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Just now, Nice Guy Eddie said:

What else did the person post besides the video?  In that tweet and in general.

i don’t believe it’s possible for Facebook or twitter to remove all copies of a Colbert video. I suppose they could try but that attempt could actually produce the opposite result.

Look, if I was able to watch the fucking video I’d be able to give you a better answer, maybe dispute the assertion of the person that posted, maybe make the same opinion that I have it it right now. But not being given the option to view it is exactly my fucking point. 
 

I’m not saying they removed all fucking copies, just the one that someone sent a link to. It could be more, it could be less. No one knows because they are doing whatever the fuck they want.

Stop letting your political partisanship get in the way of a discussion about social media companies censoring and removing information based on their own political bias or any other bias or criteria that they may have.

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9 minutes ago, Orange&White said:

Look, if I was able to watch the fucking video I’d be able to give you a better answer, maybe dispute the assertion of the person that posted, maybe make the same opinion that I have it it right now. But not being given the option to view it is exactly my fucking point. 
 

I’m not saying they removed all fucking copies, just the one that someone sent a link to. It could be more, it could be less. No one knows because they are doing whatever the fuck they want.

Stop letting your political partisanship get in the way of a discussion about social media companies censoring and removing information based on their own political bias or any other bias or criteria that they may have.

They are a private business. If you do not like their policies, stop using their products. 

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4 minutes ago, Orange&White said:

Newspapers are a private business. You good with them censoring information?

Do newspapers allow you to post ads saying vaccines cause autism?

Also, are you under the impression that newspapers don’t censor the news? 

Edited by Neonmoon
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I wasn’t the one that stated that Facebook and twitter removed a video to protect Harris from an embarrassing interview. I only asked you to back up your statement.  If they’re protecting a candidate, I would like to hear more about that.  However we’ve learned that you don’t have any evidence to back up your claim.

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13 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

Do newspapers allow you to post ads saying vaccines cause autism?

Also, are you under the impression that newspapers don’t censor the news? 

Yeah, pretty much this.

Why does anybody think they have free speech protection on some dude's massively successful website? 

Also, if I was that dude, I think I'd be a little bummed that my--at one point in time--really cool life's work is now known more for pseudo-science, conspiracy theorists, and your nut job family in law posting their thoughts on aforementioned horseshit.

...then I'd check out my bank account and immediately cheer up.

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  • 1 year later...
  • 2 years later...

Friend of mine sent me this (finance satire email):

new_meta_logo-removebg-preview.png?t=173

Meta’s new logo after the update to their content policies

Now let’s break down the 5 key updates to Meta’s content moderation. 

1. Replace fact checkers with community notes 

Rather than buying 1 million Nvidia Quadro graphics cards and running LLMs to ban content, Zuckerberg realized they could moderate content for free by having unemployed losers doing nothing at 2pm moderate for them. This saves Meta billions. 

2. Simplify content policies 

For the last 8 years you had to pretend that Caitlyn Jenner looks hot and that 12 million illegal immigrants didn’t cross the border. Now Facebook will allow your crazy uncle with 3 followers to write diatribes on Muslims because Meta realized no one was gonna read his shit anyway. 

3. New approach to policy enforcement 

Instead of banning some guy who says retard on Instagram, they’re gonna focus on addressing the pedophiles and terrorists plaguing their platforms. 

4. Bringing back civic content 

Previously you weren’t allowed to discuss politics on Meta platforms because they didn’t want someone with purple hair to have an anxiety attack. (It definitely wasn’t because the federal government was secretly forcing social media platforms to bend to their will.)

5. Moving their trust and safety content moderation teams 

Meta is moving all of their moderation teams from California to Texas. If you make $230k but your political ideologies won’t let you relocate to Texas, you were definitely part of the problem.

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57 minutes ago, FartingMonk said:

I do.  I'm a highly paid janitor.

Just saw this:

Quote

Breaking news.

Mark Zuckerberg has just announced.

Meta is set to cut another 5% of its workforce.

Which comes out to be 3600 people.

And that's on top of the 21,000 job cuts already done.

