2025-04-10
I didn't want the Meta CTO job, I just wanted to be “VR Dictator” where I knew the problem space intimately and was confident I could make a real difference if I had actual authority. A responsible Meta CTO would not spend all that much of their time on VR — the primary social media business is too important to neglect.
The Hollywood Reporter
In an interview with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, James Cameron says he is cautiously optimistic about generative AI's role in filmmaking, including cutting costs
In an interview with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, the filmmaker weighs in on Stability AI and VFX, “in the style of” prompts …
2025-02-06
@boztank An unfortunate terminology revolution that someone had to have championed — all the MR toolkit efforts and demos are now uninformatively named. What do you call what used to be MR if VR is now MR?
UploadVR
Interviews with nearly two dozen VR studios on shipping games on Quest, Meta's increased focus on Horizon Worlds, concerns over declining game sales, and more
With concerns about declining sales and discoverability, UploadVR spoke with nearly two dozen VR studios to discuss the state of VR development for Quest. Bluesky: @kentbye.com , @...
[Quote post: “Meta CTO: 2025 Will Determine Whether Reality Labs Is Visionary Or “A Legendary Misadventure"] I see some positive things in the leaked @boztank memo, but I worry that the top level strategic direction is flawed. “ We need to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR. And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. ” Why would you say “especially in MR”? Mixed Reality is seen by some as a stepping stone to the future fantasy AR world that justifies all past losses, so it gets more focus than it objectively deserves...
UploadVR
Interviews with nearly two dozen VR studios on shipping games on Quest, Meta's increased focus on Horizon Worlds, concerns over declining game sales, and more
With concerns about declining sales and discoverability, UploadVR spoke with nearly two dozen VR studios to discuss the state of VR development for Quest. Bluesky: @kentbye.com , @...
2025-01-01
LLM assistants are going to be a good forcing function to make sure all app features are accessible from a textual interface as well as a gui. Yes, a strong enough AI can drive a gui, but it makes so much more sense to just make the gui a wrapper around a command line interface that an LLM can talk to directly.
Simon Willison's Weblog
Some 2024 LLM takeaways: multimodal vision became common, LLM prices crashed, overall environmental impact worsened despite efficiency gains, and slop arrived
A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here's a review of things we figured …
2024-07-02
@TimSweeneyEpic ... That is an anti-consumer-liberty position that I can't get behind. The condescension that the little people can't possibly understand what they are trading, so the government must remove the choice from them, should grate.
Reuters
Preliminary findings: the EU says Meta's pay or consent ad model breaches the DMA; Meta faces a fine of up to 10% of its global annual turnover if found guilty
2024-05-15
Well this sucks. I liked Workplace, both at Meta and currently at Keen. I assume Meta will continue maintaining their internal version, rather than adopting the suggested commercial option, which may have similar downsides to their continued use of Mercurial vs Git.
TechCrunch
Meta plans to shut down its enterprise tool Workplace in August 2025, making it read-only until May 2026; Meta will continue to use the product internally
2024-04-19
This is a fantastic value!
Engadget
Meta cuts the price of the base 128GB Quest 2 from $249 to $199, its second permanent price cut in four months, after a drop from $299 to $249 in January
The base 128GB headset will cost $199 from now on. — For the second time this year, Meta has given the Quest 2 a permanent price cut.
2024-04-04
Not a new store, just (maybe) add a new browsing category in the main store, and even that wouldn't be needed for app lab. When run, the app just sends an intent to shell telling it to fetch the environment from its package and exits. The browsing / PDP / purchase / gifting / web presence / etc of all apps stays exactly the same, it is just a data package instead of an interactive app.
CNET
An interview with Andrew Bosworth on the 10th anniversary of Reality Labs, the past and future of VR, AR, and AI, Meta's next AR glasses prototype, and more
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth talks with CNET about the past and future of VR, AR and AI. — 2014 doesn't seem that long ago to me.
I always wanted Meta to open up VR home environments and sponsor tools so any game environment on mobile or PC could be “environment shot” in full 3D. I imagined a driver intercept hack that would capture all the drawing as you turn around, then sort out the static geometry, but dealing with all the shaders and resources and screen space effects would be challenging and error prone.
CNET
An interview with Andrew Bosworth on the 10th anniversary of Reality Labs, the past and future of VR, AR, and AI, Meta's next AR glasses prototype, and more
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth talks with CNET about the past and future of VR, AR and AI. — 2014 doesn't seem that long ago to me.
