• online@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    It never died, because it already existed for fucking years: Active Worlds from 1995 is where I started, Second Life later, now the dominant “metaverse” is VR Chat.

    The corporate simpletons just never did their homework to see what the market is like for this.

    • fer0n@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      The word is meaningless, nothing like the metaverse as described in snowcrash ever existed. If you’re talking about a multiplayer game that tries to mimic the real word then you’re right. But that’s not what the metaverse actually is…or what the word stood for, before being ripped to shreds as a buzzword.

      • online@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yeah they (Facebook) chose the word as a form of marketing to rebrand something that already existed. It’s similar to how we went from “machine learning” to “AI”.

        • Craftkorb@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          That’s the thing I hate: the word AI is being misused. It’s not a buzzword, at least it wasn’t supposed to be. It’s artifical intelligence, not in the sense of having a brain but in the sense of being an intelligent algorithm solving an issue. The path finder algorithm A* (A Star) is in this group. Machine learning is a sub category of AI, nothing less.

        • Machine learning is a form of AI. It’s the most useful one for complex problems we have right now, that’s why everybody is using it. The only reason we used random forests and more bespoke algorithms so long is that we didn’t have the compute power or infrastructure to train these networks on a mass scale. ML was invented decades ago but extremely unpractical because computers struggled to do any kind of efficient calculation the moment you added a decimal somewhere.

          The kind of AI you find in Google Maps route finding just isn’t very interesting, because we’ve had that for decades.

    • creamed_eels@toast.ooo
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      1 year ago

      Is SL still around? I left my partially nude Darth Vader wearing a banana thong in someone’s art gallery and haven’t been back

    • millie@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I remember Blaxxun’s Colony City i think even earlier than that. VRML is the future of the past!