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Facebook Renames to Meta

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Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What things would those be? As far as I know his successes are a) 1 idea he had as a 19-year-old plus b) some other things that he bought with the money from that.

* 1 idea he stole as a 19-year-old I'm not big on people complaining about "idea stealing", but zuck is in a league of his own with this shit, so worth pointing out that he didn't have the idea for FB.

Honestly, HarvardConnection would have been just MySpace but solely for Harvard users. Forums have been around since what, the 1980s (as BBSs)?

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#692
post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't include that because I don't see a workable, viable proposal. My intention was to list futures that I can see actually happening. I'm not against what you describe nor do I think it's mutually exclusive with option (3), but so far IMHO leftists have offered no solution to some of the inherent problems of this vision. The biggest one is how to make democracy work. How do you do good work under a democratic mo…

> as every engineer knows nothing good ever comes from a committee. That's a common adage, yet some of our most used technologies are created or maintained by committees - the Internet, web technologies, ECMAScript (enemy though it started out as a single person project), C++, OpenSSL, Unicode - these are all design-by-committee projects. Regarding your point about democracy vs oligarchy, this is to some extent a spe…

> That's a common adage, yet some of our most used technologies are created or maintained by committees - the Internet, web technologies, ECMAScript (enemy though it started out as a single person project), C++, OpenSSL, Unicode - these are all design-by-committee projects.

I think "created or maintained by committees" here is not precise enough. In most of these cases, especially in the case of net technologies, ECMAScript, and C++, a committee came into place only after independent vendors began to blaze the trail on their own. The committee's job here was to take existing implementations and distill them into a standard. This is important because individual entities often have almost no incentive to cooperate otherwise.

However, there are examples of initiatives created top-down by committee that ended up becoming too complicated to achieve actual usage. The OSI Model vs the TCP/IP model [1] is a good example of this failure.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite#Compar...

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were great acquisitions because Facebook failed to compete in those markets. Facebook continues to fail to compete in the youth market. I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen. And they're still failing to innovate. Facebook now will be "retooling" toward "serving young adults the north star, rather than optimizing for older people." https://twitt…

>I don't think failing to innovate and then buying your way out of the hole is a sign of particular acumen. I mean this is classic moving of goals posts - the only measure of acumen the CEO of a publically traded company is that little number called the share price. whether he buoys that number by brain-genius innovations or by brain-genius acquisitions, he's still demonstrating brain-genius business acumen (the proo…

Not at all.

I consider this in particular deeply incorrect: "only measure of acumen the CEO of a publicly traded company is that little number called the share price". And I'm hardly alone here. Indeed, the whole reason Facebook is in public doghouse right now is Zuckerberg's focus on dominance and profit without regard to little externalities like genocide. So you may have different goalposts for him, but that doesn't mean I've moved anything.

If I'm trying to understand somebody's acumen, I want to see what they can do on their own. As someone else pointed out, Zuckerberg didn't even really have the one idea that he successfully exploited. He's rich, sure, but, "He's so rich that he must be a genius" is pretty far from my criteria for genius.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#694
I really hope this transparent dodge to avoid regulators doesn't work out. The first time Zuck says "Oh, don't subpoena me, subpoena this human shield" Congress needs to turn around and say no.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#695

Can anyone here convince me AR/VR isn't a fad? If FB is headed towards a metaverse where our insane uncles can embed themselves further in a false reality, how is it that the rest of us sane individuals want to join their conspiratorial matrix? Even taking out the crazy uncles, VR makes me insanely nauseous. What's more, it's very expensive to get solid VR that doesn't, nevermind it still looks terrible even if you h…

VR the implementation is prone to false starts. I still don’t know whether this current wave will stick.

But VR the concept is universal and inevitable. The idea of feeding artificial input to the biological senses, in order to place our consciousness elsewhere, is a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle. No way does humanity leave that option on the table once it’s technologically feasible.

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#696
Thanks to Facebook, the word meta will soon sound like a curse. Words like “metadata” will start sounding very sinister.

Anything else you can do to ruin our day, Meta?

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#698
post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is investing 10 billion dollars into the metaverse this year alone and will increase this amount in the future. They can probably make the Metaverse an open standard like the web and still end up with one of the most popular hubs. If people who value their privacy can setup their own hubs, i'm pretty much OK with Facebook speeding up the advancement of AR/VR technology for the next several years using their…

>They can probably make the Metaverse an open standard like the web Thanks I needed the laugh.

Fwiw that is the stated intention:

> I think the most important piece here is that the virtual goods and digital economy that’s going to get built out, that that can be interoperable. It’s not just about you build an app or an experience that can work across our headset or someone else’s, I think it’s really important that basically if you have your avatar and your digital clothes and your digital tools and the experiences around that — I think being able to take that to other experiences that other people build, whether it’s on a platform that we’re building or not, is going to be really foundational and will unlock a lot of value if that’s a thing that we can do.

https://stratechery.com/2021/an-interview-with-mark-zuckerbe...

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish he'd just present as his awkward true self, instead of this prerecorded, fake cringefest, something Musk doesn't shy away from

Yeah but his "true self" isn't exactly something 99.99% of people enjoy. He's a robotic tool. Looks to me like he signed up for a "how to appear more human 101" course and now gesticulates with his hands non-stop.

Musk isn't a great rhetorician, and many people don't like his personality either. But some like him nonetheless, they empathize with him and see beyond that, because they see some of the drives and desires behind the unusual facade. I'm sure Zuckerberg signed up for such courses, but I don't think it's comfortable for him, or his audience either. Ignorance is bliss, forcing oneself to be hyperaware of ones own appearance, gestures and statements to please others seems wrong. Who enjoys such a lie?

Re: Facebook Renames to Meta

#700
post #233
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t like Facebook one bit, but Zuck is almost always spot on with his bets. So yes, incredibly scary as it has a high likelihood of succeeding.

This discounts a lot of failures and products without real success: - Facebook Apps - Facebook Home - Facebook Workplace - Facebook Portal - Facebook Essentials What he's done well: found promising competition and subsumed them. I think AR is going to be a huge part of the future. I don't think Facebook is going to lead that effort, not because I don't want them to (though I don't), but because they don't have a trac…

So what you’re saying is, now would be a good time to be a promising social AR/VR startup?
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