2k20, what's the worst enormous tech company?

oh hai lex luthor

https://i.redd.it/67thj75i00941.jpg

Mediaite reports:

During his talk with Rush Limbaugh today, President Donald Trump talked about a recent dinner he had with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. As the president today talked about the size of his online followings, Trump brought up how “I had dinner with Mark Zuckerberg the other day” and claimed, “He said I’d like to congratulate you, you’re number one on Facebook. You know, it’s incredible.”

Slate says "Amazon" but the lower levels of this have some I was previously unfamiliar with:

https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/evil-list-tech-companies-dangerous-amazon-facebook-google-palantir.html

Our respondents say: “I am most troubled by the growth of cyberstalking apps (pitched as legitimate help for parents and employers and deployed by domestic abusers).” —Danielle Citron, Boston University School of Law

legitimate help for employers huh

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/technology/google-search-results.html

In the two decades since Google introduced text ads above search results, the company has steadily made ads less conspicuous. But its latest look may have pushed things too far. Users complained that Google was trying to trick people into clicking on more paid results, while marketing executives said it was yet another step in blurring the line between ads and unpaid search results, forcing them to spend more money with the internet company.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pke9k9/facebook-wanted-nso-spyware-to-monitor-users

"The Facebook representatives stated that Facebook was concerned that its method for gathering user data through Onavo Protect was less effective on Apple devices than on Android devices," the court filing reads. "The Facebook representatives also stated that Facebook wanted to use purported capabilities of Pegasus to monitor users on Apple devices and were willing to pay for the ability to monitor Onavo Protect users."

Contact tracing can help slow the spread of COVID-19 and can be done without compromising user privacy. We’re working with @sundarpichai & @Google to help health officials harness Bluetooth technology in a way that also respects transparency & consent. https://t.co/94XlbmaGZV

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) April 10, 2020

a Facebook of medical data of large parts of the world’s population? no, that’s just fine

Is this bad

― calstars, Friday, April 10, 2020 2:17 PM (fifty-two minutes ago)

i guess it depends on how much you believe in the illusion of privacy your smartphone currently affords you and whether you'd sacrifice that data-collection for legitimate health reasons (ie, saving lives) rather than selling you bullshit ads.

New Candidate - Zoom

https://www.engadget.com/zoom-is-now-the-facebook-of-video-apps-190024369.html

The owner of @ChiPizzaBoss shared this nightmarish Grubhub invoice that will haunt me for days. https://t.co/VMDcIgAqxd pic.twitter.com/Zz6cPi0HnJ

— Susie Cagle (@susie_c) April 30, 2020

Ugh

A VP at Amazon quits over whistleblower firings

Warehouse workers reached out to AECJ for support. They responded by internally promoting a petition and organizing a video call for Thursday April 16 featuring warehouse workers from around the world, with guest activist Naomi Klein. An announcement sent to internal mailing lists on Friday April 10th was apparently the flashpoint. Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, two visible AECJ leaders, were fired on the spot that day. The justifications were laughable; it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistleblowing.

This is interesting:

https://themargins.substack.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage

That’s a good read. What a dumb world we live in.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/05/facebook-zuckerberg-trump/

During an internal presentation, Facebook debuted a feature for its workplace chat product allowing employers to remove & block specific topics that are trending in office chats. The topic chosen in the demonstration was “unionize,” the Intercept reports https://t.co/Q1Tpa5dXEt

— Hamza Shaban (@hshaban) June 12, 2020

Sudden outsider challenge from eBay: https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/06/15/ebay-employees-arrested-u-s-attorney-andrew-lelling-cyberstalking/

what in the fresh hell

The Wirecard story is amazing.

https://www.ft.com/content/284fb1ad-ddc0-45df-a075-0709b36868db

holy shit

Wirecard acknowledges for the first time the potential scale of a multiyear accounting fraud, warning that the €1.9bn of cash probably does “not exist”.

oops

softbank really are gonna singlehandedly destroy the world economy huh

fun read

STOP THE ZUCKIES

https://gothamist.com/news/facebook-will-lease-730000-square-feet-farley-post-office-building

bring your flamethrowers, NYC

this is "fun": https://simpletexting.com/tech-ceo-salary/

BREAKING: Facebook refused to apply hate-speech rules to BJP officials, despite evidence of their violent and Islamophobic rhetoric on the platform. A smoking gun from @WSJ:

Read now: https://t.co/jU7nxV2QR2

— Equality Labs (@EqualityLabs) August 14, 2020

Paywalled article but highlights that Facebook has been permitting hate speech from right-wing Indian politicians, having hired a BJP supporter to oversee public policy.

Not completely dissimilar to a case in Ukraine where an investigative news outlet had their page deleted after writing an article exposing far-right activists linked to the organisation that does Facebook’s local fact-checking.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/26/world/europe/ukraine-facebook-fake-news.html

The local head of public policy is another controversial nationalist.

it's a garbage company and people who use its platform are morons

It took Apple 42 years to reach $1 trillion in value. It took it just two more years to get to $2 trillion.

Even more stunning: All of Apple’s second $1 trillion came in the past 21 weeks, while the global economy shrank faster than ever before in the coronavirus pandemic.

On Wednesday Apple became the first U.S. company to hit a $2 trillion valuation when its shares climbed 1.2 percent to $467.78 in morning trading. It was another milestone for the maker of iPhones, Mac computers and Apple Watches, cementing its title as the world’s most valuable public company and punctuating how the pandemic has been a bonanza for the tech giants.

Apple is not a noble company by any stretch of the imagination but they shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath as FB, Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Uber imo

this is about right

Always find @ReadMargins fascinating https://t.co/tV5smIomXQ pic.twitter.com/QQcFtP7kfU

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) August 31, 2020

Facebook to ban political advertising

the week before the election

After reaping all those sweet political dollars, like sucking a marrow bone.

why do people still use it

They haven't banned political advertising in the week before the election they've banned new political adverts in the week before the election. Existing adverts can be retargeted, have their speed adjusted. Your bullshit will be slightly stale but it will still be served up by the shovel load.

Basically they have done the minimum amount possible without actually doing anything, so they can announce they are doing something.

Also, they "banned" political advertising in Washington State 21 months ago, after being repeatedly sued by the Attorney General for violating electoral law regarding disclosure.

They then continued to sell political adverts, but had lawyers argue that they did not have to follow the law and make disclosures about them, because they had a policy banning them, therefore they did not keep any information about their sale.

and people still use it

This is a disturbing development.

Last Friday, Facebook sent a cease-and-desist letter to two NYU researchers (@LauraEdelson2 and Damon McCoy), demanding that they shut down their research into political ads and disinformation on FB’s platform.https://t.co/ksBVmqV27K

— Alex Abdo (@AlexanderAbdo) October 23, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/oct/23/facebook-moderators-forced-to-work-in-dublin-office-despite-high-tier-lockdown

It's always simultaneously sad and hilarious when the tech bros testify on capital hill. You get, like, Jack Dorsey, with his wizard beard and nose ring and obvious tech knowhow, and then on the other side these 75-year old white guys who can barely check their AOL.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?476686-1/facebook-google-twitter-execs-testify-social-media-regulations&live

One of several fantastic answers from various Amazon help desk workers in this thread. (At some point they stop signing their initials to 'em.)

