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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

#91

Post by Galanwe »

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…

> 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.

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

#92

Post by cess11 »

jocaal wrote: post #15
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…

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.

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

#93

Post by pastage »

alex1138 wrote: post #60
dep_b wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably true if you look at all big tech companies, but before Windows, MacOS, Oracle Databases or IBM computers did not have the responsibility of dealing with the communication and shaping of world view of billions of people world wide. It's the same as owning a large share of news papers or TV channels. You own the public discourse. If Larry Ellison is a greedy immoral bastard I switch to MS SQL Server, o…

I know your comment isn't about Elon specifically and I have my own reservations about some of what he does, but it's important to point out (and maybe this depends on what you call "misinformation", it shapes all future discussion) that Twitter absolutely was censoring for partisan reasons (before he bought it; I know some have complained Musk does indeed ban his critics) including silencing covid dissent, real doct…

Everything is not partisan it might be political. The Republican vs. Democratic is hurting the US badly you can not continue to make everything ok just because you need the support from whatever extreme views is populist in your party.

Most of the things a party does is not extreme but you guys are going insane over there.

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

#94

Post by mola »

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.

Power can be diffused. Wealth accumulation is power concentration. When it's legal to buy politicians then what is corruption? How can you go after corruption when those with power define what is corruption?

Concentrated power is corrupt, there's no power without the will to wield it. If you have more power than 99 percent of humans, they become insects for you.

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

#95

Post by Neil44 »

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.

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

#96

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

HenryBemis wrote: post #51
linotype wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to delete your account though. They may still track you, but you’re not feeding the attention machine.

It won't 'protect' you. They still track you and have a shadow account for you, and sell the data. FB is a cancer that won't go away until we/you do. You can protect yourself by blocking all 'social media buttons' (as LI or Pinterest do the same), and for FB block every domain they use and their range of IPs. But there are so many trackers that will (eventually) get the 'job' done, so you either do 'more' (replace ho…

> It won't 'protect' you. They still track you and have a shadow account for you, and sell the data. FB is a cancer that won't go away until we/you do.

Firstly, this is just not true. Like basically all users who couldn't be mapped to a FB person were given userid=0, which I guess is a shadow account, but it's pretty crap as a method of tracking people. Source: worked at FB for half a decade.

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

#97

Post by tasuki »

frereubu wrote: post #83
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…

The idealism is the current corporate story - "enabling communication" etc. - but you're right that there was no idealism to start with. Zuckerberg set up The Facebook so undergrads at Harvard could rate how hot girls were, scraping their images from unprotected university servers. This is a great podcast centred around the film about it - The Social Network - but it delves really interestingly into the story and mot…

[flagged]

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

#98

Post by netsharc »

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 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 guessing this person did. And it's certainly not even the address book, but the email addresses from people's inboxes (and why not the names from the "From" field as well. If I was tasked with this I'd even suggest scraping any signature fields).

Hey, at least it bought Zuck a $900K watch.

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

#99

Post by pcthrowaway »

__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.

> 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.

This is almost exactly how I feel about Kubernetes

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