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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   36942 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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What will become of Mark Zuckerburg's empire of shit?

I was recently thinking wistfully of the brief golden age of Facebook, and how it made me more connected to my social network. At one point, most of my friends and family posted updates about their lives. I knew all about my friends from high school and college. I even connected to members of my extended family. And I could easily ask questions to my network and receive answers. It was great.

That was a long time ago. Zuckerberg pissed it all away. At first, he tried to replace the news media. Later, when that failed, he went all in on maximizing ad revenue. Facebook is now a wasteland of ads, AI, and clueless boomers. Nearly 100% of its value proposition is gone. No one I care about posts there any more.

Zuckerburg did a few things right, all more than a decade ago:

  1. He figured out that people will give you all their personal info for free and that this is worth a lot to advertisers. In his words, "they trust me, dumb fucks".

  2. He made sure his voting shares didn't get diluted so he has, in theory, monarchal control of Facebook

  3. He bought Instagram for cheap in 2012

He has reaped the rewards of these decisions handsomely and currently is the world's 4th richest person with a net worth north of $200 billion.

But what has he done more recently?

  1. Bought WhatsApp for $19 billion and promised to never advertise on the platform. Even though he has broken the promise, it's unclear how they will ever recoup this

  2. Blown tens of billions on the "Metaverse", a project which no one wants and has negative traction

  3. Made "Stories", "Reels", and "Threads" – blatant knockoffs of existing products which failed to win in the marketplace

  4. Made an open source LLM called LLAMA which was initially a success but has been blown out of the water by a Chinese startup that trained a superior model for just $6 million

I recently read the book "Titan", about John D. Rockefeller. Despite being history's greatest philanthropist, Rockefeller viewed Standard Oil as his real contribution to humanity. People take the wrong lesson from his life, which is generally viewed as "he did a bunch of evil shit to get rich but he gave it all away, so it's okay."

Bill Gates folllowed that model. Maybe Zuckerberg thinks the same way. But it's unlikely that anything he can do with his billions can undo the damage his social networks have done, and continue to do to the social fabric. The irony is that if he had just focused on making Facebook the best version of itself, he would probably be even richer today, and beloved for making the iconic product of the age.

But instead we have Instagram, Reels, and a bunch of other shit that just makes people miserable. Will it stand the test of time? I doubt it.

I would reject the idea that he's not done much. Not for consumers, no (his best product was Facebook circa 2004), but he's built an empire of information. WhatsApp has been a qualified success, and Facebook's cloning of Snapchat features has basically killed the latter company's trajectory. The Metaverse is an abject failure, but, you win some and you lose some.

And DeepSeek was undoubtedly a panic inducing setback, but the LLaMA play wasn't to establish dominance, but to prevent competitors from displacing Facebook through access to proprietary models. If someone else does that instead... well, he still has his spigots of cash and information.

In terms of his legacy, it's still too soon to tell. He's well-positioned to continue to make an impact: he has GPUs, and nothing matters more than them at this moment in history. If DeepSeek managed to build a better model than one costing an order of magnitude more, then it's not unreasonable to think Meta can now just copy that architecture and throw an order or two of magnitude more compute at it and make something even better.

The big question is whether Meta is able to excise the Google-style cruft and bureaucracy to be able to execute more quickly and effectively.

So, I agree with you about the "enshittification" of Facebook, and that Zuckerberg is a uniquely influential person. I wrote a post here a while back arguing that Facebook was the only real social network, while most "social" networks today are more like TV, people just watch celebrity influencers with no meaningful interaction.

I think you give Zuck too little credit though. Whatsapp might be small in the US and Europe, but it's huge in developing countries like Mexico. They use it for everything, not just social networking but basic calling and sending money. If it continues to grow, it could end up being more important that Standard Oil.

More broadly, I think Zuck is a guy who knows how to take risks. He doesn't just stay complacent. He saw that Facebook was losing it's zing, and went heavily on trying other things. Instagram worked. The metaverse didn't. But that's fine, he doesn't need to win all of his bets, he just needs to win some of them. Or even just once. I feel like all of his projects attract good engineering talent that looks to high quality networking, security, and AI. That used to be true of Google and Microsoft but is not true anymore.

Zuckerburg did a few things right, all more than a decade ago:

That is all you need to become super -successful. A good idea the execute near-perfectly on it, which he had from 2005-2015 or so.

Bought WhatsApp for $19 billion and promised to never advertise on the platform. Even though he has broken the promise, it's unclear how they will ever recoup this

He already has. Same for other purchases. The Metaverse is still a loss, but Wall St. has moved on.

All that other stuff works at boosting ad impressions and engagement. Evidently it semes to be working.

Bill Gates folllowed that model. Maybe Zuckerberg thinks the same way. But it's unlikely that anything he can do with his billions can undo the damage his social networks have done, and continue to do to the social fabric. The irony is that if he had just focused on making Facebook the best version of itself, he would probably be even richer today, and beloved for making the iconic product of the age.

At least Rockefeller's wealth and other Gilded Era wealth was fleeting, which quickly dwindled as the money was frittered away on dubious low-ROI philanthropy or wasteful spending. Today's tech-rich are much better at preserving their wealth and their industries less vulnerable to economic obsolescence or competition, unlike oil, ferries, cars, mining, or railroads.

At least Rockefeller's wealth and other Gilded Era wealth was fleeting

Not entirely. David Rockefeller (grandson of John D.) was worth over $3 billion when he died recently at age 102.

But yeah, the titans of old had large families so the wealth dissipated more quickly. We should seek to recreate that environment by taxing estates based on how many times they are subdivided, with more subdivisions = less tax.

dubious low-ROI philanthropy

Not all of it! Early Rockefeller was a very good steward of his fortune, and a very good spender of it. For example, he essentially cured hookworm in the U.S., for a very small investment. Hookworm stunts growth and lowers IQ by something like 10 points. Before Rockefeller went to work, 40% of people in the American South had it! This might be the single greatest intervention in the history of philanthropy and it wasn't even that expensive.

Early Rockefeller was a very good steward of his fortune, and a very good spender of it. For example, he essentially cured hookworm in the U.S.

that is amazing. perfect example of low hanging fruit. small spending that can lead to huge gains

Nearly 100% of its value proposition is gone.

I hate to say it, but the Facebook marketplace is extremely useful. I had to setup an anonymous account that I only access via web because I simply couldn't find better deals on gently used local stuff. I have to give FB credit for this. Also, every business, group and civic organization in my area uses this stupid app, so without it I have no idea what's happening.

So only 85% of it's value proposition is gone.

Yeah every martial arts gym inexplicably uses Facebook as their only method of communication. I had to make an account.

I mean it’s good for business advertising, in fact it’s almost a given that any business will have a Facebook presence, probably instagram as well. That doesn’t make it useful for other things.

The Facebook Marketplace is unbelievable useful. It's the one thing that dragged me back

I will die on the hill that "Meta" had a winning play available to it that was implied by the name.

Design the website/app so that it centralizes all of the other information feeds everyone else has into a single dashboard.

Make it so you can receive messages across EVERY other major messaging app, from Discord to Signal on your Meta app.

Be the app that flies over all other apps so users don't have to maintain 16 different logins and have their friends spread across all the other different messengers, but can instead respond through one handy chat window.

That does present a killer solution in my book because I'm sick of having to coordinate with my friends across text messaging, Discord, Whatsapp, snapchat, signal, telegram, gmail, twitter/x, Steam, slack, etc. AND Facebook messenger.