My point was that MORE work was done to build an entirely new and different category of assets that still lack the functionality of the app ecosystem; it was a rejection of the simple thing that the shell team could “just do”, because it became a “design thing”. There were lots of cases of that, with design being a separate org from the product teams and little understanding of the work involved in the different options.
CNET
An interview with Andrew Bosworth on the 10th anniversary of Reality Labs, the past and future of VR, AR, and AI, Meta's next AR glasses prototype, and more
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth talks with CNET about the past and future of VR, AR and AI. — 2014 doesn't seem that long ago to me.
2024-02-22
The AI behavior guardrails that are set up with prompt engineering and filtering should be public — the creators should proudly stand behind their vision of what is best for society and how they crystallized it into commands and code. I suspect many are actually ashamed. The...
PCMag
Google says the company is working to immediately fix Gemini's “inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions”, after some users complained
Controversy is swirling around Google's generative AI tool Gemini as some users complain that its historical depictions are not accurate.
2024-02-10
A social media mutual dying is a sobering event for an aging generation. His aerospace paper made a mark on me: https://www.fourmilab.ch/...
@stevesi
John Walker, a computer programmer and co-founder of 3D design software maker Autodesk, died on February 2 at the age of 75
2024-02-09
A social media mutual dying is a sobering event for an aging generation. His aerospace paper made a mark on me: https://www.fourmilab.ch/...
@stevesi
John Walker, a computer programmer and co-founder of 3D design software maker Autodesk, died on February 2 at the age of 75
Very sad news on the passing on John Walker, programmer and co-founder of AutoDesk. His contributions to our industry, the rise of the PC, and the modern industrialization of nearl...
2024-01-05
@TimSweeneyEpic I never owned the 8 bit pascal (Wizardry was written with it!), but I did use my schools copy. I should still have my 16 bit ORCA/Pascal manual, but it must be in a box. There are still a half dozen bookmarks in my Turbo Pascal manuals from when I wrote Catacombs. [image]
The Register
Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth, who devised nine programming languages and won the Turing Award in 1984, dies at 89
@TimSweeneyEpic Pulled these off the bookshelf. [image]
The Register
Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth, who devised nine programming languages and won the Turing Award in 1984, dies at 89
2023-11-25
Nvidia seems to be deftly navigating around the China chip bans, but it is interesting to consider how a long term performance limit could influence architectures. Historically, vendors have always quoted performance numbers that were, uh, optimistic, because big numbers good. A...
Reuters
Sources: Nvidia told Chinese customers it's delaying the launch of H20, the most powerful of three AI chips it designed to comply with US rules, until Q1 2024
Nvidia (NVDA.O) has told customers in China it is delaying the launch of a new artificial intelligence chip it designed to comply …
2023-11-24
Nvidia seems to be deftly navigating around the China chip bans, but it is interesting to consider how a long term performance limit could influence architectures. Historically, vendors have always quoted performance numbers that were, uh, optimistic, because big numbers good. A...
Reuters
Sources: Nvidia told its Chinese customers it's delaying the launch of H20, its most powerful of three AI chips designed to comply with US' ban, until Q1 2024
Nvidia (NVDA.O) has told customers in China it is delaying the launch of a new artificial intelligence chip it designed to comply …
2023-10-17
If this had been posted last week, I would have just framed the book challenge as exploring the arguments against this. I won't defend all the points, but yeah, this is my team, and I truly think it should be yours as well.
Fortune
Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto lists trust and safety, sustainability, and tech ethics as “enemies”, says AI is “our Philosopher's Stone”, and more
In a 5,200-word manifesto published by the venture capitalist and billionaire Marc Andreessen on Monday …
2023-10-10
It is doing constant reprojection with a fairly coarse grid, and the cameras are lower frame rate than the display and not synchronized. It should get quite a bit better as the software matures, but there is a decent chance that just doing a single depth estimation for the entire image and directly using the camera image instead of a re-rendering would be better: less blurring, lower latency, and less power/thermal. Ideally the display would be phase locked at 2x the camera frame rate.
The Verge
Meta Quest 3 review: more comfortable, much-improved displays, and snappy performance, but there isn't much MR content and passthrough isn't quite sharp enough
2023-02-25
The comment “we think it's important that major world governments have insight about training runs above a certain scale” makes me recall the 200,000 lb-sec FAA amateur rocketry limit. https://twitter.com/...
OpenAI
OpenAI details its preparations for “if AGI is successfully created”, including being cautious with its models and operating as if the risks are existential
Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.