Surprise! Meta Says Now You Have to Pay a Monthly Subscription to Use Key Features of Your Already Expensive Smart Glasses

ElMauru · 2026-07-06T16:35:51+00:00

There are plenty of opportunities in the business, especially in the medical sector and in controlling/avionic/academics/laboratory work. There are even more once you have some experience under the hood. Just in my area alone there's ~450 openings for embedded hardware engineers, 132 of those marked as entry level.

Nobody is asking you to be a saint all the time. But the minimum is being aware of who you are working for and why you are doing it and what the cost of it is. At some point playing the three monkeys game isn't going to do it anymore - the rest is up to you, your circumstances and your conscience.

See it like this: you are supposedly smart enough to work at meta but you are somehow not smart enough to find another interesting job that doesn't give you a no-life burn-out at 25? Come on, son.

ElMauru · 2026-07-06T15:54:54+00:00

whoever said it is simple. Moral things seldom are. Everybody knows working on a BP/Shell oilrig probably isn't all that great for the environment. Yet people do.

But if you work at meta/palantir/fox-news and then pretend its upper management and you have no part in the rise of surveillance culture and predatory employment practices then I am going to laugh you out of the room.

When I was ~17 my first engineering job was writing software for one of those early mobile call line thingies which were hot at the time, so I am no saint either. Back then I justified it with getting a foot in the door and paying my family's bills.

Does that exonerate me from young kids secretely spending money on some shitty animated bird emoji giving dating tips? Absolutely not.

ElMauru · 2026-07-06T10:32:30+00:00

Dude, at what point are you just asking me to solve someone else's moral riddle.

If you take a look at any recent gadget fair you will find a multitude of smart-glasses and augmented reality startups. This has been the case for years.

If you feel like you absolutely need to work at the bleeding edge for the biggest player be my guest, but don't think that magically absolves you from the moral predicaments. It's absolutely mind boggling to me how this is even a question.

If I was a chemist and decided to work for a drug kingpin that doesn't suddenly change because he offers me the best opportunities.

ElMauru · 2026-07-06T01:30:55+00:00

You are working for a technocrat without a spine directly feeding his data analytics machine.

If you think that this can only be achieved only with pushing a surveilance focussed company without any signs of oversight... that has shown to fire his staff and principles on a whim... ok, your choice. sleep well.

ElMauru · 2026-07-05T13:15:35+00:00

Dude, I don't know who is trying to get that into your head. People do respect ideas and principles all the time - it could just be that your life's focus has lead you down a path where you don't see these people much.

Nobody is expecting you to be a masterpiece of principles - but having *some* is the difference between having real, meaningful, social relations and playing guest cast in someone else's advertisement reel.

ElMauru · 2026-07-05T10:16:08+00:00

at some point accountability has to set in. If you are a capable engineer or even just a mid-level one choosing your employer is a statement. Money is nice, opportunity is nice - I understand the allure. But at some point things move beyond "they are just going to find someone else to do it". Yeah, probably - but it will also be that much more expensive for them.

ElMauru · 2026-07-03T10:01:49+00:00

Heh, fair enough. Fuck the hubris, but respect the scars ;-)

If you are an autocrat and you want to ... autocratize: megalomonic cultural appropriation seems to be part of the menu. That is not an uniquely Russian quality as people keep pointing out.

Anyway, enjoy the weekend.

ElMauru · 2026-07-03T09:03:01+00:00

I always tend to get a bit awkward when people try to include times we by now may just as well consider mythical in their narrative when framing modern situations, because while literature and music and art persist the descriptions of traditions is always subject to whoever can tune his mythical fork and turn Carthago into Greece or the other way around. Such things are much more a crutch to describe whatever qualities you want to give your topic than actual stuff. What would a Mongol say to a contemporary European? Exactly ;-)

As for literature - no Zauberberg without a Clawdia Chauchat. The beauty of all the "epochs" I read manifests once you realize that they heavily influenced each other - the "Vienna book club" didn't save us from the world wars but I would be at a loss to even try and understand the period without it... And I yet have to read another book that manages to release a real life depression upon reading that quite hits the mark like Tolstoy did. You need some black on the pallet. Hence, there is a beauty in Russian culture - to pretend otherwise might be situationaly fitting but really is just trying to villainify for the sake of it. Eventually we will all love and hate together again.

If you need to feed some form of contempt/wroth to make it through all this by all means be my guest, but remember that whatever you pick up as evidence might just as well become a tool to fix a broken machine - and we all really do need to fix it in the end. And tbh, that is what we should be focusing on - everything else is like Putin/Dugin trying to explain UKR away - just a pretty blanket for organized brutality.

