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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

#151
post #24
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.

Then the people who punish those in power will gain too much power.

The reality is our system is not compatible with the internet. Our system is made for a network with much lower density and clustering coefficient. When you crank these up with the internet, it creates power law distributions everywhere.

Complaining a few people have all the wealth when we have created a society with this massive power law distribution of wealth is just pointlessly stupid. Of course they do.

There is nothing really to figure out. The system isn't going to work long term. I think most people are just in denial of this because they think there is a solution. No, what we are doing right now, communicating like this, is the problem itself.

Of course, if we stopped using the internet society would collapse too.

There is no solution.

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

#152
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its sexism all the way down - Sandberg would not have done that to a male subordinate (who's wife was giving birth) and a male boss would not have done that to Wynn-Williams. Women should not discriminate against women in the workplace because they are women.

Plenty of men get asked to do work that takes them away from their families, including at special events. Controversial, but shouldn't be: men are on average better at standing up for themselves and saying "no".

I'm not sure whether men are truly better on average, or women are just on average more conditioned by our societies not to do so or even if, to do so in a manner that isn't effective.

Unlearning ~2 decades of upbringing, education, expectations, some of that from religion, etc when entering the workforce could be pretty hard and significantly affect any statistics around this.

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

#153
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> this sort of power transferred to twitter

Twitter is not the place where the masses are being influenced. Especially outside the US, as in most other countries Twitter barely found adoption outside of tech and journalist circles.

The majority of voting people (= old people) are still on Facebook. And besides Facebook, Meta also own Instagram. Meta is definitely the single company with the most encompassing political influence tool, should it choose to use it.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you. I remember FB recommending me a contact, I thought "Why does that distinctive name sound familar?". I looked through my e-mails and I had sent a few emails back and forth with the person because of an eBay transaction. I know I never told FB to scrape my email account, but I'm guessin…

Facebook is routinely suggesting me contacts that I have met and interacted with offline, the only link to them being an entry in my phone book. Which, I'm guessing, I allowed Messenger to have access to at some point. Other than that, it's inference from GPS/location data, which Meta, as far as I know, didn't deny doing.

Were you ever connected to the same Wifi network? You can probably use that for tracking too.

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

#155
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 also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you. I remember FB recommending me a contact, I thought "Why does that distinctive name sound familar?". I looked through my e-mails and I had sent a few emails back and forth with the person because of an eBay transaction. I know I never told FB to scrape my email account, but I'm guessin…

I don't think that they'd go as far as scanning mailboxes, the return on the effort doesn't seem worth it. More likely the person you were connected to added you to an address book (or perhaps their mailer added you automatically) as someone they have dealt with before. Some anti-spam measures use a source address existing in a connected addressbook as a whitelisting clue.

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

#156
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…

> It had the best network effect because of its real name policy

I think it was the best network effect because it started as an elite network in US universities and propagated from there.

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

#157
post #86

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.

That explains some of the experiences ive seen at small companies! From my pov it was "design-by-resume." People wanted to play w tech for their next job, with less concern for what the business needed.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because your opinion is wrong. I was having a strong argument/discussion yesterday with a friend who is a communist. A real "I want hammer and sickle" kinda guy. He owns two homes, works for big-pharma, his wife works for big-logistic, scuba-diving vacations across the planet, very 'communist' way of life. His opinions (just as the parent-commenter) are not 'wrong'. His/her/our/their (not pronouns, just groups of p…

>a friend who is a communist. >His opinions (just as the parent-commenter) are not 'wrong'. Yes they are. Communism is obviously wrong. Are you joking?

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