Every headline when I was in college was "App J Sold for a Gizzillion Dollars." So, I figured I would learn programming and join the club. Easier said than done. Nevertheless, I started watching YouTube videos titled "Make a Clone of J."

In hindsight, it was a horrible way to learn. Most YouTubers probably benefited more from clickbait teaching than from actual fundamental teaching. Eventually, I was able to navigate the internet and land on an actual structured curriculum, whose lectures and courses were long and boring but taught you the fundamentals of programming.

I am picking up a similar pattern with Vibe Coding. Beginners are more excited about having a launched product wrapped with a band-aid rather than having deep knowledge.

> $2 billion on sales and marketing - anyone got any idea what this is?

I used to follow OpenAI on Instagram, all their posts were reposts from paid influencers making videos on "How to X with ChatGPT." Most videos were redundant, but I guess there are still billions of people that the product has yet to reach.

There’s a bunch of users here that are probably paid by them too.

I'd prefer the use of the Heroes 3 nomenclature on crowd sizes to be more precise. "Bunch" sounds too small. I would say a 'horde' i.e. 50 to 99.

Seems like it’ll take billions more down the drain to serve them.

I have owned both Quest 3 and the Vision Pro. It is safe to say that what Meta lacks in quality, it makes up for with creativity.

When I initially bought the Quest 3, it felt unnatural, bulky, and had a poor resolution. I regretted the purchase after a few minutes. But then I started downloading apps, mainly social apps like "Big Screen", where random people can create/join rooms. I started joining these rooms with my 480p avatar with low expectations. But to my surprise, each room was unique, with crypto talks, atheist/religious debates. I accidentally even stumbled on a rap battle room, where people were passing around a mic and free styling. All of a sudden, it felt like the Metaverse. The social interaction overshadowed the corky avatar and somehow convinced my brain that I was talking to a real human being and not an avatar.

I got invited to demo the Vision Pro prior to its release. They had already announced it at WWDC at this point. Given the price tag and the fact that it is Apple, I had high expectations. I was not disappointed. In fact, I was even more amazed. The cinema was phenomenal. After a few updates, my avatar or persona, like Apple likes to call it, looked just like me. But the plateau came too fast. Everything I tried on demoed the first day was everything it had to offer, just with different content. I still use the Vision Pro 2/3 times a week to watch movies or shows, and it is still a mind-blowing experience, but nothing that would make me rush to put the Vision Pro on.

I wish Apple would follow Meta’s footprint and bring more social apps to the Vision Pro. I don't want to be on FaceTime with people I know and watch an Apple TV show. I want to join rooms with randoms arguing about why Bitcoin will be in the future.

Yeah I clocked Apples death grip on the OS as a fundamental weakness after a few weeks with it. Every idea I had for an app, I had to cross off the list because “no API” or “no permission” etc. I’d have to wait years for Apple to first develop the APIs, then grant me permission to use them.

What worked on the iPhone and to a lesser extent the iPad, will absolutely not work on the head. It’s a head mounted TV because that’s all Apple allows it to be. They’re killing their own future to protect App Store sales.

Apple burned a lot of goodwill with developers over the years with App Store. Developers play by Apple's rules on App Store, because iPhone is such an attractive (and obviously hugely successful platform).

But when Vision Pro came, no developer wanted to give in very quickly. Netflix and YouTube sat out, and so did Spotify. And why not? They learned their lesson with App Store - you give an inch to Apple, and they'll bully you for years.

The same thing is playing out with Apple CarPlay Ultra. Ford (and other manufacturers) dont want Apple to barge in and bully their territory.

If only Apple were a little less selfish, they could have had this one

To add to this, I published an app on the Vision Pro App Store within the first few weeks of the Vision Pro release. A simple 3D garden that grows simultaneously as you complete your Pomodoro goals.

After the original release, I wanted to expand my app by adding more animals and plants. However, when I searched for my app in the App Store, it kept defaulting to iPhone/iPad apps. I don't have proof to support this, but it felt like it was done intentionally by Apple, and many developers were facing the same issue and started complaining, which eventually led Apple to decide to have the native store be the default search.

I have been shadow banned by EA before for selling an item at the auction below the average price, and this reminded me of that. I lost all interest in making apps for the Vision Pro or helping grow the ecosystem if Apple was going to be this greedy.

To be fair, big screen has been around since the oculus DK2 days, so they had a lot of time to iterate.

But ya, apple should be more Dev friendly overall.

When they released visionos and a bespoke version of safari and it had zero support for openxr. After years of closed development and a full year of open development and they launched without support for the one api that was mandatory... Thats how you knew it was DOA

This is awesome! I always wanted to utilize AI for my day to day work Slack convos, but the friction of switching apps was more than me just proof reading, if I even did.

Thank you! Please give it a try, and share your feedback – this is even more important to me than revenue.

There have been a couple of instances, where I would try to debunk a conspiracy theory to a friend or family member and the next day, I would wake up to "Real/TikTok/Short" video with an AI narrating there exact argument. Most of the time, it's not even an LLM generated text turned to voice, rather an AI voice used to read a text the content creator has provided it. As long as it sounded like ChatGPT, Siri, "Her" combined with confirmation bias, people are treating these LLMs as their new oracles, as you may say.

Good job! Make it more mobile-friendly (only tested on iPhone). Like many others suggested, make the segments clickable for non-technical people to navigate, and add commands like cd, ls, etc., to make it more interesting for hackers. Gobez!

I took a stab at adding some mobile friendliness to my own implementation, if you wanted to take a look: https://con.rs

I like GPT wrapper's that let me personalize/customize existing real world things, and this a good example of that. I like it.

Thank you!

This is phenomenon! I am an iOS Engineer, not sure if you ever want to bring this to mobile but I would be happy to contribute.

> iOS have app privacy report where one can check what connections are made by app, how often, last one, etc.

How often is the average calculator app user checking there Privacy Report? My guess, not many!

All it takes is one person to find out and raise the alarm. The average user doesn't read the source code behind openssl or whatever either, that doesn't mean there's no gains in open sourcing it.

The average user is also not reading these raised “alarms”. And if an app has a bad name, another one will show up with a different name on the same day.

You're on a tech forum, you must have seen one of the many post about app, either on Android or iPhone, that acts like spyware.

They happens from time to time, last one was not more than two week ago where it's been shown that many app were able to read the list of all other app installed on a Android and that Google refused to fix that.

Do you really believe that an app used to make your device part of a bot network wouldn't be posted over here ?

"You're on a tech forum", that's exactly the point. The "average user" is not on a tech forum though, the average user opens the app store of their platform, types "calculator" and installs the first one that's free.

The real solution is to add a permission for network access, with the default set to deny.

I agree, I want a more intelligent voice assistant similar to Siri as a product, and all my apps to be add-ons the voice assistant could integrate with.