this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Those adorable baby photos you posted for your friends and family? Sorry, they’re Meta’s now.

You literally gave them to Meta. You uploaded them to Meta after agreeing to Meta's terms of service, which essentially say "we can do what we want with the stuff you give us." Big Bad Meta isn't sneaking into your houses and stealing photos off of your nightstand, they're not "seizing" anything.

Also, Meta's AI "pipe dream" has so far been very successful. Their open-source libraries and LLaMA models have become industry standards. Their future work is likely to be productive.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

It's very impressive to me that 7B LLaMA actually says anything coherent if it was trained with FB data instead of suggesting that the best way to slice strings is with a bleach enema and some essential oils...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah it's really wild the way everyone keeps trying to say that Meta is failing and falling apart or whatever. Meta's doing better than it's ever been.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Social media loves to have targets that "everyone agrees" are terrible and worthy of hating. Being part of a righteously angry mob is fun, gives a nice safe dopamine hit and lets you show you are part of the in-group.

Which isn't to say that Meta is innocent and Zuckerberg is a poor victim, of course. But it does mean that it's very easy to go overboard and believe false accusations that also fit with the narrative that Meta is terrible and awful and evil. There was a post a couple of weeks ago about Threads and the narrative in that conversation was that Meta was dedicated to eradicating open source (Embrace Extend Extinguish, think of XMPP!). I tried pointing out Meta's many contributions to open source but redirecting the mob was hopeless. Sure, the motives of these contributions are selfish. They want to crush their enemies. But in this case their enemies are OpenAI and Microsoft, and the weapon they're using is to fling open the walled gardens OpenAI depends on for the common man to enjoy.

It's a useful cautionary tale to keep in mind whenever there's a target that everyone around you hates because they're "obviously" the devil. Maybe they are, but it's likely more complicated than it seems.