Zuckerberg and company talked up another supposed tech revolution four short years ago.
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Meta’s “AI superintelligence” effort sounds just like its failed “metaverse”
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Yep, let’s buy virtual valueless merch for real money we have to physically earn. AI enshittified slop that we are supposed to hand real money over to “experience”. Real friends don’t forking charge you for their time. The trash that is the Metaverse.
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Now hold up and hear me out. What if there was some sort of digital currency that was "earned" by simply running pollution machines that powered computers to do math nobody can use for anything other than "earning" this digital currency? By Jove.ai, I think we have our solution! Fake work for fake money to buy fake merch, all of it consuming real resources without labor or improvement! It's perfect!
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"Maybe those glasses will ignite widespread interest in the metaverse in a way that Meta’s bulky, niche VR goggles have utterly failed to."
No. The glasses aren't the problem. If the metaverse was even a little bit worthwhile, it would be worthwhile on a regular computer screen. Glasses would only enhance its worthiness - not make an unworthy product worthy. The metaverse is a failure because it isn't compelling in any way and solves not outstanding problems of any kind. It's Facebook troll bait, full stop.
No. The glasses aren't the problem. If the metaverse was even a little bit worthwhile, it would be worthwhile on a regular computer screen. Glasses would only enhance its worthiness - not make an unworthy product worthy. The metaverse is a failure because it isn't compelling in any way and solves not outstanding problems of any kind. It's Facebook troll bait, full stop.
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He lives in a heavily fortified, insulated bubble. It's been decades since he's had any contact with reality.
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... This first-person-shooter game is brought to you by Lockeed Martin ...
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And Zuck probably never seen the Second Life virtual world. At least SL has legs to stand on!
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David Mayer
Ars Centurion
That's easy, they don't see their employees as people. Which is why, in the event of a societal collapse, all the expensive ex special forces guys they hired for such an eventuality, will eat them alive.
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Even if Meta achieves something novel, spectacular, or miraculous, I want nothing to do with them. They are just there to farm my data and use it for profit. I love the ideas of the Oculus and the Rayban Meta smart glasses, but Meta isn't getting my money for either. Meta has proven time and time again that they are incredibly hostile and predatory towards their consumers. The only Meta product I use is WhatsApp (I deleted both my IG and FB accounts in November) because I have groups that primarily communicate through WhatsApp.
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This is a highly relevant SMBC comic, which came out about a month before Marky Z expressed his goal of everyone having AI friends: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/gently
Alt text: "Now, watch this comic become slowly less funny over time"
Alt text: "Now, watch this comic become slowly less funny over time"
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The punch line of that comic is great.
I'm way less of an AI hater than most of the commitariat of this site but is definitely one area I worry a lot about:
This is the most dystopian view of the of the future I can imagine and he's excited!
I'm way less of an AI hater than most of the commitariat of this site but is definitely one area I worry a lot about:
This is the most dystopian view of the of the future I can imagine and he's excited!
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Remember when Internet.org was supposed to provide free Internet for everyone in the world, before it was dropped after failing in India?
Zuck needs an intervention - exactly one of his big moonshot ideas have paid off, and otherwise all the major progress the company has made has been through acquisitions.
Zuck needs an intervention - exactly one of his big moonshot ideas have paid off, and otherwise all the major progress the company has made has been through acquisitions.
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All that Meta can do do is throw truckloads of money at whatever the plat du jour is. And have its CEO come with self-aware rambling speeches on how transformative this is. Two questions: where does this endless money come from and when will investors realise it never materialises into something tangible? Nobody bought the the Metaverse, nobody's buying Meta's AI - or whatever offering they have.
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It's wildly unsettling to me, how many of societies resources we have collectively decided to put into the hands of such a terrible person with such bad ideas. Incredible that these people find willing investors.
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Maybe try reading it. It's not claiming any relationship between Meta's AI efforts and its Metaverse efforts. It's saying something entirely different and unrelated.
