Philip Rosedale
@philiprosedale
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All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
San Francisco
Joined July 2007
Second Life offline render: massing diagram with no draw distance, all prims visible.
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Buying Bitcoin and driving the price up 10% is the same as if @Tesla had put 800,000 gasoline-powered cars back on the road, forever. The math:.
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Second Life has higher revenues-per-user than YouTube or Facebook, but charges fees (for land and transactions) instead of selling ads with behavioral targeting and surveillance. And basic access is also free. It seems possible to provide virtual worlds without causing harm.
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Would folks here be interested in a twitter spaces hangout soon to discuss Metaverse design issues?.
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Calibrating my social media usage… if you are a Second Life resident, can you like or reply to this post?.
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Massive multiplayer Minecraft going on right now… @BoredElonMusk event… many people building with blocks.
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Bitcoin's carbon footprint is 37 Megatons / year CO2 (about the same as New Zealand). This is electricity used by computers that participate in a gambling contest to win new bitcoins.
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Second Life is the only virtual world that allows people to build interesting things while also being together in one place. Despite being 17 years old, no other game or world has yet fully achieved that goal. Agree? Have at me.
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Adding 10% to the price will add 3.7 Megatons / year CO2. A passenger car creates about 4.6 tons / year. So 3.7 million divided by 4.6 = 804,300 cars.
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Happy 20th Birthday, Second Life! What an exciting adventure it has been to watch you grow up, and I'm looking forward to many years yet to come. Love, Philip.
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Hundreds of people here for the Second Life 21st birthday gathering! That's tiny me sitting onstage.
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Second Life creators and entrepreneurs make $65M a year from their work, and have been doing it for more than 10 years.
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ChatGPT just fixed an error I'd made in shader code I'd been staring at / debugging for hours. We are not worthy. Amazing.
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If you increase their winnings, gamblers will add new machines to match the change (if electricity stays at the same cost).
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It is entirely possible to offer a 'metaverse' service without damaging humanity through behavior modification and advertisements: Second Life makes about $80/year on average per person in subscription fees. No ads, no suggestions, and basic access is free.
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Huge CES party with live performance from Billie Eilish just happened, with High Fidelity providing the spatial audio service!
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OK, so how cool and weird is: A line of avatars waiting to get their initial allocation of cryptocurrency from a bank teller in a virtual bank? Plus that's a cat driving a robot body giving out the money. I love my work so much.
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Help me understand again why the few thousand people who hold all the crypto are going to treat me better than the government and banks did?.
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We need to use VR headsets to enable real human connection across the world, not to watch movies or play video games.
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Watch for it next: When virtual land is owned outright (on blockchain), malicious owners will extort each other by putting offensive content on small highly-priced plots in popular spaces. This is not a stable solution - we saw it happen long ago in @SecondLife.
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Again: It is imperative that we find non-surveillance business models for future social media systems before VR headsets are a part of them.
5 minutes of VR tracking data, even with names and other PII stripped from it, can identify a user out of a pool of 511 with accuracy of 95.3%. Accuracy still at 90% when training and testing use different content (360 vs. CG). Anonymizing is not privacy.
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99.9% of the potential for VR Is in bridging distance between people. We are competing with the airline industry, not the gaming industry.
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1. Business model has to be fees, not ads. 2. Has to have decentralized moderation.
A business model centered on advertising, surveillance and behavioral targeting for the virtual world would be "highly problematic," says @philiprosedale of @SecondLife. The metaverse has to be "locally legislated and ruled in the same way the real world is," he adds.
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To move forward on Metaverse, we need to find a viable widespread use case that isn't only for kids. Everyone is trying to design platform technology without a demonstrated use case yet to optimize against. What is it?.
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Big FPS improvements to Second Life were recently released and have made it into the main clients. .
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In the old days, when the internet was too slow, we moved software around on plastic disks.
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Join me Tomorrow Jan 25 at 9AM PST from any platform to chat about:. ‘#SecondLife Stories, and Designing the #Metaverse’. TwitterSpaces: . Second Life: . Clubhouse:. Callin:.
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What brings people to virtual worlds is. other people.
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The fact that ChatGPT is always overloaded and unavailable should get us talking about whether access to AI (dramatically amplifying human performance) should be regarded as a basic human right. Otherwise it is going to get priced, meaning greatly increased inequality.
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SL friends. please join my new in-world group "Friends of Philip" and we will keep talking and dropping events there. See you soon. Fun to be back.
Second Life’s future starts with a roundtable talk with Founder and recently appointed CTO, @philiprosedale.
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"Second Life’s endurance demonstrates that, whatever the configuration, a metaverse’s success can only be founded on human qualities of social interaction and self-expression"
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It is so important to remember that people, when F2F, are almost always good to each other. Social media and most online spaces are (sadly) engineered to increase and reward negative interactions. This is not who we are, and we can change the design.