Thank you for that information. We apologize but upon reviewing your location you're in Northern Ireland. Rugby Autumn Nations Cup coverage is exclusively available to Prime members based in the UK. We don't have the rights to other territories. ^RS

— Amazon Help (@AmazonHelp) November 14, 2020

You apologise for the TROUBLES??? https://t.co/LPwwSjA9Ci

— jericho cane stan account (@brynteresting) November 14, 2020

1. A small business began selling camera tripods on Amazon
2. It reached $3.5 million in sales, 0.001% of Amazon's revenue
3. Amazon copied the tripods exactly and sold them as AmazonBasics tripods
4. Amazon banned the tripod company from Amazonhttps://t.co/f930Dvjpdp

— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) December 22, 2020

Time for a new thread?

“RAGA received significant funding from numerous corporations in 2020," including Koch Industries ($375k), Amazon ($100k), Chevron ($50k), the NRA ($50k), Monsanto ($50k), Facebook ($50k), Uber ($50k), Coca Cola ($50k), Exxon ($50k), and Google ($25k) https://t.co/v6EwRXXn2C

— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) January 9, 2021

(RAGA was the group that funded the 1/6 insurrection of the Capitol)

Google threaten to cut off search if the Australian government stop Facebook from bootlegging newspapers

Good, Google search is absolute dogballs. Let another competitor enjoy the traffic.

If only DDG converted easily to a verb.

The experience of searching on Google and shopping on Amazon both absolutely suck now so that should be all the evidence anyone needs to prosecute them for antitrust violations

If they weren’t monopolists nobody would use them anymore

A crazy detail in this @GrimKim story: Amazon got city employees to *change the stoplight* at the facility workers are trying to unionize. Organizers had been stopping cars at the light w/ info on the union.

This is how hard it is to organize when Amazon has govt in its pocket. https://t.co/CJ6kcy54uk

— Asya Pikovsky (@AsyaPikovsky) February 5, 2021

Google threaten to cut off search if the Australian government stop Facebook from bootlegging newspapers

― shivers me timber (sic), Friday, January 22, 2021 11:35 AM (three weeks ago)

Facebook have started classifying and restricting "news" pages in Australia in anticipation of this legislation. It's going well.

Facebook has banned Facebook's own Facebook page pic.twitter.com/bvZGRaO77H

— Andrew Brown (@AndrewBrownAU) February 17, 2021

They also blocked various governmental departments, whole state governments, and the Bureau of Meteorology, before, sadly, reclassifying them.

I'm not sure in this one wether to hate Zuck or Murdoch. Both have mefarious aims here tbh.

Nefarious rather. Stupidfingers.

I hear some dinosaurs had a tiny brain in each one of their fingers and yet they were dumb as a bag of hammers anyway.

there's literally no reason to stop hating either

100% endorse Facebook requiring users to access international news on a platform not riddled with Nazis and publishing conspiracy theories next to the news stories.

Not only has Facebook banned Australian news orgs, it’s Australian users can’t view the pages of international news orgs either. @BBCNews, @CNN and @nytimes are all gone. pic.twitter.com/6x4mvPs798

— Peter Law (@PeterJohnLaw) February 17, 2021

Frankly I never went to FB for any of my news to start with and its weirding me out how many ppl I know apparently do.

I don't understand Facebook full stop but surely if you want the ABC news you go to the ABC website. Would be great if we could get them to fuck off out of australia completely.

This feels like a genuinely interesting development? Like o dunno but I feel this could really fuck up Facebook and drive audiences back toward traditional news sources. Why did I hear the phrase “narrator voice” as soon as I typed that sentence.

Hard to imagine anything at all being of less concern than this

Communications Minister Paul Fletcher says he has spoken to the administrator of North Shore Mums, whose Facebook page has also been blocked, "and that is of significant concern"

— Michael Koziol (@michaelkoziol) February 18, 2021

the Federal Minister for Communications has probably already refunded the ABC's shortwave disaster/emergency regional broadcasting today and is just working right down the bottom of the list though

Arent NSM one of those antivax nobs?

My friend's online vintage store is blocked by this too for some reason. She's not bitching about it to a senator though.

So: Facebook's nuclear-option has really badly distracted from something really serious and significant. Google has entered into an agreement to *pay cash* to spread Infowars-grade misinformation about climate and energy.

My post -> https://t.co/TbmxciyBN4

And a quick 🧵...

— Ketan Joshi (@KetanJ0) February 19, 2021

A rideshare driver terminated an active ride because one of his passengers refused to wear a mask. The passenger ended up punching the driver, grabbing his phone and trying to steal it, and then upon exiting peppersprayed the driver from outside the car.

Here's how Uber responded:

The fundraiser was organized by Cyan Banister, an early investor in Uber who was appalled by the amount of money Uber gave to the driver after the incident.

"Uber then failed to step up to take care of this Uber driver to help him with lost wages and cleaning from having pepper spray chemicals sprayed into the fabric of his car," a statement read on the fundraising page. "They instead began with only offering $20 in compensation for having pepper spray covering his interior fabric. They then upped it to $120 in compensation but this does not come close to the expenses needed to have a professional car detailing to try and remove the strong chemicals of pepper spray and also the lost wages from not being able to work."

Jeff Bezos will soon be the owner of a $500 million superyacht he purchased two years ago, and whose construction is nearing completion, according to Bloomberg. The yacht will be 417 feet long, include several decks, and will also come with its own “support” yacht, complete with helipad.

In other words, this yacht—among the largest ever built in the Netherlands—comes with its own yacht.

Bezos is just one billionaire among many to recently “splurge” on a superyacht. Steven Spielberg is reportedly trading in his modest $158 million yacht for one from the same company currently manufacturing Bezos’s. And overall the “market’s been roaring,” a superyacht appraisal expert told Bloomberg, even (and especially) during the pandemic. Bloomberg explains:

Covid wasn’t a factor when Bezos put in his order a couple years ago, but it has contributed to the industry’s boom. With galas canceled and land borders closed, yachting suddenly seemed the best option for private, socially distanced leisure and a good way to escape from the prying eyes of the public that might look askance at wealthy overindulgence during difficult times.

I suspect part of the mental justification of owning a super yacht is as an insurance policy against the breakdown of social order.

i'm reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52019031-notes-from-an-apocalypse right now and there's a good chapter on that

for half a billion dollars you shouldn't have to take a zodiac to the support yacht whenever you want to fly out

Mr Choppy

Facebook will no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, a company spokesperson told POLITICO on Wednesday, a move that acknowledges the renewed debate about the virus’ origins.

how tone deaf is this social media team? this is dystopian, nightmare shit

Amazon's Leila Brown used her background in sports medicine and her passion in alternative therapies to create a space where our employees could focus on their mental well-being. https://t.co/bvk2bw9Lke pic.twitter.com/cEQhsTH0Od

— Amazon News (@amazonnews) May 26, 2021

very good thank you. im jacking off in one of these right now while playing the knight rider theme on my phone https://t.co/AlFIVlttVR

— wint (@dril) May 27, 2021

https://i.imgur.com/1aHabVf.jpg

I'm sure plenty of people have already thought of this but what came to mind:

http://www.reactiongifs.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/suicide_booth_futurama.gif

Hi we’re the portal of record for all information, also we think this is not humiliatingly badly done pic.twitter.com/GGUlZ1pbJd

— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) June 8, 2021

Regulators told Amazon that its ruthless quotas were injuring workers.

