On one side this would make a lot of sense, though I fear that the end result of that would just be that the big companies would scoop up a lot of works for free, put their watermark on it and resell it. Public domain after all is not copyleft. While the average small author, who is busy with other aspects of their life would end up forgetting to renew their copyright and have their works slip into the public domain against their will. Meanwhile big companies would have somebody on staff to auto-renew things to eternity. And it might not even help in cases like this, since this work is not abandoned, it was removed on purpose. They can make it available again for one hour on each new years eve and put it back into the vault after that to keep their copyright.

Tricky to word such legislation that it actually end up benefiting the public and not just end up as an all-you-can-eat-buffet for the content hording companies. The people controlling the content distribution channels would be the ones to benefiting the most here.

I'd prefer a blatant "copyright lasts 20 years", as that puts everybody on equal footing and means currently created works had a chance to slip into the public domain in our lifetime.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Ffacebookresearch%2Fijepa

That only works as long as the servers you want to move between are cooperating with each other. The moment they stop that, you have the same issue as with we have right now with Reddit switching of the free API. Also in the Fediverse you are still user@server, your identity does not belong to you, it belongs to whatever server is hosting it (lemmy, mastodon, etc.). If you want to actually move over to another server, you have to create a new identity.

Reddit was Open Source until 2017 too.

The source is relatively useless here. This is about users and data. You can grab yourself a copy of that old Reddit source code and run your own right now, but that's pointless without the users, it would just be another empty server on the Web.

Fediverse makes that data available to other servers of course, but so did Reddit via it's APIs, which they are now closing down. There is nothing in the architecture of Fediverse that prevents that or that would make moving to another server significantly easier for the user. User accounts in the Fediverse are still locked to a single server.

Problem with the Fediverse is that it's not really any more decentralized as the rest of the Web. If Lemmy or Mastodon go evil, people still have to find another website and move their accounts and communities over, no different from what is happening with Reddit right now. Only advantage it has is slightly easier discovery of other servers, but even that only works as long as everybody plays nice, nothing stops one server from blocking other servers.

What AI provides to gaming and media goes far beyond just procedurally generating a landscape. What AI can do is much closer to the holodeck, where the user specifies what they want to play and the AI generates everything, the story, characters, rules, landscape and all the rest. There is no longer a need for a game creator. For some genres this essentially already works. ChatGPT can generate stories, can generate puzzles and puzzle dependency graphs, it can generate images, there is AI to segment those images, generate depth maps, etc. That's basically all the bits and pieces you need to create a classic point&click adventure from scratch, completely by AI (this is what StableDiffusion can produce in 20min without any user tweaking). The thing missing is having all those AI systems integrate with each other, but people are already working on that too. If you leave away the graphics, you can already play simple text adventures right now completely in ChatGPT.

The thing I am most curious about is how this will change media consumption in general. A large part of classical media is the shared social experience, people don't watch movies just for the movie itself, but because friends and family are going to watch the same movie. With AI they now have the tools to generate custom content at home, tweaked for them personally. Furthermore that content will be dynamic. With AI you can explore locations and characters that aren't part of the main plot. You can change the story on the fly. So it's not just that AI is making the movie/game/etc., AI is the thing you use to consume the media with. There no longer a need for a finished .mp4 file falling out the other end, it will all be made up on the fly by AI.

The problem isn't the price. If QuestPro cost $50 it would still be a crap AR headset and incapable of replacing a monitor or TV, it's just not a good enough device for that task. Meanwhile if it cost $1500 and would actually be good, plenty of people would by it, there are lots of high end monitors, TVs and phones that cost just as much and they sell just fine. $1500 is very much in the realm of any other high end tech gadget and a good AR/VR headset would be capable of replacing a lot of those.

