181–190 of 368 posts
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…
We still haven't found out how to use the internet to socialize, without resorting to giving power to a central entity. If there is something out there that can do this, profitably, then we can kiss these mega social giants good bye. I heard about the Blue Sky protocol, but it still feels primitive.
You realize people (including me) were socializing on the internet before any of these big companies existed, right?
All else aside Zuck was basically a kid when the whole Facebook rocket ship ride took off. Nobody is their best self all day every day. Personally I always thought he came over as kind of an asshole but you have to keep hit pieces like these in the right frame. The shortest accurate answer to what's Zuck like is "I never met him" the rest is just clicks and hot air.
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> 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.
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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.
I mean, you're both probably correct. In the US a huge portion of the population doesn't vote, I would expect those that think every politician is a crook. The other side that does vote thinks the other politician lies and their politician is the good one.
> 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…
>the idealistic Twitter Never saw Twitter as idealistic. Seems to just want to show you celebrity gossip. Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start, and really pioneered the attempts at trying to continuously grab people's attention as opposed to just being a tool. Not really a defense of Zuck's products as a whole as Instagram seems to be the same. >Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people…
I disagree. When Twitter first started taking off at SXSW twenty years ago it had very little in common with Facebook. There wasn't an algorithm, there were no ads, and there was barely a website. You just received text messages from people you followed. You mostly interacted with it via your phone and for many of us, that meant text entry on the digits keys of a Nokia or Motorola phone. It was delightful. You likely personally knew all the people you were tweeting with.
Facebook was something you did on your computer. There were lots of ads and they had just launched the algorithmic news feed. It was the beginning of something bad IMHO.
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> 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 are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses
1. I hate these "click-and-hold" "bot" "detectors" that takes 6, 7 seconds or longer to complete. 2. Making me do it three times in a row is just obnoxious.
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…
> Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... There should be a level of market cap where you company has to split, period. Megacorps create oligarchs, ruin competition and cheat antitrust.
On a different note; it's funny how otherwise reasonable people (on HN but also in general) become stereotypical gossiping girls whenever there's expose on %famous_person% or a cheap ideological position to have fun with. Woah, corporate America sure rewards the fucked-up people! We do, indeed, live in a society. Chirp chirp