[HN Gopher] Three Steps to the Future
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Three Steps to the Future
Author : uptown
Score : 30 points
Date : 2021-12-06 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ben-evans.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ben-evans.com)
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Innovation has reached a local maximum if tech elites can only
| think of cyrpto-currencies and VR as near or long-term
| opportunities. What a depressing time to be in technology.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| I think this metaverse/VR emphasis is a passing fad. We've been
| talking about VR for decades. Engineers focus on technology, so
| focus on how the technology for VR keeps getting better. But
| outside of very specific domains, no one wants VR.
| holoduke wrote:
| If at one point a VR/AR headset looks the same as ordinary
| sunglasses with 16k per eye , I am sure it will be a new
| revolution. The amount of information you can project on those
| glasses while walking around in the normal world is beyond
| imagination. you can show the world as it is plus a ton of info
| at every object you look at. Those glasses will slowly evolve
| to the size of eye lenses and it will be a necessary item in
| order to participate in modern society. Just like living
| without internet isnt possible.
| ok_dad wrote:
| > living without internet isn't possible
|
| Sure it is, my MIL doesn't do anything on the internet other
| than entertainment (TV and music) and maybe email or texting.
| If she wanted to, she could cut it out completely and get
| along fine with landline phone calls and mailing bill
| payments and such.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| what is your life where living without the internet isn't
| possible?
|
| also, you seem to think projecting more information onto the
| world is a Good Thing, this is not obvious to me.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I want VR, but not Oculus because of the FB linkage (I don't
| have FB). I also want it to be self-contained, so I don't need
| a fancy PC to run it, but it should still connect to my PC as a
| display device or something. I also want it to be open source,
| or at the very least it should not have telemetry, account
| logins, or anything like that for the hardware. It also has to
| work on any OS, it should work with my game consoles, and my TV
| output as a virtual screen. I just want a "dumb" VR display,
| effectively. An AR display would be nice, too, if I could put a
| "mask" over it to turn it into a VR display.
|
| Right now, I am pretty sure there is nothing to fit that bill.
| If there is in the future, I definitely want this, if only to
| be able to play games while lying in bed or to have several
| virtual computer screens for coding and work.
| Escapado wrote:
| Growing up with a specific, media influenced vision of VR(Ghost
| in the shell, .hack, sword art online) where lots of of the
| current technical challenges to create something truly
| immersive are solved, I really want VR to succeed. I got to try
| the original Oculus Rift and later Quest and I would argue that
| visually we are maybe 5 or so years away from a pretty decent
| experience (like 4k by 4k per eye with decent latency, 120hz+,
| no screen door and maybe even proper foveated rendering).
| Sound-wise I don't even think there is much missing. Form-
| factor/comfort-wise I also believe that we are not far off. And
| experiences which make use of "just" that are ok or fun even.
|
| IMHO however, movement and tactile feedback are still lacking
| so far behind that I don't even know if they can be solved in a
| non-invasive, average user friendly manner. I mean sure, you
| can strap yourself to a treadmill contraption and use
| controllers or gloves to track your hands and maybe even wear
| some suit which vibrates here and there. But you won't feel
| real collisions, let alone texture, realistic force and
| acceleration. And somehow when I tried VR I felt like this was
| missing so much that it limits my enjoyment big time.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _But outside of very specific domains, no one wants VR._
|
| Parallels with early computing industry? The very nature of
| technology adoption is such that it always appeals to a niche
| first aka "no one but a handful want it". Then, depending on
| incentives, an ecosystem crops up that continues to add value
| as it grows. Computers had internet to fallback on for network
| effects, with web and email help add value. For VR, that could
| be gaming, crypto-currencies, social networks... who knows what
| else.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Personally, it's just not comfortable. I know it's petty but
| that's a huge negative for everyone I try to show it to.
| 0_gravitas wrote:
| Speak for yourself, I've desperately wanted a VR setup for
| years, but have never had access to the real estate. I tried it
| once a long time ago, and long for the day I can have my own.