Zuckerberg says the cuts are in preparation for ‘intense year’

 

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Zuckerberg is about to make billions more with Meta. Eliminate jobs via killing moderation and moving jobs to lower costs states. And he's going to put more and more AI on their apps. Their income will go up whiles costs go down. Wall St. will reward that with a doubling of the stock price. I own tobacco stocks but I refuse to own Facebook, not counting their inclusion in index funds that I can't stop.

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I don't think the job cut thing is a bad thing.  There is a lot of bloat and we have a lot of people who just show up to collect a paycheck.  I hired on with a person.  We were given 6 months to learn how to do our job.  I was sent on my own in 3 months.  This guy 14 months later is still "learning". No one would be mad if he was trying, but he sits there and watches movies all day 

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3 hours ago, FartingMonk said:

I don't think the job cut thing is a bad thing.  There is a lot of bloat and we have a lot of people who just show up to collect a paycheck.  I hired on with a person.  We were given 6 months to learn how to do our job.  I was sent on my own in 3 months.  This guy 14 months later is still "learning". No one would be mad if he was trying, but he sits there and watches movies all day 

Yea I mean it's clear in the verbiage this is a move to cut fat and low performers. Can't really hate that.

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Zuck is a pretty serious operator. FB looks superficially like a mess of spam, but things like Marketplace is a big hit. Their advertising revenue per user keeps growing and growing, even during what looks to lay people as the twilight period of their primary product.

He had already announced 2 years ago about starting a "year of efficiency", and did a big cut then, so this current workforce reduction was coming from miles away. Their operating expenses had been on a steady decline. Since then, profitability went up 3x. They're putting tons of money now into infrastructure for AI and VR, so this will go into offsetting that spending.

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3 hours ago, 52-80 said:

Zuck is a pretty serious operator. FB looks superficially like a mess of spam, but things like Marketplace is a big hit. Their advertising revenue per user keeps growing and growing, even during what looks to lay people as the twilight period of their primary product.

He had already announced 2 years ago about starting a "year of efficiency", and did a big cut then, so this current workforce reduction was coming from miles away. Their operating expenses had been on a steady decline. Since then, profitability went up 3x. They're putting tons of money now into infrastructure for AI and VR, so this will go into offsetting that spending.

Yeah.  I'm on the infra side for AI.  It is insane how fast we are moving.

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31 minutes ago, FartingMonk said:

Yeah.  I'm on the infra side for AI.  It is insane how fast we are moving.

Lotta money getting thrown around for hardware and computing clusters, but sitting on the provider side of AI I'm really not seeing any level of uptake from customers that validates the investment. Even the customers that do have a decent level of revenue with genAI are still just in the proof of concept phase after a year

3 hours ago, 52-80 said:

They're putting tons of money now into infrastructure for AI and VR, so this will go into offsetting that spending.

Those segments aren't exactly growing in terms of customer uptake though. Their VR hardware is best in class, but I know of more than one person that will just stay out of the space rather than engage more with meta. It'll be interesting to see if their investments pay off, especially since "Metaverse" is lingua-non-grata in the tech space after it went up in flames with NFT's

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I don’t see how AI won’t be anything but huge for Meta. Obviously it’s a gigantic capital cost upfront but it will pay off. Start getting users conditioned to typing/talking with AI and Meta will began to learn even more about them and their current state of mind. Then you can pinpoint more relevant ads to them with a higher sales conversion. That will be valuable. Turns into a money printing flywheel.

im in healthcare and advertising in Meta is considered fairly weak. It can help with awareness but we and Meta really have limited ability to know when the user needs healthcare today to throw advertising at them. I could see AI helping to recognize what’s going on in that household. $-maker.