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I think that 256 VR-capable avatars together able to see and hear each other is a world record. Does anyone know of others?
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Would you consider using VR to interview people for jobs, using avatars and with the voice slightly changed to make the age/gender/race of the applicant unknowable while still allowing a live conversation as well as the use of body language?.
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Is it lost on anyone that this 'metaverse' re-discovery is 99% due to COVID? Faced with the chance of a deeply dystopian future where we are all forced inside, the big companies are circling like vultures trying to figure how they get a piece of it.
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If a virtual world was incredibly interesting, with tons of other people, would you be willing to take the time to walk everywhere (no teleporting)?.
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Two years later, I still think this is a great idea. Does anyone want to start a company with help & funding from me?
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Maybe an "I'm feeling lucky" button in Second Life that teleports you to a random place where there are other people?.
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Second Life friends: Is anyone, in the last 24 hours, seeing parts of your avatar or attachments not appearing to others after teleport? If so, please DM me. It *should* be fixed, but checking here.
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"I'm not building a game, I'm building a new country" (me, sometime around 2006). What if we really did make a new country, starting in Second Life? What if we tested out new ideas in democracy and economics there? What would we do first?.
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The first 16 servers ever put online in Second Life, in the shape of a key! And. if you know where to go. they are still there to explore.
Next up, a terrain model showing a group of sixteen very special regions that anyone familiar with #SecondLife’s history should recognize. 🗺️😉 Hint: Made with LSL, Python, and @Blender’s bpy. Terrain textures courtesy of @tycheshepherd’s Grid Survey. #b3d
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Another 'metaverse' thought: Using an avatar to play a game is very different than living and working as an avatar. This is being overlooked. The two roads (games and worlds) don't end in the same place.
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I suspect that the big unvoiced objection to UBI is men’s fear of losing control over women. A fair society needs to compensate both women and men for their work.
@sama And yet another story of escaped abuse: "Without the program, Mallory tells us, 'I would probably still be in an abusive relationship.' Because of the $1,000 she was able to get her daughters away from an abusive home life, and expose them to new experiences. "
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What if we all just agreed to call Facebook by it's original name, forever?.
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@Doggie_wumpus @Tesla Yes, I am conservative in estimating a linear relationship between price and mining. As you and others in this thread point out the real numbers are worse.
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Many americans have only one internet provider. Removing the requirement for net neutrality would allow their opinions to be biased by the provider. Unbiased information will become a privilege of the rich. This is against everything we stand for as a country.
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Did it! we reached 110 people in one place in VR on friday @highfidelityinc , thanks to everyone who came! More next week.
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it should be possible to stand 'inside' a VR avatar and measure how accurately you slowly move your body to copy a precise motion such as Tai Chi, or a boxing punch, and then slowly increase the speed toward real-time while keeping in precise correspondence with the motion.
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Some people are hard to understand because they are intentionally using big words to try and convince you they are smart. Other people are hard to understand because they genuinely see something others don't and are unable to clearly explain themselves.
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I'd like to always work at a company where we stay up all night not to meet a deadline or even to make a bunch of money, but because it was so interesting we didn't want to stop.
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Today's @highfidelityinc load test went pretty well: 300 people came total, steady peak about 190. Large EC2 server instances held up well. Audio was good. Avatar mixers reached 1Gbps of outbound traffic, restarted a few times but found the problem.
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Second Life friends - if you are using Firestorm 6.6.17, we need you to consider the latest version, because we can't make changes to SL until we get you updated. Have you tried the latest?.
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16 years of Second Life!! That's just crazy great.
#SecondLife is celebrating 16 years of the most creative community and platform there is. Here's a sneak peek - but be sure to join us tomorrow when #SL16B officially opens!
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We've been led by the bad examples of a few big tech companies to think that the only way to make big money is to make people hate each other. It doesn't have to be that way.
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The combined global markets that VR will change by enabling telepresence are 200 times larger than the video gaming market. Education alone is more than 6 Trillion $USD
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For most people and for most VR experiences, putting on a headset means being cutoff from other people. I think this is the most important reason why there is little HMD sales growth. The industry needs to focus on communication, not immersion.
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Found my first cell phone in a box. Want to show me yours?
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Crucial VR accessory: the binder-clip desk hanger, with safety pen.
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If a virtual world doesn't have entropy, it can't contain life.
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The way everyone gets fired up about "legless avatars" is fascinating (though not at all surprising). It speaks to the importance of embodiment - we are more than just our brains. At present there are no solutions for this problem.
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"I've been fascinated by the connection between avatar and the person behind them."
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Monopoly was originally called "The Landlord's Game" and was intended to educate people by showing how owning land outright leads to runaway wealth inequality and a single winner.
