I would be shocked if the company was actually breaking even.

Facebook needs to be burned to the ground. I’ll let you decide if that means in a business or physical sense. It is a cancer consuming us from the inside out.

I hope that some of the coders losing their jobs to AI find a way to poisoning the well somehow and create tools to undermine the technology, the companies paying for it, and the oligarchs that want it.

Given that we are going full authoritarian fascist now, perhaps the EU should ban Google, given the US tik tok precedent.

20 years ago, a piece of shit like Mark Zuckerberg would have used a similarly meaningless term like “political correctness” instead. Made no sense then and makes no sense now. What is the problem exactly? Is there something wrong with having an ethical framework and applying it consistently? Or, having standards? Using this framing, any ideological viewpoint is inherently bad, including the nihilistic and hypocritical one that Zuckerberg himself is expressing here. It’s all just nonsense, and further evidence that the economy that plied this asshole with so much wealth is anything but a meritocracy.

This is correct.

Feudal lords like Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk will wrap themselves in fake populist notions like “free expression”, but they will never, ever tolerate speech that meaningfully challenges the entrenched power structure that they benefit from. All of their feel good taglines are an intentional misdirection designed to pacify the mob that would tear them to pieces if they actually realized what was happening. Remember “Democracy dies in darkness”? I work in Silicon Valley and I’ve been trying to educate family members who continue to mistakenly believe that the tech community is comprised of lefty California hippies. Tech will not save us from fascism. The professional media won’t either. Given the institutional corruption now fundamental to our government, I fear that there is no ‘rules-based’ solution to any of this.

This is some legit dystopian shit right here. I almost wish I hadn’t abandoned these platforms years ago, so that I could take this opportunity to do it. I hope that more people wake up to the insidious nature of this company and these services.

Keep this in mind as you listen to them claim that privacy is built right into ‘Apple Intelligence’. The profile that is being built as that system learns about you will probably grow to be the largest potential privacy threat that has ever been introduced to these devices and ecosystem. Keep that shit off your phone.

I’ve had one for a decade or so. It’s fine. Life was fine before it too. Let’s all stay grounded people.

I don’t doubt apple’s ability to make this work well. I do doubt that there is more than a niche market for it. I also think it’s boring, and for some reason, I still expect apple to do better.

How long have people been trying to make smart homes a thing? I feel like this would have happened by now if there was a real mass market for them. It’s not like there is a huge technological impediment to achieving that vision, like there is for VR/AR. In other ways it’s just like VR, a cool idea that’s been around forever, but doesn’t seem to have widespread application or demand.

If apple is really working on this, I consider it further evidence that they are really really struggling to have a substantive vision of the future. Other than incremental improvement of existing products and financially beneficial business maneuvers, what have they done in the last decade other than try to grasp at old sci-fi notions of ‘the future’. I suspect that this can’t change until they get new leadership. Of course, they’ve largely achieved escape velocity in terms of revenue, and are so established now that the money machine will keep working for a long time, independent of any need to be actually visionary.

If you encounter one of these, absolutely don’t pet it. Instead, kick it. Run over it. Perhaps, light that little robot fucker on fire. But definitely don’t pet it.

At the height of digg, I thought Rose was kind of cool. One of those Silicon Valley success stories that used to inspire tech enthusiasts like me. I watched diggnation and bought in to the culture being presented. But I’ll never forget that when digg 4 released, and bombed, Kevin threw his own employees and developers under the bus instead of taking responsibility for strategic mistakes. It was really eye opening to me about him and many of the other frauds that Silicon Valley hoists up as role models. Since then, he’s done nothing to dissuade me that he’s just another talentless tech-bro asshole that got way more attention and money than he deserved.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/iSF0KGsFuI8?si=ZF7KAiSOFYnADzzk

I really cannot fully express how much I have grown to hate all these motherfuckers and their awful work - and I work in Silicon Valley.

This take is correct although I would make one addition. It is true that copyright violation doesn’t happen when copyrighted material is inputted or when models are trained. While the outputs of these models are not necessarily copyright violations, it is possible for them to violate copyright. The same standards for violation that apply to humans should apply to these models.

I entirely reject the claims that there should be one standard for humans and another for these models. Every time this debate pops up, people claim some province based on ‘intelligence’ or ‘conscience’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘awareness’. This is a meaningless argument because we have no clear understanding about what those things are. I’m not claiming anything about the nature of these models. I’m just pointing out that people love to apply an undefined standard to them.

We should apply the same copyright standards to people, models, corporations, and old-school algorithms.

The problem with what creeps like Mann are claiming comes down to the difference between “art” and buying an “interest” in art as a speculative investment. Mann conflates these two ideas, trying to bestow the wholesomeness of artistic expression with his investment business venture. I’m all in favor of getting artists paid, and structuring society in a way that encourages the production of art, but Mann wants to weaken securities regulations and consumer protections to do that. That’s a terrible idea because it will lead to many more people being conned and defrauded.

If investors were merely trying to support an artist’s work, and not seeking to profit from their investment, they wouldn’t need a securities mechanism like NFTs to do it. We already have money for that.

If a side effect of regulating NFTs as securities is to somehow damage the regular fine art marketplace, as I think Mann’s suit is warning, that is no great loss for society. The fine art market is a blight, a fraud-riddled playground for ultra wealthy douchebags to sequester wealth and does nothing to advance art or promote the creation of artworks writ large.

Mann has ridden the crypto speculative bubble and has an inflated impression of the value of his work. He’s carved out a niche as a sort of court jester for billionaires like Mark Andreesen who want to rebuild financial systems in a way that would dismantle the regulatory state and enshrine an elite class as technologically empowered feudal lords. He thinks the money is compensation for his songs, but it’s largely just a side effect of crypto bros forever trying to find a greater fool to hold the bag in a pyramid scheme. In that effort, his lawsuit is basically a marketing campaign for his investment business. I hope the court puts an end to this once and for all, but I’m not optimistic.

What a man of the people.

Just to clarify what I said: I know that there are good people working in these corporations, and I know that good sometimes happens. What I am saying is that the organization itself doesn’t care the way they are often given credit for by their own marketing, media coverage, and public perception. The incentives that are foundational to these organizations are antithetical to achieving anything beyond revenue that is either widespread or long-term in nature. I am all in favor of holding corporations accountable, and pressuring them to be better members of our society, but people should never fool themselves into thinking that meaningful, sustainable change on social or environmental issues will ever result from actions taken by corporations. Those kinds of changes can only come from governments that are open and accountable to their people, and have the confidence to check the actions of private industry.