Hi schrep! Unrelated to the article, but I wanted to say thanks for taking the time to talk to me at the 'Silicon Valley comes to Cambridge' event in Nov 2010, back when I was just a 2nd year cs student! You not only motivated me to aim high and to apply to FB, but also actually submitted an internship referral!
I didn't end up doing an internship that year (was my first ever coding interview and I did not do well!!), but partly because of this very positive interaction, I later on did end up joining Facebook right out of university! I spent seven years there from 2014 to 2021 working on messaging infra and had a great time (and i miss our infra stack)! Thanks again for talking to a clueless 2nd year student back then!
I gotta say, seeing the Meta CTO / Senior Fellow pop up on HN is an unexpected treat! (Oddly, a relative and an ex-boss of mine both worked with you at CenterRun back in the day. Silicon Valley is a small place indeed)
I've gotta say... Changing the name of everything to Meta to try to change the perception was a bit absurd. Just stop requiring Facebook accounts to use VR devices.
Curious how a group of people that seem to care so much for each other could care so little for everyone else. That is the thing I just can't wrap my head around with Facebook... what did you/do you believe the mission is, before it was VR?
Do you have a reference/citation for any system that does 100x100 translation? That's the claim here - first to do 100x00 language directions from a single model. But if we are wrong I'd happily update with a reference/citation.
Why do you say its the hardest part? Hand gesture tracking is quite hard, but tracking IR LEDs on a controller is much easier than tracking head motion as long as you have the camera setup to keep them in view.
The Lenovo Mirage Solo had 6DOF tracking with the Daydream controller. It had an experimental 6DOF controller add on but Google killed Daydream before that shipped. Inside out PC headsets exist with the camera setup for 6DOF inside out.
Currently the Quest is the only Android based (and thus fully stand alone) headset that's wasn't Daydream branded and wasn't killed when Google mothballed their VR support. There's less now then there were, or would have been if Google stuck with it.
“ Neo 2/Neo 2 Eye is available for businesses only. Please fill out this form if you are interested in ordering the Neo 2/Neo 2 Eye and we will get back to you once stock is available.”
Our products aren't perfect, and we understand that we have a lot of work to do.
However, the fundamental purpose of our products is to allow people to efficiently communicate with each other. Hard for me to square that with "drain on society." I have many friends who, via Facebook, found a connection that was life changing: from finding a job, a spouse, to a community to deal with the loss of a loved one or support after being diagnosed with a terminal illness.
One of the things that draws AI researchers to come work at Facebook is the opportunity to see their work make a positive impact on billions of people around the world.
The research done by FAIR is helping us do things like deliver billions of translations a day, provide automatic photo captions for people who are visually impaired, and help bring blood donors and people in need together. It also helps us spot when someone is expressing thoughts about self-harm so we can alert first responders.
But we also believe there's even more we can do to help bring the world closer together, to give people a voice, and to open up new opportunities for everyone. AI is a key part of that and we believe pretty deeply in the power of open research to help not just us but the whole industry.
> The research done by FAIR is helping us do things like deliver billions of translations a day, etc...
All for the purpose of increasing buy-in to an increasingly Orwellian digital surveillance regime.
> But we also believe there's even more we can do to help bring the world closer together...
What brings people closer together is real human interaction and connection. Face to face communication with visible emotion. Vulnerability. FB's video chat is the only thing serving that interest, but that's better served elsewhere with less tracking. Posts that broadcast one-way to an invisible audience are inhuman. Filter bubbles are toxic. Widespread use of FB is cancerous on the social fabric of society.
This post kind of reminded me of one of those drug commercials with old people happily skipping hand-in-hand through a field of flowers. The only difference is that you forgot to quickly list the many terrible side effects of your product at the end.
Tell your PR team the appeal to emotion was a nice touch. If I didn't know anything about your company I might have even been able to get through it without feeling absolutely nauseated.
> the fundamental purpose of our products is to allow people to efficiently communicate with each other
No, the fundamental purpose of your products is to efficiently surveil, profile and manipulate your users on behalf of your customers.
> It also helps us spot when someone is expressing thoughts about self-harm so we can alert first responders
What happens when those first responders bust someone's door down and your "helpful" feature essentially becomes algorithmic swatting?