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They're identical: Zuckerberg hopping on whatever the latest hype-train is, because he wants to monetize your interaction with other people. Facebook & Instagram made him rich by inserting him between you and your friends, and letting him choose who you saw and push ads. With the metaverse, he was hoping to create a proprietary way to hang out with your friends so he could do the same. With the AI push, he wants to create Facebook-owned systems that outcompete real human interaction. In a perfect Zuck-world, millions of people depend on Facebook servers for their basic human need of friendship.
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I won’t believe it until he changes the name of the company to “SuperAI” or something.
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And conveniently ignoring the fact that there is no path to even BASIC INTELLIGENCE that any single AI company is pursuing outside of fever-dream marketing hype. Though I'd love to see him try to lay out the steps to go from a glorified sorting algorithm to 'SUPER intelligence'. lol
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I don't get how they miss the most obvious shortfalls.
Metaverse: most normal folks don't actually want to spend all their time in VR.
AI friends: for most people, the point of a friend is for them to be human.
These are so obvious that a smart strategy would be to address them in the marketing materials, somehow.
Metaverse: most normal folks don't actually want to spend all their time in VR.
AI friends: for most people, the point of a friend is for them to be human.
These are so obvious that a smart strategy would be to address them in the marketing materials, somehow.
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Well Microsoft just laid off an additional 9,000 employees from the gaming division yesterday. People that made Starfield, Indiana Jones, and Doom. Because I guess the CEO doesn't have enough yachts.
And this morning, the MS office home screen (which previously links to meetings, recently opened docs and such) had only this:
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
Advertising. You have never met a larger hive of scum and villainy.
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Whatever the future of AI may hold, I'm sure as hell staying as far away from anything Meta touches ... forever.
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How does he manage to sound so fake, so creepy, so corporate-bot-like in every single sentence? It's like he hasn't expressed a genuine personal thought in the last 20 years.
What a weird, sad little human...
What a weird, sad little human...
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Noted above, he has little or no human contact beyond a close circle of uber-sycophants ready to accept and amplify whatever he says. And he's lived like that for decades now, in near-complete isolation. His mental aberrations are probably very much like what people kept too long in solitary confinement wind up afflicted with.
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"Zuckerberg claims that a billion people use Meta’s AI products monthly, for instance"
Yeah, but 99% of that is probably people who were trying to execute a basic search in the Facebook or Instagram, but accidentally tapped the ➤ button next to the search entry field, instead of tapping the Enter (or
) key within their phone's keypad.
That is, a year or so ago, Meta started sending queries to its AI by repurposing that UI field and the button next to it. Now, you have to remember to press not the button next to the field, but the Enter button on your phone's keypad (which may contextually change to showing a "") to avoid getting the Meta AI's inane responses and instead just find the damn thing you're looking for. It's ridiculously unintuitive that an Enter key doesn't do the same thing as the field submission button that's up top.
So yeah, this is them boasting "Hooray! Our AI is so popular! (...ever since we made it seem to many users like it was the only way left to do a search.)"
Yeah, but 99% of that is probably people who were trying to execute a basic search in the Facebook or Instagram, but accidentally tapped the ➤ button next to the search entry field, instead of tapping the Enter (or
) key within their phone's keypad.That is, a year or so ago, Meta started sending queries to its AI by repurposing that UI field and the button next to it. Now, you have to remember to press not the button next to the field, but the Enter button on your phone's keypad (which may contextually change to showing a "
") to avoid getting the Meta AI's inane responses and instead just find the damn thing you're looking for. It's ridiculously unintuitive that an Enter key doesn't do the same thing as the field submission button that's up top.So yeah, this is them boasting "Hooray! Our AI is so popular! (...ever since we made it seem to many users like it was the only way left to do a search.)"
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First and foremost, build AI models that refrain from confidently stating utter bleepin' bullshit. Then we can start to study how to build upon these much more solid foundations than the present quite shaky ones.
Otherwise: nope, never, nada, forget it.
Otherwise: nope, never, nada, forget it.
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CEO throws away $60B on feels -> research
Paying employees a larger cut of profits -> waste of money. Actually, lay them off.
Paying employees a larger cut of profits -> waste of money. Actually, lay them off.
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That cat is out of the gate. There are ad companies out there that target AI already. If AI has the jobs it will also have the money.
