this remains the most baffling story in tech in the last decade
yes, salaries are high
yes, hardware is expensive
$45 billion is still an utterly staggering cash burn and I am desperate to get a breakdown of exactly where it went
yes, salaries are high
yes, hardware is expensive
$45 billion is still an utterly staggering cash burn and I am desperate to get a breakdown of exactly where it went
Reposted from
Ed Zitron
Happy to help. Nothing happened. Everyone pretended like it didn't happen. It's almost entirely gone. Horizon World somehow exists. $45bn basically disappeared into a black hole owed to "lack of a clear vision and mismanagement." Who knows what happened!
finance.yahoo.com/news/metas-r...
finance.yahoo.com/news/metas-r...
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I've not used them bit they have a good reputation as far as VR goes.
https://youtu.be/CFlAumGjWH8?si=ta0zjW86N2Whu_M-
It seems so so so so expensive but WHY
Add in some very expensive SF real estate and low production run prototypes, and yeah.
Meta has 75,000 people.
86,000 - a day
1,000,000 - 12 days
1,000,000,000 - 32 YEARS
45,000,000,000 - 1,440 years
Then there's the whole Meta experience at the cost they dropped on it, and it's full-spectrum bad. I don't get it.
$45B of storage could probably contain it.
Atleast one of them might get a competent leadership team.
At the very least breaking the company would break his power.
But 45 billion? That's getting into territory where even the pentagon would chastise you for being wasteful, or not hiding the lab funding well enough.
(OMG> how bad do you have to be? jfc. Didn't anyone learn from steve balmer?)
10% of anything these fucks burned could have made workers (or cities) lives better by paying taxes.
Callous behavior all around.
Will Samsung or some other South Korean firm have their take on it in a year, and that one end up being the better one we all use after that? Absolutely.
(Yes, I know the concept itself came from Stephen Beck, but Gibson was my first exposure to it.)
I actually think that Facebook survives almost entirely based on inertia, and its actual product is...well, pretty crappy. Put another way, if people I'm already connected to didn't use it, neither would I.
FB could survive on building the platform, but that requires a use case that's worth mass adoption.
Heat dissipation is also a very big deal, the device is on the consumer's head and heavy realtime GPU and CPU power usage doesn't go well with that.
(Mostly because it was used in the intro-to-programming-for-non-majors class I had to take, as physics student.
AFTER I had taken electronics 1 and 2, which included programming things in assembler.)
(Now, the year after, they introduced "Intro to programming for physics majors" where you DO learn a language, but I'd already taken the course. -.- )
$45 billion can probably buy you a secret lair w/ goons.
So like my example but 4000x bigger. Easy peasy 🤣
Basically, smart people hit the mega-lottery and ride coattails.
Proof that money doesn't mean you're successful...it just shows that you got lucky
- guy can code
- makes a website
- grows insanely beyond his wildest imagination
sure it could be big....but who would've guessed this
The 787 program had serious teething problems... but it has matured into a solid and effective airplane.
What I get from that is, most likely, a *lot* of mismanagement.
43 billion in avatar clothes
A drilling company went bankrupt and its executives met with their lawyer ahead of bankruptcy proceedings. He asks them what they spent the money on.
They answer: "well, we spent a third on drugs. another third we spent on liquor and women. (1/2)
I like my Oculus Quest for playing games. I don't want to live there. I like AI for tedious tasks. I don't want to be friends with it.
These people are such cowards. Tech before human lives and dignity. It's incomprehensible to me.
The chads vrchat and second life: you just now added legs? That's cute. We've always had legs. And tails. And penises too. Oh, and penises are a selling point for us. People pay us for them.
This one was hoping we'd all want to live like shit.
You can tax Meta for the same amount without them worrying.
There are people in my industry who make their entire career bouncing from project that will never happen to project. That will never happen. Just soaking up investment dollars.
Basically they're just learning cool new computer skills and LARPing a job.
And they're getting paid in obnoxious amount of money for it because people like Zuckerberg have more money than they know what to do with.
In this case, the thing he spent it on was gathering people's personal data, training a few models, and professional connections.
The product was the money investors gave him. None of this stuff is intended to appeal to consumers anymore because consumers are not the customer.
Investors are the customer.
He had the luck to be in the right place at the right time, and the brains and temperament to ruthlessly exploit the opportunity.
Like.
*HOW*.