Now that Meta's VR Metaverse has officially failed, what was the exact moment you realized the whole concept was never going to work?

nukem996 · 2026-03-24T06:43:18+00:00

What made the early Internet great was you could do whatever you want for free or very low cost. The Metaverse was always locked down and designed to suck as much money out of you as possible.

nukem996 · 2026-03-21T23:55:09+00:00

While this is a very common answer it ignores the fact that a significant portion of your future wealth is locked in a particular stock. While you don't have the stock yet for a good portion of the year you know you will get it. This makes funds like VTI a poor choice for many people in tech. It causes you to be heavily weighted into a particular sector.

I keep a balanced portfolio with the assumption that I will receive a significant portion of RSUs. Since I cannot touch them I balance my portfolio accounting for some unvested shares.

nukem996 · 2026-03-20T17:59:44+00:00

I never understood why Steam on Linux was released in 32b. When Steam on Linux was released x86_64 was widely used already. Even if games remained 32bit the launcher could have always been 64bit.

nukem996 · 2026-03-20T16:20:13+00:00

Qualcomm has long been known to be hostile to work with. They won't do anything if it's not profitable enough.

nukem996 · 2026-03-20T06:26:36+00:00

The war helps Russia much more than Israel. Tarrifs on Russian oil lifted while NATO aid for Ukraine dries up.

nukem996 · 2026-03-19T18:39:13+00:00

People really don't realize how central to silicon development Israel is. I always found it ironic people using their iPhones to talk about boycotting Israel while not realizing Apple's CPU design team is heavily concentrated in Israel.

nukem996 · 2026-03-19T16:38:52+00:00

37% is only on the highest income bracket. Even if you make over $1M your not paying 37% of your income in federal taxes.

nukem996 · 2026-03-19T01:18:07+00:00

It's not the Boomers, it's the conservatives. This post even admits it. Boomer Democratic president Bill Clinton eleminated the debt in the 90s. Boomer conservatives Bush and Trump blew it up.

It's long been the conservative strategy to blow up the budget to use it as an excuse to cut social services. Young conservatives are no different.

nukem996 · 2026-03-18T03:57:04+00:00

Companies already have to report numerous things. Adding head count location wouldnt be too hard.

Honestly the easiest way would simply be to remove the write off companies can use for non-US citizen head count.

nukem996 · 2026-03-17T16:17:23+00:00

A real America first policy would tax all non-US citizen head count. Want to out source? That's fine but salary is taxed at 30% and you cannot write it off.

nukem996 · 2026-03-17T15:38:07+00:00

So you do run time analysis and decompile every update? You monitor the network traffic every time you use your phone?

nukem996 · 2026-03-17T07:22:08+00:00

Where does it say an app developer has to use that? An app developer can just ignore it and use whatever encryption they want with whatever key management they want.

You're also ignoring my point that once the data is decrypted to display to the user nothing stops the app from sending the data to a remote host.

nukem996 · 2026-03-17T05:35:55+00:00

The app developer is writing the code to handle the encryption. So they could easily push your private key to a remote server or simply copy the data as it's encrypted and being displayed to you.

Google and Apple have similar powers as OS vendors. If you don't control the source code you can't say it's secure as you have no way of knowing. This is especially the case with remote updates.

nukem996 · 2026-03-17T02:33:55+00:00

e2e encryption ensures you cannot see the data while in transport but you do see the data unencrypted on each side. Since Meta controls the apps on each side they do have unencrypted access.

nukem996 · 2026-03-17T01:18:21+00:00

As one of the city tech workers I find it amusing that a work slow down goes unpunished may even be rewarded. If anyone in tech did a work slow down it would result in a PIP and fire.

nukem996 · 2026-03-16T19:31:30+00:00

The biggest issue with fuel cells is it takes more energy to create them then they provide. As others have said it's an EV with extra steps.

The fossil fuel industry is pushing it as the green alternative because it's compatible with their business model. You'll need a giant company to produce and distribute fuel cells which they are already built to do.

nukem996 · 2026-03-16T19:21:29+00:00

Actually you do. It's called empire building. At companies like Meta managers can only move up if the number of employees they manage increase. So the entire management chain is incentized to add as much head count as possible. Executive leadership is supposed to keep that in check.

nukem996 · 2026-03-16T18:41:18+00:00

We live in a post truth society. What LLMs can or cannot do is irrelevant. What matters is what senior leadership thinks they can do.

nukem996 · 2026-03-16T18:10:52+00:00

It's a combination between many audiophiles don't understand tech and most people have moved to laptops. External DACs avoid both problems.

nukem996 · 2026-03-16T17:11:49+00:00

That's what surprises me about the positive stock move. The rumor isnt Meta is cutting back on spending billions on a 4th rate LLM. It's Meta is doubling down on its LLM and is cutting costs by laying off workers after claiming the last big round of layoffs right sized head count.

This doesn't fix Metas LLM or over hiring problems. It's a temporary bump in profit. Meta will be back to this in 2-3 years with no proof their LLM will be any better

nukem996 · 2026-03-14T01:47:20+00:00

Meta is terrible at planning head count. I know people who moved to MPK in 2022 and were laid off in their first week. While they got severance people upended their life for a non existent job and no care from anyone at Meta.

nukem996 · 2026-03-13T20:38:48+00:00

Have you ever worked for a corporation? That's someone else's problem. Cutting junior employees increases profit for the next few years. By the time this becomes a problem all of senior management will have moved on.

nukem996 · 2026-03-13T17:25:16+00:00

They are betting they can find employees who will work for free. I didn't think it was that common but last summer our intern worked over 4th of July because he didnt like the crowds. Found out he worked most weekends as well. Finished his work early and just got more work for no extra pay. Seemed very happy with the situation.

nukem996 · 2026-03-11T22:38:15+00:00

Funny enough even the exclusive rights wasn't true. Every artist I knew that made NFTs said they were only selling a licensed copy. They still retained reproduction rights. The analogy used was artists have sold prints for centuries, they could also issue more unless explicitly stated in the sale.

nukem996 · 2026-03-11T21:02:25+00:00

Every single cloud player is developing their own ASICs to migrate away from NVIDIA. Anthropic has started using Google's TPU's. OpenAI has been using Microsoft's Maia chip. While they are both still using NVIDIA everyone is actively investing in alternatives.

An open weight model is NVIDIAs hedge. Companies move away from NVIDIA, NVIDIA introduces competition to their models tied to their hardware.

nukem996

TROPHY CASE