It's just HP and HPE split up. HPE took all the nice enterprise stuff, plus the supercomputing business (they own Cray). HP took the consumer stuff, and proceeded to milk as much as they could.
No, wrong decade and wrong split - the test & measurement equipment and scientific equipment was long gone from HP at the time of the HP -> HP inc + HPE split. It ended up in Agilent (1999) and from there Keysight.
HP semiconductors went HP -> Agilent -> Avago, now broadcom.
I've got two garages full of 80's and 90's HP lab equipment, and most of it even works. In that era, HP had the best hardware design/production capability in the world.
Unfortunately, in the same era, their software was almost always complete crap. I think the same rigid processes and controls that allowed them to make great hardware were the reason their software was awful. Their rigid processes made changing the software difficult, so it was harder for the devs to improve (and they usually didn't bother).
Every field and every publisher has this issue though.
I've read papers in the chemical literature that were clearly thinly veiled case studies for whatever instrument or software the authors were selling. Hell, I've read papers that had interesting results, only to dig into the math and find something fundamentally wrong. The worst was an incorrect CFD equation that I traced through a telephone game of 4 papers only to find something to the effect of "We speculate adding $term may improve accuracy, but we have not extensively tested this"
Just because something passed peer review does not make it a good paper. It just means somebody* looked at it and didn't find any obvious problems.
If you are engaged in research, or in a position where you're using the scientific literature, it is vital that you read every paper with a critical lens. Contrary to popular belief, the literature isn't a stone tablet sent from God. It's messy and filled with contradictory ideas.
Short of developing psychic abilities, how would you then address the discoverability problem without relying on a third party?
Forums, search engines, social media, and link aggregators are all third parties with their own ranking. Nobody outside of a handful of small-web hobbyists have put a "cool links" section into a website since 1997.
This is classic engineering missing the forest for the trees.
The answer to your question is: same as we always did before! Do you talk to friends? Colleagues? Family? You definitely chat with us here on HN. All of these people share things with you constantly.
There's a funny obsession in tech circles to gather all the information they can as quick as possible. I much prefer to optimize for the quality of information I'm ingesting.
> The answer to your question is: same as we always did before! Do you talk to friends? Colleagues? Family? You definitely chat with us here on HN. All of these people share things with you constantly.
So, in your opinion, we can cut out the reliance on third parties by relying on third parties?
There’s always a relationship aspect in discoverability. Unless the set is small, there will always be intermediary nodes in that graph that will connect consumers and producers. But there’s no need for it to be a mega tech company. Radio DJs help with discovering musics. Books club can help with recommending books.
Doesn't need to be, but most traffic is driven by search. I reckon 2nd most common is influencers, and I don't know if that's an upgrade (even easier to buy out).
What's with the purism? It's just a term used to differentiate one way of making a UI from another. Who cares about what is practical when you're just trying to give a thing a name.
Even in your example, it's pretty clear cut. If the window is built with text and served in a terminal emulator, it's a TUI. If you build it with a graphical framework that now needs X11 or whatever, it's a GUI.
Being a few months behind schedule is forgivable for human space flight.
If a SpaceX Falcon blows up on the pad, that's one thing. It's expensive but they accept that risk to move faster. At least they gain knowledge of what failed, to do better next time.
You can't apply that mentality once a human is piloting it however. That's how you get Columbia, Challenger, or Apollo 1.
> If a SpaceX Falcon blows up on the pad, that's one thing. It's expensive but they accept that risk to move faster. At least they gain knowledge of what failed, to do better next time.
Assuming it's not carrying a SpaceX Crew Dragon with crew onboard ;)
Also, it's a bit of a dated metaphor. Falcon 9 is by most accounts, now the most reliable rocket in history and is pretty design-locked. The modern metaphor is SpaceX Starship :)
That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.
What happened is Facebook's version of this was a corporatized, simplified, G-rated fraction of what its competition is. Despite being in a medium where the defining factor is the ability to look out the eyes of anything vaguely humanoid, you could only be a generic human who only exists from the waist up, devoid of almost any self expression beyond maybe accessories or retexturing.
As a result, there was no audience: the people who already use VR aren't going to go to an inferior product. And the people who would buy a VR headset aren't going to waste their time on a ghost town.
The thing is, Facebook/Meta wasn't trying to make a product with 80k concurrent users, or even with 800k concurrent users. Facebook has 3 billion MAU, and they literally renamed the entire company to Meta - they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.
They hoped it would be a platform for fitness classes, business meetings, college classrooms, shopping, attending concerts [1] and so on.
If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
I think what Meta didn't realize (or maybe they did and ignored it) was that they were not pioneering the metaverse. They already existed on the platforms you just mentioned. I've never played Roblox or Second Life but I know kids and teens who live on Roblox and adults who live on Second Life. Those worlds _were_ their metaverses, and there was no reason to jump ship to another platform when they already had a digital life established. And meta just ended up making a shitty version of the metaverse anyway for the reason you mentioned.
It's not that the metaverse never took off — the popularity of Roblox and Second life (and other online social spaces) is proof that the metaverse was in demand. It's that Meta never gave people a reason to join their metaverse.
Note that I'm loosely defining the "metaverse" as any online world where the community is the point and people spend real money to "get ahead" in those worlds. Many MMOs can be metaverses in this sense. I've logged onto Final Fantasy XIV and saw people who logged on just to hang out at their friend's in-game house, not to play the game at all.
I think the biggest problem that you hint as is that "metaverse" is an ill-defined term. When they rebranded, and given that I had been working in the 3d industry for _many_ years, I couldn’t define what the metaverse was.