| arbuge wrote:
| I think Web3 is still a solution in search of a problem at this
| point. I personally remain unconvinced. This presentation
| proposes Helium as a suitable application but it seems to me you
| could do everything Helium does just as well with an old-
| fashioned centralized network controlling the whole thing.
| Collect usage fees on one side from the users, and pay them out
| to the "miners" (AP providers) on the other... and you don't need
| any stakers. If the network is too stingy with paying out the
| proceeds to the AP providers, you won't attract AP providers, so
| the whole thing self-balances in the same way Google Adsense
| does.
| Animats wrote:
| _The most exciting themes in technology today are transformative
| visions for 2025 or 2030: crypto, web3, VR, metaverse... and then
| everything else._
|
| Ugh. Is that all we get? Not even self-driving cars?
|
| The big trend in cryptocurrencies is crackdowns. In June 2021,
| China dropped the hammer on crypto mining. They started with
| "please stop doing that" in 2018-2019, and progressed to turning
| off the power to hundreds of Bitcoin mining operations and
| arresting people. This stopped the big use case of Bitcoin in
| China - evading exchange controls on capital. In the US, we're
| seeing much more involvement by the IRS, SEC, FBI, and New York
| State authorities. The US government seized US$3.3 billion in
| cryptocurrency in 2020. Cryptocurrency operations are being
| forced into either bank-like regulation (UK, Canada) or pushed to
| the usual regulatory havens (the Cayman Islands is popular). The
| SEC stopped most ICOs back in 2018. Currently being looked at
| hard, stablecoins. Next, NFTs. Most legit countries are now
| requiring Know Your Customer identification, and many of those
| countries share that data between tax authorities. The legit use
| cases of cryptocurrencies being somewhat absent, this doesn't
| look like a transformative technology.
|
| 2019 was the year of VR. Like 3D TV, it works, but it's just not
| that interesting. AR, though... For that, see the "Hyperreality"
| video I've mentioned before. That's where Facebook probably wants
| to go.
|
| Much as I like virtual worlds, I don't see them as being a big
| thing. 3D social worlds go all the way back to Quantum Link,
| which predates AOL, and continue through to Second Life, which is
| sluggish but has all the features people claim metaverses should
| have. They are only useful to people with too much free time.
|
| The technology most likely to change the world in the next decade
| is vaccine engineering. Not just COVID. Vaccines for AIDS,
| tuberculosis, all variants of influenza, and Alzheimer's are in
| development. Some of them will probably work. Creating new
| vaccines is now done by sequencing and then synthesizing a
| candidate vaccine. There's much less trial and error involved.
|
| Batteries are going to get cheaper from production economies
| alone. This will quietly change the whole energy landscape.
|
| And we're going to get self-driving cars. Waymo and Cruise test
| in San Francisco routinely now, and they have few accidents.
| Usually they get rear-ended at slow speed because they're
| cautious about left turns. That will get better as most manual
| cars get auto-braking.
| naasking wrote:
| > Batteries are going to get cheaper from production economies
| alone. This will quietly change the whole energy landscape.
|
| Indeed, and even better, I think this will finally be the
| decade of grid storage. There are something like a dozen pilot
| projects for all kinds of theoretically scalable grid storage
| solutions being built and tested right now. This will make or
| break renewables as a viable source for baseload power.
|
| It will also see the revival nuclear because grid storage can't
| be built cast enough and many governments don't want to invest
| in the infrastructure improvements that will be needed.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| wrt biotechnology, don't forget at-home desktop-pharmaceuticals
| via engineered yeast. It's a good thing vaccines will provide
| profits because their over the counter drugs will soon be
| subject to pirating.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Anyone want to explain web3 like I'm from 2007?
|
| I haven't been able to tell what it is?
| noir_lord wrote:
| Neither has anyone else which is the brilliance of calling
| something by a deliberately nebulous name.
