BC TECH
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

Stephen, why are you so critical of Facebook and not the other big tech companies?

A 🧵 for well-intentioned engineers about how to navigate the complexities of big tech.

 There's a simple inescapable truth about the distinction in kind between Facebook and the others.

Google could fix its content moderation and stop its military contracts and its business model would still be Google. (1/)
Apple could fix up its supply chain, raises the unit prices on its products for more sustainable and environmentally sound sourcing, and its business model would still be Apple. (2/)
Amazon could treat its workers better and stop self-dealing in adjacent markets with its own products, and its business model would still be Amazon. (3/)
Netflix could ... actually don't really have here to complain about here really. Maybe less Tiger King. (4/)
That leads us to the key point, the subtle point that makes all the difference. All companies have psychopath executives, all companies cut contracts with unsavoury third parties, all companies have employee issues, all companies have ethical problems in their supply chain. (5/)
These things are not immutable facts about a company, they can and regularly do change. What *cannot* change is its core business model. The raison d'etre for its existence and the mechanism by which it continues its own existence, pays its shareholders and issues bonuses. (6/)
And that leads to Facebook, the singularly worst company in the tech sector ever. Its business model is to strip mine data from your relationships to your friends and family. It does this by showing you addictive, misleading and divisive content to optimise your screen time. (7/)
Their ambition is to create an ML-driven driven system designed to optimize your addiction to its apps to extract even more time and data from you. There are no limits or bounds on what it will show you to maximize your addiction to its platform. So long as it makes money. (8/)
Facebook is destroying the very fabric of human relationships, the democratic functioning of our state, and behaves like a dealer peddling in an addictive drug called anger. (9/)
Hell, Facebook even wants to issue their own sovereign currency so that they can track every cent of every purchase you make globally. To become a shadow bank that integrates purchasing data with behavioural data, to finally complete their user manipulation loop. (10/)
As the Wall Street Journal reported, any effort to reform moderation is second to one thing: user engagement. A public corporation must show quarterly growth, and Facebook's growth is built on ever-increasing user engagement to toxic content. (11/)
https://t.co/92EKe7UxJD
If you work at Facebook, you dump poison into the body politic of society every day you log into Workplace. Every Phabricator task is a step forward in Facebook's executives unbounded psychopathic ambition for nightmare surveillance capitalism based on digital addiction. (12/)
So, no Facebook is not "just another company" like the other tech giants. The ethical distinction is one in kind, not degree. Its business model is corrupt to the core. It is the Big Tobacco of the information age. (13/)
There can be no redemption or internal reform for companies whose business model is based on human suffering. And the only answer is burn it to the ground, salt the earth and ensure our children's generations never builds the same horrors. (14/)

/end rant

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Josh Constine
Josh Constine
@JoshConstine
Facebook lost another 1 million daily users in Europe and stayed flat in North America as scandals and low engagement with teens come back to bite its business https://t.co/O7tfyIw7Fd tip @Techmeme


Facebook still added 37M monthly & 24M daily users thanks to big gains in the Asia-Pacific region, but those users earn it 1/10th as much as US/Can users


The real story dragging on Facebook's share price is that yearly revenue growth has fallen from 59% 2 years ago to 33% today. It's run out of lucrative Western users and News Feed ad space.


Let's remember that Facebook doubled its security staff & cut back on viral videos/clickbait. That drags on its profits & revenue, but are crucial to society. And while Twitter shares soar, it has made no such commitments to fighting harassment & misinfo.
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Zen Black
Zen Black
@z3nblack
1/ Thread: "A Silicon Valley Ponzi Scheme"

Thanks to @chamath for laying this out in Social Capital's 2018 annual letter.

I've always appreciated his outspokenness.

2/ The hardest thing for most startups today is the path to market: first finding product-market fit & a way to reach customers, then building a ruthless machine to acquire, monetize & retain them.

3/ Because of this, when the VC industry invests capital into fast growing startups today, the plurality (if not majority) of invested capital will go into user acquisition and ad spending, for better or worse— usually worse.

4/ Todays massive venture-backed advertising, sales, and user acquisition playbook has morphed into one that champions growth at any cost.

This is creating a big bill that will soon come due...

5/ Ad impressions and click-throughs are bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention.
TECH , STARTUPS , {TEST FOLDER}
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getify
getify
@getify
Java was first released in mid-1995, just 6 months before JS.

By 98, when I went to college, Java was already used for all the first level courses in the CS program.

How did it catch on so quickly (just 3 years) to shift university curriculum, which is usually so slow/behind?

I wonder why Java was so respected and JS was not? Why/how was Java already seen as such a stable and mature language?

Not just Java, other languages (like python) were also released around/near 95, and also seemed to get to "mature" respect status. much quicker.

I bring all this up because my impression of Java in 98 was that it had been around "forever" (as had C++ first developed in 79, but not standardized until 98!), but that's not. true at all. These were all new languages around the same time.

I'm sure the language designs had different merits, and the target applications meant a different perception and reception, but...

it sure seems like the industry (and academics) just decided Java and C++ were the stable mature ones and langs like JS were toys.

BTW, before you assume JS was nascent/immature b/c the web wasn't much of a thing yet, remember that JS was actually released as LiveScript on the server before it was released in a browser. So "server-side JS" was always part of the story, not just Node 15 years later in 2009.
TECH
Zed A. Shaw, Writer
Zed A. Shaw, Writer
@lzsthw
When you complain about an open source project's management you'll get the reply, "Use something else if you don't like it!" That'd be true except for the tiny problem that *many* projects also strive for complete monopolistic dominance.

Let me tell you about Java in early 2k:

I was programming in Java since it's release, and all through the late 90s into the early 2000s. At first Java was very determined to unseat C++ and it used various propaganda tactics to turn C++ and malloc into a weird enemy for all of us to hate. This worked great!

Everything was fine though because there were plenty of jobs in tech because of the dot-com boom, and then suddenly there were not jobs because of the dot-com bomb.

Overnight it seemed as if the *only* way to get a job was at giant companies, and they *loved* Enterprise Java.

Now, this is the golden ticket for many open source projects and corporations. They all want to be the top dog #1 in the industry for their particular use, and once they gain that position they become abusive by ignoring user needs and extracting wealth from them.

With Java the dominance was so insane that *every* language had to copy Java's weirdness to survive. If you wonder why a language has some odd CamelCase things it's because early Python, Ruby, and others had to copy Java's semantics and style to even be considered "serious".
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Santiago
Santiago
@svpino
Here is a simple example of a machine learning model.

I put it together a long time ago, and it was very helpful! I sliced it apart a thousand times until things started to make sense.

It's TensorFlow and Keras.

If you are starting out, this may be a good puzzle to solve.


The goal of this model is to learn to multiply one-digit
TECH

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