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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

#131

Post by alterom »

max_ wrote: post #24
kelnos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly the "maximum big level" is something that reasonable people could disagree about, but I don't think a society is healthy when people can get as big as Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, and Bezos have gotten. Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.

It is definitely not healthy. But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism. I think the real problem is abuse of power, not accumulation of it. Power cannot be eliminated. It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros) or remain in hands of wealth creators. What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

>But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism

I'll have "Everything I don't like is communism" for 500, Alex.

Ever heard of this little-known thing called taxes?

Particularly, progressive taxation and wealth taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax

>What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

Wealth isn't power.

Obscene accumulation of wealth is abuse of power in and of itself.

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

#133

Post by latexr »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #104
blitzar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve seen people smugly post ChatGPT screenshots without commentary with the intent of ending a conversation in a “I’m right and this proves it” way.

Of course, the wronger the answer is the more likely they are to have that attitude.

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

#134

Post by KaiserPro »

wisty wrote: post #45

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies. Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into usi…

> Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names

No, FB was a much better product, it was far more connected, any way easier to talk and make friends online. It also was a lot more reliable.

> Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.

Indeed, they were not kind, mainly because they realised, way too late, that the API they had designed gave third parties way too much access to the "social graph". (see Cambridge analytica, although actually its much more smoke and mirrors than you might imagine)

They needed to cut down that access because 1) they'd been told to 2) they realised that people could extract that data for free, thus denting their analytics advantage that made advertising so lucrative.

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

#135

Post by jocaal »

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.

I didn't say the products are trash because of who is at the helm of the companies. They are just bad compared to alternatives. Period.

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

#136

Post by jemmyw »

max_ wrote: post #24
kelnos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly the "maximum big level" is something that reasonable people could disagree about, but I don't think a society is healthy when people can get as big as Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, and Bezos have gotten. Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.

It is definitely not healthy. But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism. I think the real problem is abuse of power, not accumulation of it. Power cannot be eliminated. It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros) or remain in hands of wealth creators. What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

You can limit people's wealth and it's not communism. If it was communism then they wouldn't have any wealth at all. A limit would just be democratic capitalism with a limit. There's no rule in capitalism that says you can't be taxed, or that the taxes couldn't be designed to approach a wealth limit. It's an economic system, not an entire governmental and social handbook.

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

#137

Post by latexr »

anal_reactor wrote: post #120
latexr wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? That’s how Zuckerberg painted it, and no doubt there were people who bought it, at least internally. See the red book. https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook

The number of people who drank the kool-aid is astonishing. To the same tune, I think that if you tell people that politicians lie, majority of them will be deeply shocked, hurt, and offended.

I’m not sure that’s true in general. I see many people do the polar opposite: spout “every politician is the same, they’re all crooks”. Which isn’t helpful either.

Could be a generational or cultural thing, though.

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

#138

Post by jocaal »

cess11 wrote: post #92
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.

Have you tried figuring it out? It's not magic or miracle, there are reasons why they're profitable and if it's not obvious you might get surprised and learn something if you try to study it. One reason is that they are extremely manipulative and strategically exploit people with power over other people's money, notably taxes and what labour generates.

They are super profitable because of the naivety of their customers and for that you can't blame the companies themselves.

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

#139

Post by jkukul »

wisty wrote: post #45

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies. Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into usi…

> and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big.

I sometimes wonder what motivations these orgs have in contributing to open source.

My cynical side refuses to believe that the reasons are altruistic (although I'm sure there are altruistic individuals in those orgs!).

I think that the decisions to contribute to open source are calculated business decisions made to benefit the organization by:

* Getting outside contributions to the software that's widely used inside an organization

* Getting more people familiar with the software so that when they're hired they are already up to speed

* Attracting talent

* Improving PR

* Undermining competition (Llama?)

Regardless of the reasons, I think that there's a huge net benefit to society from large companies open-sourcing their software. I just don't think that's an argument to view these companies more favorably.

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