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I find it charming Zuckerberg actually seems to care about this stuff. He of course wants every human interaction to be monetizable by Facebook, total control o

I find it charming Zuckerberg actually seems to care about this stuff. He of course wants every human interaction to be monetizable by Facebook, total control of our dopamine channels, etc. but I think beyond that, deep down, he's just a nerd who wants to live in a VR dreamland to shut out the millions of people who call him a weird lizard.

rl3 4y ago
>... but I think beyond that, deep down, he's just a nerd who wants to live in a VR dreamland to shut out the millions of people who call him a weird lizard. I mean, in his defense he might be pretty normal by lizard standards, I don't know. Calling him weird just seems unnecessary in that context. >He of course wants every human interaction to be monetizable by Facebook, total control of our dopamine channels, ... I agree. It'd be a much better future for everyone if he'd just throw his advertising biz in the garbage. Apple is going to kick Meta's ass in the long run just by virtue of their privacy stance—which isn't all that great to begin with, but it sure does beat "our intent is to sell every iota of information we collect on you."
- ntoskrnl 4y ago
  I've never heard of any other lizard that eats Sweet Baby Rays. By lizard standards that's pretty weird.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > Apple is going to kick Meta's ass in the long run just by virtue of their privacy stance I think you're discounting (ha) the allure of free/cheap to people who don't have disposable income. Which is to say, most people.
  - rl3 4y ago
    You're probably right, though I don't think it all comes down to disposable income. Laziness, apathy and network effects are perhaps equally powerful forces. After all, I continue to use Google and Instagram despite my knowing how the sausage is made there.
  - FredPret 4y ago
    But there is zero money to be made out of people who have zero money.
    - kwizzt 4y ago
      I would argue there is money to be made out of people with zero money. Student loans are an example. Instead of zero money, they now have negative money. This is terrible ofc.
    - germinalphrase 4y ago
      Zero money now - but one must be ready to skim the cream off their raw human potential.
    - rl3 4y ago
      >But there is zero money to be made out of people who have zero money. That's not true. That's why credit exists. Selling poor people shit they can't afford with terrible terms is a long-standing American tradition. When a debtor is unable to pay (often times through no fault of their own), the creditor eats the cost because their margins are good enough to allow for it. That effectively represents a wealth transfer between corporations providing the services and the corporations providing the credit.
      - echelon 4y ago
        The creditor doesn't put a lien on the debtor's house, repossess their goods, or take them to court? Obviously this happens with mortgages, cars, and other extremely high value things. IRS debts, student loan debts... But what about credit cards? Don't they have mechanisms other than tanking your credit report? And if not, why don't poor indebted people simply default all the time to remove debt?
        rl3 4y ago
        Sure, but you also can't squeeze blood from a stone. That said, I was mostly talking credit cards, since that's what most tech services would fall under in a zero-money consumer situation. >And if not, why don't poor indebted people simply default all the time to remove debt? Some do, but having your credit ruined for seven years sucks for most people. Likewise the courts don't exactly smile upon those who run up huge debts with the intention of defaulting.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    It'll be interesting to see where this goes. If VR becomes a big thing and we get to the point where an appreciable chunk of social interactions start to take place over it (huge if), the device would at least be as significant as your phone. People in the US are willing to spend extra on the Apple phone. There's already drama over the stupid blue text/green text thing, imagine a world where you know that your social interactions with a Facebook user are snooped on. I think it could lead to some significant ostracization. Private party -- no Facebookers.
    - germinalphrase 4y ago
      Reality shaping, not snooping, will be the primary concern.
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        What's reality shaping and why will it be a concern?
        germinalphrase 4y ago
        There’s a Philip K Dick line that goes - “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”. Reality shaping is like that - but coercive and in reverse. How much do I need to nudge your perceptual world with ubiquitous, desirable lizard-brain augmentations before you stop believing in reality?
        bee_rider 4y ago
        I mean, we already have religion, advertising, and "influencers" so I guess this is a current problem. With VR, at least it will be obvious when headset is on.
        germinalphrase 4y ago
        A problem as old as humankind. Ideally, one would attempt to tie the user’s livelihood to the platform to keep them engaged.
  - cyanydeez 4y ago
    You refer to poor people. "You're forgetting the poor people"
- mortenjorck 4y ago
  There's an alternate universe where Zuckerberg takes Yahoo's $1B offer for Facebook in 2006 (which Yahoo sells a decade later to Pinboard for $100k) and becomes more of an Elon Musk figure, investing in and running a handful of forward-thinking businesses. Imagine Oculus becoming Meta without the Facebook baggage – a hardware-focused company with a major services play, but no adtech business.
  - rl3 4y ago
    >Imagine Oculus becoming Meta without the Facebook baggage – a hardware-focused company with a major services play, but no adtech business. I think this was called Magic Leap. I don't know, I think I still prefer Rony Abovitz awkwardly dancing around in a space suit rather than Zuck.
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    A cautionary tale - for a certain kind of person.
  - intrasight 4y ago
    There's only a hand-full of companies that can make the kind of investment that VR will require. FB is one of them. So is ByteDance.
- lettergram 4y ago
  Apple scans your iCloud for illicit photos and sends them to police. I don’t think Apple has any privacy stance worth recognizing. https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/05/apple-icloud-photos-scanning/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/05/apple-icloud-photos-scanni...
  - planetsprite 4y ago
    There's a reconciliation, necessarily in a civil society, between promoting privacy and doing what's possible to stop child abuse. Should Apple allow child porn to be hosted on its cloud servers since that's the pro-privacy stance?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ahtihn 4y ago
      I don't think they should knowingly allow it. On the other hand I don't think they should do anything about it proactively.
    - bckr 4y ago