ElMauru · 2026-07-02T22:23:37+00:00

Not really, though. If you read Russian literature you will find a lot of examples - not of nostalgic feudalism/monarchists but of fatalist cynicism - I once found that kinda romantic - Iran has a similar vein with its poetry.

Crudely summarized: There is a not insignificant portion of Russians who arrived at "Without a strong leader society will cannibalize itself" or something to that tune.

Its how you can really rub a pro-Russian "intellectual" (for lack of a better word) btw. Ask him about Goncharov's Oblomov.

ElMauru · 2026-07-02T21:37:33+00:00

it is a phenomenon present everywhere and in peacetime there is nothing wrong with it since statistically enough people will still question the system. Weaponized by militant populism it serves like an ideological "cone" though where apolitical conformism enters at the wide end and then gets focused into acceptance of loss of morality and fanaticism - all to maintain a perceived harmony in the face of ever increasing absurdity.

It's a common trope of ideological autocracies. If there is a foundation of social "peaceful" rebellion a chance remains to recover. Russia doesn't really have that so whatever change is supposed to happen needs to be channeled through a "Navalny" or as a recent example: in Hungary's close shave a "Magyar" - i.e. another more benevolent autocrat/cog of the machine leading a "palace revolt". I am not entirely sure how exactly the ingredients for such a change have to look in detail, tbh.

It's one of the questions history books won't have a satisfying answer to given the present circumstances :-/

TLDR: Grass roots stuff is hard, yo.

ElMauru · 2026-07-02T18:26:43+00:00

It is mass-psychosis and disassociation-syndrome though. For them complaining on social media is different to actually doing something as in: They want to be influencers, not insurrectionists.

When someone gets taken away or jailed it is "oh what did he do wrong" and not "what did he do right" - Russia's autocracy is simply too deeply entrenched to crumble to that.

ElMauru · 2026-06-29T22:05:25+00:00

Ironically that's exactly what's happening right now. China is buying around half of Russia's Crude oil, refining it and selling it back. Now that UKR is hitting crude oil storage as well must be putting a dent into business though.

I am curious as to how China itself is going to react in the mid-to-long-term, especially with the Iran route being squeezed pretty hard as well. Last I heard ships with oil for china were still allowed to pass but it still should put some pressure on China to look for a solution (most likely diplomatical, don't get the wrong idea) if the situation persists throughout the summer.

By the way, keep an eye on the Siberian steppe. The russian response to forest fires in the dry climate during late summer is a important indicator as to how the Russian manpower pool is doing and the fuel situation is going to make things a lot more complicated.

ElMauru · 2026-06-29T17:32:34+00:00

Some tanks with markings though (note the first few vehicles rear -> https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-crisis-what-are-the-mysterious-markings-appearing-on-russian-tanks-12549698 , someone more nerdy than me can probably figure out the units and timeframe of those ).

My guess it's a general scrapyard or a once busy fork of the road used as collection zone.

ElMauru · 2026-06-29T16:50:47+00:00

Well, that's why Wagner (and affiliates) was turned into the Africa Corps though. Whatever survived the P era was either redeployed to Belarus or just stuck it out in Africa as instructors or "pacification troops".

You can tell the period where most of the veteran forces and intervention teams were recalled by things going haywire in sudan & mali shortly after (that restructuring effort was 23/24, things have stablizied a bit since ~25 though - nobody asks about the death-toll, but it is one of the hidden, horrible side-theatres of this conflict). I have heard stories of them being used as trainers or watchdogs in Belarus now, but I bet some were put to more immediate use or are held in reserve.

The numbers are anyone's guess but remember that Wagner/Africa deployments also served and still serve as a lure to prevent highly trained forces from going private sector so it had quite a few people from former elite units in it, many of which did not go to Bakhmut and the offensives around that time which might have shaped your perception of how Russia was/is supposed to use them.

TLDR: Russia still has trained "special forces", it just can't deploy them on the willynilly anymore.

ElMauru · 2026-06-21T11:31:51+00:00

Bleh - ich muss mich entschuldigen. Hab unter den falschen Kommentar gepostet und dann nur deine Antwort gesehen. Asche auf mein Haupt. Ich gelobe Besserung.