Amazon just said it won't be changing anything.

Its plan instead: a donation and a task force!https://t.co/4eD667Tl1j

— Andy Donohue (@add) June 11, 2021

The new Apple Watch commercial featuring real 911 calls might’ve landed a bit better if the people making them weren’t regularly launching themselves out the factory windows

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/13/capitol-attack-subpoenas-google-facebook-twitter-reddit-january-6

The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack subpoenaed Twitter, Meta, Alphabet and Reddit on Thursday for records related to the 6 January insurrection, as it seeks to review data that could potentially incriminate the Trump White House.

Facebook is part of Meta and Google is part of Alphabet.

Far from the worst thing about either, but good God the renaming of these companies is so mindboggling stupid and irritating.

Is anywhere on ilx hosting the "let's clown the metaverse video" conversation? Lots of pointing and laughing on twitter.

ysi?

Twitter enabling NFT losers even more than they had previously lol

Civil War II won't be fought between MAGA and liberals but people who paid $300k for a racist caricature vs. people who think those people are troglodytes.

this video?

This is the #metaverse... A live rave happening right now in @decentraland for the upcoming @LightbulbmanNFT release by #BjarneMelgaard. Music from @feedelity @prins_thomas @mightbetwins #NFTdrop #rave #virtualevent #NFTCommunity pic.twitter.com/aC4WYRbgH9

— Alex Moss (@alexmoss) January 20, 2022

Yeah, that one. It's just... THIS is what the facebook billions are being spent on? Sub-Second Life garbage for incredibly boring NFT parties?

yeah it's embarrassing...or it should be. Predicting what happens in tech is pretty futile, but everything metaverse is so strongly reminiscent of the dot-com bubble to me, it's hard not to assume this is all going to be dead in a year

textbook wishful thinking of course, but yeah it just looks so bathetic and unappealing

Third Life

feels way more divorced from reality than the dot-com bubble

Ha that's a good point. I was reacting more to the wave of corporations rushing to declare their participation in something that has no proven utility yet, but you're right, websites could at least be mundanely informative

That laughably awful video makes me think back to all of those (understandably! justifiably!) concerned articles about pervs taking creep shots with their Google Glass because they were going to be so ubiquitous in mere months!

They've been trying to make AR/VR/etc. happen for almost 30 years now (the first Wired I ever read had a big thing on VR in... 1995? '96?) and it's just a bust over and over. Nobody wants an extra layer of shit on top of buying their morning coffee.

damn this is grim: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/28/suicide-hotline-silicon-valley-privacy-debates-00002617

"META" stock down 26% today. Hundreds of billions of dollars in paper value wiped out all because iPhones made it harder for advertisers to follow you around the internet. Fucking wild.

anyone here read Tim Hwang's Subprime Attention Crisis?

snap down 25% during the day (presumably on the basis that they suffer the same problems as meta due to ios 14.5) and now up 55% after hours having reported results. (pinterest down 10%, up 20% a/h on results.) nobody knows anything.

breh

Pinterest is so weird, it only exists for me now as an annoying site that pops up in Google image searches.

there were people who built entire careers on pinterest traffic. a lot of people!

I've never quite understood Pinterest's business model, but I'm told that interior designers use it or something? Pin it!

Anyway, their fierce gatekeeping kept me from ever even looking around the site (without an account), so now I too just find it a mysterious annoyance

I know a guy who got rich off pinterest but he’s one of the main shareholders so idk

They built a brand-new building a few years ago on Brannan Street and now I understand they're giving all or most of it up

apparently it used to be a great place to work, relative to other big tech companies. obviously the product is moribund now, but it's also had a bunch of bias/abuse scandals a la amazon/uber.

I only got pinterest once we had to do home renovations. It's a really good way to keep track of stuff you like and also find ideas. I get why it generates ad revenue, because we would be like "we like this maple colored vanity cabinet" or whatever, and then you could find other similar maple colored vanity cabinets, save them, possibly follow through and purchase one, etc.

Also you have your vanity cabinets, your shower fixtures, your tiles, your mirrors etc all on one "board" and can move them around and put them next to each other to see how they look together. At the same time, it's really *only* useful to me for something like that, like I can't come up with any regular use case for it. I guess someone who is exceptionally into clothes could use it for that.

Pinterest does a weirdly bad job of generating money from its users, given the dominant use case is exactly what you say, ie deciding what to buy

$PINS : A Love Story

Starting with the Numbers

Latest Quarter ARPU (North America):$FB: $48.03 per MAU$TWTR: $23.65 per DAU$SNAP: $7.37 per DAU$PINS: $3.99 per MAU

Pinterest is in the first inning of monetizing it’s user base - pretty straightforward

/1

— Ragnar Danneskjöld (@RagnarSkjold) July 23, 2021

i used to use it for briefing graphic designers on what sort of style to go for. very easy to just google a bunch of stuff that was in the right ballpark and have it all pinned to a page.

was just clicking through tech stocks on yahoo and realized Fiverr is still valued at almost $3 billion. Lol. Remember Fiverr? I didn't until just now.

thiel out at facebook.

he'll rebound. after all, you can't keep a multi-billionaire down for long

to spend more time promoting fascism, apparently

"Pinterest is in the first inning of monetizing it’s user base" - it's existed for like 15 years, didn't occur to them to do it before now?!

Pinterest does a weirdly bad job of generating money from its users, given the dominant use case is exactly what you say, ie deciding what to buy

Collecting pictures of pretty things is the dominant use case. How many people are going to actually buy a macramé plant hanger after pinning a photo of a 70s living room?

More than you'd think if it's supposed to be a multi-site "Amazon wish list" with pretty pictures.

I'm actually kind of curious when/how they get credit for a purchase and how much (vs just a click). I've definitely bought a fair amount of stuff I saved on pinterest, but I'm not sure whether I actually bought it by clicking through from pinterest, and even if I had, I wonder how much credit pinterest gets. I also wonder how much they *should* get since in a lot of cases I just found stuff on wayfair or build.com or whatever and then saved it there so I could remember it.

They’re not all shopping but most of them are imagining what they’d like to own and they seem like they should be worth a lot to AdWords-type advertisers than eg Twitter users.

iirc the endgame for pinterest was supposed to be not just referrer links but partnerships with companies where it'd be a direct click-through purchase, but I don't know how much of that panned out since I stopped paying attention over a decade ago

imo if I was running it and wanted to monetize, I'd drop any semblance of ethics and just aggregate the most popular styles and sell the early access data to companies making product knockoffs

ah, the pinterest to wayfair pipeline

pinterexpress

about 50% of everything i see on Pinterest feels like it's sponsored or promoted. don't they make money on that?

