You know, I had other things I wanted to yell about. I have about five essays in my drafts folder about like, deep systemic issues and big bad shadows on the horizon. And I have like three jobs, all of which are screaming for my attention. But I cannot

I recently listened to a “tech” podcast host drone on for 45 minutes about the “Elon vs Zuck” cage match and this piece perfectly captures the frothing, screaming stream-of-conciousness in my brain at the thought of seeing another discussion about Twitter vs Threads/Insta/Face/burning-sh*itpile. I felt some small amount of catharsis just from reading.

  • NewtraEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m all for hating on Musk, and Meta’s hellscape of social networks and privacy violations, but when you take a step away from the capitalist front, Meta and Zuckerberg haven’t been as evil as the likes of Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Sure, he’s in a bad bunch, but IMO he’s the least bad human being in the billionaire celebrities club.

    Meta’s open-sourcing has greatly changed my life for the better: React, PyTorch, Zstandard, Yarn, etc are joys to work with compared to their competitors. LLaMA and No Language Left Behind have been huge developments in the AI world - released without trying to profit from them. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funds great science and even almost funded one of my projects.

    For contrast, Apple, Amazon and Tesla barely open-source anything, and a lot of Google’s open source stuff is garbage. Bill Gates eventually turned to charity after retiring from utterly ruining the PC software market, Bezos claims he plans to give his fortune away eventually, but Zuckerberg started being charitable way earlier than those guys.

    I’m all for burning down capitalism and social networks and billionaires, but not all bad things are the same level of bad.

    • HughJanusEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      LLaMA and No Language Left Behind have been huge developments in the AI world - released without trying to profit from them.

      You’re delusional if you really believe that. They’re entirely planning to profit from them. They just need more developers to do it because it’s a monumental task.

      The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funds great science and even almost funded one of my projects.

      Yeah and Bill Gates did all kinds of objectively great philanthropy but he made that money by fucking consumers repeatedly for decades.

      • NewtraEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        They’re entirely planning to profit from them.

        What I mean is that they didn’t try to profit from their open-sourcing. They didn’t lock them behind an API or charge a licensing fee like other AI companies.

        Absolutely they’ll profit from having these models, but open-sourcing them actually gave some advantage to their competitors & the general public.

        Yeah and Bill Gates did all kinds of objectively great philanthropy but he made that money by fucking consumers repeatedly for decades.

        The difference is timing. Bill Gates only started thinking about the impact he made on the world after he completely fucked us. He’s trying to repent and just fix his reputation after the fact. Zuckerberg started trying to fix the world while relatively early into the fucking. It’s as if he realizes the harm and is trying to offset it.