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An interesting thing I read a few weeks ago and am surprised didn't get more play is that apparently the 2017 Trump tax law included provisions ending a large R&D tax credit in 2022. The tech layoffs all started in 2022.
As much as tech CEOs want to claim the layoffs are because their wonderful AI tech means they don't need as many developers, it's far more likely to be because they are heartless and the new tax situation means they needed to lay off a ton of devs to keep things in the same budget.
https://www.techspot.com/news/108230-how-little-known-tax-change-sparked-tech-layoff.html
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For some scale, that's the purchasing cost of five Gerald R. Ford-class nuclear powered supercarriers burned in four years with absolutely nothing to show for it.
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Zuckerberg can spend all the money in the world on whatever frivolous bullshit he wants, and it will not change the inescapable truth: he is a fraud, whose sole success was stolen from others, and whose every subsequent dream has been a failure. He will never know another real success because he is a pathetic, worthless husk of a man, and he knows it. He can practice MMA and try to project Alpha Male Energy all he wants, he can dry his tears with his piles of cash, but we all know he will never be more than a sniveling snot-faced little shit.
His greatest accomplishment, if you can call it that, has been to destroy countless real relationships and convert society into a panopticon police state for his own profit. He has no true friends - his every relationship is transactional and no one would suffer his miserable, soulless company if they didn’t need his money or power. He will die unloved, and the world will be a better place for his absence. He can try to run from this fact in an alternate reality populated by his low-budget Mii knockoffs, or by seeking companionship from a wildly expensive computer program designed to fellate his ego, but it will inevitably catch up to him.
Rot in hell, you disgusting fuck.
His greatest accomplishment, if you can call it that, has been to destroy countless real relationships and convert society into a panopticon police state for his own profit. He has no true friends - his every relationship is transactional and no one would suffer his miserable, soulless company if they didn’t need his money or power. He will die unloved, and the world will be a better place for his absence. He can try to run from this fact in an alternate reality populated by his low-budget Mii knockoffs, or by seeking companionship from a wildly expensive computer program designed to fellate his ego, but it will inevitably catch up to him.
Rot in hell, you disgusting fuck.
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OK, I know Zuck knows what the Internet is. Why is he working so hard to dumb things down and conflate the Internet with the World Wide Web?
I've been doing almost anything I can imagine on the Internet since 1990. No need for the Metaverse (although I did try out both a 3D Internet packet tracer and a 3D browser/virtual world back in the late 90s/early 2000s.
I'm waiting for a technology that combines social media, 3D TV, cryptocurrency, NFTs, the cloud, AI, and physical appliances with expensive disposable refills -- and hyperloops.
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Ah, the Soviet Union returns. "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." Meanwhile the piles of nickel, tungsten and titanium build up with nothing useful achieved.
Being a natural pessimist, I suspect the problem here is that the electronics revolution has finally run into the buffers, to mix metaphors. The astronomical share prices of Tesla, Meta, Alphabet etc. have been supported by an apparent endless growth path as new ideas came forward and electronics got ever cheaper and faster. And now it's really going nowhere. Simple AI bots that help you get to the right customer service person are OK, ones that pollute the world with junk disinformation are not, but that's where the money is perceived as being. The real growth looks like being in different areas of technology - emissions reduction, renewable energy, medicine (check your jurisdiction), civil engineering as more of the world moves to cities - and this is where China is headed. Nobody likes to see their business model evaporate, but as Drucker taught us all those years ago, you have to be ruthless in dumping yesterday's product, putting today's on maintenance, and investing in the future, which will not look like a bigger, faster today.
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Locking Zuckerberg, Musk and MTG in a room, feeding them a diet of essentials, and having a video and audio feed would make a wonderful pay to view operation, a modern version of Sartre's Huis Clos.
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I don't know if anyone has attempted to do a study and quantify it, but I'd bet the externalities generated by Meta cost more than $50bn a year.
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Ah yes, it was bought by a British guy who promptly managed to kill himself on one. Zuckerberg bought (stole?)the idea of Facebook and Musk bought into Tesla.
Well, how about it, God? We're waiting.
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