Wayfair has the whole child trafficking side biz going on, and that's definitely profitable

xp
they do make money: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PINS/financials?p=PINS

just not as much as you might guess is what I think people itt are saying, but digital advertising is an absurd industry in many ways

yup. FB is not a great comp because they make revenue from things other than advertising.

but it seems very weird to my that they make so much less per user than twitter and snap. the claim in that tweet is that they're just getting started but it was founded 13 years ago (i.e. they're older than snap and barely younger than twitter).

wait I thought FB made like 90% of their revenue from ads

like 90% actually 97.9% in 2020

well, that's not 0% from not ads. i was thinking of revenue from weird hardware bullshit and partnerships, but i guess the weird hardware bs loses money and pinterest has partnerships too.

ok the the FB comparison is fair. and they make > 10x per user. assuming this is not an ad tech shell game, what is pinterest doing wrong?

ftr I agree that Pinterest seems odd! They should *not* be doing worse than Twitter at selling ads, though thinking about that makes me wonder what Pinterest's mobile numbers look like. There's a lot of value in travelling with people throughout their day that Pinterest maybe can't offer.

But it's hard to say really. FB has tons more data on their users due to the much wider variety of things people do on their platform plus all the tracking infrastructure they've built (sign-in with your FB id stuff) to follow users around the internet without cease. All that data lets them present themselves as much better at microtargeting consumers than Pinterest, despite the consumer friendliness of P's functionality. I wouldn't discount a kind of marketer herd mentality here either: we need to advertise on FB because our competitors do.

Also, "ad tech shell game" is sort of correct actually, especially if we bring in Google as the other half of the online advertising duopoly

good post. do you work in this area? (cards on table, i'm at twitter, but i'm not on the revenue side and have no idea what i'm talking about.)

Sort of yes and no. I'm currently, ill-advisedly getting a phd in communications, which in my case means studying technology through a social science/humanities lens so I try not to weigh in too much around here on the technical stuff. My dissertation won't be about advertising, but my master's was in part (plus "emotional recognition" tech) and I've kept up with it for other projects.

Funnily enough I just spend a few weeks researching Twitter's ad system and policies for a law firm that is suing twitter over their political ads policy uh sorry

ah, theorizing the web etc.?

I never attended that but yeah that's in roughly the right ballpark. I think the guy who ran that now publishes this https://reallifemag.com/, which is def an accurate para-academic version of what I'm up to. Have you read Safiya Noble, Virginia Eubanks, Kate Crawford, or Ruha Benjamin? Or like Fred Turner, Wendy Chun, Paul Edwards...I can go on if you want!

Basically comms is such a grab-bag field that you can kind of pursue whatever you want, however you want—there are people in my dept doing ethnographic fieldwork, other people are making video games, I read HR software trade mags lol

cool! i went to ttw a couple of times when i was in new york, and got interested in the FATML stuff via that. i'm less familiar with the comms/sociology/anthro side than the legal/fairness stuff (and even then).

Honestly the law review papers on these subjects are often the best, not sexy and theory-fun but super otm and neither optimistic nor pessimistic

my gateway drug was this bad boy https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2477899

That’s a banger

It seems a bit unfair to have people who work for the tech companies in the thread about the worst tech companies but maybe that's just me.

I really want the Odd Lots Podcast to do a deep dive on how Pinterest does/doesn't make money now.

It seems a bit unfair to have people who work for the tech companies in the thread about the worst tech companies but maybe that's just me.

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table), Thursday, February 10, 2022 7:16 AM (two hours ago)

I totally get that, but two things:

1) Unlike, say, the spotify spokesperson who used to frequently post in the spotify thread, I don't recall ever seeing caek being defensive about Twitter criticism. I don't know if you read my hidden text, but caek didn't even respond to that. Anyway, ILX is small enough these days that I think it's fair to take this on a case by case basis?

2) I'm sympathetic to a fuck them attitude tbh, but organizing/radicalizing/educating tech workers is one necessary way to tackle the power these companies have, so I'd rather talk to caek about algorithmic harms here than push him to feel defensive.

Unfortunately, given how massively powerful and largely unaccountable these companies are right now we need tech employees to find out things like this: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-politicalcontent

Otm. Aside from officially sanctioned critique/analysis, hasn’t most of the best info on precisely how bad these companies are come from leaks from whistleblowers? (I’m thinking especially Meta and Alphabet, haven’t heard so much about leaks from Twitter or others.)

To an extent yes. Though you also have the related, aggravating phenomenon where governments and the media continue to over-value the voices of tech executives who have seen the light, many of whom tend to push more technology (an app that limits your screentime, etc.) as the solution to tech-company-created problems rather than policy or regulatory solutions.

Yeah I mean I was mostly kidding. I am still upset about being priced out of the only city I've ever loved by a bunch of culture-less nerds...not saying that y'all are that, it's just a visceral and deep reaction.

Oof yes, not that I ever lived there (well, one summer I sort of couch-surfed there). I've been re-watching Mr Show, and the sketch about turning San Francisco into a family-friendly amusement park was kinda lol mostly sad

caek is one of my favorite culture-less nerds though

Xpost

Haha I’ll have to look for that Mr Show clip. SF is overrated imo. Sure the culture was a weird and cool little niche from 1960-2000 but it was never really sustainable given the desirability of the location. (But mostly my issue is that the weather isn’t for me.)

i don’t recall glenn ever being defensive about spotify. i do remember him patiently correcting an absolute litany of misconceptions about how payments and algorithms work. that felt like important work for him to have done and i’m grateful to him for it, and frankly you probably should be too? if you’re interested in trying to find the right levers to pull to start compensating musicians fairly in a streaming world. rather than just rail gratifyingly against greed etc. don’t get me wrong though i love a good rail.

some very high level points:

i don't live in SF
i started working at twitter at the end of last year
happy to stop posting ITT if it has a chilling effect
i don't think twitter is worst enormous tech company

Though you also have the related, aggravating phenomenon where governments and the media continue to over-value the voices of tech executives who have seen the light, many of whom tend to push more technology (an app that limits your screentime, etc.) as the solution to tech-company-created problems rather than policy or regulatory solutions.

this is otm. "how can we do this terrible thing so it does less harm" vs. "just don't do the terrible thing".

Pretty clear the consensus is that your voice is valued here in case there’s lingering doubt.

It probably doesn’t help the regulatory context that a lot of these executives are being socialized by the likes of Peter Thiel and Gavin Belson.

caek can you confirm whether you've got culture

happy to stop posting ITT if it has a chilling effect

nah, Tracer and I may disagree on the tenor of some of glenn's posts, but they certainly didn't prevent people from posting.

I literally was mostly joking guys lol

i don't think twitter is worst enormous tech company

enormous tech companies are so uniformly bad that they all deserve harsh criticism, but facebook sets such a high bar it's amazing that any other enormous tech company would ever be considered for "worst".