The problem Apple needs to solve is making a device that is good enough to fully replace a TV or monitor, along with enough additional features to make it worth the hassle of putting on the headset. QuestPro utterly fails at that, but it fails for avoidable reasons. There are other cheaper headsets on the market that already have better resolution and better passthrough than QuestPro. What they don't have is good software, which in turn renders them largely useless in the consumer market.

Apple has access to a full stack of desktop OS, mobile OS, along with music, games and movies. If they integrate that properly with their headset, it could easily be leaps and bounds above anything we have seen so far in the AR/VR space. The bar that Facebook/Meta put up so far is incredibly low and could easily be beat by anybody with some money and better management.

And yes, at $1500 or $3000 AppleVR won't sell like hotcakes, but that's not the goal here, the first version is supposed to be essentially a development kit from what I understand. What's important is that they manage to make AR/VR look desirable and interesting again. Meta so far made it look more boring the more years they spend on it.

QuestPro being a flop comes to nobodies surprise, that thing is just an overpriced Quest2 with face tracking and better optics (but not better resolution), for 5x the the Quest2's $300 launch price. Even calling that "Mixed Reality" is a stretch. The resolution and clarity of the passthrough cameras are garbage and the depth sensor, which is fundamental to any kind of AR that interacts with the real world, got removed a couple of months before launch. That thing was designed by a committee that didn't know what they want, they just threw whatever tech they had available into it, no matter if it made sense or not. Face tracking itself is a weird proposition, who wants a feature that they literally can't see unless they are standing in front of a mirror? That's a feature that would make sense once you solved everything else broken with modern VR, not when quintuples the price.

As for Apple headsets, all the problems the QuestPro has are fixable. Put in better cameras. Don't waste bandwidth and processing power with face tracking. Add in higher resolution screens. And most importantly, write actual software to make use of the new features the headset has. QuestPro didn't get that, it's almost all Quest2 software. There is room for a "monitor replacement" headset and headset resolution is approaching a point where that can become viable, see Nreal Air for ~$400, what's missing is putting it all together in a nice package and having software that integrates it all smoothly. There is plenty room for innovation here and Quest so far really is just scratching the surface of what's possible. The problem most current headsets face is that they make the VR and AR aspect the center points, while largely ignoring 2D content, that puts them into a barren wasteland where there is nothing to do. If Apple does this right and makes sure that all their software and entertainment is smoothly accessible from within VR, it could be a far more useful product than anything on the market right now.

The Metaverse done right would not just be another VRChat app. It wouldn't even be an app in the classical sense. It would be a digital platform that combines all the other existing platforms in one unified experience. You can see bits and pieces of that all over the place right now. Be it things like Microsoft's PhoneLink allowing you to stream your phone to your PC, Apple's Universal Control allow seamless sharing of mouse/keyboard between your devices or SteamLink allowing you to play PC games on your TV. All of those break down the borders between devices.

Now imagine that applied to a AR/VR headset, instead of the headset locking you out from the world, it enhances it. If you look at your phone from within VR, you can still see it, but since you are in AR/VR it can now display content beyond the limits of the physical device. And things get really interesting once you start adding multiplayer on top, as now it's not just you that can look at your own devices, you can also invite friends and see what they are up to on their devices. Teleconferencing and screen sharing would become trivial and automatic, it's not something you have to setup, it's something you can just do by meeting up with people in the Metaverse.

All that said, I don't expect Facebook to build this. While they certainly are throwing money at the problem, they seem to lack a real vision on what to do with it. Even now, almost 8 years into VR, they can't even manage really basic stuff, like making their VR offerings (e.g. Venues) available on other headsets or using VR for their own presentations and conferences, those still happen in the form of plain 2D video. There are apps on Quest that go in that direction (e.g. Immersed), but Facebook still has a lot of catch up to do here. Facebook Horizon so far still just looks like a lame VRChat clone, not like a proto-Metaverse.