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9 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I don’t see how AI won’t be anything but huge for Meta. Obviously it’s a gigantic capital cost upfront but it will pay off. Start getting users conditioned to typing/talking with AI and Meta will began to learn even more about them and their current state of mind. Then you can pinpoint more relevant ads to them with a higher sales conversion. That will be valuable. Turns into a money printing flywheel.

im in healthcare and advertising in Meta is considered fairly weak. It can help with awareness but we and Meta really have limited ability to know when the user needs healthcare today to throw advertising at them. I could see AI helping to recognize what’s going on in that household. $-maker.

people who never thought a social networking website for college kids sharing drunk pics would grow to 1T, are skeptical they can grow an VR based business. we spend 8+ hours a day on a computing device, 5+ separately on a personal device, whos to say building a digital world is a wrong trajectory. 

and on the AI end its already a space race of every other tech company, and meta owns massive trove of graphic data, text data, relationship data.  paying for all of this is an advertising business rated by actual advertisers big and small as far and away the most effective alongside google.

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I will say our internal AI tools they let us play with.  The LLM has jumped exponentially.  The AI went from an infant to an adult pretty damn fast.  Even my Meta Ray Bans scare the hell out of me.  A friend of mines mom is going blind but she likes to read.  You can literally snap a picture of a page out of a book and have it read it back to you 

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2 hours ago, FartingMonk said:

I will say our internal AI tools they let us play with.  The LLM has jumped exponentially.  The AI went from an infant to an adult pretty damn fast.  Even my Meta Ray Bans scare the hell out of me.  A friend of mines mom is going blind but she likes to read.  You can literally snap a picture of a page out of a book and have it read it back to you 

I foresee that when walking through a crowded airport, or wherever, smart glasses can alert you to your college buddy sitting in the bar that you just passed. Or remind you that you might want to eat in the airport before getting on the plane. Then Meta or Google receives a commission from the restaurant. Think the Minority Report world minus the pre-crime aspect.

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7 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I foresee that when walking through a crowded airport, or wherever, smart glasses can alert you to your college buddy sitting in the bar that you just passed. Or remind you that you might want to eat in the airport before getting on the plane. Then Meta or Google receives a commission from the restaurant. Think the Minority Report world minus the pre-crime aspect.

Lol that sounds more like the Ferengi in DS9, where every social interaction and every function came with a very reasonable and nominal fee

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16 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I foresee that when walking through a crowded airport, or wherever, smart glasses can alert you to your college buddy sitting in the bar that you just passed. Or remind you that you might want to eat in the airport before getting on the plane. Then Meta or Google receives a commission from the restaurant. Think the Minority Report world minus the pre-crime aspect.

That would be annoying as fuck.  I think there is a function to disconnect it from Facebook and just allow you to take pictures and listen to your music only

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2 hours ago, FartingMonk said:

That would be annoying as fuck.  I think there is a function to disconnect it from Facebook and just allow you to take pictures and listen to your music only

Meta would still monetize that by datamining your wearing experience and geolocation.  At least I'm getting old enough to [happily] realize I'm not the market for those wearables, nor the 'metaverse.'  Touch grass, nerds.

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On 1/14/2025 at 7:39 PM, FartingMonk said:

I don't think the job cut thing is a bad thing.  There is a lot of bloat and we have a lot of people who just show up to collect a paycheck.  I hired on with a person.  We were given 6 months to learn how to do our job.  I was sent on my own in 3 months.  This guy 14 months later is still "learning". No one would be mad if he was trying, but he sits there and watches movies all day 

 

On 1/14/2025 at 11:17 PM, Vegas64 said:

Yea I mean it's clear in the verbiage this is a move to cut fat and low performers. Can't really hate that.

Yes, CEOs always tell the truth about how layoffs will be run. 

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2 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

 

Yes, CEOs always tell the truth about how layoffs will be run. 

You aren't wrong but you can tell the sentiment around the campus.  The ones that know they are performing well aren't too concerned.  The ones who have slacked off hope they aren't part of the bottom 5 percent.  

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4 hours ago, FartingMonk said:

You aren't wrong but you can tell the sentiment around the campus.  The ones that know they are performing well aren't too concerned.  The ones who have slacked off hope they aren't part of the bottom 5 percent.  

It's interesting and I've read a lot of commentary how usually when leaders do layoffs, unless it's whole swaths of departments or roles being eliminated, it's of course the lowest performers. But it's uncouth to say that because it makes it harder for those recently laid off to get a job if the new company and interviewers think "dang, this guy/gal was laid off because they were in the lowest bucket, I bet they kinda suck".