Give me a single app where I can send a text blast out to EVERYONE at once, including a link to an event or something else I want to show them, regardless of how I'm connected to them and you'll have my loyalty. I can even tolerate some ad injection.

The services would surely change their api so as not to be easily run by a third party, like Reddit did, and legally I doubt they permit this kind of thing.

Unless Meta actually did the legwork to secure API access as part of their business model.

They're extremely well suited to make these sorts of bargains.

Until the DOJ starts saying the magic words—anti trust

My guy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_v._Meta_Platforms,_Inc.

Wonder if the outcomes of such a case might be different given that there was a small change in leadership over in Washington.

Doesn't this exist? I used to use something like this called Pidgin back when MSN messenger was the most popular messaging program. I haven't used it in years though. I don't know how well it still works.

Pidgin is what you're thinking of. It does that for instant messaging services, including apparently having a plugin for Facebook Messenger that has recent issues on GitHub, so it seems to still be working for some people. There's also XMPP and it's modern competitor/replacement Matrix which have a concept of bridges which means you log into your one Matrix account but have that account bridged to other protocols (so similar concept, just putting the multi-protocol support in a different place in the architecture).

Needless to say, none of this is terribly user-friendly, largely because none of the companies running these services want third-party clients to work, so there's a continual arms race of protocol changes. For similar reasons, there will never be a commercial product because third-party clients are likely explicitly against the terms of service. Back when MSN and its ilk were popular, the arms race was less heated and they were more usable.

Also, this is all about instant messaging. Maybe that's all you care about, but if you want to keep track of non-chat-structured posts, then the closest I know of to a similar multi-protocol client for social media posts is setting them all up in an RSS reader. And for similar reasons, social media companies make it difficult to access posts that way, although it works for some / has worked for others in the past (e.g., I used to follow Twitter feeds via RSS).

Why would Discord, Snapchat or the others agree to this? They would lose all their revenue and moat.

What moat do messaging apps have aside from network effects?

They're probably the most easily spun up and replicated type of app. I'm leaving off all the old ones that have fallen from favor over the years. I still remember Ventrilo AND Teamspeak.

Likewise, its hard to see why they'd be so reluctant to partner up with Meta when these app already exist largely at the pleasure of Google and Apple for not booting them off the app stores.

You can’t do that. The Terms of Service of all of these services would not allow for such aggregation.

Those two sentences don't really follow.

The terms of service saying "don't do this" doesn't actually stop you from doing it.

And likewise, the terms of service can be changed so really this is "how do you convince them to partner up."

Yes, the letters on a screen won’t stop you, but the cease and desist letter and lawsuit for damages will. I’m sure you realize that.

As for the partnership idea, this is an obvious non-starter. No competitor would ever want that. What would they even get out of it that would make up for the downsides?

No competitor would ever want that. What would they even get out of it that would make up for the downsides?

Why do movie studios license their films to competing streaming services?

Meta is literally the company best suited to make the deals that help centralize chat apps through a single platform.

Why do competing companies trust facebook logins on their own websites? You can log in to fucking TIKTOK with your facebook account!

Also DOJ would shut down the attempt at cartel forming. .

Rockefeller viewed Standard Oil as his real contribution to humanity. [...]

Bill Gates folllowed that model.

As some of you might know, Gates made his fortune leading a company called "Microsoft" in the 80s and 90s.

It is somewhat of an understatement to say that the Microsoft of that era was not generally seen as a force for good. They were the most hated company on the net in that era. Their software (i.e. Windows 95, 98, ME) was garbage. Its security was atrocious. Their marketplace behavior was anti-competitive. Their 'innovations' were things like a fucking talking paperclip which would try to distract you in word.

Basically, I stopped hating them when I stopped using their crap for serious work. Recent iterations of windows are tolerable as an operating system for a gaming-only machine, though.

I think that Gates has reached net good with his philanthropy, but to claim that MS was his real contribution to humanity is absurd.

Edit: made misinterpreted quotation more accurate.

Isn't that kind of a "programmer" perspective on Microsoft? From a normie perspective, Microsoft brought computers to the masses and made them useful to normal people.

  • Instead of typing cryptic commands into a terminal, you could just click buttons with a GUI
  • Yes, I know, Apple also had that in the Lisa and Macintosh. But those cost $10,000 in 1980s money, so no normal person could afford them.
  • Yes, I know, Xerox had it even earlier. Again, no normal person could afford that or even knew that it existed.
  • Instead of trying to choose between 12 different competing brands of computer that all ran totally different software, Microsoft made it easy by dominating the market with one standard that could run almost any kind of software
  • Microsoft didn't just sell computers, they came prepackaged with a bunch of useful software so that it would "just work" right out of the box. Tech nerds might call that an exploitive monopoly, but normal people were pretty happy that they could easily write a document, run a spreadsheet, or get an email on this complicated gadget which they had spent a month's salary on, without having to do some complicated "software installation" process. Hell, even just Freecell and Minesweeper were mindblowing to people back then, when the alternative was ordering game installation floppy disks by a mail-order catalogue, or programming them yourself.
  • A lot of their security problems were just because they had so many users, and so many hackers targeted them. Nobody bothered to target Unix or Apple back then because it simply wasn't worth it. But I'm sure they also had security problems that could have been targeted if "rich old boomer boss" had started using them en masse. hell, Richard Stallmen in his early years was notorious for hacking into people's accounts at MIT and changing their password because he believed that noone really needed a private password.
  • In general, they just did what any corporation does... try to make money. IBM and Intel were exactly the same. Commodore under Jack Tramiel was even worse. The early hackers like Steve Woz were just too naive to understand how the world works. They thought they could just give away everything for free in live in a hippy paradise forever.

Instead of typing cryptic commands into a terminal, you could just click buttons with a GUI

LOL.

Yes, I know, Apple also had that in the Lisa and Macintosh. But those cost $10,000 in 1980s money, so no normal person could afford them.

The Mac cost $2500 in 1984 dollars, not $10,000.

Microsoft didn't just sell computers, they came prepackaged with a bunch of useful software so that it would "just work" right out of the box.

Again, LOL. The original Mac came with a word processor and a drawing program.

First, $2500 was still a heck of a lot of money for a home computer in the 1980s. Its main competition were around $1000. Second, the original Mac in its launch state was woefully underpowered (https://www.filfre.net/2014/02/macintosh/)

Those realities could be hellish. The single floppy drive combined with the inadequate memory could make the original Mac as excruciating to actually use as it was fun to wax poetic about, with the process of just copying a single disk requiring more than fifty disk swaps and twenty minutes. MacWrite, the Mac’s flagship version of that bedrock of business applications the word processor, was so starved for memory that you could only create a document of about eight pages. Determined Mac zealots swapped tips on how to chain files together to craft their Great American Novels, while the business world just shrugged and turned back to their ugly but functional WordStar screens. The Mac was a toy, at best an interesting curiosity; IBM was still the choice for real work.

Those problems were eventually solved, but they required even more expensive versions of the Mac plus expensive peripherals:

Apple’s empire would be a very exclusive place. By the time you’d bought a monitor, video card, hard drive, keyboard — yes, even the keyboard was a separate item — and other needful accessories, a Mac II system could rise uncomfortably close to the $10,000 mark.

First, $2500 was still a heck of a lot of money for a home computer in the 1980s.