I'm open to the idea that Amazon shouldn't be considered a tech company, but they are more harmful than FB imo. Or at any rate, I think there's plenty of room for debate there

amazon's one of, if not the largest, cloud providers

they also do some internal hardware development, including their own processors for servers

I think that I just find Twitter to be so obnoxious, just a veritable chasm of depravity and blather, that I inflate its evilness to an extreme it doesn't deserve. Amazon and Facebook are obviously much much worse.

I know mh, but they also own grocery and other retail stores plus logistics and shipping etc. Basically I mean they're something even worse than a 'mere' tech company

how about only posts itt that have a thrilling effect

(Google over hear listening quietly, taking notes, nodding softly)

I don't get in what universe Amazon isn't a tech company. Beyond all the significant side business that have already been mentioned, it is precisely their innovations in internet commerce, big data management, and high tech logistics and warehousing that's given them a monopoly over retail. They did this because they are a tech company and not a brick and mortar bookstore or whatever.

Amazon is predatory as hell, but at least they make their profits by providing functions that accomplish useful tasks. FB is little more than a sugar-coated poison pill.

amazon corporate (i.e. not logistics) is apparently finding it very difficult to hire, especially engineers

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/setxnt/psa_one_of_the_fangs_is_about_to_internally/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-01-24/amazon-employees-are-burned-out-and-leaving-their-jobs

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-07/amazon-is-raising-base-salary-cap-to-350-000-from-160-000

(Google over hear listening quietly, taking notes, nodding softly)

Hear, hear. They’ve done some very close work with the carceral industrial complex. And you thought you turned off tracking on Maps? Ha jokes on you.

Had to consider Google-proofing that post.

I just consider Google far, far more ominous than something like Twitter - FB & Amazon might justifiably take most of the heat, but we've allowed Google into our lives in ways that most of us are probably not even aware of.. and I don't even have a Google account

*squawk* Drones inbound on viborg, I repeat, drones inbound

*squeal* roger that, target acquired

*squawk* copy that

Yeah I don’t think living in China necessarily improved my sense of always being under surveillance.

But

https://pandodaily.com/2014/03/07/the-google-military-surveillance-complex/

I don't know how serious some of these posts are, but you cannot actually googleproof your posts on ilxor.com unless you put them on the secret borad

xpost

Haven’t really seen anyone refute these claims of political censorship either.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/02/pers-a02.html

Rob, I think you meant:

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Rob I was being genuine but just in the sense that I gave a passing thought to not putting “Google” and “Maps” together in the same phrase cause whatever. Maybe that wouldn’t matter in the slightest granted. But for example if I wanted to mention the awful Nazi sympathizer website that is on Facebook’s political oversight board, wouldn’t writing br31tb4rt effectively Google-proof it?

Anyway here’s the reason I came here today to share my paranoia with y’all. This is discouraging.

On Twitter: “False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people.” False info was 70% more likely to be retweeted & travelled 6x faster than truth. pic.twitter.com/XwbNzVXwgB

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) February 10, 2022

I was like, "St*rmfr*nt is on Facebook's political oversight board????????" for a bit too long

xp lol amazing, DJP did you do that manually or is there a google-proofer out there?

viborg: yes, that makes it harder to search for with a text-based search engine; I just meant google crawls & indexes this site regularly regardless of orthography, so there's no way to google-proof something from the eyes of google, if that makes sense?

DJP reintroducing leetspeak to the masses

There's already an old saying that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets out of bed. Nice to have it so neatly confirmed by real world data.

haha I wish I could say I typed that but I was never that fluent in l337speak; I used this: http://www.brenz.net/services/l337Maker.asp

On false info being more likely to be retweeted - isn't this also that ppl who consume "traditional" news are likely to have social circles where others do the same, while ppl who consume fake news have much more of an "OMG EVERYONE MUST SEE THIS" impulse? Like when I'm talking about the news of the day on social media I seldom feel the need to share any news item unless someone specifically asks for that,

I think that's confirmation bias tbh

everyone reading clickbait headlines and not reading the articles, even when they are decent, is killing me

I feel like the axios style of what amounts to tiny paragraphs and bullet points is far from ideal, but they’re really directly mimicking the style of someone screenshotting two paragraphs from an article, tweeting it, and going viral

I spent an inordinate amount of time making fun of Upworthy-style headlines on Facebook, then discovered that one of my classmates (who was on my friend list) was Head of Audience and Business Development at Upworthy.

As a result, I spent a lot more time making fun of Upworthy. I'd say this had a good influence because he no longer works at Upworthy but he's now at Fatherly, so I think it's really a wash.

Fatherly, so I think it's really a wash.

last night I put on Dan Deacon - I was just listening to the record but I looked a song up on YouTube to post it here. I think I also visited the RYM page for it.

two hours later I go to bed and check FB and get a notification saying "You have been recognized as one of Dan Deacon's top fans". I don't think I've ever even visited his FB page. I didn't visit the YouTube link on the same browser I use FB for.

I know you're supposed to expect FB to be tracking every single thing you do but still, this kind of shit freaks me out. idk if I posted about this but a couple years ago it spotted me in a picture someone else posted, a person I have no mutual friends with...and I was so far in the background I didn't even see where I was until FB pointed it out.

what i would give to be recognized as a top fan :(

post more

i've posted all i can!!

haha

damn, if that's all it takes, lean times for Dan Deacon

man alive, you have been recognized as one of Dan Deacon's top haters

what most people dont know is that the google drive icon represents a troppy disk, a common form of data storage in europe for most of the 2000s that fell out of use as usb sticks became more popular pic.twitter.com/C0a1px6gMC

— laura (@freezydorito) March 10, 2022

a friend just sent me this photo from #SXSW of a facebook/@Meta VR booth there. starting to suspect this *may* not be the best company to hold a near-monopoly over our shared digital future... hmm... pic.twitter.com/OtQVhp0fdD

— Dave Infante (@dinfontay) March 15, 2022

uh

mh otm

Eh. It beats Warhol's longest by a couple of hours.

IDGI? Are they actually enticing people to see what it’s like being trapped alive under the collapsed towers?

Found a new one

https://www.palantir.com/in-defense-of-europe/en/

SCOOP: Facebook is exploring the creation of virtual currency (dubbed 'Zuck Bucks' internally) for the metaverse, "social tokens" & lending services

Its finance push comes despite the collapse of its Diem/Libra cryptocurrency project earlier this year 🧵https://t.co/1sCAQkEtZG

— Hannah Murphy (@MsHannahMurphy) April 6, 2022

this sounds fairly benign to me. it's not some crypto currency, just some bullshit points you get in FB that are meaningless outside of FB/Meta.

That explains my failure to pay for groceries with Reddit karma yesterday

https://i.imgur.com/z076uR1.png

Last year, former Oculus CTO (and current Meta "executive advisor") John Carmack threw down the gauntlet for Meta's near-term metaverse plans. By the 2022 Meta Connect conference, Carmack said last October, he hoped he'd be in his headset, "walking around the [virtual] halls or walking around the stage as my avatar in front of thousands of people getting the feed across multiple platforms."

Carmack's vision didn't come to pass Tuesday, as a jerky and awkward Carmack avatar gave one of his signature, hour-long unscripted talks amid a deserted VR space, broadcast out as plain old 2D video on Facebook.

