Tag: facebook

Facebook Metaverse

No one company will run the metaverse — it will be an “embodied internet”, operated by many different players in a decentralized way. So, one is you will be able to, with basically a snap of your fingers, pull up your perfect workstation. So anywhere you go, you can walk into a Starbucks, you can sit down, you can be drinking your coffee and kind of wave your hands and you can have basically as many monitors as you want, all set up, whatever size you want them to be, all preconfigured to the way you had it when you were at your home before. And you can just bring that with you wherever you want. If you want to talk to someone, you’re working through a problem, instead of just calling them on the phone, they can teleport in, and then they can see all the context that you have. They can see your 5 monitors, or whatever it is, and the documents or all the windows of code that you have, or a 3D model that you’re working on. And they can stand next to you and interact, and then in a blink they can teleport back to where they were and kind of be in a separate place.

Beachheads and Obstacles

Amazon, on the other hand, seems to have learned the right lessons from its mobile failures; what is notable about the company’s approach to Alexa is that it leverages and learns from the mobile era. Alexa benefits from Amazon’s investments in data centers and networking, interacts with both iOS and Android to the greatest extent possible, and is in line with Amazon’s overall business — making buying things that much more convenient. Alexa is an operating system for the home, and perhaps beyond.

Facebook and OSM

The OSM global copy receives up to 5M changes every day, which means our local copy would quickly become outdated if we didn’t regularly update it. To reduce the risk of bad edits, whether intentional (vandalism) or unintentional, we don’t update our local copy directly. Instead, changes between the 2 versions are reviewed and accepted into the local copy. This all needs to be done on a regular cadence, or the growing difference between the global and local versions will require significant time and effort to catch up. We developed 2 new tools to help us keep pace: Logical changesets (LoChas) and our new machine-augmented automatic review system (MaRS).

LoChas break OSM changesets into individual CRUD operations and then cluster them for more efficient human review. MaRS uses a blend of heuristics and machine learning (ML) techniques to automate evaluation of LoChas that don’t require a further nuanced review. The ultimate goal of these tools is to create a funnel where machine-augmented techniques reduce the workload that requires human intervention.

Libra

What if the market for the underlying currencies and assets is (for a while?) more liquid than the market for Libras? Say the basket values adjust before Libra values do. What kind of arbitrage opportunities does that create? If we know Libras are due to depreciate, is there a higher nominal rate of interest on them, as with traditional currencies in an international multi-currency setting? What are the equivalents of covered and uncovered interest parity in this setting? Does a kind of “program trading” arise to perform the arbitrage? Can perfect redemption be offered credibly while the prices are still out of whack?

plus there are smart contracts

Another important aspect of the Libra Blockchain is Move, its new programming language. This programming language will allow users to define their own smart contracts in the future. Smart contracts are agreements written in code whose clauses are automatically enforced when a set of predetermined criteria is met.

and analysis by Matt Levine:

there are probably some things to say about regulation? Is this thing a payments processor? A money-market fund? A bank? I dunno, maybe, a little bit. 7 I cannot get too worked up about the regulatory framework applicable to it. For now I would prefer to be swept up by Facebook’s grand vision for it. That vision seems to involve competing with or even displacing national currencies, and if you’re going that far why not displace national regulatory regimes too? If we meet back here in 20 years and Libra has become the currency of the internet, we’re not going to be talking about whether Libra complies with banking regulation, we’re going to be talking about how the Libra Association regulates and stress-tests the Libra banks that it licenses

and a possible long game:

And this is when this bet would pay off for Facebook (and the second point I missed in my earlier analysis): the implication that digital currencies will do for money what the Internet did for information is that the very long-term trend will be towards centralization around Aggregators. When there is no friction, control shifts from gatekeepers controlling supply to Aggregators controlling demand. To that end, by pioneering Libra, building what will almost certainly be the first wallet for the currency, and bringing to bear its unmatched network for facilitating payments, Facebook is betting it will offer the best experience for digital currency flows, giving it power not by controlling Libra but rather by controlling the most users of Libra.