Microsoft did a lot of good groundwork with WMR Portal, if they would add multiplayer to that it might be the closest thing to a Metaverse on the market right now. But so far they don't seem very motivated pushing it forward, WMR Portal hasn't seen any substantial updates in years and the WMR headset brand has been decimated and only a single headset is left on the market. Though they are bringing Microsoft Teams to Quest2, so they haven't given up completely.

Apple on the other side might be able to build this. They control both the hardware, OS and a lot of the services, so they can make a headset that tightly integrates with them all. If they can release a headset that can compete with a monitor in terms of resolution and clarity, that might be a start of a Metaverse. It might still end up being a very Apple centric Metaverse of course, but it would be an actual product, not just hollow talk. And given how things have worked in the past, it might inspire a lot of other manufactures to jump on the hype train.

Might be time to establish something like Nintendo's "Seal of Quality" for Open Source software. Having the source code itself is a start, but recently there have been a lot of issues that just aren't caught be normal open source licenses, be it a hidden dependency on closed source server infrastructure, dependency on other non-free bits or spyware like here. Software that is free of bullshit is starting to get rare.

Linux had "App stores", aka package repositories, since the 90s. And Windows, well, they still don't have an App store that anybody bothers to use, at least the native one, there is of course Steam that predates this by a few years. I kind of fail to see what makes Apple special here, other than locking down their hardware so that all software sales have to go through them, though even that isn't new and has been done on consoles since the NES days, both in physical as well as online downloads. And than there have been feature phones with J2ME apps long before Apple too.

So as far as monopoly abuse goes, I am sure this can be considered an important step for Apple, but for the rest of the world nothing really has changed.

You can work around that limitation by entering offline mode or by manually starting the .exe without Steam in case of DRM-free games.

But generally speaking, this isn't really an isolated Steam issue, but really an industry wide issue in that it's not clear how much you "own" digital goods. Selling your "used copies" is hardly ever possible, so is lending them and if you die, all your digital library dies with you, as transferring accounts is explicitly forbidden in most of the ToSs. Even transferring licenses between services is hardly ever supported.

Steam family sharing has issues, but Valve can only go so far in lifting them, as otherwise the publishers would start blocking that feature all together. Worth keeping in mind that pre-Steam digital goods often meant limited amount of times you were allowed to redownload a game, installation on only a single computer, online always required and your license would bust when you reinstall the game more than five times or so.

That's what GoG Galaxy offers. Steam isn't stopping anybody from building such a platform.

It doesn't. There are tons of DRM free games on Steam and once you have downloaded the game you can just uninstall Steam and run the game on it's own by whatever means your OS provides. Steam doesn't force developers to make use of any Steam-specific features in their games and many developers don't.

I really don't see how one can make an argument for a monopoly, when de facto there are tons of games that not only are sold on different platforms, but *require* those platforms. Every half serious gamer will already have Uplay, Origin, GoG Galaxy, Epic Game Launcher, Oculus App or Viveport on their system along with Steam. The choice is already there, it's not Steam's fault that most of those other launchers and shops aren't any good.

Have a government run notary service and build a crypto without all that energy wasting proof-of-work. Or go a step further and introduce a real government run digital currency, so that you can transfer your dollar without going through an expensive third party.

This won't get rid of bitcoin by itself, but if there is a government run crypto that can actually be used to buy stuff, it might make it clear that bitcoin has no future and drop it in value enough to become useless.

Just plain outlawing it would of course also work. Bitcoin at the moment is basically just a pyramid scheme, all the theoretical potential of it being used to buy stuff pretty much evaporated with the ever increasing fees it cost to actually use. Outlawing it or even just the attempt to do so could have severe impact on its value.

Pretty much, just look at the first paragraph of the open letter:

Richard M. Stallman, frequently known as RMS, has been a dangerous force in the free software community for a long time. He has shown himself to be misogynist, ableist, and transphobic, among other serious accusations of impropriety. These sorts of beliefs have no place in the free software, digital rights, and tech communities.

How any sane person can sign that pile of lies is beyond me.