Gary Mintchell

December 20, 2022

Metaverse Fedaverse Where the Heck are we Going

OK, it has been a while. I had a late summer project that sucked up time like a black bear sucking up honey at a bee hive. November was filled with trips, Thanksgiving, and a little outpatient surgery (nothing serious, but fixed an anomaly as we say in process control). Time to get back into the rhythms of newsletter, podcast, and blogging.

A thank you to my long-time sponsor, Inductive Automation. Its Ignition SCADA and IoT platform has become a leader in that space. 

I'm researching for some longer essays on the meaning of work. Coming out of the pandemic, people are taking a new look at the type of work they do, going to the office or not, and even where and how they want to live. When I was in graduate school, I worked on developing a paper based on a thought of Karl Marx (before Das Kapital) on how humans had become alienated from the fruits of their work. If you have any thoughts on work, life, meaning, and the like, please reply.

I took a look at the Metaverse. https://themanufacturingconnection.com/2022/11/industrial-metaverse-dream-or-real/ IIoT World conducted a Web-based panel discussion on the topic. I served as moderator. It brought out some interesting ideas. Digital Twin is an essential foundation. Sensors are crucial. Visualization tools are the end point. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg popularized the phrase as he described how the new Facebook was going to capture our collective attention for longer periods in order to show us even more advertising. Thoughts?

Metaverse supplanted 5G as the topic of news for a while. Now it is the "Fedaverse". I've avoided writing about the whole Twitter fiasco. Many of the tech "cool kids" have rushed to Mastodon. This twitter-like app builds on a federated platform, hence, Fedaverse. I will be playing with this over the holidays. Looks cool.

Mainstream media has been fascinated with the continuing drama that is Elon Musk and Twitter. Here is an article from The New York Times on Musk's management style and how some of the Silicon Valley bosses are drooling over his ability to wield so much power over employees. I offer with no further comment other than my management style and coaching would be 180 degrees from this.

Elon Musk Management Style
NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/technology/elon-musk-management-style.html
It may seem obvious, to most people outside Silicon Valley, that Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has been an unmitigated disaster.

In less than two months since taking over, Mr. Musk has fired more than half of Twitter’s staff, scared away many of its major advertisers, made (and unmade) a series of ill-advised changes to its verification program, angered regulators and politicians with erratic and offensive tweets, declared a short-lived war on Apple, greenlit a bizarre “Twitter Files” exposé, stopped paying rent on Twitter’s offices, and falsely accused the company’s former head of trust and safety of supporting pedophilia. His personal fortune has shrunk by billions of dollars, and he was booed at a Dave Chappelle show.

It’s not, by almost any measure, going well for him. And yet, one group is still firmly in Mr. Musk’s corner: Bosses.

Paul Graham, a venture capital legend, writes monthly longer essays on deeper topics. The latest is on "The Need To Read". 
http://www.paulgraham.com/read.html

You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things. People who just want information may find other ways to get it. But people who want to have ideas can't afford to.

And from the archives of The Manufacturing Connection:

Some news from Siemens IT https://themanufacturingconnection.com/2022/12/a-little-it-update-from-siemens-edge-and-networking/

Rockwell Automation Updates https://themanufacturingconnection.com/2022/12/rockwell-automation-smart-machine-safety-security-announcements/

AVEVA updates https://themanufacturingconnection.com/2022/12/aveva-world-announcements/

Gary