Meta is adding rate limits and soft paywall to smart glasses

EExoristos about 4 hours ago 26 commentsRead Article on theverge.com

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90% Positive

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Discussion (26 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

buzzwords•about 2 hours ago

Meta's survival is fascinating to me. They dumped money in VR, their AI is not as good as their competitors and now they are dumping money on this glasses thing. They keep on getting caught doing shady things too.

m11a•about 2 hours ago

Says a lot about just how much money they’re raking in from core business.

sofixa•about 1 hour ago

> their AI is not as good as their competitors

That's irrelevant because their AI was never a product they sold.

watwut•about 2 hours ago

I think it is the shady stuff that earns them money. They cant survive without that. The rest is a corporate hobby, basically.

bstsb•about 1 hour ago

i think honestly it’s the opposite. it still confuses me why meta invested so much in their pointless experiments (think any of their AR ventures) when their main source of revenue was, and continues to be, their boring advertising on consumer apps

jorams•27 minutes ago

You call it "boring advertising on consumer apps", but that's exactly where all the shady stuff keeps happening.

watwut•25 minutes ago

> continues to be, their boring advertising on consumer apps

That is where the ugly shady stuff is.

> AR ventures

That is the corporate hobby stuff.

tushar-r•29 minutes ago

It's interesting that people seem to have forgotten/gotten over the whole Glasshole "rejection/anger" against Google glasses ~10years ago. Maybe it would have been more socially acceptable even back then if they hadn't made them look sci-fi and instead like regular glasses.

Or is it just that we haven't seen Scoble using these in the shower? :-D [1]

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/yes-you-can-w...

janalsncm•about 2 hours ago

Something doesn’t add up. According to what the article is saying about Meta’s help article, there is no price tier which allows unlimited conversation mode 720 hours/month. Even the highest paid tier can only get 15 hours.

But the article says this is an on-device feature. So there should be no overhead to Meta at all, aside from them storing the conversations I assume.

kstrauser•about 2 hours ago

Me: You know, these ugly creeper peepers could not possibly make me want them any less.

A PM deep in the heart of darkness: Hold my creatine.

cyberax•about 2 hours ago

Hey, the sky's the limit. The next version can also shock the user!

hamburgererror•about 2 hours ago

This kind of product should simply be banned, there's just so many things wrong.

khurs•about 1 hour ago

Like all things, there can be positive use cases.

For example, a musician would probably rather have the audience wearing recording glasses and actually watching then recording on phone and watching the phone screen.

The 'creepy pick up artists' and other social media types have become synonymous with it unfortunately

drsalt•about 2 hours ago

absurd to ban cameras but allow firearms

hamburgererror•about 2 hours ago

I'm not in the US so firearms are not even a question for me.

verytrivial•about 2 hours ago

I was shown a full page interstitial for Meta Starfire by Kylie the other day, and it wasn't even the good Kylie.

I have doubts they know how to market these if I'm seeing this ad.

probably_wrong•about 1 hour ago

Mild tangent: are there smart glasses out there without camera, without needing internet access, and with custom app support? All my neck and back want is a way for me to look up instead of down whenever I'm bored and smart glasses would be one possible solution for that.

tehlike•10 minutes ago

You can look for smart glasses (hey cyan) in aliexpress, and use claude/codex to reverse engineer. There's a guy who put an sdk on github. All you need is bluetooth to your phone, and of you go. You can build an app that does whatever you want within the firmware limitations of the glasses.

dmitrygr•about 2 hours ago

> Meta’s rate limit is ridiculous. [...] feature [...] doesn’t use Meta’s servers. It runs on-device, using the chips inside the glasses [...] I turned off my internet, and it kept working.

BMW heated-seats style move. Classy.

johanbcn•about 1 hour ago

Well, of course it's getting rate limited behind a subscription. Someone has to pay for all the additional compute and storage required to datamine your conversations.

stavros•about 2 hours ago

https://archive.is/vGVor

Havoc•about 2 hours ago

Doesn’t even have adoption yet? They’re skipping a couple of steps on the enshitification ladder here

ageitgey•about 2 hours ago

They are actually selling really well. But sadly, they are selling because you can drill out the 'recording' indicator light and use them to secretly record people to make creepy TikToks.

kakacik•about 1 hour ago

Thats a good candidate for a closed fist falling at non-walking speeds at somebody's ugly face. Do that around my kids and you are automatically a pedo that will get adequate treatment.

Also, where I live its against the law to record people without their consent so if I would be feeling very nice I would just hold you against the ground till cops come.

You wear them = you film with them. Get your shit together kids, this ain't some harmless fun.

Havoc•44 minutes ago

Seems likely that the cops would take action against you for assault more than filming

Hendrikto•28 minutes ago

It’s one thing to make a passionate speech on the internet. It is another thing to be charged with battery and assault.