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On 1/15/2025 at 7:45 AM, Captainant said:

Lotta money getting thrown around for hardware and computing clusters, but sitting on the provider side of AI I'm really not seeing any level of uptake from customers that validates the investment. Even the customers that do have a decent level of revenue with genAI are still just in the proof of concept phase after a year

I’m glad you brought this up because Derek Thompson just had the chair of market and investment strategy for JP Morgan on his podcast (Plain English if you want to listen) and he made the same point.  The Mag-7 are burning through lots of cash building infrastructure but don’t have customers yet and it’s likely a few of them are going to be big losers.  That said, he described himself as 51% bull on AI and was kind of impressed just how committed these firms were towards the R&D.  
 

I was listening to Ezra Klein Jake Sullivan interview yesterday and it was interesting how confident Sullivan was on winning AI dominance over China, presumably because these tech titans who have created cartels over our information are using those enormous profits in competition for the next thing.  

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13 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

I was listening to Ezra Klein Jake Sullivan interview yesterday and it was interesting how confident Sullivan was on winning AI dominance over China, presumably because these tech titans who have created cartels over our information are using those enormous profits in competition for the next thing.  

And because China's chips/capabilities are orders of magnitude behind ours (e.g. nvidia) which is why nvidia got peeved with the latest announcements of restrictions to export to that part of the world (though likely the new administration will strike it down, thus nvidia stock has rebounded).

But, that won't be the case forever. We can look at EV's (BYD) as the example of catching up when the innovation is one and it's mass production, operationalizing and commodotizing time.

Quote

The Mag-7 are burning through lots of cash building infrastructure but don’t have customers yet and it’s likely a few of them are going to be big losers.  That said, he described himself as 51% bull on AI and was kind of impressed just how committed these firms were towards the R&D.  

There will certainly be huge losers, but the bigger risk is to sit idly and let the opportunity pass you by and you attrit to nothing slowly (then quickly). Unless you think AI is NOT going to be transformational in the way mobile or the internet was, then you keep your powder dry and play it safe, but I don't think many serious business or industry pundits are that contrarian or bearish on AI; today presently, since November 2022, and even before when AI was quietly being worked on.

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1 minute ago, Vegas64 said:

I don't think many serious business or industry pundits are that contrarian or bearish on AI

I can't recall who was mentioned but the Chase guy cited some and made the point they have legitimate reasons.  At the moment, no one can monetize it to match the degree of investment and subscriptions to LLM shit for resume reviewing isn't a good use case. 

Bear in mind he's coming at it from an investor standpoint and this isn't VC money he's advising.  I presume his enthusiasm is more dampened because it's unclear WHICH firm might win out than that one of the will do so. 

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8 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

I can't recall who was mentioned but the Chase guy cited some and made the point they have legitimate reasons.  At the moment, no one can monetize it to match the degree of investment and subscriptions to LLM shit for resume reviewing isn't a good use case. 

Bear in mind he's coming at it from an investor standpoint and this isn't VC money he's advising.  I presume his enthusiasm is more dampened because it's unclear WHICH firm might win out than that one of the will do so. 

Last week there was some noise around a company that was able to be as fast and good as OpenAI (plus or minus 10%, let's say) with like 1% of the investment or something that OpenAI had to date. I'll try to find it, but essentially homeboy tweeted out an acknowledgement of that fact with a "it's easier to copy someone who has already done the hard part" in the standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants sort of way.

But just like the Cloud Wars, the big winners are going to be legacy big tech and the decacorns of today, IMO.

Edited by Vegas64
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54 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

There will certainly be huge losers, but the bigger risk is to sit idly and let the opportunity pass you by and you attrit to nothing slowly (then quickly). Unless you think AI is NOT going to be transformational in the way mobile or the internet was, then you keep your powder dry and play it safe, but I don't think many serious business or industry pundits are that contrarian or bearish on AI; today presently, since November 2022, and even before when AI was quietly being worked on.

Thing is - large language models ARE the next big thing when it comes to handling extremely large and complex sets of data that are spread across a variety of different modes. There's been some fascinating research with LLM's being used to quickly explore possibility spaces within mathematic theories in academia.

