Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: Comment of the Week
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One super-fun Monday activity i have is going through this blog's comment filter to confirm the nuking of apparent comment Spam. For the longest time (like the last 15 years), it's been quick and easy to spot the Spam comment, which is totally off-topic promotions with a link to a commerce/scam sites. In a recent…
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Virtual world experience from Wild Palms starts around 45 minutes in I asked readers for favorite depictions of the Metaverse/virtual worlds in movies and TV besides Ready Player One, and they delivered — starting with this oddball post-Twin Peaks TV classic from the 90s recommended by Ariane Barnes: Back in the 90's when VR was…
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One point raised by readers of my story about the inevitable arrival of ChatGPT-powered sexbot avatars in Second Life: Is this even allowed by the service's owner, OpenAI? Stone Johnson, creator of the Uma bot that I interviewed, answers the question this way: I should say that there is no violation of Terms of Service…
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Much interesting conversation on whether we'll pay for entertainment content created by AI — including, ironically but inevitably, a couple comments from Spam bots — with longtime reader Nadeja pointing to a coming glut of AI content: I think buying content that is mostly made by AI will eventually have no point. The smarter the…
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Lots of interesting chat in comments and on social media for my post about Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth heatedly insisting to me — "Dude just take the L"– that the company was still focused on the Metaverse despite not mentioning it at all in his latest "vision of the future" post. Rony Abovitz, founder and…
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Spinning off from MMO developers' thoughts around using AI for virtual world creation, Sinespace lead developer Adam Frisby shared his own recent experiences: [I] asked GPT-4 to design a quest for World of Warcraft; the results are no worse than the human output actually in the game; and certainly better than the 'radiant quests' in…
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Pretty amazing reader debate around my interview with professional game artist Penny Patton, who pointed out the problems with poorly optimized mesh items being sold in Second Life, and how to solve them. (That one shirt above, as I noted, has way more triangles than Kratos in God of War on the PlayStation 4.) Reader…
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In case you missed it, Tim Sweeney laid out his vision for the Metaverse last week after his company Epic unleashed a number of metaverse platform-related announcements — watch above at around 1 hour in: Let’s take a long term look at what we see here. And the core of it is some very real…
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A reader named “Nade” came along and posted a pretty interesting comment to Hilary Mason’s brilliant explanation of ChatGPT and how it’s often misunderstood: Most of the key ML/AI papers come from Google Brain and DeepMind. The 2017 paper on transformers “Attention is all you need” came from them too. OpenAI based their GPT models…
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Above: Current version of Chat/IM user interface on Crystal Frost Many SLers are excited about Berry Bunny's Crystal Frost, the Second Life-on-Unity project, because of graphics enhancements like physics- enabled water. In Comments, veteran metaverse developer Gwyneth Llewelyn notes how this will also enable the community to improve the user interface: By pushing the rendering…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 