      > Should Apple allow [child abuse material] to be hosted on its cloud servers since that's the pro-privacy stance? No they should not.
  - rl3 4y ago
    Right, but the comparison here is that Meta also does this, in addition to selling every iota of information they have you. Content scanning is just an assumed part of every major tech platform these days. That of course doesn't necessarily make it right, but it still places Apple's privacy stance significantly ahead of Meta.
    - murderfs 4y ago
      People keep repeating the refrain of Google/Facebook selling your data, but is there any evidence of a single case where this actually happened? They use your data, to let advertisers target specific subgroups of the population. The companies that you should be concerned about selling your data aren't the advertising companies, they're the financial companies that are literally selling your transaction data to those and other companies.
- lvass 4y ago
  >their privacy stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Facebook does not sell users’ information. It uses their information to target ads, which it sells. You might also be against the latter, fine! That’s a perfectly reasonable position to hold. But don’t muddy the waters by calling it something fundamentally different.
  - rl3 4y ago
    >But don’t muddy the waters by calling it something fundamentally different. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582 "In total, it said the social network had special arrangements with more than 150 companies to share its members' personal data. Most of these, it said, were other tech firms, but the list also included online retailers, car-makers and media organisations, including the NYT itself, among others." Suffice it to say Facebook's track record with PII is pretty terrible. At some point the word sell really becomes a matter of semantics.
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      Again you are bumping the waters. Users were asked permission for Facebook to share their user data. Saying Facebook has a poor track record because they had a more open platform in the past isn't true. Now Facebook is more closed and locked down because giving people the option to share their information is apparently a bad thing according to the public.
      - rl3 4y ago
        I don't buy that narrative. As if things were somehow fine until the stupid public ruined it all. Facebook is and always has been deep in adtech, which is fundamentally slimy. It's no surprise that led to a history littered with data privacy blunders. >Again you are bumping the waters. On the contrary, my chemistry knowledge is too poor to do such a thing.
- krapp 4y ago
VerminOctopus1 4y ago
This was legitimately the most humanizing piece of media I’ve seen from Zuckerberg. It helps that I find VR fascinating, and seeing him engage with it beyond a superficial corporate level like I’d expect was refreshing.
- yreg 4y ago
  I found his recent conversation with Lex[0] interesting (though I haven't listened to all of it). It is obvious that he is personally interested in the future of VR. When he talks about it, he seems more relatable than usual. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zOHSysMmH0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zOHSysMmH0
oofbey 4y ago
No I'm pretty sure his only interest in VR is to control our dopamine channels as completely as possible. He may be a nerd, but he's Machiavellian to the core and will do anything he can to amass power to control other humans. Things like legality and morality merely provide guidance to him on how other people will react to his efforts. His biggest challenge has always been convincing his employees that what they're doing has merit and is not pure evil. Generally that has worked by paying them tons of money and telling them they're special snowflakes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Helitico 4y ago
Good if someone like him cares about something. It would be much greater if he actually cared for society and would fix what he did with facebook, addicted mobile/facebook games and fake news. But hey now the poor can have a 1-2k high quality VR Headset with full immersion to see others in a VR Chat while living in a dumpster. --- On a more non emotional side: Of course i like the idea of a high quality VR Headset but i'm not sure what FB thinks what this will do for FB. Those millions/billions they invested in their Metaverse will not become something great. I'm still very confinced that VR is a novelity and nothing people will just be in all day long. Why would they? Lets compare it to others: Apple key notes are about new hardware, new usability. Google IO has a ton of diversity, doing things for society. They talk about taking good pictures of people with all type of skin tones. They talk about 24/7 sustainability, better and easier security, protecting their users, skin mold detection and they have android. What is Meta talking about? How to put all of us into a VR world with probably a ton of monetarization. Awesome \o/ the poor who can't afford their own house/home are then sitting in a cheap/bad flat, sitting in a chair with a VR Headset on? And of course there will be a handful people playing around with this, but you know Second Live is also probably still running... Google is one of the few companies were their Keynotes are so boring because they actually fix real life boring shit which affects us all.
- CompuHacker 4y ago
  There exist people now who spend all of their sleeping time, and the majority of their waking time in primitive virtual environments while wearing incommensurately cheap hardware, speaking with almost nobody, over Internet connections barely fit for the task of voice, let alone streaming video. There exists appeal, for a few. You can do a lot with an avatar making one of two faces.
  - Helitico 4y ago
    Depressing somehow. As said, imagine we would spend our energy in our society to actually bring poeple back together. Social hubs just in a way that people want to go there. Imagine what you could build up with that money
systemvoltage 4y ago
Worth watching his interview with Lex Fridman. He seems like a decent guy, genuinely nerdy and smart.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  It's a really good example of how media shapes our perceptions of villains in a way that makes us unable to see how villainous behavior works in the real world. In short, the tendency to reinforce attributive simplicity especially in moral terms, means that a decency and relateableness become ineffective socio-moral proxies.
scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago
I think it’s so strange that people are calling him a “Weird Lizard”. “Weird Lizard” is a mouthful - plenty of other names worth calling him and his monopoly. I highly doubt his VR dream is anything more than an anti-antitrust maneuver.
- bckr 4y ago
  How about "Sauron". [] https://www.google.com/search?q=zuckerberg+sauron https://www.google.com/search?q=zuckerberg+sauron
  - ben_w 4y ago
    I’m kinda surprised, I’d have guessed Smaug if people were going to associate him with a Tolkien villain.
    - dwighttk 4y ago
      I dunno… big eye that can see all over the world through palantirs

