The author mischaracterizes algorithms and ridiculously attributes their importance in computer science to a desire by programmers to polish their own images. He reveals ignorance of one of the biggest motivations for the earliest computers, which was to solve differential equations in several domains. Eigenvalue estimation algorithms existed long before Page Rank.
Facebook’s war on free will
81–90 of 284 posts
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#82> Data, like victims of torture, tells its interrogator what it wants to hear
That is a great analogy and something that bit more than a few scientists and engineers over the years
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#83It's the Internet that enables communication. Families and friends would be able to communicate once the Internet became possible whether Facebook exists or not. People would be able to use and get value from the Internet whether Google exists or not. These companies add value but they are not the Internet. If they didn't exist the Internet will continue being useful. What they have been able to do is inject themselv…
I hate to defend Facebook, but I'm not sure about their data having no value for the users. One such example would be that they've connected people who were otherwise unknowing of each other. People have found long lost relatives due to the big data that Facebook has. I'd say that's value.
And I've seen friendships and families destroyed by arguments on FaceBook.
We've also seen how much of it is truly fake, curated by foreign companies and political groups to push agendas.
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument I've heard in favor of this is that in 1995 if you wanted to talk to Aunt Sylvia in Indiana you had to pick up the phone and call her. More often than not, this resulted in a 20-30 minute conversation where you talked about something. This would happen, what, once every few weeks or months? Now, you see her in your news feed, and you might like it or fire off a one-sentence [fragment] comment. This mini-…
Facebooks whole shtick is making you feel like your being social. In reality you are partaking in the most superficial 'fast food' social needs scratching imaginable. This causes people to become addicted to a constant stream of ultimately unsatisfying validation at the cost of spending time on meaningful relationships.
Facebook being social 'fast food' (or junk food) is the best analogy I've seen. Great thought!
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#85It's the Internet that enables communication. Families and friends would be able to communicate once the Internet became possible whether Facebook exists or not. People would be able to use and get value from the Internet whether Google exists or not. These companies add value but they are not the Internet. If they didn't exist the Internet will continue being useful. What they have been able to do is inject themselv…
I'm not sure if you remember the internet before Google, but finding stuff was significantly more difficult. Other search engines were either based off of manually curated indexes or were simple keyword searches and you'd often need to scroll pages of results to find a match that was actually relevant to what you wanted.
People used to buy printed books with lists of useful websites to help find things.
So yes, the internet existed before Google and would exist without it, but Google Search was a game-changer in making it useful to the average person.
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
In context, it doesn't appear that he actually believes the first video games, for example, to be a marvel - he's deliberately describing the programmers at MIT in a way to make them seem childish and naive. This makes his point that Zuckerberg is both childish and exploitative an easier one to support.
Immediately preceding sentence: "The heroes of his adolescence were the original hackers. These weren’t malevolent data thieves or cyberterrorists. Zuckerberg’s hacker heroes were disrespectful of authority. They were technically virtuosic, infinitely resourceful nerd cowboys, unbound by conventional thinking." I think you're reading a sarcasm into it that I'm not seeing? > "Plenty of companies have similarly appropr…
>I think you're reading a sarcasm into it that I'm not seeing?
It's possible - I've also read his book and some other work of his. He's a very good writer, though, so if it's there, it's almost certainly intentional.
If you follow that paragraph, 'With their free time, they played epic pranks, which happened to draw further attention to their own cleverness – ' is then followed up by Foer's description of them as the enemy of suited bureaucracy. It makes you imagine young people going against a paternal figure, but the examples he chooses both cut their credibility and show that their fight was ultimately useless. It also provides better juxtaposition for his ultimate point about Zuckerberg's perversion of the hacker ethos.
You're right, he is painting Zuckerberg as a wannabe. A boy who wants to emulate naive heroes but doesn't have the 'technical virtuosity' and ends up exploiting the culture he's almost but not quite a part of, turning it from something fairly harmless into something that Foer believes is extremely dangerous for society.
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#877 words about Facebook:
No way to put pages into categories
(so much about free will / organzing)
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#88It's the Internet that enables communication. Families and friends would be able to communicate once the Internet became possible whether Facebook exists or not. People would be able to use and get value from the Internet whether Google exists or not. These companies add value but they are not the Internet. If they didn't exist the Internet will continue being useful. What they have been able to do is inject themselv…
I hate to defend Facebook, but I'm not sure about their data having no value for the users. One such example would be that they've connected people who were otherwise unknowing of each other. People have found long lost relatives due to the big data that Facebook has. I'd say that's value.
Is there really value in an online connection to a distant person who you didn't know existed, at the expense of time you could be spending on face-to-face local relationships?
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#89Slight tangent - since the image of the 1 Hacker Way FB sign is invariably used in FB pieces, its amusing to note that the back of this sign still shows the Sun Microsystems logo that they cheaply painted over when they took the space over:
Re: Facebook’s war on free will
#90> The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines. This is the money quote of this article, and it's been on my mind quite a bit as of late. More than ever, we live in a world where there are many forces ready to take full advantage of our laziness. It takes a bit of introspection to really understand the tradeoffs that are appr…
Facebook is very useful to me - as an address book. There has never been a better tool to get in touch with folks not talked to in years.
As for the 99% of the profit-making garbage on that site, I haven't bothered since the Snowden disclosures.