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Free markets are not a meritocracy. Simple example:. Your kid and my kid are identically-skilled. But I can afford a tutor, so mine gets into a better school than yours, and then gets a better job. Money can be used to get more money, meaning free markets are not fair.
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Would someone be willing to re-make me my original SL avatar? I've been spending more time in SL lately (it's just so amazing and great) and I'd like my old look back. This vintage.
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To start building really interesting things again, we must give up the hope of making money with them.
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You can’t store “ownership” on the blockchain any more than you can store “friendship”. These words are human concepts, not cryptographic primitives. They require agreement from other people to take on any sort of meaning.
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It would help to identity a single clear user experience for virtual worlds that both: does no harm, and is broadly appealing. I don't think we have it yet.
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About to unbox. gift from a friend. one of my earliest computers!
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Question for SL folks about governance: If we wanted to pick 12 representative people to help us decide something super important about SL, how could we fairly choose them?.
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Difficult to express how cool this is to meet as a whole company every friday as avatars.
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As @Dusanwriter pointed out, Second Life had 'NFTs' from the start. As this image shows, I can create a digital atom that can be sold/transferred/mixed by others, with attribution.
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Jobs in VR are going to a big part of our future. There are 4 Egyptologists leading sold out tours, and growing. We thought World War II was the right next thing to try. come apply for a job leading tours. .
High Fidelity is #hiring a part-time #WorldWarII #educator. Are you a trained #historian, seasoned hobbyist, or passionate collector of World War II memorabilia?. Apply now to lead in-depth tours | #ARVRinEDU #VREducation #EducationinVR #VR
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The many articles debating whether VR/AR is going to make it keep missing a key point - that we are in a race to create a better screen than the mobile device for basic activities such as messaging and browsing. It is this need, not xR apps, that will put screens on our heads.
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Taking down Facebook for a bit: Progress. Taking down Facebook while also highlighting key vulnerabilities in the Internet's core architecture: Priceless.
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Both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake are mechanisms for distributing new currency to rich people: the first by rewarding those who own the fastest computers, and the second by rewarding people with extra money to stake. Neither distribute currency more fairly than 'fiat'.
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SecondLife's Lindendollar (L$) has remained stable in open trading against the dollar and euro for almost 20 years through lots of growth and hype and worries. One reason for this is that there are exchange fees that reduce speculative/arbitrage trading.
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The timeline we are in is one where the incoming US president rug-pulls his fellow citizens with an illegal shitcoin scam, three days before being inaugurated.
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That's my company in our weekly all-hands meeting in VR. If you'd like to try doing meetings in VR, let me know. Plus for extra credit we meet in the Dr. Strangelove 'warroom'
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Here is a new podcast recording with @slhamlet where we talk about lots of @SecondLife history and metaverse-stuff:
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Come to my island in @SecondLife tomorrow (Friday) at 1PM PT for a conversation about how to re-invent money.
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Just starting a virtual panel with a live audience. Good example of one of the challenges we still face in getting to a metaverse - the challenge of rendering more than 100 or so avatars in the same place (there are 200 people here, hence the billboards).
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@sama This is oversimplifying a complex issue: Some tech (like new medicine) is pretty obviously good and options-expanding. Other tech (like Uber or Google ads) serves to concentrate wealth and cause harm.
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Just dropped Re-dressing Philip, episode 2. So I have to put the link in the reply now, right? Seriously??
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Standing in Second Life in region "Rosedale" - quiet here. Mostly water.
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Any proof-of-work cryptocurrency whose price is increasing will inevitably concentrate wealth in the hands of a few because those who got in early will have more capital to buy faster computers to mine more of the coins. We are not paying attention to this.
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"This means creators in Second Life are 100 times more likely to earn over $10,000 than on Roblox. And they are 27 times more likely to become a millionaire." -- Dean Takahashi / Venture Beat
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You know that feeling in your heart making you want to connect with others? It goes all the way back to the beginning of the universe - when the first atoms snapped together to form a crystal. It is the force that perfectly opposes entropy. Another name for it is ‘love’.
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It is unfortunate that the first wave of distributed ledger tech has been about free market speculation (coins, NFTs, deFi), rather than democracy and governance (DAO, UBI, proof-of-human). Hopefully we will see that change, as there are many great possibilities in the latter.
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If you have time tomorrow at 1:30, please log into @highfidelityinc and help us test our scaling while we try to set a record for most people in one space together in VR. We're giving out gift cards, too.
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Adding my voice to those who are concerned that @doctorow isn't coming up in search results. If twitter is capriciously reducing access to people without explanation, we should all be prepared to leave in protest.
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A big Second Life thank you and shoutout to @Yuzuki_Eiren , who reached out and alerted us to a billing systems problem this weekend. You were a lifesaver, thank you so much.
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