"Last year I said that I'd be disappointed if we weren't having Connect in Horizon this year," Carmack said by way of introduction. "This here, this isn't really what I meant. Me being an avatar on-screen on a video for you is basically the same thing as [just] being on a video."

That set the tone for a presentation in which Carmack said that "there's a bunch that I'm grumpy about" regarding the state of Meta's current VR hardware and software. While that grumpiness was somewhat tempered with talk of recent improvements and hope for the future of virtual reality, Carmack seemed generally frustrated with the direction Meta as a whole is taking its VR efforts.

VR will be like 3D movies have been for the last 65 years - they periodically keep trying to get us all onboard, and everybody's like 'eh no, I'm good, 2D is fine thanks'

VR headsets are a cool novelty but they also make me super dizzy. I can't imagine anyone wanting to wear one for more than 15 minutes

even the plausible use cases they seem to have for it are kind of really bad ideas. for example, carmack brings up a couple things: 1) VR meta world could be a costsaving thing for conferences - "you could just give them a free headset and it comes out cheaper than the rest of the expenses", and 2) there's a debate going on between whether to improve the quality of the avatar graphics, and he (Carmack) is on the side of going for quantity by keeping the quality at a minimum and optimizing for smooth performance and greater numbers of users instead.

makes sense. now imagine the conference whenever several dozen professional asskissers follow the CEOs around

https://i.imgur.com/4jCiqVZ.jpg

“should we be apex legends or minecraft” these guys are such visionaries

in the conference of the near future, as soon as you enter someone runs up to you and crouches and stands and crouches and stands, repeatedly

so the thing about that is virtual conferences already exist

but can I walk up to you and crouch and stand up repeatedly? on facebook? with a free headset?

i'm starting to talk myself into this honestly

honestly it's wild to see billions and billions of dollars poured into this thing and the only use cases they can come up with are reproducing experiences that people hate

i think VR makes sense for (some) (parts of) (some) video games. and for specialist applications like CAD. for meetings, conferences… who cares?

I take it back shopping in the metaverse looks awesome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w262elaqhI

It's fascinating and also sad - but happy, and mildly erotic - to follow the career of the people who wrote Doom. They all got sick of each other when they were making Quake and left Id, except for John Carmack, who eventually got sick of everything after Rage flopped. And left Id.

John Romero still comes across as a dude. He has about four ex-wives, but he speaks to people on Twitter and still has a lustrous head of hair. He still looks like a hitman from a late-1990s action film. Is that because he actually used to watch action films, and he modelled his look on Antonio Banderas etc? Who knows. Sandy Petersen has a fun YouTube channel. John Carmack is still very angry.

I'm precisely the kind of market for the Metaverse, and I don't want it at all. I remember being wowed by Doom. I can think of a bunch of tech products that I wanted. That people wanted. Netbooks. People wanted netbooks. SSDs. The original PlayStation. DVDs. People wanted them. I wanted them. I had them! I might not be rational, or reflective, but I have the same instincts as a regular person. The same guts, the same fluids, the same cran, the same sisu. I can think of several times when "the industry" pushed things at me that I didn't want. 3D television. Blu-Ray. Pre-iPad tablets. Early-1990s pen-driven tablets. Any audio codec that wasn't MP3. Any type of memory stick that wasn't Compact Flash and latterly SD. Clear colas. Supersonic airliners. I'm still on the fence with crossbows.

Curved televisions. 3D televisions, which I mention twice. Because it's a great example of something that the industry pushed at people. 3D TV made a certain amount of rational sense - people loved Avatar, didn't they? - and the TV industry wanted a boost after people had all switched from CRT to LCD televisions. But I didn't want a 3D TV. All the people I knew who bought one weren't massively keen; they were just replacing their TV and thought "why not". I am embedded in the same culture as everybody else - but not tech executives, who live in a different word - so I know what people want. Some people. My people, which includes all of you here on Ilxor. I am within you. I know what you want. Even you. Especially you.

And I don't want to wear a VR headset. I loved Half-Life 2 but I'm not buying a VR headset just so I can spent seven hours playing Alyx. Even if I did, it would be like owning a joystick for the few times I boot up Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 - an indulgence, a luxury. It's not something that hundreds of millions of people are going to flock to. I have no desire whatsoever to buy a VR headset so I can pretend to stand in a room talking to people. "But what about VR sex?", to which my response is that I'm not stripping off and coating myself with butter while wearing a headset that blocks my eyes and ears! What if someone else wants to use the shower?

I have faith that the market has a mind of its own and will reject nonsense and flim-flam. Marketing people always claim that they can shape public opinion and make people buy things they don't want, but that's meta-marketing. It's marketing people marketing themselves. In reality their power is limited.

otm

AR on the other hand i think could be wildly successful tbh, they just need to get the tech light enough

On the other hand, there's a double embarrassment when people barge into the office store cupboard room while you're wanking to porn. There's the embarrassment of people seeing you wanking, and the embarrassment of people seeing what you wank to e.g. Carol Vorderman's Twitter account, the naked athletics at the beginning of Triumph of the Will etc.

Wearing a VR headset halves the embarrassment factor because people can't see what's on the screen. But "it halves the embarrassment of being caught wanking" isn't the kind of thing that tech giants want to talk about, is it? "You can watch Alex Jones without anybody knowing about it and you can also move your head around and examine the rest of the studio" isn't good optics nowadays.

And on further reflection why would I want to look around the environment when I'm watching porn? I mean, porn and pirated movies drove the adoption of broadband internet. That's another thing people wanted. Cracked copies of PhotoShop CS4. Good-quality rips of the first series of Heroes etc. VR doesn't fit in with this at all.

AR on the other hand i think could be wildly successful tbh, they just need to get the tech light enough

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, October 13, 2022 12:34 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the Google Translate app has this cool thing where you can put the camera on anything and it'll detect and translate any text it sees and then superimpose it onto the image in a way that looks somewhat natural - it detects the font & background color and all that. I thought that + Google Glass would be a huge deal, you could walk around in any country and at least read all the signs, which seems pretty damn useful. But it hasn't materialized yet. maybe it's harder to do than I'm assuming.

Ashley Pomeroy i enjoy your writing

and otm, at least it captures my own feelings. i notice that VR is kind of awful for social situations when, irl, there are multiple people. because once the person is in VR, they are no longer accessible irl. instead, you are viewing a person waving around in space, probably with their mouth slightly open, and often laughing to themselves and referencing a dimension that you're not in. to be there, but to not have a VR headset of your own, forces you into observing only one side of a telephone conversation, all in the hopes that you will eventually get your own turn inside the box while everyone else waits. i have a friend who repeatedly tries to get everyone to play VR when there is a social gathering in the backyard. i can't overstate how annoying it is, for a person who doesn't hang out with a lot of people or very often, to FINALLY be in a situation where it is happening, and then suddenly everyone is summoned to a room to watch someone in a box for an hour until bored people inevitably start leaving the building

xposts to ashley's first post

(also, i realize that most VR setups allow for a separate monitor which mirrors the VR so that people irl can view the action. i believe that this mirrored display mode is one of the most unpleasant audio-visual experiences you can subject yourself to)

VR has some valuable educational applications, many of which are already in use - teaching surgical procedures, complicated mechanical processes. But they're niche and not direct-to-consumer, so of course Meta isn't focusing on those types of actual applications

every time i see a meta commercial im just like...please let this bankrupt you

I think VR has definite value for people who are housebound, or paralyzed, or stuck in the hospital - maybe even for people in prison who want to visit Tibet

But right now it all looks like Second Life circa 2002

I have faith that the market has a mind of its own and will reject nonsense and flim-flam. Marketing people always claim that they can shape public opinion and make people buy things they don't want, but that's meta-marketing. It's marketing people marketing themselves. In reality their power is limited.

