What they are seeing is insane user and revenue growth. It's that simple. ChatGPT has like a billion users, and it came out 3 years ago. And then AI is getting better every year in a way that internet companies like Google or Facebook didn't. Google peaked very early in terms of usefulness, then it just spent decades monetizing it. AI is not even funded by ads, people are actually paying for it. It's really hard to get people to pay for something. I don't know if the investors will get a nice return, but given the numbers they're seeing I understand why they're doing it.
VR is in the trough of disillusionment phase right now, but I can almost guarantee you we'll see a slow but steady climb from here. The big question is if Meta will continue to invest into the space or if other smaller players will fill its place.
What's different is that Meta has sold 20+ million headsets, and there is a decent sized user base, albeit much smaller than people expected 5 years ago. This is not a dead technology just because you don't use it. In 2023 Meta Quest had roughly 6.3 million monthly active users.
So, in some sense not a lot, but it has a decent foothold of people using it often. It's clearly different from VR in the past where there were literally a handful or maybe on the order of hundreds of headsets in the world. VR now also has a ton of different niches and use cases beyond games. I also think a comparison with gaming console hardware is more apt than comparing it to something like PC or smartphone sales.
There are kind of two ways to look at VR. One is "no-one wants this because it is a bad idea". The other is "this is a good idea, but no-one wants it because the tech is grossly inadequate". _If_ option two is correct, then maybe eventually it sees adoption, as the hardware finally gets good enough. Personally I suspect that option one is correct, but I've been wrong about this sort of thing before and I wouldn't be _totally_ shocked if number two comes to pass.
(There's also number three: "this is magic and will change everything, and you'll do all your socialising and work via VR", but this is just bubble-pumping nonsense and I doubt anyone _actually_ believes it. And option four, which is like option two except that "good enough" is essentially technically impossible.)
Game dev in general has a much tighter feedback loop than most software. If you're leaking memory, you're doing that a hundred times a second. If your code is slow you get visual stuttering. If you want performant code you need to think about things like cache coherence, you can't use GC etc.
I agree, but that's really true for questions like "does it run fast"? And those kind of arguably fit into the "legible" camp. Whereas "is it fun?" is a question less able to be formally tested and articulated. It's "illegible".
The tighter feedback loop that helps to answer that question comes from dogfooding.
I agree with you for almost all of this, just a small nitpick:
GC isn't really incompatible with games, for the overwhelming majority of games, it's basically a non-factor in performance if you spend even the slightest amount of time on performance.
It's kind of similar to native code - don't allocate too much, reuse resources, don't leak them uncontrollably.
It's only a problem when you need guarantees (i.e. the game should never drop a frame) but basically no game fulfills that nowadays and it isn't a player expectation.
GC is ok as long as you aren't writing some factorio-like etc. Modern computers are perfectly fine doing shit ton of useless stuff 120 times a second without blinking an eye.
If you're allocating stuff every frame you'll run into problems quickly. Sure, you can use an object pool or arena allocator, but then you're basically circumventing GC.
This is exactly how I'd put it, and also why I absolutely hate context switches. When you're asking me to switch context, for example to a different project, then I have to bring in the project structure, the modules the moving pieces, the problem we're trying to solve, everything before I can remember enough to answer your question.
Totally agree. It takes a while to "load" the project but then once it's loaded moving around a large codebase is a breeze but as soon at the code changes broaden and I slow right down cos I have to rebuild the map with the new additions. only way i can describe it: it's like loading google/apple maps and instead of it showing a low detail view with only the big roads displayed i'm loading the entire super details map, it takes a while but once it's loaded there's 0 lag.
also it's actually reassuring knowing someone else is similar, no-one in my life seems to work the same.
Would like to know as well. Whenever I suggest something new it's a default "NO!". But if it just happens naturally it's ok. Like if I put on a song and suggest he listen to it, my kid will literally scream and cry like I'm torturing him, but if it happens to be on the radio while driving then suddenly it's fine and he'll love it. I think part of the reason is that everything is on demand these days, unlike when we grew up on broadcast tv and radio.
A little embarrassing to admit this, but I find it harder to listen to a new song or genre if that's the main activity I'm doing - like sitting down to just focus on the song. If I put it on while washing the dishes or driving I don't feel as pressured about it.
Maybe this is involved a bit? asking your son to listen to something could be making it an activity, maybe put it on while you do something else and then ask his thoughts on it after?
I remember feeling vaguely threatened by interests that I didn't understand growing up. At one point for instance, my friend was really into anime, and I felt like it's too weird, like you'd need to be a very different kind of person to enjoy that kind of thing. Years later I decided to try it though, and still I have a bit of an aversion to a lot of the tropes of most anime, but there are also quite a few gems in there that I would've missed. I'm reminded of this often because it's common that people just have a blanket "I don't watch cartoons" attitude. I try to remember this when I have an aversion to some kind of music, literature, movie or hobby.
yep, for me, the wild overemphasis on grunts, huuuhs, hmmm, uhhh, errr, etc drives me absolutely bonkers.
it isn’t at all the animated aspect, i do love a few anime’s but the good ones don’t do that weird noise huh thing. the stories can be incredible i just wish i could watch them without ripping my hair out every time the characters do that.
I mean from a different perspective, western animation has similar tropes / issues; it's just that you grew up with it. I couldn't stand Pokemon, but in hindsight that was an anime too, just with Dutch dubs.
Anyway, just keep in mind most anime is aimed at children/teenagers, if you watch it with that in mind or think of English voice acting and vocalizations in western animation, some of these things make more sense.
Humans bad. I think it's an ideological off-shoot from environmentalism. If you recognize that humans are the cause of environmental issues then we are the problem. If we are the problem, then we should try to discredit our specialness so that we can motivate there being fewer of us (anti-natalism).
It's the opposite. "Human special" is an ideological off-shoot from religion and fear of dying. From a scientific point of view, humans are not special in any sense. We are a primate species that evolved through natural selection, just like every other organism.
We are also all made of atoms, not sure what you're trying to say here. We are different from the other animals on Earth, we are clearly special. That doesn't mean we're chosen by God or anything like that, but I don't see the sense in downplaying humanity either. We may be the only intelligent species capable of science and space flight in the universe for all we know.
Imagine our response if we went to another planet and the highest life form we found was a dog vs. a humanoid with books, computers, music, films, language...
