TL;DR: you now need to pay a $20/month “meta premium” subscription to use a 100% offline feature that runs on your own malware-ridden smartglasses.
If you don’t subscribe, you can use the feature that is already included in the hardware that you already paid for 3 hours each month
The now-paywalled feature boosts the voice of the speaker in front of you, something that even low-end ANC earphones are doing now. 5 minutes of free usage per day is basically nothing.
This is the kind of enshitification thats good for society.
Fuck these privacy invading creep goggles. I hope they continue to make them worse to use and posses
good! hopefully this will discourage everyone who bought them from using them, so they just sit in a drawer somewhere or get recycled instead of spying on unwitting people, and meta will fail to make back the huge amounts of money they’ve invested in tech that most people don’t want 😌
It’s funny, I would love to some have the novel tech they developed (HUD / display built into glasses since I’m wearing them anyways). The problem, as usual, is corps taking the piss with prices and profit then spying on you and everyone around you non-stop anyways…
I would 100% be open to some HUD glasses delivered with a FOSS OS that works completely offline and/or via your phone (but still offline). But that’s seriously wishful thinking given our corporate and political overlords
I can’t think of anything I would want to have pop up in my view. I have a phone to hand all day, and the notifies me of important things.
Can you think of anything that you actually want so see constantly or so immediately you can’t pull a phone out of your pocket?
As someone with auditory processing disorder, the only thing i want is real-time closed captions of whoever is talking to me.
Oh that would be nice.
I think directions while walking would be better than carrying and looking down at a phone.
How fast do you walk that you need to constantly check? You can also have you phone all out instructions for the next turn.
I’d rather just have that overlay like Google already has for walking instead of pulling out my phone every few intersections or having it loudly announce that I’m a tourist to everyone in earshot.
Dude, you asked for examples of what people might find useful and now you’re just shitting on all of them.
I think the number of comments below you show the uses of glasses like that. I really think they would a lot of people who are disabled etc. For me they would really help me with some of my memory issues, especially since i’m looking to have a career in a genre of music where’s it’s frowned upon to have sheet notes
And I asked because I am ignorant about some of them. I also think a lot of what has been posted has been looking for a problem, not solving something.
Needing Google maps when walking? Is honestly a terrible reason. Phones, sign posts, smart watches all already solve this.
Someone just posted about closed captions when people are talking to them due to a disability, that’s a really good reason to have some kind of smart glasses.
For your situation, I don’t think smart glasses are really the answer, and are more of a band-aid. The real answer in my mind is using the sheet notes and getting the stigma changed(but I understand that is a lot, lot, lot harder than just getting smart glasses).
Yeah, I also try a lot to break the stigma. But I think a lot of people are ingrained in their ways and tradition and it takes more time or effort to see past it. It would also help to get a type of Shazam for the tune that’s playing to know what sheets to play too.
In any case, fair play to you for recognising there are some uses that could enable people.
Yea breaking stigmas is always the most uphill battle. I know it is not the same, but you see a lot of resistance to better tech in cycling. Things like disc brakes which are just better(outside of the tiny minority of cases) having so much fight against them.
I will say i am pretty opposed to the tech in many normal cases. Especially as it just seems like such a massive privacy nightmare at best. Or just shoe horning in tech for no real reason. I do think that everyone is already so in grossed in tech(I know I am a lot of the time) that they forget to just look around them and take in the world, and I think that smart glasses are that tipping point of going to far for most people.
I am happy to see that some really good use cases have been brought up, I am not all knowing I would in fact call me ignorant about a lot of things as I can only know what I know. But almost every good(even great) reason I have read has been based around improving life and interactions for people with disabilities which I can honestly get behind.
I’m actually OK with this enshittification, and hope it continues into oblivion on the Facebook spyglasses. Personally
def hope it reduces the glass-pervs out there.
Im sure the pervs will gladly pay extra
depressingly plausible;
Aren’t you supposed to wait for something to be widely adopted before you enshittify it?
I get long-term enshittification in pursuit of short term Line Must Go Up but I feel like this would significantly impede it even in the short term.
Kinda reeks of Meta being in financial trouble.
Subscriptions for offline features should be completely illegal. In fact Meta is probably already technically illegal.
Meta’s finances must be in the shitter to be enshittifying a premium product.
beginning of the end for yet another set of AR glasses
And thank god for that. Right now they’re just going to be secretley-always-on Zuckerberg surveillance tools in ways that phones struggle to replicate.
beginning of the end? i haven’t even seen the beginning of the beginning!
I’d say this is more like the middle of the end, with the beginning of the end being the Meta logo on them.
Good. Enshittification of the panopticon goggles.