You set the goal posts in the first place; leave them where they were. IBMs competition at the time was the PC-XT, introduced 10 months earlier. It cost twice as much.

you're just nitpicking. Apple computers were always more expensive than other brands, and the Macintosh was considered expensive even by Apple's standards. There were many, many types of IBM and IBM computers at that time, which mostly cost a lot less. Going from Google... (https://www.neowin.net/news/the-ibm-pc-xt-launched-40-years-ago-today-but-it-got-competition-from-the-compaq-portable/)

The original IBM PC had a starting price of $1,565 when it launched in 1981 according to PC Mag. By contrast, the price for the first model of the IBM PC-XT was a whopping $7,545

So the Pc_XT was also an expensive high end computer. On the other end, you could get a commodore 64 for just a few hundred dollars.

Anyway my original point was that Microsoft isn't some uniquely evil company. They just sold a lot of software to anyone who wanted to buy it, unlike Apple with their little walled garden of Apple-only software.

You built your claims that Microsoft actually did what Apple is justly famous for doing on a foundation of false facts, and I picked at those; they aren't nits.

The Mac cost $2500 in 1984 dollars, not $10,000.

I think his point is that $2500 in 1984 money is >$10,000 today after accounting for inflation.

Their 'innovations' were things like a fucking talking paperclip which would try to distract you in word.

MS pushing Microsoft Bob and then the cartoon assistants in Office makes a lot more sense once you know that the future Melinda Gates was a marketing manager on Bob and later Office and thought that the assistant technology was an amazing step forward. Bill Gates came away from those meetings thinking he heard some amazing ideas. Eventually he realized what was up and started dating her.

Microsoft was on some weird stuff in the tail end of the 90's. They were publishing some killer PC games (Midtown Madness, MechWarrior 3), they launched their own version of the then-newly-commercially-viable optical mouse (the IntelliEye), they had the legendary Sidewinder Force Feedback joystick, and software like Bob was also paried with less-well-remembered oddities like Microsoft Chat.

I just checked because it was a childhood favorite, apparently hasbro published MechWarrior 3. I can never remember the big licensing crossover thing with fasa, hasbro, and grand wizards of the coast. Remember the latter had a battle tech cockpit sim arcade at their HQ back in the day (...I think?)

(Edit: oh, but fasa itself belonged to Microsoft Game Studios at the time, I never knew! But they didn't develop 3 either: that was zipper. Microsoft published two Mech Assault games and then seems to have totally abandoned the franchise)

Fascinatingly, FASA's ultimate goal with the Battletech/Mechwarrior franchise was to build the Battletech centers. It was an amazing experience to be able to sit in a Battletech pod for some good old fashioned lance vs. lance combat in 1991, incredibly advanced tech for its time.

Sorry, I think you misunderstood me. Here's what I said:

People take the wrong lesson from his life, which is generally viewed as "he did a bunch of evil shit to get rich but he gave it all away, so it's okay." Bill Gates folllowed that model.

So we are in agreement. Microsoft was (and continues to be) evil shit. I can see how I was unclear.

I probably should have expanded more on this. It's my belief that how you make your money matters even more than how you spend it. It's hard to give money away, and most non-profits are full of grifters. The typical titan does a bunch of evil shit, then dies, and then his wife gives all his money away. These wives, lacking their husband's business sense, are often very bad at philanthropy. Look, for example, at what Mackenzie Bezos has done with her billions.

A better model would be to run a company that keeps prices fair, makes good products, and doesn't look to extract maximum profits at every turn. Put earnings back into the business and find a successor who will do the same. Selling out in order to give to charity is probably a bad thing in general.

Ok, sorry for misunderstanding you, it seems we are in agreement.

Seems like having two quotation lines will result in them being stuffed in the same paragraph, so I fixed my comment to make it seem less like I am misquoting you.

Initiated nerds were shitting on MS in those days, sure, but I think that leads people to underrate how successful they were at putting computers into the hands of non-techies.

There's a similar effect with Apple, which is often lambasted for making kiddie walled-garden software for people who don't know how to use computers (as Wes Borg said even back in the iMac days it's a "computer for idio... for mommies and daddies") but it's undeniable how successful the iPhone design as "computers for the rest of us" has been, it's so successful that people have forgotten how to use computers that aren't smartphones.

But back to MS, the simple fact that they made Excel is a towering achievement of ergonomics. Excel is rarely called this but it's probably the most popular programming language ever made, one so simple and intuitive you can get 90s businessmen to understand it.

So yeah, as with everything if you scratch the surface it looks like the pile of shit everything is. But people underrate how valuable and impressive it is to stack shit that high. I think Zucc will be fine.

Excel is rarely called this but it's probably the most popular programming language ever made

In a very technical sense, you could indeed argue that Excel can be viewed as programming language. It seems to be Turing-complete: I can describe the rules defining state transitions in the first cell, use the rest of the row to store the state of the band and then tell it to fill out subsequent rows, running the TM row by row. It would be up to the user to stop adding more rows once it has reached a halting state, though. Of course, the memory overhead would scale with the number of total steps.

While I am sure that there are power users (or nerds who like a new challenge after brainfuck) who implement prime factorization, array sorting or iterative solvers in Excel, my estimate is that most users only create programs which take input which can be reasonably be considered one- or two-dimensional and runs for a time which is proportional to the input size. Like, they can calculate the sum, average or minimum of a column. Ask them for anything which is above linear runtime, like the median or matrix multiplication (without resorting to purpose-built functions), which even a novice programmer who has the concept of cascading for-loops can solve, and they will be stuck. (Of course, there is always VBA, but if VBA makes Excel a programming language, then it also makes Word a programming language.)

Despite this, spreadsheets have their uses (if you can stomach interleaving the code and the data). For example, I used one to catalogue my discoveries when playing Book of Hours without spoilers.

TL;DR: calling Excel "the most popular programming language ever made" is like saying that pictograms are "the most widely read script on the planet". Sure, only a 1.5 billion people can read the word "airplane", while likely more than half of the world population would recognize the ✈ symbol. However, these universal pictograms do not qualify as a script because they are not expressive enough. Seeing people use Excel for tasks which would clearly call for a programming language is like seeing a six-year-old who insists the he does not need to learn his letters because he can just chat with unicode symbols.

Edit: also, to the degree that spreadsheets empower users, letting Microsoft take credit for that seems a bit like giving Toyota the credit for providing mobility to millions of Americans. The empowering thing is the underlying invention, the fact that the customer selected Excel and Toyota instead of SuperCalc and Fiat is of much less concern.

Seeing people use Excel for tasks which would clearly call for a programming language is like seeing a six-year-old who insists the he does not need to learn his letters because he can just chat with unicode symbols.

Well, not necessarily. You're missing:

  • Distribution, guaranteed compatibility, and common UI/UX; all you need to run an Excel spreadsheet and the calculations contained therein is an Excel VM (usually, but not necessarily, made by Microsoft)
  • Zero overhead to pick up and use, everyone knows how to interact with a program made in Excel simply by pointing and clicking, which means lots of things you'd normally have to implement in more advanced languages are done for you (UI, saving/loading, the functions themselves)
  • Ease of observing, debugging, and tracing functions and program state (it's all out in the open, and the input-to-output function chains can be made as terse or as expansive as you want it to be)
  • Ease of printing data (to a screen or a physical page), which in other programming languages needs a bunch of iteration and string-conversion to work correctly

The best programming language is ultimately the one you know how to use right now, and "office worker gets bored, automates themselves" is [or once was] a valid career path. Sure, Excel stops being a viable option once you need to do things like talk to a network (which, totally coincidentally, Microsoft has an intermediate-level programming language called Access that can use Excel sheets as a frontend), and once you outgrow Access you're really in trouble (mainly because now you've created a problem for programmers to solve, and so now you're going to have to pay for the bootstrapping that Excel/Access did for you)... but most people don't get that far anyway.

like the median or matrix multiplication (without resorting to purpose-built functions)

Both of these are trivial to implement in Excel if you know what they are (without using the builtin functions, which seems... kind of dumb? like, do you implement lists from bare metal in python?) -- which granted most business users do not, but that doesn't make excel worse than a real language at these things.

