ericflo

Linux on M1 and sideloading OSX apps are fairly orthogonal. Bootloader/sideloading term mixup maybe?

Even the main skynet portal doesn't run off a mint subsidy - it's funded by VC money instead :)

No problem on running a portal! It was fun to be part of it for a while. I may run one again in the future once it's a bit more sustainable.

I'm still interested in the project - I think we still haven't scratched the surface of what something like Skynet is capable of. That said, I'm a little less optimistic than others. I think it's going to be a long road to relevance.

As someone who used to run a Skynet portal and no longer does because it was costing me too much money: no, it's not funded by subsidy from minted coins.

Right now portals pay for the hosting of the files as a charitable service to the community. In the future, portals will charge users directly for extra features (with U.S. dollars!)

Some portals may be operating less out of charity, and more out of a desire to build mindshare about their portal in hopes of translating that mindshare into future revenue via subscriptions.

> Twitter eventually cut off Instagram in-line image sharing, but by then it was too late.

It actually went in the opposite direction - Instagram shut down Twitter's ability to display their images in-line.

Electricity consumption doesn't equal climate change per se - not all electricity is created equally. I see PoW cryptocurrencies as one of the most promising incentives to move to a sustainable energy future. Given the lack of political will for policy-based incentives for this goal, a market-based incentive is welcomed.

My cynical view on this is that Facebook has realized they can better protect their market dominance by raising the walls on their garden and locking down your data as much as possible, and calling that privacy. I expect them to fight data portability initiatives tooth and nail in the name of said "privacy."

It's not at all about those things. This move is about entertwining Oculus and Facebook in such a way that Oculus can't be trivially broken apart from Facebook once antitrust regulators set their sights on the company.

Dear Mozilla,

Please continue your work on this. It's one of the lowest-cost, highest-leveraged points of counterbalance against Facebook's continued attempts to dominate the platforms of the future. In addition, there are numerous monetization opportunities that naturally arise from this effort, so if you stick with it, other Mozilla efforts will be buoyed by its success.

microk8s has a Prometheus add-on that you can enable with one command: https://microk8s.io/docs/addons

I'm using it and it's been great so far.

Rift S is discontinued, their marketing materials notwitstanding. Half Life Alyx can only be played by a standalone headset if you let a computer run the all the graphics and game logic, similar to how an iPad can be used as a second monitor for Apple devices. It's really quite different from smart/dumb TV.

Standalone absolutely is a separate product cateogory. It's the difference between a computer monitor and an iPad: even though they both have screens, they are different in kind. They target different market segments, have completely different software ecosystems both for end-users and developers, orders of magnitude more R&D requirements, higher switching costs, etc.

Epic has been very clear from the beginning that they would like to viably run a store on the major mobile hardware, they are not claiming that stores are bad in general.

And yet, today you can buy Control on Steam.

Not really, the economics are just better for the platform with vendor lock-in. They'd still recoup their costs via their store, which they can gift powerful advantages like making it default, having it be more integrated in various ways, etc. It would likely end up as a power-law distribution of store usage with the platform owner on top, so platforms would still make their profits. Having an option for another store wouldn't be the end of anything, and would improve consumer agency significantly.

They're clearly picking their battles. If they are able to win this case against Apple, they can use it as precedent to (hopefully) pressure consoles to open up too.

The direct link mention is encouraging, I hope they do something interesting with the opportunity

> Why is that hard to believe?

Because they haven't given us any of these details that you're imagining. Will there still be an approval process? Will Facebook give up any control? Will this be just like "keys only" distribution, a return of the Concepts/Early Access channel, or something like the old Oculus Share? So...I'll believe it when I see it.

I'll believe their new distribution method when I see it. How will they handicap it? How will they maintain their requisite absolute control? And we won't see it until sometime next year? Hmm. (Spoken as someone who was rejected from the Rift store.)

Either government has to intervene and make the marketplace competitive, or we'll have to spend a decade or more routing around the app duopoly.

I used to think we could build a new platform in a sandbox on top of the old platforms (like a browser), but the duopoly has gotten so confidently aggressive that they'll squash out of existence any new platform before it has a chance to grow.

I actually thought Expo (the React Native runtime) had a chance to do this "platform on a platform" thing, but Apple wouldn't even allow their debug tool to exist once they realized you could preview apps by plugging a URL into their runtime client, and that those apps were actually good.

So yeah: government intervention, or a few decades of lost progress and value creation. Thankfully for those of us still living in a democracy, we get some choice in the matter.

Great! Facebook's Oculus store, more locked-down than any smartphone app store, is the canary in the coal mine for the future of independent developers.

> Tell me one last known successful launch by Facebook in the last 2 years

Oculus Quest

That misses the largest and fastest-growing market for VR: self-contained systems like Oculus Quest, which has had no real competition for about a year now.

They ask that you pitch them with marketing materials and get permission before you start working on anything, so they can "compassionately" tell you not to even start:

* https://developer.oculus.com/blog/submitting-your-app-to-the...

* https://developer.oculus.com/quest-pitch-form/

> If we feel that your app is not a fit for Quest, we'd like to let you know that early in the development process, before you've made significant production investments, rather than at the end.

People who are worried about Apple's review process being arbitrary and onerous have no idea what's in store for them when VR/AR becomes more mainstream. Facebook's Oculus store is more of a "don't call us, we'll call you" and it's not getting better - they're actively training users to want this type of curation.

The smartphone era will quickly be seen as the Good Old Days where publishing was self-serve at all. Basically what I'm saying is, we need to nip this in the bud, or indie development is over.

It's in the post - the author was able to put the taken-down video back up on lbry.tv, which is a cryptocurrency-based decentralized media platform.

What about games? People pay tons of money for them, and they are content too. When Cyberpunk 2077 comes out later this year, try telling people it's worth $0. I think the difference is social norms. The internet having no real built-in payment mechanism has obliterated the norm of paying for most content. Games have held the line, but things like Google Stadia and Apple Arcade are working to change that.

Whether or not the API is opt-in is orthogonal to its security hardening - this is a false dichotomy.

It's been a while since I used PyPy, but JITs in general warm up over time. If you have hot loops with heavy arithmetic and no branches, that's usually best case scenario for JITs. If you have branchy non-uniform control flow, that's the worse scenario. So it really depends on your usage - you may be paying the JIT overhead costs with little benefit.

> A decentralized website makes both parts censorship-resistant: it uses IPFS (a distributed file storage network) for storage

This is a bit over-prescriptive: there are other distributed file storage networks out there. For example, Sia's Skynet. (Disclaimer: I maintain a Skynet portal)

The framing of open APIs disappearing because of bad actors doesn't ring true to me. In my view, the golden age of APIs disappeared one-by-one as tech companies realized they won their respective markets and consolidated their power.

If it's around your forehead, how is it shielding you?