To some extent I still cant. The real indicator is when the crypto bros started peddling it, then we all knew it was shite.
Shocking to watch this human imitate us, no shade to anyone neurodivergent either, but obviously it could track he would allegedly[1] OK with his bots sexting literal children—he’s obviously only making an effort to be like us (but he isn’t)
[1]not by me; Mark, you can sue Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Oct ‘25)
> If the primary appeal of your VR universe is that your avatar can be an anthropomorphic banana, an anime girl, a furry, a giant penis with legs - that's never going to become a 300-million-user platform.
I mean the inherent appeal of VR is self-expression; being who you want to be, seeing the worlds you want to see. You won't get 300 million users with corporate slop either. That maybe works once, if ever, VR headsets become an interface suitable for white collar work, which they currently very much aren't, and then it wouldn't be the next Facebook - it'd be the next Microsoft Teams. Which is not really in line with Meta's other offerings, though they certainly wouldn't say no to it I guess. But I think a 500-user survey is all it would take to get a very clear signal that current VR is NOT about to replace Teams.
Indeed, the people who would like to spend hours and hours hanging out in the digital world like something out of Snow Crash are not generally the kind of people to want to hang out in a simulated corporate lobby under the watchful gaze of someone like Zuckerberg.
I'm absolutely sure there is a massive market (or at least user base) for a metaverse but until spending more time in VR than reality is mainstream, the audience is the underground clubbers and kids behind the bike sheds of the digital world.
Until we reach the point where outside becomes ruined and hostile I do not think a metaverse has much attraction to your average person, I see that as the main reason as for why VR became MR and then just AR.
Also you missed furries from your audience group, there is overlap but it is a pretty distinctive group that is actively drawn towards VR for creative expression.
Indeed, physical world, nature, mountains, beaches, human look-in-the-eyes interaction, breeze of fresh air on a hill you climbed and so on is something extremely important to humans. Some feel it more, some less but ie everybody recharges in nature, just not everybody is so connected with their own bodies to actually recognize it.
I like a bit of gaming and VR seems like almost-there, but its just a gimmick in one's life, and for life quality purposes never should become more than fringe relax activity.
And for corporate-privacy-destroying virtual spaces - they would have to pay me massive amounts to spend, unwillingly, any time there. Those are the last people who should be in charge of such place
Indeed! Your comment is probably the most important in this thread. The Korean/German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes a lot about losing humanity because of tech advances.
I am retired so this is easier for me to do: For every hour each day I spend on tech (personal AI research, writing) I spend 90 minutes hiking with friends, playing games like Bridge, enjoying meals with my wife and friends, reading good literature and philosophy, etc.
I worked for 50 years before retiring, but even working, I tried to balance human time vs. tech and work - often leaving 'money on the table' but it was worth it.
Pardon an old man ranting, but I think so many people seem caught up in the wrong things.
The SteamDB player number for VRChat is kind of underselling its size since half the player base is on other platforms, primarily running it standalone on Meta Quest.
A few days ago it reached 156k across all platforms because of some event that is outside my sphere of interest. And VRChat is generally above 100k per day peak nowadays.
https://metrics.vrchat.community/?orgId=1&refresh=30s&from=n...
But it is definitely limited by hardware and while it is constantly growing, its growth is dependent on there being a supply of relatively cheap hardware.
> That's the thing though, there is interest in "metaverse" style programs. VRChat, the biggest one, got 80k concurrent users last month (all time peak) according to SteamDB. Seems low, but hardware is a limiting factor for them.
The problem here is that "the metaverse" has a specific meaning, and that meaning was a Potemkin-elevator-pitch.
People were envisioning the ability to take a rocket launcher from Halo and use it directly in all your other games. Which is a fun sketch*, but nobody thought past the sketch into any concept of why any game developer would support that, well, meta.
To the extent that VRChat gets around this, it's because it's being a playground rather than a meta-game. So, again, the "meta" part isn't there, at least not to the extent envisioned by people who saw Ready Player One and thought "Yes! Also, I like what Nolan Sorrento is saying, how many more ads can we put into our stuff?"
There is a niche interest. Meta bet was on the next iPhone. They were either way too early or completely off.
Though I’m personally happy to see massive corporations spend their money on pushing the state of the art in niche fields instead of using it for more evil stuff. I’m not sure why people care that they burn their own money on risky bets, that’s great for my point of view. We need more of that
I'm not sure how you define metaverse but some games where you get together with friends in virtual worlds like Fortnite have been pretty successful - $9bn+ revenue on that one. I've never been a big believer that it's important to strap the computer screen on your face rather than looking at it in the normal way.
Yeah, they totally did not get it & burned a lot of money. They could basically just dumped a much less money into VRChat (or even 1:1 cloning it) and getting almost assured success.
That, and I've never had to beg an LLM for an answer, or waste 5 minutes of my life typing up a paragraph to pre-empt the XY Problem Problem. Also never had it close my question as a duplicate of an unrelated question.
The accuracy tends to be somewhat lower than SO, but IMO this is a fair tradeoff to avoid having to potentially fight for an answer.
Related, I was talking to a computational chemist at a conference a few years ago. Their work was mostly at the intersection of ML and material science.
An interesting concept they mentioned was this idea of "injected serendipity" when they were screening for novel materials with a certain target performance. They proceed as normal, but 10% or so of the screened materials are randomly sampled from the chemical space.
They claimed this had led them to several interesting candidates across several problems.
It's just HP and HPE split up. HPE took all the nice enterprise stuff, plus the supercomputing business (they own Cray). HP took the consumer stuff, and proceeded to milk as much as they could.
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