2022-01-29:

Facebook announced in 2019 with enormous fanfare that it was going to launch a stablecoin and work closely with all of the relevant regulators blah blah blah, and it went to the Federal Reserve and said “what do we need to do to launch a stablecoin,” and the Fed said “you must bring me the egg of a dragon and the tears of a unicorn,” and now the Facebook stablecoin is shutting down. One of the largest companies in the world devoted millions of dollars to figuring out how to launch a stablecoin and concluded that it was impossible. It is demonstrably not impossible! Tether did it! Tether has a hugely successful stablecoin! Tether does not care at all about working closely with all of the relevant regulators! That’s why!

Tupperware

While Tupperware shares many common features with other cluster management systems, such as Kubernetes and Mesos, it distinguishes itself in the following areas: Seamless support for stateful services. A single control plane managing servers across data centers to help automate intent-based container deployment, cluster decommission, and maintenance. Transparent sharding of the control plane to scale out. An elastic compute approach to shift capacity among services in real time.

Efficient, reliable cluster management at scale with Tupperware

Break Up Facebook

I take responsibility for not sounding the alarm earlier. Don Graham, a former Facebook board member, has accused those who criticize the company now as having “all the courage of the last man leaping on the pile at a football game.” The financial rewards I reaped from working at Facebook radically changed the trajectory of my life, and even after I cashed out, I watched in awe as the company grew. It took the 2016 election fallout and Cambridge Analytica to awaken me to the dangers of Facebook’s monopoly. But anyone suggesting that Facebook is akin to a pinned football player misrepresents its resilience and power. An era of accountability for Facebook and other monopolies may be beginning. Collective anger is growing, and a new cohort of leaders has begun to emerge. On Capitol Hill, Representative David Cicilline has taken a special interest in checking the power of monopolies, and Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ted Cruz have joined Senator Warren in calling for more oversight. Economists like Jason Furman, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, are speaking out about monopolies, and a host of legal scholars like Lina Khan, Barry Lynn and Ganesh Sitaraman are plotting a way forward.

VR Avatars

The theory underlying Codec Avatars is simple and twofold, what Sheikh calls the “ego test” and the “mom test”: You should love your avatar, and your loved ones should as well. The process enabling the avatars is something far more complicated—as I discovered for myself during 2 different capture procedures. The first takes place in a domelike enclosure called Mugsy, the walls and ceiling of which are studded with 132 off-the-shelf Canon lenses and 350 lights focused toward a chair. Sitting at the center feels like being in a black hole made of paparazzi. “I had awkwardly named it ‘Mugshooter,'” Sheikh admits. “Then we realized it’s a horrible, unfriendly name.” That was a couple of versions ago; Mugsy has increased steadily in both cameras and capability, sending early kludges (like using a ping-pong ball on a string to help participants hold their face in the right place, car garage-style) to deserved obsolescence.

Facebook Privacy Pivot

Ultimately, Zuckerberg doesn’t address the biggest trade-off: Are these changes compatible with Facebook’s fundamental business model, which relies on a steady supply of user data? If these changes are truly implemented, there will be a substantial business cost to bear. Until he fully answers that, Zuckerberg’s vision of privacy will be incomplete.

The move towards privacy seems designed to respond to a number of problems. To some extent, it responds to Facebook’s content-moderation problem: if a conversation that violates the company’s “community guidelines” is encrypted, such that even Facebook’s software can’t read it, then the company can’t be expected to expunge it. It responds to the Ralph Northam-yearbook problem (“People want to know that what they share won’t come back to hurt them later”), since, by default, content will auto-delete. And it responds to the China problem, as Zuckerberg vows “not to build data centers in countries that have a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression.” It also attempts to address Facebook’s public-relations problem: after a scandalous year, fewer people trust the network than ever.