If you think of it as a functional language in which you can see the value of every variable all the time, it becomes more language-esque -- you can do quite a lot without resorting to vba, you just do it in different ways than iterating over arrays or cascading for loops.

Excel can be very dangerous for business logic because it doesn’t have strict error handling. I’ve seen an insurance company severely misprice an obscure product because somebody accidentally deleted a cell in one row on a different sheet and nobody noticed.

Bugs can happen in python too, of course, but it’s at least a little more robust.

I said that it's an interesting programming language, not a good one -- believe me I have seen some shit too.

But to be fair, not that many programming languages to have strict data validity checking built in/mandatory out of the box -- you can implement that in Excel too, it's not even that hard -- just a little conditional formatting on key cells can go a long way, and if you really wanted to you could probably get pretty advanced.

But Excel users tend not to be that interested in this sort of thing, because most of them are also bad programmers.

to be fair, not that many programming languages to have strict data validity checking built in/mandatory out of the box

I'm sure you're right, and certainly python doesn't. Type hints aren't binding, etc etc.

If you'll forgive me for changing my tune partway in, what I meant to convey is that I don't like the way that excel splays the entire workspace out in front of you, allowing you to change the value of any variable at any time, anywhere through the history of the 'code' because it's not imperative in the same way that code is. That allows way more scope for weird, hard-to-find bugs. (Yes, you can lock cells but often people don't, or they lock the wrong ones, or they unlock something to edit it and forget to re-lock).

The only criticism I'm seeing here is that it's not the form of programming you're used to and that it's optimized for light scripting because that's what most people do. Those sorting tasks you're thinking about and manipulating arbitrarily sized data? That's part of the standard library. It even has lambdas now and the formula language is itself a PL in its own right.

It's fit for purpose as the lightest of scripting languages. You wouldn't argue Python isn't a PL because most people use it for light scripting.

Entire companies run on excel macros, and it has ports of Doom and XCOM in it. Go watch competitive excel competitions (yes that's a thing) and then try and argue it's not a PL.

I understand what you're doing. You're trying to argue that people who play candy crush aren't gamers. And sure, most people that use excel aren't programmers. It's still the most used PL on the world.

Well, I think 90% of the people who write python and can do matrix multiplication can implement arbitrary-sized matrix multiplication in python. (And if I posed a similar problem, like "combine two matrices like in matrix multiplication, but instead of summing the products, just take the maximum", they would likewise come up with a solution, not simply say "that is not in numpy, hence it can't be done".)

By contrast, I would estimate that the fraction of people who grok MM and use excel which could implement the modified problem is less than 20%.

Of course, this is mostly an argument about semantics. I would not call someone who sets an alarm clock on their mobile a programmer, even though they are changing the behavior of a computer system to suit their needs. I don't use spreadsheets, but I occasionally use the unix sed command, which is technically Turing complete. However, like 98% of sed users, what I do with it is not something I would call programming -- I use it for trivial string/RE operations, but do not know how to implement a while loop in it (and also consider it ill fit for anything which requires a while loop). So sed is technically a PL, but most sed users are not sed programmers. Likewise postscript: technically Turing-complete, but the subset of users who use it to express arbitrary computation as opposed to just having it draw glyphs and graphics primitives is almost a null set. Likewise, HTML+CSS+User clicking.

Now, you are correct that Excel has had recursable lambda expressions since 2020, which together with lazy evaluation allows arbitrary computations in a single cell. However, it is my understanding that Excel was popular in the corporate setting even before that, and I would wholeheartedly recommend VBA (*) over writing a recursive lambda function in a spreadsheet cell (with very few (tiny) exceptions).

I will concede though that this is arguing over a definition. If one defines programming rather loosely, then most programs might be invocation of a Photoshop filter. Demand a bit more expressiveness, and Excel is the top PL. Demand still more (like "most users have created a non-halting program either on purpose or by accident at least once"), and Python might be most popular. Put in a bunch of conditions by machine code fetishists ("it only counts if it is compiled to opcodes and run on a physical CPU"), and likely C wins. M-x butterflies and all that.

(*) Now that are five words I had not thought I would utter in that order.

Only a very specific group of nerds was shitting on Microsoft (and still is to this day, in my experience). Most nerds, even most computer nerds, didn't really care about Microsoft. Plenty of computer nerds liked Microsoft. I don't think that @quiet_NaN's picture of Microsoft as this universally hated company is accurate. It certainly doesn't match my experience, at any rate.

Initiated nerds were shitting on MS in those days, sure, but I think that leads people to underrate how successful they were at putting computers into the hands of non-techies.

That's like saying "look how good the Mafia is at running Italian restaurants". Or like robbing a bank, donating some of the money to charity, and then trying to take credit for donating to charity.

The main reason why it was Microsoft specifically getting computers in people's hands is that Microsoft cornered the market, so nobody else could get a foothold. Microsoft should get no credit for pushing its competitors out of the market and then doing some of the good things that would have been done by the competitors that it pushed out.

Apple, Commodore, IBM, and RadioShack tried very hard to corner the market in the 1980s. It's their own fault that an upstart competitor was able to take it away from them, despite their first-mover advantage, because they did such a crappy job of actually taking care of their consumers.

This is overstated. Apple existed as a viable competitor during the entire period, and while Microsoft used what amounted to strong-arm commercial tactics to get its OS onto every PC sold, it was indeed this OS that enabled those sales. Microsoft should get credit for providing workable baseline software, that was very open to developers, and didn't cost much money. Did they push OS/2 out of the market? Maybe. It's also possible OS/2 wasn't a viable competitor to begin with. Sometimes companies dominate because they get first mover advantage and manage to build a large moat. Sometimes companies are dominant mostly just because they have an overall superior value proposition. Microsoft, for long periods, had both.

Recent iterations of windows are tolerable as an operating system for a gaming-only machine, though.

Modern versions of Windows don't crash like they used to, but you don't have to install BonziBuddy to get a machine full of ads any more; they bundle the ads with the OS now.

And you don't even get a purple ape buddy for your trouble.

You mean Micro$haft?

Rockefeller viewed Standard Oil as his real contribution to humanity

It absolutely was. The Oil industry moved next 150 years of progress.

It was, for example, supposedly his idea to transport oil in tank cars instead of barrels, which nobody initiated as a practice until then.

Later, they were a pioneer in pipelines as well.

Supposedly, in the early days, Rockefeller’s refiners were so efficient that he could easily underprice competitors. When he offered to buy competitors he opened his books and showed them his running costs. This led them to sell immediately as they knew competition was futile. He often gave them very generous terms as well, not that this prevented them from later complaining about it. In the end, consolidation created enormous consumer surplus as the cost of kerosene plummeted.

Dang, everyone was doing the no pipes Factorio challenge before him

Somewhat ironically, the oil industry also killed off whaling by making kerosene a viable alternative to whale oil.