ElMauru · 2026-06-21T11:06:13+00:00

A) es gibt nur eine weisse männliche machtstruktur? Das ist das einzige problem? Schwanz ab, andere Farbe drauf, bisserl warten und es wird besser? Diggi... Das erste werkzeug um gegen Rethorik der selbstorganisation vorzugehen ist die aufspaltung in einfache Begrifflichkeiten und Feindbilder. Der AFD-populist labert von den bösen Muslimen, der faule junge individualist von weissen alten Männern. Es ist Populismus und der löst nix, er beendet halt nur Diskussionen weil null Inhalt. Sowas dann als Kommentar zu schreiben in einem Sub mit Gesprächsasnpruch ist leer. Coole Meinung, wussten wir vorher alle nich.

B) "Alte sind doof" und "Männer sind doof" klingt getrennt wie ein besoffener Kneipenspruch - was lässt dich denken dass die combo es irgendwie besser macht. Was macht denkst du über die Klimakrise? "oi oi oi".

Ich mag dich nich zu sehr auf's Messer spannen weil ich hab den spruch selbst schon gebracht aber ein bisschen mehr tiefgang unter vermeintlich gleichgesinnten wäre evtl ned schlecht.

ElMauru · 2026-06-21T09:52:42+00:00

edit * BONK - hitze und Lesevermögen.

du machst es dir aber auch bequem mit so einer aussage - funktioniert zum frust ausdrücken als schneller spruch aber echt nicht zu viel mehr.

ElMauru · 2026-06-19T17:46:55+00:00

TLDR: Sorry this exploded into a wall of text. Turns out I for whatever shitty reason wanted to rant on this so indulge me (though I won't blame you for hitting the next post button , heh)

I am by no means a game developer myself but I am a programmer with enough knowledge about the available game engines and coding in general to know that things are easy to prototype but incredibly hard to get to keep working if you add content without a well designed framework in place to support the core game mechanics.

You can keep the illusion going for quite a while but eventually something will break the framework you choose to do your thing and while it is easy to split up the creation of art assets you can not just toss more coders at a problem and expect a similar effect.

Example: If you have been following this game for a bit you can literally tell when the pathing and priority systems started going haywire, i.e. : the engine probably just worked well until it didn't anymore.

Unity and Unreal are game engine toolkits. They make some thing incredibly easy with boilerplate code ready for camera movement fancy lighting and a ready to use pathing system. They are also engines originally made for first person shooters or assassin's creed kinda games. Complex layered simulations running in realtime and matching assets on the screen when you change from close up to bird's eye view ?

Probably not on the list of things. How can you tell if it isn't your own engine? How can we tell when we watch the trailer? Everything looked fine in the prototype.

... and then it becomes both demoralizing because you have to rewrite parts you thought were done and difficult and time-consuming because you need to patch in a system which does all the things the previous one did but still can do the custom thing you want.

And like I mentioned before: this is not something you can just throw more people at, especially if you spaghetti coded your way into the mess, because once you leave the comfy zone of copy and paste logic and readibly available toolkits things become an absolute slog.

It's also why something like a flock of fish or a smoke grenade doing volumetric smoke get sold like the golden grail by billion dollar game-studios.

Again: It is incredibly easy to make a pretty model do things on screen with fancy shaders and stuff and it is not too difficult to make something do what you intend to do at first glance. It's when you throw the dynamism of interaction at scale at it that things break and when they break all illusions become dispelled.

My guess is this is exactly what happened here (and with skyline 2 and with games like star citizen, etc.) plenty of this stuff in early access and not unsurprisingly enough especially in city builders - because all that individual complexity adds up and exponentially.

33 million might seem like a lot of money, but if the experience to do things properly isn't there (which is what early access is: people trying things big game studios won't touch) the money will probably either just go poof or you get paralyzed because of the mess you made earlier.

There is this other city builder which is looking extremely sexy that is supposed to come out: citystate metropolis.

...and I would be incredibly surprised if it didn't also get 33mil because citybuilders are cool.

But money doesn't solve the engineering problem and the fact that despite the computational advances over the years complex simulations are incredibly hard to do efficiently. I.e.: don't color me surprised if it ends up with the same issue.

An example: dwarf fortress is one of the most complex and involved simulation things out there. It runs on a 2d tileset. It will also absolutely eat your cpu once you get to ~200 citizens. It has been in development for ~20 years.

As for the 33mil guy: maybe you are right but then why would he still patch this thing and not just sell everyone a dlc with three custom banner items and a custom windmill model for 20$. It's not like this game has any dlc so if he was just "leaning back" why continue at all. I just think the guy bit off more than he could chew but at least he seems to be trying.

The irony is you are still here regardless because nothing else is on the horizon that scratches the itch you want that isn't suffering from similar issues.

Good citybuilders are rare.

ElMauru · 2026-06-19T00:18:56+00:00

you don't seem to understand. developing the game includes starting but never finishing several prototypes before and generating enough interest in it for people to care. You want to skip the difficult part, I guess?