― Ashley Pomeroy, Thursday, October 13, 2022 1:30 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago)

I'm inclined to argue against your first sentence for political reasons, but that's probably unnecessary & maybe futile. This thread has some evidence that the market doesn't have a mind of its own, or, if it does, it's kind of dim and short-sighted: Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

But the potential threat of Meta's VR is that some of the use cases being floated would be marketed to other businesses, and the biggest marks in the history of capitalism are corporations, who often are exactly the kind of gullible saps that marketers pretend all consumers are. Personally I'm also inclined to believe that VR will once again be rejected as a mass consumer product, but corporations still give employees Myers-Briggs tests to this day, so I'm not completely sanguine that there won't be mandatory VR meetings in the future. The open-plan office was also a bad idea.

https://www.garbageday.email/p/finally-a-conference-call-with-legs

Think back to why you last opened up Facebook. And now imagine that instead of pulling it up on your phone or opening a new tab on your desktop, ask yourself if you would still feel the urge to check Facebook if it meant sliding on a bulky (and weirdly heavy) plastic helmet to do so.

interesting thread with this obvious problem in mind

I've worked on a number of high-profile failures:

- Lytro lightfield cameras
- Google Glass head-mounted computer
- Google Clips automatic photographer

They all had a fatal flaw. Everyone saw the flaw. But the culture that arose in these teams purposefully ignored the flaw. 1/n

— Warren Craddock (@warren_craddock) October 10, 2022

yeah when i watch something on my tv i want to get away from my body. escape. not be like, using it all the time, craning my neck around etc. i know you can mimic the body movements with hand controls etc but at that point the only real diff with a 4K TV is that you have an all-encompassing head-clamp wrapped around your face. is that really such a game changer?

but just think, you could simulcast your VR experience to the living room as well

yea I remember that commercial where that lady is like "ooOoooOOOoh you think VR is just for gamer nerds??" which cuts to her getting an intense VR workout and I always think who fucking wants to do that. workouts may feel good but one thing they are not is "fun". and they never will be!!! sorry!!!!!

also who wants to move around that much when you don't know where you are in the room? cmon Suzie

Hey blu-ray is way better than dvd don’t mix that up with all this other useless stuff

the thing about the metaverse via headset is that kids these days are always multitasking. how do I get on Discord while also in the metaverse? do I walk up to a computer in the metaverse to check on the chat?

to return to the thread caek linked, lmao

Google Glass actually had *two* fatal flaws:

- It didn't really do anything very useful.
- You looked stupid while wearing it.

The culture in the Google Glass team grew to completely ignore these flaws, too. 7/n

— Warren Craddock (@warren_craddock) October 10, 2022

strong "oh my god, he say it!" vibes here

it's a great thread! what a fascinating career!

mh otm about multitasking

i’m pretty sure horizons actually does have a thing where you can look at a virtual “tablet” that does remote desktop to your actual laptop so that you can rudely answer emails even during your VR meeting but come on, the pure faff of it

My outsider view is that the whole Meta rebranding is simply to make Facebook look like it is capable of innovation and VR can be sold to market analysts as the Next Big Thing, and proposed as evidence that FB can continue to expand its revenues into the future. Whatever comes of it, if anything useful, won't look much like what we are now being told it will look like, which is just silly and needlessly cumbersome.

C'mon, if Brainstorm is any indication, the headsets are gonna seem like Viewmasters in a couple years, when they start mainlining content directly into THE MIND:

https://prod-images.tcm.com/Master-Profile-Images/brainstorm1983.69568.jpg

wtf that Twitter thread. Yeah, build a culture where you can say to your boss, hey how about canceling this junk and firing us? Notice the protagonist never dared suggest this. Because who would?!

I'd never seen the Google Glass spread in Vogue. That really didn't help matters.

In the Future, we will all be Christopher Walken

Hey blu-ray is way better than dvd don’t mix that up with all this other useless stuff

I agree blu ray rules, but think it's a fair example of something people didn't want regardless. At the time I think the general reaction was "well fuck I already have all these movies on DVD, now you want me to rebuy them?". Turned out what ppl actually wanted was no physical media at all and, instead of that, streaming services that give you access to like five movies made before 1990 and The Big Bang Theory.

crazy remembering the HD-DVD vs BluRay beef

what was it, just 8 or 9 years ago? and i'm now getting UHD content streamed to me in 4K

https://kotaku.com/zuckerberg-facebook-meta-legs-feet-video-vr-staged-fake-1849656315

it's fun to imagine the heady early days of internet and the abstraction of social communication, away from in-person speaking and gesturing, away from penmanship or typed letters and sealed envelopes and mailboxes, and toward the near-instant transfer of data, a name or a class or a field standing in for the visual information. abstraction. and then, snap forward to the present and we are desperately trying to add some legs onto shitty cartoon avatars

oh shit, meant that for wherever we're making fun of virtual facebook

or is that here

truly onethreadin today, sheesh

the thing about the metaverse via headset is that kids these days are always multitasking. how do I get on Discord while also in the metaverse? do I walk up to a computer in the metaverse to check on the chat?

― mh, Thursday, October 13, 2022 3:39 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is a really good point, I think this stuff fundamentally misunderstands the way the world has changed the last 10+ years

for me the event that really drove home how fast things were changing was when Michael Jackson died. it felt as though everyone on the planet knew about it like 15 minutes after his heart stopped. there was no period of "holy shit did you hear?", we all just knew, because we're checking social media constantly. if anything that pace would only accelerate today.

obviously there are still a ton of jobs where you can't just be on your phone all the time but the stuff Meta is trying to replace (enhance? what the fuck exactly are they trying to do?) is mostly conferencing/collaborations/hangouts or whatever, situations where now (thanks to Covid) people are used to being online while doing work. you know, I reboot my server, I go post on ILX or check Twitter, or maybe while some meeting is going on that doesn't concern me I'm doing something else. it's amusing to me that even on days where we can have in-person meetings people don't like to do them, because then you have to SIT and LISTEN, as opposed to just working through them like we all do now. and, as most companies are starting to realize, that if anything is making us more efficient. so who is going to want to use this?

tbf any meeting that you're just working through you shouldn't be at, that's a management failure and no amount of tech is going to be able to fix that

I dunno for me it usually means I'm easily distractible in meetings I should be paying attention to...

yeah though tbf you're seated at the greatest distraction machine ever built. maybe Meta meetings will be enforced. no multitasking during my important rant!

plus think of all the bs data analytics you can run with a device that covers your employees' entire heads

Phrenology comeback

the thing about the metaverse via headset is that kids these days are always multitasking. how do I get on Discord while also in the metaverse? do I walk up to a computer in the metaverse to check on the chat?

great point but solvable. in fact it should be better than real life, because in the metaverse you can pretend to be making eye contact with someone while actually looking at an invisible Discord window.