I'm not an expert on whaling but I thought that whale fat(?) was mainly used to produce high-quality candles and certain machine lubricants.

Nope, whale lamps were the main use case in the wooden ship days of sailing from Nantucket, although whale oil has a zillion uses only some of which are replaceable(nasa still doesn’t have a petroleum based replacement).

The crash in whale stocks mostly came later, after whale oil for lighting became obsolete- the Japanese, Norwegian, and Soviet fleets killed an utterly unsustainable number of whales for eating(/faking fish quotas), not oil. Right whales are the only species that was threatened by the Nantucket whaling industry.

This is a historical misconception- whaling to produce oil for the purposes petroleum would later replace it in was sustainable. Whale stocks crashed when they were heavily exploited for protein, and also partly to make numbers go up for the Soviet fishing industry.

The old school ‘some guys in a wooden boat throwing a harpoon’ whaling industry was replaced by the Norwegians ‘hunt whales in an actual warship’ method.

Protein?

Cheap meat/fish? The wooden ship days of whaling didn’t feature a lot of eating whale meat, but the whaling revival which actually crashed stocks did- mostly in Europe and later Japan. Today only the nordics and Japan still eat whale meat, but it was common in institutional food and sometimes for the poor(a much larger percentage of the population at the time) in the first half of the twentieth century.

Of course it still might have been sustainable if it wasn’t for the Soviet Union’s ‘kill as many whales as possible to count towards total fishing tonnage’ scam.

Today only the nordics and Japan still eat whale meat

And Alaskan Inuit.

And Greenlanders and a few indigenous tribes elsewhere in the world, yes, but I thought a ‘other than primitives only Nordics and Japanese still eat whale meat’ was implied.

Fuck you, whale! Fuck you, dolphin!

Pls no ban, it came into my head when I saw that and I couldn't help myself, kthx!

I think you need to distinguish between sperm whales and other species.

While sperm whales were heavily targeted by Nantucket whalers, they weren't particularly threatened as a species because whalers preferred to target bulls, which are infinitely replaceable.

Now right whales, on the other hand, may have actually been badly impacted by the Nantucket industry- stocks of right whales depleting was the cause of the shift to targeting sperm whales. But there's no records of sperm whale stocks depleting like that. Rorquals, on the other hand, were mostly impacted by the later whaling industry mostly going after food.

Add "saving the whales" to Rockefeller's long list of accomplishments.

I was recently thinking wistfully of the brief golden age of Facebook, and how it made me more connected to my social network.

I have the same nostalgia and even some more:

It is noteworthy that "The Facebook" startet as the hip place for students and required a university email address for signup. Imagine being a young adult moving for the first time away from home and to the big new city and starting your new exciting student life, only that you know no one, everyone is a stranger, and university life is complicated in all kind of ways. If I recall correctly TheFacebook had group chats, like mini message boards, which were made by students for every course (and of course used for organizing partying). You could stay organized. You could connect. This was a very useful and fun service. I wonder if it was lightning in a bottle or could it be replicated today? The students I know today organize with group chats on WhatsApp (I think this is less a thing in the States?). And Family networks also moved to group chats. But this is not discoverable (which to be true is a big feature as it provides intimacy/privacy, but it also loses something).

What changed? You say it was monetization which drove more and more antisocial features, but there was also a big vibe change when everyone could join and your grandma first time commented disapprovingly your binge drinking party pics. And does one want your colleagues and work aquaintances see your children pictures or "its complicated" relationship status? Anyone remember Google Circles? They tried to out-facebook Facebook, but couldn't make the separation of friend circles stick as managing "circles" was too cumbersome. (Was it though? We do it fine in group messengers.)

The other explanation is that Facebook was always doomed to doom-scroll, as every new generation tries to find their own new cool thing but like all non-crab crustaceans evolve into crabs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation) all "social" networks seem to evolve into anti-social doom scroll time sinks: Twitter -> SnapChat -> Instagram -> TikTok

Imagine being a young adult moving for the first time away from home and to the big new city and starting your new exciting student life, only that you know no one, everyone is a stranger, and university life is complicated in all kind of ways. If I recall correctly TheFacebook had group chats, like mini message boards, which were made by students for every course (and of course used for organizing partying). You could stay organized. You could connect. This was a very useful and fun service.

This is exactly what it was for me.

... and then they took all of my private posts and photos and made them public to the entire world. I don't think I can ever feel the same trust for an internet service ever again.

I think the big thing dooming Facebook was that it didn’t recognize the difference between social circles for a long time, which leads to a kind of self censorship. Once people understood that anyone you’d friended could see everything, it became pretty clear that you couldn’t say just anything on Facebook because everyone from your boss to your granny could see it. Posting wild party pictures, or talking with your friends in ways that would offend people became a potential liability.

I think some of this was inevitable as social norms became established, but Facebook definitely missed the chance to shape those differently. I know quite a few who, say, don't post pictures of their kids on the internet. I don't think they could have prevented anyone from adopting that norm, but they could have tried to make it feel "safe" to share things before the last decade of, I dunno, whatever this has been. No amount of "Trust and Safety" can restore naivety, but maybe we could have been let down more gently.

The norms that existed before became the issue. Facebook didn’t implement any sort of system to separate your social networks. If you posted to “friends” anyone you friended could see it. So you couldn’t keep your coworkers from finding out about your drinking binge or your granny from seeing your post that’s slightly racy and meant for your twenty-something friends. The norm that developed was “only post stuff you’d tell your boss about and feel comfortable talking about in front of granny” because they could see it. Of course this creates a fairly safe-space vibe where only the most boring stuff gets posted and you have to be absolutely on your office manners the whole time.

The fun part of social media is that on a really good space, you get to be yourself. You don’t have to worry about what someone will report to the boss and so on. Facebook sucks because it’s basically part of a social network score alongside your credit score that determines how well you fit in mainstream social structures.

Google Plus at the time tried to make "circles" happen, but that lost to network effects and IMO explicitly separating your social networks is more work than it sounds like. Which I think explains why people are adopting different networks for different content: think LinkedIn versus a Discord between gaming buddies. Or my pseudonymous shiteffortposting account here. Although some still shout unprofessional takes into the Ether with their real names.

Yeah, I remember thinking that Google Plus had some good ideas, but it was just too much work to use it properly. It's easier and more natural to just think like "LinkedIn is for work, Instagram is for hot pics, twitter is for politics." Facebook is for baby pics and connecting to my elderly relatives.

Hey now, they fund zstd. Is that not worth the rotting cerebral cortices of 30 million boomers?

The Metaverse is a good idea but unfortunately for Zuck it’s probably going to be built by a game company out of an existing online world like Fortnite or Roblox rather than from scratch by a tech company.

Well, now that mergers are back on the menu, he can theoretically buy a promising gaming company.

Blown tens of billions on the "Metaverse", a project which no one wants and has negative traction

It certainly has negative traction, but I for one really want the metaverse. I grew up at the height of the virtual world craze, and I really miss that energy. I would absolutely love a credible and full-featured virtual world where you can customize a character, build structures, socialize with people, and play games, especially if it had connections to real-life friends in VR. As it is, these features all exist, but are spread throughout different games and platforms, many of which are dated, like many MMOs and Second Life. I absolutely see the value proposition of the Metaverse, but I would want to see some credible implementations of the opportunity for expansive creativity and socialization.

