Item — HN Reader

I'd be the first one to buy these if they weren't made by Meta. I've wanted a pair of smartglasses for a very long time, and these seem like the first viable pair in terms of capabilities - aside from the thickness, which I can live with.

Unfortunately, Meta, and Zuckerberg, have been involved in far too much malfeasance. I just can't ethically justify buying a product from them again. I'm hoping that viable competitors become available, but it's going to be hard to compete with Meta's investment, especially on the HCI front.

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Fwiw i don’t have a facebook/instagram account (have whatsapp) and am still able to use all functionality in my Meta Rayban glasses.

I struggled with this question too. Unfortunately our current system doesn’t make it easy for startups to build this stuff at scale without being gobbled up (the FTC under Lina Khan seemed to want to change that but oh well) so Im resigned to using Big Tech products if they’re the only option.

> Fwiw i don’t have a facebook/instagram account (have whatsapp) and am still able to use all functionality in my Meta Rayban glasses.

That was the promise when I originally bought the Quest 2, but a year later they forcibly tied those accounts to Meta accounts and through that, facebook accounts. Now I can't use my Quest 2 because it is locked into an account verification screen, demanding that I upload a photograph of my drivers license to access the games I already purchased from the quest store.

Meta cannot be trusted.

That was the promise with the original Rift, not the Quest. The Quest2 required a Facebook account from day one and never worked with an Oculus account, unlike Quest1. They relaxed the requirement in 2022 to only require a Meta account and converted all old accounts to Meta accounts later on (and if you didn't login to 'ok' that change they deleted your account completely including all the games).

If you created the account early in the Quest2's life, or hit the wrong button in the UI, your Meta account will end up linked to your Facebook account.

You might be able to unlink the Facebook account from your Meta account at https://accountscenter.meta.com/accounts, though I don't know if you can still reach the page.

It's a tough needle to thread. I mentor a high school robotics team that's using a Quest 3S as odometry. You'd be astonished at how well a Quest keeps up while both spinning around and moving laterally at 12mph. Imagine an IMU that never, ever drifts no matter how much you whip it around. And you can just buy this thing from the local Best Buy! And it's cheap!

And yet, Meta is squeezing every cent they can out of our attention spans, and knowingly tearing apart the fabric of our society in the process. Do I discourage the kids from doing amazing stuff with Meta's gadgets? I don't think so. They're not my kids. It's not really my place to be having those conversations with them.