rl3 4y ago

>... but I think beyond that, deep down, he's just a nerd who wants to live in a VR dreamland to shut out the millions of people who call him a weird lizard. I mean, in his defense he might be pretty normal by lizard standards, I don't know. Calling him weird just seems unnecessary in that context. >He of course wants every human interaction to be monetizable by Facebook, total control of our dopamine channels, ... I agree. It'd be a much better future for everyone if he'd just throw his advertising biz in the garbage. Apple is going to kick Meta's ass in the long run just by virtue of their privacy stance—which isn't all that great to begin with, but it sure does beat "our intent is to sell every iota of information we collect on you."

ntoskrnl 4y ago
I've never heard of any other lizard that eats Sweet Baby Rays. By lizard standards that's pretty weird.
ethbr0 4y ago
> Apple is going to kick Meta's ass in the long run just by virtue of their privacy stance I think you're discounting (ha) the allure of free/cheap to people who don't have disposable income. Which is to say, most people.
- rl3 4y ago
  You're probably right, though I don't think it all comes down to disposable income. Laziness, apathy and network effects are perhaps equally powerful forces. After all, I continue to use Google and Instagram despite my knowing how the sausage is made there.
- FredPret 4y ago
  But there is zero money to be made out of people who have zero money.
  - kwizzt 4y ago
    I would argue there is money to be made out of people with zero money. Student loans are an example. Instead of zero money, they now have negative money. This is terrible ofc.
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    Zero money now - but one must be ready to skim the cream off their raw human potential.
  - rl3 4y ago
    >But there is zero money to be made out of people who have zero money. That's not true. That's why credit exists. Selling poor people shit they can't afford with terrible terms is a long-standing American tradition. When a debtor is unable to pay (often times through no fault of their own), the creditor eats the cost because their margins are good enough to allow for it. That effectively represents a wealth transfer between corporations providing the services and the corporations providing the credit.
    - echelon 4y ago
      The creditor doesn't put a lien on the debtor's house, repossess their goods, or take them to court? Obviously this happens with mortgages, cars, and other extremely high value things. IRS debts, student loan debts... But what about credit cards? Don't they have mechanisms other than tanking your credit report? And if not, why don't poor indebted people simply default all the time to remove debt?
      - rl3 4y ago
        Sure, but you also can't squeeze blood from a stone. That said, I was mostly talking credit cards, since that's what most tech services would fall under in a zero-money consumer situation. >And if not, why don't poor indebted people simply default all the time to remove debt? Some do, but having your credit ruined for seven years sucks for most people. Likewise the courts don't exactly smile upon those who run up huge debts with the intention of defaulting.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  It'll be interesting to see where this goes. If VR becomes a big thing and we get to the point where an appreciable chunk of social interactions start to take place over it (huge if), the device would at least be as significant as your phone. People in the US are willing to spend extra on the Apple phone. There's already drama over the stupid blue text/green text thing, imagine a world where you know that your social interactions with a Facebook user are snooped on. I think it could lead to some significant ostracization. Private party -- no Facebookers.
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    Reality shaping, not snooping, will be the primary concern.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      What's reality shaping and why will it be a concern?
      - germinalphrase 4y ago
        There’s a Philip K Dick line that goes - “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”. Reality shaping is like that - but coercive and in reverse. How much do I need to nudge your perceptual world with ubiquitous, desirable lizard-brain augmentations before you stop believing in reality?
        bee_rider 4y ago
        I mean, we already have religion, advertising, and "influencers" so I guess this is a current problem. With VR, at least it will be obvious when headset is on.
        germinalphrase 4y ago