That being said, this has been the dream of silicon valley and cyberpunk for several decades at this point, and they've never gotten it to take off. But I will absolutely keep the dream alive.

this has been the dream of silicon valley and cyberpunk for several decades at this point

As far as I can tell this is essentially the entire reason the concept continues to even hang on at all despite the almost total lack of any meaningful use case outside of some niche video game crap. Ask what business purpose the technology serves and maybe you hear something about virtual meetings. Ask why anyone would bother when Zoom and the like already exist and you hear crickets. It's a solution looking for problems that don't exist.

"never buy a monitor again" sounds pretty good for business use, particularly travel -- but the resolution is not there yet.

It's a small monitor you tie to your face. That's it. Unless your traveling businessman owns a laptop with no screen, he's actually buying an extra monitor.

Yes?

If the resolution becomes adequate, this would create the impression of being surrounded by monitors, no?

I would be pretty into that, even at home.

So what happened to never buying a monitor again? You're still going to own a regular screen for every use case where having it tied to your face isn't optimal (might want more than one person to see it, don't want to be blind to the world, etc.) plus this extra screen you tie to your face so you can pretend you're surfin' the cyberworld.

Work gives me a laptop -- it has a screen anyways. I don't want to "surf the cyberworld", I want a seamless desktop covering ~180 degrees in front of me, so I have more room for windows and stuff.

You can sort of do this now with 3 (or 6!) 40" 4k screens, but those are expensive, not seamless, and don't travel well.

Not sure what's hard to understand about this?

Not sure what's hard to understand about this?

The part where "never buy a monitor again" sounds pretty good, when it seems like you're just buying one extra monitor to wear on your face.

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As far as I can tell this is essentially the entire reason the concept continues to even hang on at all despite the almost total lack of any meaningful use case outside of some niche video game crap.

FPV drone control.

Do people do this? The thought makes me motion sick.

Yes, it's very common, but I wouldn't do it for the same reasons as you (I can't even play Unreal Engine games on a large screen)

Because Snow Crash made it sound super-cool thirty years ago!

That being said, this has been the dream of silicon valley and cyberpunk for several decades at this point, and they've never gotten it to take off.

The hardware simply isn't here yet. The headsets are tethered and yet still too heavy, they are sweaty and disorienting, they don't have enough resolution for quality text, they give people motion sickness because the framerate/sensors are to slow.

Solve each of those hardware issues (most need an order of magnitude in improvement), then you can start with software. Do that part semi-well, and you've killed both phones and personal computers in one stroke.

A lot of these problems are individually solved -- the Bigscreen Beyond weighs 150 grams, consistent 90hz framerate is the low end of new headsets and 120hz the up-and-coming standard, low-latency wireless video is a (admittedly even dweebier) SpaceX when it comes to doing what a lot of people were calling impossible five years ago, even cheap sensors are vastly improved and hardware sensor fusion is the default option -- and there's incoming tech that'll merge most of these.

(Long battery life + wireless + ultralightweight is, admittedly, hard)

The intermediate trouble is that the people interested in the current tech are a tiny community, they're near-invisible to outsiders while what portals into the world are available give a poor or actively misleading grasp on the state of current tech, and the minimum cost of buyin for a not-awful experience ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars.

The bigger problem for Meta, specifically, is that even if they get past all that, it's not clear how they make money off it. There are business models for VR that make sense, for better or worse -- but none of them make sense for Meta; they're either things Meta are actively bad at, have competitors that are eating their lunch with Meta's own hardware, or could easily have a million competitors in three years.

I don't think they need an order of magnitude of improvement. There's already headsets being sold now that are lightweight visor style headsets rather than helmet size headsets, more of these coming soon, and wireless tethering between computers and their headsets is now a thing. It's not all perfect yet, it needs a bit of tweaking to be consumer ready, but at this point the main thing is for pricing to come down.

First look, those still only have 2K displays. A whole lot of modern screen time (even doom scrolling) is text interaction, and if you smear 2K pixels across a 100°+ field of view, you're not doing anything productive with text for any length of time.

The Vision Pro has double the pixel per line, uses tricks to increase pixel density where it matters most, and you still wouldn't really want to look at text with that headset.

Our family has an Oculus Quest 2, and it's not tethered (unless you want to pair with a computer that way, which I'm told shaves off a few milliseconds of latency vs WiFi 6?), not excessively heavy for adults and teens, not disorienting, renders text readably even with small fonts at a distance, and doesn't give my motion-sickness-prone wife problems as long as she keeps her sessions under an hour. I find it sweaty, because I almost exclusively use it for exercise games, but in the few cases where I play something else it's fine. I can definitely see room for resolution/framerate/latency upgrades, but we're nearing the 5 year anniversary of "eh, good enough".

All that said, I don't use it very often recently, solely because of software issues. If it takes 20 seconds to start up the OS, another 20 seconds to convince the thing that I've cleared enough open space to play in safely, another 20 seconds to switch from my wife's account to mine, another 20 seconds to start up the game I want to play, another 20 seconds to load up the level I want ... man, I only had 15 minutes of free time in between work and dinner today, I'm going to need 5 of that to cool down, and I've just burned 15% of the rest staring at one loading icon or another. It's so much easier to go to the treadmill or piano if I'm feeling like self-improvement or to the Steam Deck (roughly 2 seconds from hitting the power button to being ready to unpause my game in progress) if not. And the 20×N tedium is for a game that's in the Oculus walled garden! Getting the thing to pair properly with Steam on another computer is so much more tedious that I've barely even tried out Half Life: Alyx, despite that being a bucket-list-tier game for me.

Man, the quest 3 is a huge improvement then - I got one for Christmas and I just experimented and booted it and my steam deck up at the same time, and it was just finished loading the steam deck when passthrough and the internet connected on the quest 3.

If you want to play half life alyx though, you need the tether. If your WiFi is good the latency won't be a huge difference, but getting it connected is so much simpler it should be criminal somehow to not package them together. With the tether literally all I have to do is start steam vr, then connect the tether, and it figures itself out. If I want to try a different steam account I just unplug and reboot and start again.

Do you have any recommendations though, while I'm at it? I've been loving the shit out of Maestro and my brother gave me this cool game that feels a bit like half life meets bioshock called Genotype, but I want to try some of the exercise games and I don't even know what I should be looking for there.

For exercise, Beatsaber and its clones are the go-to, but I've also found Rumble (Avatar Earthbending contest) pretty fun if you don't mind pvp.

Doing a double-take at the first part of your comment ... maybe it's possible that the quest 3 isn't a huge improvement, but rather the Steam Deck is? I was using Steam from a laptop when experimenting with the quest 2, and I confess it didn't even occur to me to try VR via the Steam Deck after we got the Steam Deck. Will any USB-C to USB-C cable work for the tether if I want to give that a try?

Beat Saber seems to be the most popular, and I definitely had fun with it. I prefer Supernatural, but that does have a recurring fee.

not disorienting, renders text readably even with small fonts at a distance

Come on, that's a 2K display stretching its pixels across a 100°+ field of view. At that point, you can't even read instruments in flight simulators or racing sims, not to speak of productively interacting with text. And it turns out that even a lot of tpyes of doom-scrolling heavily rely on text interaction.