| JeremyReimer wrote:
| I don't think there's a good explanation out there.
|
| From what I've read, the main idea is decentralization, either
| of website databases using blockchain (which seems wildly
| impractical and ludicrously expensive), or of payment of
| advertising revenue to website users and contributors (which
| seems like an impossible business model)
|
| The main issue, I think, is that "decentralization" means a
| different thing to every person, therefore "web3" can mean a
| different thing to everyone. This makes it hard to define it or
| to argue for it or against it.
|
| I read a blog post linked on HN recently on "the architecture
| of a web3 application" [1] and it was so long and complicated
| that I honestly thought it was satire. I don't think the
| methods described in the post were at all practical.
|
| Ultimately, web3 might simply be a rebranding of blockchain and
| crypto technologies in order to make them seem more democratic
| and transformational than perhaps they are.
|
| [1] https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/the-architecture-
| of-a-...
| helloworld11 wrote:
| So, many people here complain and whine about how the
| internet has become too centralized and ad-rev driven by the
| big tech behemoths and all the little shitty fish that follow
| their tactics, but then when a bunch of people come along and
| at least propose a certain type of possibly workable solution
| that's particularly friendly to avoiding major centralized
| arbiters, they get booed down because some of them also
| happen to be pie in the sky or scammers (where does either o
| these two not exist in any tech?) The same people booing
| these types themselves work for the giant tech behemoths,
| which are themselves some of the absolute most parasitical,
| mendacious, lying, perpetually damaging agencies on the
| entire web and in the wider world of digital technology.
|
| Tell you what, as full of scams and cons as the world of
| crypto is, i still sympathize with it much more than I do
| with any random argument in favor of a real monstrosity of
| dishonesty and prying scumminess like Facebook or today's
| Google. Those and so many of their modern digital cousins are
| the real enemies of so many good things.
| zbyte64 wrote:
| Another fast and loose term is "User". The claim OP makes is
| that Users will control the network and money created. Seeing
| how you can't directly transfer an NFT from opensea to a
| different marketplace, I find this claim dubious. But that
| aside, the "user" is a programmer, not your Aunt and Uncle.
| cgh wrote:
| Stephen Diehl to the rescue:
| https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/web3-bullshit.html
| [deleted]
| grey-area wrote:
| It's the latest problem invented so that cryptocurrencies can
| fix it, after egold, currencies, payments, micropayments, apps,
| smart contracts, icos, asset tracking, nfts, now we have
| communities of bored apes and pudgy penguins who pay someone to
| be members of an exclusive club of pixel receipt owners.
|
| Web 3.0 didn't exist, so it was necessary to invent it to give
| cryptocurrencies value again.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Ethereum's javascript API was named web3. It enables people to
| login with their wallet anywhere. From there it exploodes to a
| universe of possibilities.
| openfuture wrote:
| Some people found out that legitimacy is implied by
| coordination and started using cryptography to build various
| ways to coordinate multiparty computations that can simulate
| various banking/finance protocols.
|
| Web3 is normal web development where you use some APIs to
| interact with these protocols and condition access to
| {functionality,resources,..} in your webapp on the current
| state of the multiparty computation. You can also participate
| in coordinating the computation.. idk maybe I'm taking the 2007
| constraint a bit too far.
| tild3 wrote:
| It's just a rebrand of the term "blockchain" and the ecosystem
| of apps built on top of various blockchains. It's trying to
| presume that these ecosystems are the next iteration of the
| internet.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Serving web sites from a blockchain (which is decentralized,
| exists in pieces across the whole Internet), instead of serving
| them from a single computer located in a data centre.
|
| i.e. makes web sites harder to switch off/censor.
|
| p.s. Freenet has been doing this since Satoshi was in diapers.
| gumby wrote:
| In a nutshell: Web3::web 2.0
|
| as IPFS::filesystems
|
| You may interpret this as praise or criticism depending on your
| point of view.
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