This should be in “leopards at my face.” They didn’t care about the impact of their carless decisions, and now they are getting screwed.
their carless decisions,
Idk if they was a tacit reference or accidental, but…
I bout the bool and.couldn’t get far in it. It made me sick.
Non-paywalled: https://archive.ph/vGVor
Complete Article:
Would you pay $20 a month for access to AI hardware you already own? That appears to be one of Meta’s next bets. This week, it quietly announced that your glasses’ Conversation Focus feature will soon be limited to three hours of use per month, unless you pay for a $19.99 Meta One Premium subscription.In a help article, the company insists that it won’t require a subscription to use your glasses, period; it’s merely erecting a “rate limit” for certain AI features. Even premium subscribers will only get 15 hours of Conversation Focus per month under that “rate limit,” it claims.
Problem is, Meta’s rate limit is ridiculous. The Conversation Focus feature, which amplifies the voice of the person you’re speaking to so you can hear better in noisy environments, is not something that should plausibly be rate-limited, because it doesn’t use Meta’s servers. It runs on-device, using the chips inside the glasses that you’ve already purchased. I turned off my internet, and it kept working.
Meta’s description of “rate limits.”
Meta’s description of “rate limits.” Image: MetaHere’s how the company introduced it last year: “[C]onversation focus uses your AI glasses’ open-ear speakers, beamforming technology, and real-time spatial processing to dynamically amplify the voice of the person you’re talking to.”
Not only does it avoid Meta’s servers, but Conversation Focus doesn’t technically require an internet connection at all. I double-checked by turning off my phone’s Wi-Fi and cellular, turning on Airplane Mode, and I was still able to use Conversation Focus just fine by tapping a button on my phone.
Does Meta have some secret licensing deal with another company that costs it money every time a person uses Conversation Focus? Failing that, the rate limit sounds utterly bogus.
Meta is feeling some financial pressure trying to make AI happen, recently laying off around 10 percent of its entire workforce — around 8,000 people — to help offset its AI investment costs. It also recently managed to make three pairs of AI glasses $80 cheaper by nixing the Ray-Ban name. But perhaps ditching the branding isn’t the only way it plans to subsidize that move.
At a time when hardware is getting increasingly expensive, I suppose this isn’t as controversial as Meta quietly beginning to embed a facial recognition upgrade for these glasses in millions of phones, code that it has since quietly removed. Still, I’m filing this under “Meta will ruin its smart glasses by being Meta.”
We asked Meta if it could explain the move and whether the company plans to put other on-device features behind a subscription. Meta did not reply to those questions, but it did reach out to make it even clearer that the subscription is optional. “Most people will use Conversation Focus without hitting the monthly limit. The subscription is for power users who want expanded access and additional benefits like premium device support,” Meta spokesperson Tyler Yee tells The Verge.
“Out of the box, you’ll get core AI features like voice assistant, live translation, look and ask, and more. The subscription simply unlocks more access and more powerful features on your AI glasses. Currently, this only includes expanded access to Conversation Focus and premium device support.”
That “currently” does make it sound like Meta might put more features into a subscription bucket, but it also sounds like a few features will stay out of it.
My mom just caught one of her kids using these to cheat on a final. He had them Bluetoothed to his laptop and it disconnected at some point and she heard “the answer to number 7 is…” But she said he barely got a C on it even while cheating. So since she didn’t know about the glasses until after that student left and another student told her it was the glasses, she just kinda let it go saying “it’s honestly going to be his problem in the future.”
Edit: she couldn’t pin point the kid at the moment, and wasn’t informed who it was until after the kid was gone and the other student told her.
I’m not a teacher, but I dunno if that’s the right response to someone cheating. It is going to be his problem in the future, but as a teacher, isn’t it her job to teach the kid that that’s not OK? Sorta depends on the age, I suppose, but I’d definitely give the kid a 0% instead of a C.
You know, if the kid is using state of the art tech to cheat and he still only got a C, then maybe let this one go.
Maybe this kid needs all the help he can get.Teaching someone that cheating is a way to get a pass vs a fail isn’t helping anyone, in my opinion, but it could be situational.
Morality and such isn’t really a teacher’s job.
Besides that, “between no kid left behind” and government testing standards that are tied into funding, teaching a turned into a generic lump of shit, and everyone gets to pass.
It isn’t really an issue of morality imo, it’s a teacher’s job to give grades that reflect the student’s skill level.
Excuse me, with how shitty parents are, someone has to step up, or we are all screwed.
Let’s put aside who’s job is what, these kids are going to be building our future too.
I mean, they really won’t, since the old people are the ones who always vote. I’ll be dead by the time any of today’s school kids are in charge of anything and the teacher lesson plans, or no kids left behind aren’t going away any time soon. if you can’t teach your own children a sense of morality, you don’t even deserve to have a say in this discussion.