        A problem as old as humankind. Ideally, one would attempt to tie the user’s livelihood to the platform to keep them engaged.
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  You refer to poor people. "You're forgetting the poor people"
mortenjorck 4y ago
There's an alternate universe where Zuckerberg takes Yahoo's $1B offer for Facebook in 2006 (which Yahoo sells a decade later to Pinboard for $100k) and becomes more of an Elon Musk figure, investing in and running a handful of forward-thinking businesses. Imagine Oculus becoming Meta without the Facebook baggage – a hardware-focused company with a major services play, but no adtech business.
- rl3 4y ago
  >Imagine Oculus becoming Meta without the Facebook baggage – a hardware-focused company with a major services play, but no adtech business. I think this was called Magic Leap. I don't know, I think I still prefer Rony Abovitz awkwardly dancing around in a space suit rather than Zuck.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  A cautionary tale - for a certain kind of person.
- intrasight 4y ago
  There's only a hand-full of companies that can make the kind of investment that VR will require. FB is one of them. So is ByteDance.
lettergram 4y ago
Apple scans your iCloud for illicit photos and sends them to police. I don’t think Apple has any privacy stance worth recognizing. https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/05/apple-icloud-photos-scanning/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/05/apple-icloud-photos-scanni...
- planetsprite 4y ago
  There's a reconciliation, necessarily in a civil society, between promoting privacy and doing what's possible to stop child abuse. Should Apple allow child porn to be hosted on its cloud servers since that's the pro-privacy stance?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ahtihn 4y ago
    I don't think they should knowingly allow it. On the other hand I don't think they should do anything about it proactively.
  - bckr 4y ago
    > Should Apple allow [child abuse material] to be hosted on its cloud servers since that's the pro-privacy stance? No they should not.
- rl3 4y ago
  Right, but the comparison here is that Meta also does this, in addition to selling every iota of information they have you. Content scanning is just an assumed part of every major tech platform these days. That of course doesn't necessarily make it right, but it still places Apple's privacy stance significantly ahead of Meta.
  - murderfs 4y ago
    People keep repeating the refrain of Google/Facebook selling your data, but is there any evidence of a single case where this actually happened? They use your data, to let advertisers target specific subgroups of the population. The companies that you should be concerned about selling your data aren't the advertising companies, they're the financial companies that are literally selling your transaction data to those and other companies.
lvass 4y ago
>their privacy stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
School-Cotton 4y ago
Facebook does not sell users’ information. It uses their information to target ads, which it sells. You might also be against the latter, fine! That’s a perfectly reasonable position to hold. But don’t muddy the waters by calling it something fundamentally different.
- rl3 4y ago
  >But don’t muddy the waters by calling it something fundamentally different. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582 "In total, it said the social network had special arrangements with more than 150 companies to share its members' personal data. Most of these, it said, were other tech firms, but the list also included online retailers, car-makers and media organisations, including the NYT itself, among others." Suffice it to say Facebook's track record with PII is pretty terrible. At some point the word sell really becomes a matter of semantics.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Again you are bumping the waters. Users were asked permission for Facebook to share their user data. Saying Facebook has a poor track record because they had a more open platform in the past isn't true. Now Facebook is more closed and locked down because giving people the option to share their information is apparently a bad thing according to the public.
    - rl3 4y ago
      I don't buy that narrative. As if things were somehow fine until the stupid public ruined it all. Facebook is and always has been deep in adtech, which is fundamentally slimy. It's no surprise that led to a history littered with data privacy blunders. >Again you are bumping the waters. On the contrary, my chemistry knowledge is too poor to do such a thing.
krapp 4y ago

