me everywhere.
That dream was the metaverse indeed. Great graphics of course helps a lot, but they are not the main characteristic of this immersion. It's depth, content, the sense that every couch in the room could have a long lost and forgotten receipt under it.
Adding people often breaks the immersion, especially in Free to Play games. When you are in a medieval world and suddenly a player called "Memes4Ca$h" dressed in a pink armor shows up, it breaks the immersion. The ideal environment would either need true human role players or AGI-managed characters.
Immersion, like resolution, keeps leveling up in ways I don’t find easy to go back on.
A single world: There is a single main Substrata world, which is filled with user-generated content and scripts. Rendering this and running physics for it is such a difficult technical problem that most other metaverses don't even try! Instead they tend to have lots of separate worlds / rooms. A single main world was important for me, partly as a result of reading Snow Crash.
Technology sharing: I recently added Luau scripting, which is a fantastic Lua fork from Roblox. It allows sandboxed script execution, has a JIT mode, and has all the usual benefits of Lua (easy binding code etc.).
Substrata also imports standard formats like GLTF. GLTF actually allows pretty good reuse of assets between metaverses.
Crypto: Substrata optionally uses Ethereum NFTs for land - people can pay for land in Fiat, and then optionally mint the land as NFTs. The big advantage of using NFTs here is that allows land to be traded on the 'secondary market', without me having to do anything, and without my permission and involvement. If I didn't use crypto then i would need to implement some kind of marketplace myself, perhaps with an escrow system for land transfer etc, and have to deal with fraud and chargebacks etc.
(In Gibson's "Neuromancer", an Ono-Sendai is a brand and/or type of cyberdeck).
The Metaverse is a bit like federated services: it springs from some idealism rather than giving users anything they actually want or need.
The Apple lawsuit, in hindsight, I think was a serious miscalculation. I think Apple's (and Google's) monopolies will end but they won't let them go willingly and it'll be worse for both companies because it'll be Congress and the EU who will decide how that works.
A court action is a way to force the issue earlier under existing legislation but only if you win. And Epic most clearly did not. So Apple is emboldened. There should be no reason that Netflix or Amazon or Epic should have to pay the Apple 30% tax (it's probably less by some agreement they have) on digital purchases purely through their existing payment platforms. That seemed like the most natural way to attack the monopoly (which is both a monopoly on distribution and payments).
Anyway, I put the Metaverse in the same category as the Star Trek transporter except a transporter would have utility.
But it's obvious why it's mostly under 18 who play it and spend money on the hats specifically to look cool or to impress others. At a certain point you realize there's not much value in it unless you enjoy specifically seeing those hats yourself whenever you use the product.
In addition, roblox a third-person game, so you see your own character constantly - while a lot of value is lost in a first-person title without getting creative (e.g. weapon skins in shooters).
That's the root of so many issue with the modern Internet, but every "solution" is just more cloud nonsense, instead of addressing the core connectivity issue.
I don't need virtual reality when even just the act of moving a file from one computer to another is already such a dysfunctional mess.
All because of Fortnite. A game that was a flop before they copied Pubg mechanics.
A person with one of the very longest runs in history as CEO of a tech company? A tech company CEO who is also involved in all the company's engineering and knows what he is talking about?
> Epic bought Psyonix, makers of Rocket League, promised not to change anything, then 6 months later they stole the game from people who bought it for mac and linux.
Didn't they stop developing the macOS and Linux versions and give those players their money back?
What a monster. I can see why people wouldn't want to be in the same room as him for some reason.
I have my doubts. For example, he claims that they won't support Linux because it's too niche but Linux has been (slightly) ahead of MacOS in the Steam survey for a while now (context: Fortnite is available on MacOS). Making is mistake is human, but he's sticking to his guns despite objective metrics to the contrary - I would expect more from a renowned CEO.
And so there's always been this linkage in people's minds between cyberspace, the Metaverse, and goggles. What we've learned is way more nuanced and interesting than that. The year after Snow Crash came out was when Doom was released, and Doom is the ancestor of all games that are set in immersive environments [Note: Tim is nodding]. And it didn't require stereoscopy. It was all in a screen - very low resolution by current standards - and yet, the magic of the illusion was that you were running around in this three-dimensional persistent environment. And then since then, that kind of experience has only gotten better. And in the meantime, we've been learning things about goggles, about headsets and what they are and are not good at. And it took a long time for them to get to the point where [input/output] lag was acceptable. And so there's kind of this long period of time during which video games on screens were getting much, much, much better, but the acceptance of headsets was [falling] behind, because if lag is bad, you're more prone to get sick.
One of the things that I became aware of when I was working at Magic Leap on AR headsets is that stereoscopy isn't enough. That your brain actually uses a lot of other cues other than stereoscopy to build a map of the three-dimensional world around you. And so people with one eye, one-eyed people can still perceive three-dimensionality, for example, because of these other mechanisms.
This is a kind of a long-winded way of saying that the reality we've ended up with, which didn't seem plausible in 1990 when I was writing [Snow Crash], is that we've got billions of people fluently navigating highly realistic, immersive, three-dimensional worlds using flat screens and keyboard and mouse."