Posts by williampietri@sfba.social
(DIR) Post #B1pTx8EgL58G7SjGgS by williampietri@sfba.social
2025-12-31T16:00:59Z
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I keep seeing the phrase "Heritage Americans" without a definition. Is it:* The Native Americans who arrived in America ~20k years ago,* The Latinos who lived in a lot of America before it became the US, or* The African immigrants who mostly came here well before my ancestors?Or is it the people who most believe in the American heritage of aspiration toward equality, freedom, egalitarianism, and eternally fighting against kings, aristocrats, oligarchs, petty tyrants, etc?
(DIR) Post #B1pTx9s4G8EPBuAEiG by williampietri@sfba.social
2025-12-31T19:24:31Z
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@marick Holy moly! https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0080
(DIR) Post #B2MOIfB1YDa3uSta6q by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T19:48:21Z
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In honor of Meta's latest announcement, a thread on 175 years of 3D failure.Let's first go all the way back to 1851 with the Brewster Stereoscope. No less a person than Queen Victoria was impressed, kicking off a fad that quickly sold over 250,000 units. Turns out it was not the future of photography.1/
(DIR) Post #B2MOIkb5OkOmik7xvU by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T19:51:08Z
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There was another wave of 3D during the rise of coin-operated machinery. Here, a device from 1905. 2/
(DIR) Post #B2MOIphePlcYYYEmLw by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T19:57:06Z
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By the 1940s, thanks to amazing technical advances, the future arrived not just for postcards but for education. The US military bought 100,000 viewers and 6 million reels to educate soldiers and sailors. 3/
(DIR) Post #B2MOIuiBnC1S5fWmO0 by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T20:02:51Z
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Then in 1952-1954 came the future of movies: anaglyph (aka red/blue) 3D. 4/
(DIR) Post #B2MOIzfBNnaXRn9wtU by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T20:10:23Z
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The crash of that was enough to get people to forget about stereoscopic 3D for a generation. But in the 1990s as personal computers became ubiquitous and the early Internet created excitement, computers became powerful enough to render 3D graphics in real time. Rendering 3D worlds on 2D monitors was wildly popular, but interactive stereoscopic 3D was seen as the future of fun. And also of work! 5/
(DIR) Post #B2MOJ4dEuS0MrDHy3k by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T20:15:58Z
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We then needed 20 years to forget about that before the next 3D future arrived: Movies! Again! This one ran circa 2009-2013. As we know it ultimately didn't pan out, but it was enough to touch off two more fads involving stereoscopic 3D. 6/
(DIR) Post #B2MOJ9gc7KfuX7uEVs by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T20:21:25Z
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With 3D movies back in fashion, electronics manufacturers wasted no time taking the obvious next step: 3D TV. One CES these were everywhere, and the next one they weren't. 7/
(DIR) Post #B2MOJEw2bOzCoQA7km by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T20:24:52Z
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But the big new future that came out of 3D movies was virtual reality, round 2. Starting in 2010 or so there were many stabs at this, all funded by rafts of ZIRP investor money. 8/
(DIR) Post #B2MOJJmIb3AFpedulM by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T20:31:27Z
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I'd put the peak of this era in 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta, because a VR universe, the metaverse, was the future of both play and work. 9/
(DIR) Post #B2MOJOjIBejLBmH5Gq by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T20:32:35Z
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This era is clearly in retreat with mass Meta layoffs and killing products that were, only a few years ago, the future of both Meta and the world: https://www.theverge.com/tech/863209/meta-has-discontinued-its-metaverse-for-work-too10/
(DIR) Post #B2MOJTQgiForlWbnSy by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T20:36:35Z
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Now as people have already pointed out, stereoscopic 3D has never been totally dead. Look, for example, at this graph of the proportion of movies in 3D. It's kept bumping along. https://stephenfollows.com/p/how-are-3d-movies-performing-at-the-box-office 11/
(DIR) Post #B2MOJY8RDXByMN6nDM by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T20:42:19Z
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My point here isn't "3D bad". It's that for 175 years or more, people have been thinking "2D success + stereoscopic 3D technology = the future".It's not a dumb hypothesis, really. People do process (a relatively close portion of) the world with binocular vision. Seems possibly important. 12/
(DIR) Post #B2MOJd8Gdb1hrI4E8u by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T20:46:58Z
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My objection is that otherwise smart people, over and over and over again, make big investments in that hypothesis without ever understanding why it has failed so many times before. Facebook's VR losses alone are above $75 billion dollars.Stereoscopic 3D is a cool novelty, but at this point I'd be amazed if anything serious ever comes out of it. And if it does, it will be because somebody really looked at the failures and pursues products people actually care about. Because so far, every time, people get bored and quietly go back to the thing that was already working for them. 13/
(DIR) Post #B2MOJibAJa74oMcsNc by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T20:58:09Z
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Here we move from history to speculation, but I think the real reason this doesn't matter is that humans are extremely good at reconstructing mental 3D from visual 2D.It doesn't appear to be well studied, but human binocular vision mainly works well up close, and peters out around 50 feet.But anybody can look out a window and have a decent 3D model in their heads extending out hundreds, even thousands of feet. 14/
(DIR) Post #B2MOJnY9uBgAAUG2t6 by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T21:02:01Z
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My grandfather was blind in one eye from 12, but you never would have known it; he just lived his life. My understanding was that it was more a field-of-view problem for him than anything involving depth perception.You can try it now yourself. Close one eye and go get a snack or a book from the shelf. How much does binocular vision matter at 1 foot, 10 feet, 30 feet? /15
(DIR) Post #B2MOJspMHfPMXHLLtI by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T21:03:30Z
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Or we can look at seeing entertainment in person versus on a screen. People have many reasons for going to see live performances, but never once have I heard somebody say they went to a play or a concert because they wanted it to be in 3D. 16/
(DIR) Post #B2MOJxjA48QDjVTyQS by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-16T21:13:22Z
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So in sum: 175 years of history shows that stereoscopic 3D is a fun toy and a very bad basis for a sustainable industry. If we all work together, we can create another 40 year gap in money wasted on unachievable 3D futures, just like we had between the first wave of movies and the first wave of VR. But everybody keep making the fun novelties, please! 17/17
(DIR) Post #B2XwPxhsJPv2K41TJw by williampietri@sfba.social
2026-01-22T14:57:12Z
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@futurebird I totally agree with all your points, but I think building a good mail merge is tricky for two reasons.One is that it takes a thing that people are familiar with and tries to add a new dimension. Some people, especially the kind who go into programming, find this sort of meta-work easy, even preferable. But for a lot of people it's sheer wizardry.The other is that the word processor and the spreadsheet are basically fossilized. Somebody from 30 years ago would have no problem using Google Docs today. And they're close metaphors to paper formats that go back at least hundreds of years. They're just not well suited to meta-ization like mail merges.People have tried innovating there without much luck. E.g., Lotus Improv was wildly successful in niche markets, but disliked by mainstream audiences. Even today things like Notion and Firebase and Salesforce, nominally for everybody, tend to be handled just like your cigar boss did: putting a primate interface on top of it.@aeveltstra