But that sort of usecase AIN'T what's being sold. Every "AI" widget at CES was just the same shit from last year with a chatbot front end slapped on it. There's definitely more hay to be made, but right now the leaders are leaning into AI slop. Hell, Meta considers AI slop for boomers to be a critical part of their platform strategy for FB because it keeps engagement up

Edited by Captainant
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2 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Thing is - large language models ARE the next big thing when it comes to handling extremely large and complex sets of data that are spread across a variety of different modes. There's been some fascinating research with LLM's being used to quickly explore possibility spaces within mathematic theories in academia.

But that sort of usecase AIN'T what's being sold. Every "AI" widget at CES was just the same shit from last year with a chatbot front end slapped on it. There's definitely more hay to be made, but right now the leaders are leaning into AI slop. Hell, Meta considers AI slop for boomers to be a critical part of their platform strategy for FB because it keeps engagement up

I mean, right now it's 100% focused on digital labor and capital cost takeout (e.g. replacing human beings).

Post labor economy is one of things we should all be studying IMO.

That said, this prolonged AI hype cycle might just be priming us for the real revolution: Quantum Computing!

Quote

Quantum computing stocks, which took a hit recently when Nvidia’s CEO cast doubt on how soon the tech would be ready for primetime, jumped after Microsoft declared 2025 “the year to get quantum-ready.”

 

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19 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

That said, this prolonged AI hype cycle might just be priming us for the real revolution: Quantum Computing!

I'll believe it when quantum systems are generalizable to start solving actual problems. But yes the promise they present would be earthshaking. It would also completely break modern information security and bumblefuck cryptomarkets, by virtue of (theoretically) solving blocks and crypto keys in O(1) time rather than a constantly escalating exponential number of calculations

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1 minute ago, Captainant said:

I'll believe it when quantum systems are generalizable to start solving actual problems. But yes the promise they present would be earthshaking. It would also completely break modern information security and bumblefuck cryptomarkets, by virtue of (theoretically) solving blocks and crypto keys in O(1) time rather than a constantly escalating exponential number of calculations

I’m going to cite Derek Thompson’s podcast again, but he also just had someone on in December to talk about Google’s quantum computer successes if anyone is interested in that.  
 

I think the TL:DR was that it was capable of remarkable problem solving given very discrete and specific instructions, but that it was not yet broadly superior to what they refer to as classical computing (also, there may be a thread for this stuff already but we’re veering off Facebook fuckery into far more interesting subjects).  

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1 hour ago, LCHorn said:

I’m going to cite Derek Thompson’s podcast again, but he also just had someone on in December to talk about Google’s quantum computer successes if anyone is interested in that.  
 

I think the TL:DR was that it was capable of remarkable problem solving given very discrete and specific instructions, but that it was not yet broadly superior to what they refer to as classical computing (also, there may be a thread for this stuff already but we’re veering off Facebook fuckery into far more interesting subjects).  

I'd like to hear about this Derek Thompson guy I guess-- but that makes sense timing-wise as in December Google released Willow it's quantum chip. This is what was said about it:

Quote

 

Google measured Willow’s performance using the so-called random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark, which presents a computational task that’s difficult for classical computers to solve.

Willow performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years — or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years — Google said.

“This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe,” Neven said.

Shares of Google parent Alphabet were nearly 4% higher Tuesday morning. It’s unclear if the move was in part due to Willow’s release.

Has Google truly made a quantum breakthrough?

Google’s Willow chip has demonstrated a “new milestone in how quantum computers can deal with errors that happen during their operation,” according to Winfried Hensinger, professor of quantum technologies at the University of Sussex.

“Their technique becomes more effective in reducing errors the more extra qubits are being used to correct for these errors. This is a very important milestone for quantum computers.”

But despite optimism that quantum computing could one day change the world — or at least computers’ role in it — experts in the field have suggested that Google’s quantum computing breakthrough is still lacking in real-world uses.

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/10/google-claims-quantum-milestone-but-cant-solve-real-world-problems-.html

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