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Salesforce, the largest private employer in San Francisco, is laying off hundreds of employees and joining a string of major Bay Area tech companies cutting their workforces.

The Big Down-Turn is coming fast & hard - not sure if it's just a cyclical contraction or if this is like the whaling industry

The whaling industry at least gave us a pretty good novel.

I for one don't want to pay for anything, or see any ads

Haven't used an oil lamp in years.

definitely eager to hear what Japan's scientific whaling uncovers about these fierce leviathans of the deep

i'd prefer not to

Smart Move, Google

For as long as I can remember, maps.google.com was the defacto domain for Google Maps. Also for as long as I can remember, I allowed this domain to use the location services of my browser.

Yesterday I was asked to allow the usage of location services for Google Maps seemingly out of nowhere. Of course I accepted. After all, I just wanted to check a route to a local business and I was in a hurry. Back home I opened Google Maps again, and noticed that maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps. This implies that the permissions I give to Google Maps now apply to all of Googles services hosted under this domain. So far I only identified Google Flights to have made the same switch (google.com/flights), though I'm sure they're just beginning to transfer their services to the main google.com domain.

Congratulations, you now have permission to geo-track me across all of your services.

Smart move, Google.

congratulations to the tories!

As a parent, and based on recent experience, fucking Roblox

my nephew is absolutely addicted. so i've seen him play it a million times, and also read the stuff about manipulating kids into becoming employees. is there anything new to be horrified at with roblox or is it mainly that? the internet, arguably, is bad

The boy's basically learned how to code through Roblox.

I'm not saying that's a great thing, but it's better than what I got from Sega Genesis.

I don't know how common a problem it is or if they've made improvements with this, but I've definitely heard of predators on roblox

YouTube Will Stop Removing Videos Pushing Lies About the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election https://t.co/AUcJ5lfGvN

— Variety (@Variety) June 2, 2023

It's cool to see the entire world slowly shifting towards 'but what if we just stopped giving a fuck about anything?' as an overarching ethos. The structure of society will regulate itself independent of the behavior of its constituents, nbd.

I just wanna see Deep Purple videos from 1971, not this garbage

Google’s return-to-office crackdown reportedly includes a $99 hotel for workers

The tech giant is offering a $99-a-night “Summer Special” deal for an on-campus hotel to “make it easier for Googlers to transition to the hybrid workplace,” according to CNBC, which viewed promotional materials and internal forums. Employees must pay out of their own pockets for the special, which is open until Sept. 30, the outlet found.

The offer comes as the YouTube and Android owner cracks down on remote work by more strictly enforcing its three-day-a-week policy. The Wall Street Journal reported in June that Google told employees office attendance records would start to figure into performance reviews.

I'd figure the answer is ALL OF THEM at this point.

Good, I want people to stop moving here while still making their coastal salaries.

Well this pretty fucted. Humans suck.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbot-training-human-toll-content-moderator-meta-openai

https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup

ignoring repeated credible warnings that your product is enabling genocide - pretty bad i would say.

they pay very well though.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/11/business/ebay-cyberstalking-settlement/index.html

Seems like a slap on the wrist, though the lawsuit from the targeted couple is still pending.

Should have been more, but:

the $3 million settlement, announced Thursday, is the statutory maximum fine for eBay’s charges

zuckerberg:

I think there’s been this trend over time where the feeds started off as primarily and exclusively content for people you followed, your friends. I guess it was friends early on, then it kind of broadened out to, “Okay, you followed a set of friends and creators.” And then it got to a point where the algorithm was good enough where we’re actually showing you a lot of stuff that you’re not following directly because, in some ways,
that’s a better way to show you more interesting stuff than only constraining it to things that you’ve chosen to follow.

they absolutely believe their own bullshit - that it's good for people, not that it absolutely sucks for people but generates wealth for them.

I think the next logical jump on that is like, “Okay, we’re showing you content from your friends and creators that you’re following and creators that you’re not following that are generating interesting things. And you just add on to that, a layer of, “Okay, and we’re also going to show you content that’s generated by an AI system that might be something that you’re interested in.”

aaargh

https://www.theverge.com/24253481/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-ar-glasses-orion-ray-bans-ai-decoder-interview

“and from there, it’s a logical leap to start showing you turds left behind by the types of animals that people who fit your profile have shown an interest in”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/us/politics/trump-tech-inauguration-parties.html

Facebook, Spotify, X, etc etc

https://i.postimg.cc/KYBr6msQ/Gqjkzcx-Xc-AAR7p-X.jpg

That is some actually successful underpants gnoming! Make the product worse so we can sell more of it.

Same Cart, Different Price: Instacart’s Price Experiments Cost Families at Checkout
https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instacart/

Two shoppers walk into the exact same grocery store, at the exact same time, and pick up the exact same box of Cheerios. Then, they head to the cash register to check out. This sounds like the opening to one of those “three guys walk into a bar” jokes — but there is nothing funny about this punchline.

The first shopper is charged $4.99. She pays and leaves the store with her box of cereal. The second customer steps up to the register and is charged $6.12. He’s ticked and tells the cashier that he, too, should pay $4.99, just like the woman in front of him. His response is understandable. Customers expect to pay the exact same price, for the exact same item, and his experience violates our shared understanding of how pricing for essential products like groceries is supposed to work.

But increasingly, this scenario is no longer hypothetical, it’s real. In fact, the proliferation of new pricing practices and technologies has upended pricing transparency. Fair pricing is no longer a guarantee in the cereal aisle or anywhere else. Our research suggests that companies like Instacart — the focus of this study — are developing, acquiring, and perfecting technology to experiment with pricing, at scale.

These new strategies are pervasive in the growing online grocery sector, with $10 billion in sales in a single month in 2025 and more than 60% of U.S. households reporting they have purchased groceries online.1 At a time when food price inflation outpaces overall inflation, and Americans report that the price of groceries is their number one cost concern, pricing experiments used by companies like Instacart are making the situation worse.

One has to wonder across all businesses how many of these schema are running that are small enough to not really be noticed but the results in money made are impressive in the aggregate. Like the plot of 'Office Space' turned the other way. I would think the current climate, it probably could easily and widely go unnoticed except on the company bottom line. People have complained for years or decades about all the weird ass charges that end up on phone bills or cable bills, got to think that is probably all over the place.

Credit card companies/banks have had the sweetest deal of all (outside maybe like a Megachurch) where they get a sliver cut on every sale being made with the plastic, both taking a cut from the seller and buyer. What a racket. I always pay my local people at the garage or that say do some work on my house in cash if I can.

Compounding interest of bullshit world.