VerminOctopus1 4y ago

This was legitimately the most humanizing piece of media I’ve seen from Zuckerberg. It helps that I find VR fascinating, and seeing him engage with it beyond a superficial corporate level like I’d expect was refreshing.

yreg 4y ago
I found his recent conversation with Lex[0] interesting (though I haven't listened to all of it). It is obvious that he is personally interested in the future of VR. When he talks about it, he seems more relatable than usual. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zOHSysMmH0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zOHSysMmH0

oofbey 4y ago

No I'm pretty sure his only interest in VR is to control our dopamine channels as completely as possible. He may be a nerd, but he's Machiavellian to the core and will do anything he can to amass power to control other humans. Things like legality and morality merely provide guidance to him on how other people will react to his efforts. His biggest challenge has always been convincing his employees that what they're doing has merit and is not pure evil. Generally that has worked by paying them tons of money and telling them they're special snowflakes.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Helitico 4y ago

Good if someone like him cares about something. It would be much greater if he actually cared for society and would fix what he did with facebook, addicted mobile/facebook games and fake news. But hey now the poor can have a 1-2k high quality VR Headset with full immersion to see others in a VR Chat while living in a dumpster. --- On a more non emotional side: Of course i like the idea of a high quality VR Headset but i'm not sure what FB thinks what this will do for FB. Those millions/billions they invested in their Metaverse will not become something great. I'm still very confinced that VR is a novelity and nothing people will just be in all day long. Why would they? Lets compare it to others: Apple key notes are about new hardware, new usability. Google IO has a ton of diversity, doing things for society. They talk about taking good pictures of people with all type of skin tones. They talk about 24/7 sustainability, better and easier security, protecting their users, skin mold detection and they have android. What is Meta talking about? How to put all of us into a VR world with probably a ton of monetarization. Awesome \o/ the poor who can't afford their own house/home are then sitting in a cheap/bad flat, sitting in a chair with a VR Headset on? And of course there will be a handful people playing around with this, but you know Second Live is also probably still running... Google is one of the few companies were their Keynotes are so boring because they actually fix real life boring shit which affects us all.

CompuHacker 4y ago
There exist people now who spend all of their sleeping time, and the majority of their waking time in primitive virtual environments while wearing incommensurately cheap hardware, speaking with almost nobody, over Internet connections barely fit for the task of voice, let alone streaming video. There exists appeal, for a few. You can do a lot with an avatar making one of two faces.
- Helitico 4y ago
  Depressing somehow. As said, imagine we would spend our energy in our society to actually bring poeple back together. Social hubs just in a way that people want to go there. Imagine what you could build up with that money

systemvoltage 4y ago

Worth watching his interview with Lex Fridman. He seems like a decent guy, genuinely nerdy and smart.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
It's a really good example of how media shapes our perceptions of villains in a way that makes us unable to see how villainous behavior works in the real world. In short, the tendency to reinforce attributive simplicity especially in moral terms, means that a decency and relateableness become ineffective socio-moral proxies.

scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago

I think it’s so strange that people are calling him a “Weird Lizard”. “Weird Lizard” is a mouthful - plenty of other names worth calling him and his monopoly. I highly doubt his VR dream is anything more than an anti-antitrust maneuver.

bckr 4y ago
How about "Sauron". [] https://www.google.com/search?q=zuckerberg+sauron https://www.google.com/search?q=zuckerberg+sauron
- ben_w 4y ago
  I’m kinda surprised, I’d have guessed Smaug if people were going to associate him with a Tolkien villain.
  - dwighttk 4y ago
    I dunno… big eye that can see all over the world through palantirs