Those headsets will get competitive for a lot of tasks when they get to the level of a cheap office monitor 3' away from your face, and that's around an order of magnitude more pixels (per line, two orders more pixels in total). The Vision Pro has 2x the pixels per line, uses tricks to increase pixel density where it matters, and is still far away from looking at a shitty full HD display.

not disorienting

I hate interacting with people or real objects while wearing one of those. To make this go away, you need transparent displays or really good pass-through mode. The latter is less than ideal, because turns out most other people really hate talking to someone wearing a headset - no matter if you paint a face onto it or not.

Getting the thing to pair properly with Steam on another computer is so much more tedious that I've barely even tried out Half Life: Alyx, despite that being a bucket-list-tier game for me.

Use Virtual Desktop. I found it basically works out of the box.

He figured out that people will give you all their personal info for free and that this is worth a lot to advertisers. In his words, "they trust me, dumb fucks".

(A direct message from 19-year-old Zuckerberg to a friend, when thefacebook had 4000 users.)

I looked it up, and it sure is true. But in context it almost sounds shocked and horrified rather than deliberately manipulative; he's realizing people have much smaller boundaries than he does and he's startled.

But I also just have unusually positive feelings about Zuck, people keep saying he's a psychopath but I find it hard to see that myself, his complete inability to appear human aside.

his complete inability to appear human aside.

Hold on there, they have now rolled out Zuckerborg Mk. II with distinctly more human features.

I think Facebook simply died a natural death that can't really be attributed to anything Zuckerberg did or didn't do. I don't think it's a coincidence that the demise of Facebook roughly corresponds to the rise of Reddit as a mass-market phenomenon. Though the platforms seem very different, they essentially serve the same purpose — a time suck for bored people. People who used to spend their free time scrolling Facebook now spend it scrolling Reddit, and Reddit offers more in the way of content than Facebook ever could. Message boards have existed since the dawn of the internet, but they were mostly specialized. Now, everyone has a whole universe of them in one convenient place, and the more popular subs like AmItheAsshole aren't the kind of thing that can exist as a stand-alone site.

That and there was just a general weariness about some of the shit that went on there. I'm not talking about politics, except in the sense that everyone had a friend that posted about nothing but politics and you didn't give a shit about their opinions regardless of whether you agreed with them or not. And then there were the people who posted nothing but memes. And the people who posted nothing but pictures of their kids. This was all relatively benign, though. The worst was the people who overshared personal information, or hinted at personal problems without giving details, all of it for the express purpose of generating lazy sympathy. The politics was often the most interesting thing about it, because at least it gave you the chance to engage in a way similar to how you would in person. But even in person, the guy who always has to bring up politics is annoying.

So the normal discussions that you would have with these friends were few and far between. Then sponsored content began taking up a greater and greater percentage of your news feed (I don't look at my account often anymore, but when I do I'm lucky to get one or two posts from friends, even if profile checks show a significant number of them still posting regularly; it's really something to behold). So people lose interest and go to places that aren't as irritating. Also, like Reddit, they changed to a "modern" interface that does the site no favors. The best thing they could do is go back to the 2010 UI. But it won't happen.

Then sponsored content began taking up a greater and greater percentage of your news feed

Yeah, I left Facebook after they made an algorithmic change that led to my feed being taken up by toxoplasmosis-inducing posts full of scissor statements that generated clicks by being controversial. I had carefully curated my feed to see only posts from local organizations and friends who posted things I wanted to hear, but they spit right in the face of that and filled my feed with things designed by robots to make people maximally angry.

This is the same reason I can't use Twitter or even reddit nowadays, I log in for 5 minutes -- literally -- and I'm overwhelmed by 50,000 people trying to get me to feel fear or anger or hate. But listening to the teaching of the Jedi that these things lead to suffering, and the apostolic teaching that "enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, and envy" leads to ruin, I chose to walk away from such things and focus on "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, and whatever is gracious," which leads not to suffering and anxiety but to peace that passeth all understanding. Iterum dico, gaudete!

I disagree with you that the problem with Facebook was too much personal stuff or memes or pictures of people's kids... IMO that was the nice side of Facebook that gave you a small sense of connection to people you know in real life. I'm not annoyed by calls for sympathy, but I don't talk politics in real life outside of a small group of people I can have motte-style conversations with, so Facebook politics was much more grating to me than it was to you. But maybe this is an agreeableness thing.

They filled my feed with images generated by robots to make people maximally "ooh" and "aah". I guess I posted about hiking one time too many and now I'm damned to see every half-assed Midjourney output for a "fancy cabin in the woods" prompt? If I manually go to whatever "show me less like this" button I can find on each post, things might clear up for a week or a month, but eventually to goes right back to AI slop.

It's utterly baffling to me. I understand the ads, since they gotta pay for the site somehow, and I'd be content to wade through 33% ads to see 67% posts from friends and family ... but it's not 33/67 on my feed, it's 33/33/33. For exactly the same revenue to them, I get a 2:1 ratio of non-content to content instead of a 1:2 ratio. Why!?! They've driven me away successfully enough that they should have a huge backlog of things I'd want to see available every time I actually go back to the site, yet rather than digging in to the backlog they show me garbage. Are other people drawn in by the garbage, and I'm an odd exception not the target audience? I just wanted to see pictures of family's and old friends' kids.

The non-ad slop posts are probably also some form of ad -- you can do "boosted" posts on Facebook, anyways; not sure about IG. Or else just people farming engagement so they can be paid by someone else to create ads -- which would be trivial for Meta to detect, but they choose not to because "engagement" is also one of their key internal metrics so employees are incentivized towards "number go up".

I am surprised that nobody has filled the niche that facebook is useful for, keeping track of distant acquaintances. Facebook was decent in 2010 when it let users keep track of their second cousin's graduation and high school classmate's new house. There should still be a market for a listing of life events for people on the periphery of your life. Linkedin has weirdly enough partially filled the role but there is no true platform for this.

You knew, but did you care? I think that's what ultimately did the platform in. Seeing pictures of people you actually knew was one thing. Seeing the wedding pictures of someone you hadn't talked to in a decade was just crap that cluttered up your feed. There was a certain novelty to it for a while, but as soon as people realized that that was as far as the relationship was ever going to go (or, more ominously, that they had no interest of pursuing the relationship any further), the novelty wore off and people stopped caring. I'm not going to lose any sleep over the fact that I no longer know what some guy I was sort of friends with in college is up to now.

People's opinions on this are going to differ, but I personally really like being able to passively keep up with people I was once close with.

The tall awkward girl who flirted with me in high school is now married to an indian guy and is a therapist out in LA, my study buddy from college is swimming and biking a lot and recently changed jobs, another reconnected with the girl we always knew he was destined for and has a kid....

I do see these people in real life occasionally as I travel back home, attend a wedding, or put together a guy's trip. Being able to launch directly into relevant conversation is worthwhile, and I still actually do care about what they're up to.

Sure, there were some folks who went off the deep end in some sort of way, and changed beyond recognition or value as people. But is a tweet or some harebrained shit from reddit really more worthwhile content than staying connected to the mostly-good people I've met? I'd argue no. I miss Facebook quite a bit.

Yeah, I’ve heard other people say this in real life too, that there was this brief period from like 2009 to 2017 when you actually knew what your random high school friends and extended family had going on in their personal lives on a weirdly intimate basis, and now nobody knows anymore. You get curated glimpses of it on Instagram (although most users just lurk or post once a year), and you see the career side on LinkedIn like you say, but it’s not the same.

on a weirdly intimate basis,

IMO it's not that weird: My parents' generation sends annual Christmas cards with updates on career moves, births, deaths, graduations, and marriages to people they might not have seen IRL in a decade.

