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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

What if Facebook has gone out of business in 20 years?

would you use a VR headset today from 20yrs ago?

I am generally against creating unnecessary e-waste but let's be real, it will likely be better to recycle it and experiment with something else in that time frame...

On the off chance that I would be using VR headsets in the first place - I might.

Much in the same way I will happily play a well maintained pinball machine from the last millennium, or an arcade game in a lovingly restored cabinet from 30+ years ago.

There is an allure to retro-gaming with MAME (which I love), but for some of us, going properly vintage can have a special meaning.

I don’t know, it was Carmack’s hypothetical not mine.

I was playing around on a 486 machine the other day. It's not impossible someone might.

Yes?

The retro computer museum in Leicester has a few of the Virtuality systems, which are still great fun.

Loads of people hack on old hardware.

I have 2 Google cardboards on my shelf.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S6 that is still on Android 7 so I can still use the GearVR headset.

I think work still has a carton or two of actual cardboard boxes with plastic lenses that you shove any random phone into, from when we were doing VR meeting stuff back at the beginning of Covid.

Then do it now and it’ll be unlocked.

That is not really what Carmack suggested in his quote. I’m not saying it is necessarily some huge loss, just pointing out that we still haven’t managed to pretzel our brains into an interpretation that makes Carmack right.

You're comprehensively missing the point. According to Carmack's hypothetical, someone in the future could discover a unit and unlock it even if they were born after Facebook/Meta went out of business completely. But that just isn't true if a Meta login is required.

Yes. However you can imagine a world where he is right but someone along the way put a hurdle in, yet his essential goal is correct given in the present you could do this and in 20 years use the device as he described. To say he’s entirely wrong, which was what was said, is extremely ungenerous.

> "opens up the ability to repurpose the hardware for more things today, and means that a *randomly discovered* shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now will be able to update to the final software version"

No, the device in his hypothetical is randomly discovered, so it is not ungenerous to assume that the person discovering it randomly didn’t happen to have set up a dev account. Because most people don’t have these types of accounts, a random person discovering the device should not be assumed to have one.

Additionally, he’s clearly describing something serendipitous, not something that requires planning ahead by 20 years.

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