On a semi-related note, did you guys ever figure out how many of the hundreds of thousands of people you enrolled in an emotional manipulation study without their consent ended up killing themselves as a result? It's a given that the figure isn't zero across that number of people.
All of these goals are positive. I also assume that's all of the goals that you focus on.
But it's an abuse of power to only look at one side of the equation.
Companies are run by people, and at the end of the day, no person would want to dump their money into a technology that couldn't yield any financial gains. Where do all the large companies get most of their revenue from? From figuring out how to trigger dopamine to be released into our brains, and we're starting to see the negative effects it's having on people.
Also, you aren't giving people voices. You're opening up a door to a world where they have no control over. In their outrage, and futility, they focus more and more time trying to fix something that doesn't exist.
Is this what you tell yourself in order to sleep at night? From the perspective of an external observer, this talk of "making the world more open and connected (and making billions in the process)" seems shockingly disconnected from the reality of the damage that FB is causing in America and in the world.
You talk about impact. There's no doubt FB is making a big impact. Unfortunately, it's overwhelmingly destructive impact. As someone in position to change that, it would be great for you not to dismiss out of hand the valid concerns of the people in this thread. Personally, it's because of replies like this (in particular zuck's attitude) that I have zero confidence in FB's potential to fix its products in the future. Bye bye democracy I guess.
One day you may be held responsible for your impact on the world. I hope the talk about making the world a better place will work out then.
This was a bug. There was an old feature that used to allow you to record and post directly from the browser. Those videos were streamed to FB as they were being recorded. If you decided not to post those draft videos should have been deleted but were not. They showed up in download your information (DYI) as expected because that tool is designed to show you the data Facebook has about you. Thanks to New York Magazine for the flag. If you see anything in DYI that doesn't look right, let us know and we'll investigate. This was a bug, and we really do appreciate any help in finding them so we can fix them.
I downloaded my information and then deleted my account before realizing that the archive I downloaded did not include any of the photos or posts that I had been tagged in, because I made those posts only visible to me on my timeline.
If these are posts by other people that you were tagged in then those posts should still be up, just without the tags of you, on the original posters timeline.
I believe there charges shows not only well intention but also that Facebook actually cares about and listens to the community, which in the long term is many times more valuable for the ecosystem then this particular change in itself.
I totally get that view and it bums me out. I can say there is reasoned debate about the different licenses as you can see in this thread. We've changed an explicit patent grant into a debated implicit one. We thought the first was clearer to folks but when debate turned into action we decided winning the debate wasn't important we should just do what would allow people to use the code. I know big companies can look opaque and self-interested on the outside so I get your view. Just sharing as someone part of the internal discussions what happened and why.
You forgot to mention that the explicit grant came with obnoxious conditions, and those conditions were the crux of the issue. Your characterization of the change says a lot about the internal discussions in which you participated.
I think it's unlikely that Facebook added the PATENTS file in order to make things easier for other companies and not for self-interest. It's an explicit patent revocation, not just grant. If I'm not mistaken, there was backlash against an earlier version of the file as well. Only later they tried to spin it as something they were doing for the public.
+1, this debate has been going on for a long while(6mo-1year?).
Claiming that you decided to change it out of the goodness of your heart seems a bit disingenuous. I get if you needed to clear it with the lawyers/business owners over that time but claiming it was changed on a whim doesn't ring true.
Someone on Reddit argued that the new legal situation is worse because the PATENTS clause provided protection against litigation unless you sued Facebook first. Licensing under MIT, s/he argued, theoretically opens you up to litigation at any time IF Facebook decides to enforce any patents. So I was wondering: as far as you know, does Facebook have any patents on React or React Native?
Some lawyers think the language used in the MIT license implies a patent grant limited to the use of the licensed software. They think it would be difficult for the licensor to give a license on the software from one hand, and claim a patent infringement on the same software from the other hand, but as far as I know, this was never tested in court.
Not to mention the question that the older language had a perpetual patent license for anyone using the software (subject to termination under the now much-discussed rare circumstance of suing FB).
So long as you were using the software under those conditions, it would be an interesting argument for how that patent license could now be unilaterally rescinded. (The new license doesn't say anything about it.)