I think Facebook simply died a natural death that can't really be attributed to anything Zuckerberg did or didn't do. I don't think it's a coincidence that the demise of Facebook roughly corresponds to the rise of Reddit as a mass-market phenomenon.

I think social networks just have a natural lifespan. Their users are their product, and as they grow old, they become less attractive to the real customers: they stop posting cool stuff and they stop browsing the network. Facebook aged quicker than most because it tried to become the network for the whole family. That's why Mark bought Instagram, to preserve a separate "hip" social network for Millennials. Now it's full of moms promoting their small businesses, and hip Zoomers are on TikTok instead. As they become squarer with age, some other network will capture the new generation of users.

Instagram is still pretty hip IMO. Lots of young people on there posting bikini pics. It's just a matter of who you follow. But I think the instagram format of photo-dominance is well suited for anyone who wants to be hip, regardless of age. Despite it's name, Facebook was more of a text platform.

Oh definitely. Facebook was doomed to lose young people posting about last night's drunken debauchery.

But that's okay. They could have been so much more. If they hadn't tried to go political or maximize ad revenue, people would have stayed with the platform and it would be a great place to post family friendly stuff.

There's huge value to a platform that 90% of your friends and family are on. For example, sharing contact info, Facebook groups, Facebook marketplace. Hell, even Facebook dating might have worked.

But since everyone left, its just a wasteland of AI and ads, and nothing came up to replace it.

This might be your elite user opinion.

My mother, a great grandmother in her 80s, is from another world. Despite being in a household with computers since the 1990s, she has never been able to use computers to do anything.

I tried to teach her once to use a desktop PC and she picked up the mouse and waved it around in the air, confused. She never figured out web browsers or email.

When cell phones had SMS, she ... never once sent a message. Same with smartphones really.

But what she is able to use is Facebook on an iPad. Not perfectly, she still gets into trouble and needs tech support from time to time (gets lost in a deep tree of settings menus and can't figure out how to get back to her timeline, or gets logged out and can't remember how to log back in).

And I tell you every tech company in the world can burst into flames right now and she would not give a fuck so long as Facebook kept working. Facebook connects her to a steady drip of pictures of her cute grandkids and in touch with life updates from her extended family and it is literally all that matters. The entire computer revolution has been a useless gimmick to her, except for Facebook. Facebook is the only thing SV has done that has brought her actual joy.

I suspect for at least a billion people Facebook is great.

But if you're at all tech savvy it's a cringe wasteland and you keep in touch some other way.

Nevertheless, I think it's an enduring contribution. It makes computers actually useful, even joyful, to a whole mass of humanity that had been left out.

That is how I used to feel about Facebook until around 2019 and I am in my 20s. Everyone I know was actively on it and all the social events were organized using it. I fondly remember throwing house parties with Facebook events or having an active feed where actual friends and family would both share wholesome photos but also their opinions about stuff or music etc. I could post anything I found interesting and expect a bunch of comments and chatter about it. Picture/video/algorithm based social media is such a bad replacement in comparison.

That’s the sad thing. It could have been that for everyone. My parents don’t get to see their cute grandkids on Facebook because I’m not there. All they see is AI bullshit and insane political opinions. Facebook could have been great. But Zuckerberg murdered it.

I agree Facebook is not as great as it could be, and I consider myself forced to use Facebook to provide the cute stream of grandkid pics to my mom.

I wouldn't be willing to write off Llama and Meta's AI team at this stage, it's a safe bet that they're working on their own CoT models and it's any body's guess what they'll be like in terms of price to capabilities. Deepseek is impressive but also much more spikey capabilities-wise than other language models. The real test for open source models is the community uptake, but even then I wouldn't even say it's over even if teams were overwhelming choosing to finetune Deepseek over Llama. It only took one generation for Anthropic to turn "Clod" into the darling of AI enthusiasts everywhere. It's still anyone's game.

Here's some LLAMA panic from (alleged) Facebook insiders.

https://www.teamblind.com/post/Meta-genai-org-in-panic-mode-KccnF41n/44121030

DeepSeek trained V2 for 5.5 million. That's equivalent to the total comp of like 5 Facebook ML engineers. Training costs for LLAMA using Facebook's algos probably cost on the order of 100x what DeepSeek paid. It's hard to overstate just how big of a coup this is.

DeepSeek is doing to LLM's what China has already done to nearly every industry. Except this time it's not 50% cheaper, it's more like 98% cheaper.

Facebook (Meta) is probably the single greatest facilitator and promoter of open-source AI at the moment:

  • The vast majority of AI researchers use pytorch, a library created and maintained by Meta.
  • Open source LLMs only got any traction because Facebook released their LLAMA model with an insanely permissive license and wrote llama.cpp to efficiently run local LLMs on private user's GPUs.
  • Huge amounts of modern AI is built on top of foundational models trained by Meta, especially the Segment Anything Model (SAM) which not only pioneered foundation models for image tasks but is also used to do data-labelling for everybody else's fine-tuning workflows, meaning that you can make a working computer vision AI in days where it used to take weeks.

Not to mention that Meta remains the only people to have built affordable, easy-to-use VR headsets and market them to casual hobbyists rather than high-level prosumers.

I was down on Meta for the same reasons as you, but in the last five years they've really knocked it out of the park. Right now they're the only FAANG I'd happily work for.

llama.cpp was written by a solo developer from Bulgaria, not Meta (and not even funded/supported by it as far as I know, though they did have the grace to not bring a trademark lawsuit or anything so far).

Thanks for the correction, I thought he was an employee. Bloody well should be by now. Absolute legend.

Didn't Facebook integrate using its services to pay people? If you get to Facebook-as-payment-service and especially if you aren't as greedy as other payment providers that's another source of free money right there. But I don't use Facebook's payment services so I have only the foggiest idea about how that all works (or doesn't). But yes Facebook is a wasteland now (not that I ever was particularly enamored of it).

Yeah, with 90% market share of the college-educated public using the site, they could have been anything. Payments would have been a perfect expansion.

They could have been a superapp like they have in China.

Did they not expand to payments? I thought they did. If not, yeah, huge fumble although I understand that US regulatory agencies exist, so perhaps one that was out of their hands.

I bought something through marketplace the other day and paid through the app. The person never sent what I ordered, I reported them to facebook and they gave me my money back.

So it seems like they're doing it.

I've often thought while Mark Zuckerberg founded and owns facebook, someone with actual business experience should have been the one running it the whole time. Zuck would have had his martial arts phase a decade earlier, and maybe Cambridge Analytica might not have happened. Having the emotional intelligence of a lizard, might have helped at the start but lately its seems he lacks the ambitious and focus necessary to have really made the company soar; to me he's obviously a weather-vane shifting with political winds. The company to me, is essentially an advertising agency selling market research which wasted its immense money and enthusiasm in its early days on trying to become something like Google, but In my opinion with aimless inexperience and really nothing to show for their wastefulness. If most your profits are from advertising to boomers, what innovation is really necessary or possible? They'll probably stay relevant, QVC is till kicking, but I count them out of tech in my book. Of course I might be wrong, Microsoft has pulled ahead with this AI when previously Google seemed the true tech innovator so who knows.

I haven't used Facebook in a long time, but I am extremely dubious of the idea that if only management had been turned over to guys with business degrees, it would have made a lot more money. In general, I think it's a pretty bad bet that the most successful things ever are actually failing and could have been run better if the guys in charge weren't so incompetent.

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