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Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#101

Post by ajb »

__loam wrote: post #86
rajman187 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) Not to detract from your main point but I think this misses a lot of contributions, eg Cassandra, Hive, Presto, GraphQL, the plethora of publications coming out of FAIR (fundamental AI research) and of course the Llama family of models which have enabled quite a few developments themselves

I think React and GraphQL are pretty impressive in terms of how shitty they've made the developer experience at so many companies. GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.

There's actually a well-known effect in standards, that large orgs want to overcomplicate them, as having implemented a bunch of overcomplicated standards becomes part of their moat against competitors. This is definitely done deliberately; the most blatant example is Office Open XML but it's true of others too. They know that they have the staff to waste effort on it, and others don't.

I'm not sure anyone is thinking 'lets open source our most dumb ideas to hobble potential competition' - but they would do it if they thought of it.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#102

Post by avgd »

poincaredisk wrote: post #87
blitzar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Facebook though - I can not think of a lower stakes workplace. Should the photo grid be 3 wide or 5 wide... Thank god ChatGPT can now pump out the mindless talking points for them.

It's Facebook - a website that is a large part of life to over 3 billion users. A website that can influence elections in major countries, that sometimes shows fake ads and is responsible for (roughly) millions of frauds caused by them, that incited genocides in African countries. I don't think the stakes are that low.

> website that can influence elections in major countries,

I think this sort of power transferred to twitter, with most of the users who haven't left facebook being boomers who keep reposting AI slop over and over and over.

The rare times I look at my facebook account, all I see is the older members of my family spamming AI garbage like shrimp jesus, "look at this nice dog sculpture I made out of wood" (that I didn't actually make), videos of random nonsense like dogs taking care of toddlers and behaving like humans etc.

FB has become AI slop no man's land.

I don't even understand how facebook continues to operate at this point.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#103

Post by [deleted] »

blitzar wrote: post #52
aoanevdus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious what would be considered the industry standard for fact checking in tech. Does Google Search, Apple App Store, TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon store, etc. apply fact-checking to the content posted by users/sellers? Or more abstractly, is fact-checking the responsibility of authors and content editors, or of platforms and infrastructure that spread the content?

Wikipedia is the gold standard. Good enough is asking Grok.

[deleted]

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#104

Post by pcthrowaway »

blitzar wrote: post #52
aoanevdus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious what would be considered the industry standard for fact checking in tech. Does Google Search, Apple App Store, TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon store, etc. apply fact-checking to the content posted by users/sellers? Or more abstractly, is fact-checking the responsibility of authors and content editors, or of platforms and infrastructure that spread the content?

Wikipedia is the gold standard. Good enough is asking Grok.

A Youtuber I follow got in an argument a couple of days ago with someone who kept claiming the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 was primarily voluntary (not by force or a response to threats to their safety). The Youtuber kept asking him for sources (providing his own to the contrary), and the contrarian kept, I shit you not, asking Grok and then citing Grok as his source.

We are fucked.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#105

Post by wqaatwt »

dzonga wrote: post #9

you don't become a global ceo without being an absolute killer and not having non-questionable morals. I can make up different stuff about how a ceo can be amoral, and those would still apply to zuck / {{ whoelse }} book meant to be sold at airports for bored people. non-story.

Seems like historical founders/CEOs like e.g. Hewlett and Packard were relatively decent people despite being immensely successful.

So at least it was possible back in the day (of course after this many years a lot of details were lost and overall standards and expectations were very different back then).

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#106

Post by wqaatwt »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71
blitzar wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boards have a lot to answer for, and in theory at least, this is their responsibility. It did not work out that well for the OpenAi board however.

> Boards have a lot to answer for, and in theory at least, this is their responsibility Boards have plenty of things they're properly responsible for. CEO sociopathy isn't one of them, especially not if it's the profitable type of assholery. The regulation has to come from outside.

How do you legally stop extremely ambitious sociopaths from obtaining positions of power?

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#107

Post by close04 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #29
jocaal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the people you mentioned's companies sell products your life depends on. If you don't like them, don't use or buy their products. I'm of the opinion that AWS, facebook and tesla cars are genuine trash. I don't know why people use that stuff.

Because your opinion is wrong. Problems with social media notwithstanding, just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad. Most people don't give two fraks about who Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg are, and they definitely don't think of them when using products and services from the companies you mentioned.

> just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad.

And just because that product does something you need doesn't mean it's not trash. GP didn't say "all cloud, all social media, all cars". Heck, literal trash is not all trash, people throw away a lot of good stuff.

Many people thought Tesla cars are diamond studded trash since Musk was still an idol. And it was pretty objective, great motor/battery surrounded by bargain bin components.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#108

Post by hermannj314 »

roywashere wrote: post #57
isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, s…

> Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... People amassing more money than entire countries just should not happen. "Eat the rich"!

Tuvalu has a GDP of $70 million. Is that the line?

It is a very small country.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#109

Post by stef25 »

kelnos wrote: post #13
isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, s…

> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?! Sure, but you can look at this in one of two ways. One is the way you seem to be angling for, where we have an employee who is so disturbingly eager to please that she continues to do work at absurd times when no one should ever e…

If you have a job at Facebook today, you can get an impressive job somewhere else tomorrow. Nobody should be that connected.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#110

Post by baxtr »

This triggers my cautionary nerve a bit. I think it is important to recognize that she wants to sell a book.

I am not saying she isn't doing this because she has a cause. I am also not saying she is lying or anything.

But if you sell a book you can't deny that there might be a conflict of interest. Potentially she paints things more extreme than they really were.

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