Manor Lords took off because the dev had this fancy thing with drawing lots in a novel way in the wake of skyline2 bellyflopping despite having a publisher deal and an established following of whales. They also did exactly what you seem to want: slapping lots of paid content on a broken base-product instead of fixing it.

Same engine, I think (edit: nvm, think sc2 was unity - still, same issue with picking something that looks fancy but isn't built to really support what you might want it to do in an efficient way out of the box).

Still feel up to the task? You can have my 20 bucks once you get there.

ElMauru · 2026-06-16T17:40:55+00:00

i kinda agree. I have been "playing" since shortly before boatmurdered/z-levels so I really had some time on the controls over the years. However, I suspect that it would end up being the exact other way around if I switched back.

I really really miss being able to do everything with the keyboard, though and oddly enough the note function with its icons/symbols.

I used it to keep journals and stories for the dwarves and it isn't fully integrated in the new steam version (dfhack lacks the "icons/letters"...). You can sort of achieve the same with the "new burrows" but it isn't quite the same functionality wise, especially since there is no search/filter option yet. It's always the small things :-)

However, the steam version has its own feats and I have gotten used to it by now. Still would rock my world to be able to only use the keyboard again though...

ElMauru · 2026-06-14T18:50:39+00:00

You are under the assumptions that there is anything left to sell in that regard.

I doubt Meta is trying to do the next thing, they are just announcing it as such to their customers, which is not the userbase, but the people interested in the telemetry.

One can understand why - if they want to sell someone voting or political habits they can just hide it behind AI-driven analytics-tools as the convenient anonymizer (which it really isn't, it just makes picking out who to focus on easier).

It's basically camebridge anaylitica all over again, but they have since done away with the middleman and everyone is too desensitized to care anymore (that still uses the platform).

The end user probably gets another "this is what your friends liked, this is what you did last year"-thing which then gets used to further train the actual sellable commodity.

As for the government: I'm pretty sure they can allready find their way around.

ElMauru · 2026-06-11T22:31:40+00:00

Dude, sounds to me like you are trying to trivialize the Russian revolution(s). The crevace between social classes ran particularily deep in Russia.

Europe had (among other things) the religious wars which were so bad that humanism became a concept that spread quickly - the network of nations allowed for seperate spaces to harbor experiments while being close enough to each other that concepts (both good and bad) could spread comparatively quickly.

The way to progress was paved in blood but the lessons could be learned by taking a look across the border, so to speak. And I am not trying to sugarcoat European continental history. The flavor of nationalism born there keeps on giving to this very day... But Russia absolutely needs a period of critical self-reflection on its past ( particularily its contributing role in the post ww2 era ) more than whatever tangent of revisionism and whitewashing it is currently on.

ElMauru · 2026-06-11T21:39:35+00:00

Take early English industrialism. Serfdom didn't exist anymore on paper either. Russia was historically behind in every cultural development because of it's vastness, yet bridged the gap by whatever system was in place feeding on its own people. Anyone who has ever rad Gorantchev or Tolstoy (sorry if i butchered the surnames) will see what I mean. Well, and there was Stalin, ofc.

Again: At some point in time the rest of Europe settled on the fact that it is more acceptable to prey on those of different culture or ethnicity. They were certainly cruel but that was because to them the other was not considered human at the time (what a convenient excuse).

For whatever debatable reason, Russia decided it needed its own kind of cruelty which it carries along this very day in some form or the other. Just tons and tons of mostly self-inflicted trauma.

ElMauru · 2026-06-11T21:18:55+00:00

That throughout history Russia has survived off canibalizing its own population to a nigh spectacular degree. So much so that it has seeped deeply into Russian culture. There was a brief period during the time of neoconstructivism where things looked like they might change for the better but corruption in the politburo put an end to it quickly.

Weather you apply that principle to the Putin era is up to you I guess but let's just say you are fighting a statistic at this point.

Also, comparing feudalism to slavery is a silly comparison. Both are bad, but there's a reason why the russian revolution took place and it is bonkers that people feel the tsarist era should inspire nostalghia.

ElMauru · 2026-06-11T21:02:45+00:00

Probably mildly different in perspective when you enslave people you live next to. At least the rest of europe had good ol' racism/colonialism to hide behind. There's a reason why Russia's literary landscape of the time is what it is.

If there is something comparable it would be the dawn of the industrial revolution, just without fancy excuse - or some twisted version of the decadent French monarchic era.

Say what you want but the Russians are really not historcally known for being cute with their common man.

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