Comment by probably_wrong
12 hours ago
I have some respect for Meta Research for the good they did releasing Torch, FastText vectors, and the LLaMa models among others for free.
How does this work fits with their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers, I cannot explain.
It's like the best of the best mechanical and electrical engineers have teamed up to build the world's most efficient orphan crushing machine. It sips power, runs cool, requires almost no maintenance, and pulverizes orphans into dense little cubes for easy clean up.
To me it read as, "Scantrons did a lot of good, but were developed to track Jewish concentration camp prisoners" type a thing.
Meta's ultimate goal is immoral. It's not justified if a few projects do some good.
Unless the scantron corporation is so antisemitic they invented a time machine to participate in world war 2, I think you mean IBM.
> It's like the best of the best mechanical and electrical engineers have teamed up to build the world's most efficient orphan crushing machine.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read on here.
A modest proposal, really.
Also it has a glorious viewing gallery to watch and listen to a thousand doomed orphans get fed to Zuckerberg’s ego so it can illuminate the path to total enshittification.
You've got to justify such a silly comparison.
Agreed, it takes a lot more power and doesn't run nearly as cool as all that.
The orphan crushing machine is a meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/orphan-crushing-machine). Most of Meta's products hurt society from driving impressionable young girls into an early grave, over supporting genocide and ethnic cleansing, to splitting voters into rabid fans with blind devotion on "their team" over everything else.
They also work hard to force users into their walled gardens and to stop the useful content users to this day feed into they intentionally broken services from escaping into the real world wide web of hyperlinked and discoverable content.
In short they're at the forefront of making the internet harmful to society and less useful to almost everyone.
Similar to how Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, etc. used tiny fractions of their wealth, on things that would bolster the opinions of the public. They’re laudable, but become less so when you see the bigger picture. Those free software tools are things that Meta needs for its own operations, and their moat is so vast that they can give them away for free and benefit from public participation.
Advertising. It's literally advertising to get high quality engineers in the door to do the dirty work.
ZSTD as well.
wasn't LLaMa only open source because it had already leaked anyways? And they wanted to spin it in a positive light for their stakeholders.
It opened the floodgates, though. It was a real paradigm shift. After LLaMa, everybody saw that you could release large open models without any negative repercussions, and DeepSeek et al. hopped aboard the wagon. LLaMa was the first popular model that was truly open to the global public.
Meta earned a ton of goodwill by doing this -- it was very brave, and very influential. In my eyes, it outweighs everything negative they've ever done.
Let's stop saying that open weight models are open source. They are just a software that you can run on your own hardware (if you have a ton of money to spend to get it anyway) but they are not open, they are as open as any proprietary software that you can run on your PC is.
You can't study them, you can't modify them, you can't improve them, you can't look into how they are built etc.
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> it was very brave, and very influential. In my eyes, it outweighs everything negative they've ever done.
Are you being sarcastic? Please let it be that you’re being sarcastic.
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> I have some respect ... I cannot explain.
Naturally, they do it to earn "some respect" from those who otherwise see them clearly.
> their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers
Their mission is to make Zuckerberg rich and powerful. That’s the sole purpose of Meta, everything else is incidental. It just so happens that they also destroy the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers but it’s not their primary goal, they just don’t care about the side effect. It would be all the same if they were poisoning coral reefs and giving wedgies to grandmothers instead. As long as the process benefits Zuckerberg in the end, nothing else matters to the company.
It's the era of mad boy kings. 'Boy' being more of an attitude than a strict age requirement.
We used to have something resembling a democracy, now we have an evolving neo-fascist hellscape created by a cabal of the least interesting tech people on the planet.
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