> If Mark Zuckerberg didn't exist, we'd still have Facebook.
Yes, because multi-trillion dollar companies are completely natural and spawn almost at random to whatever nerd happens to be working on a particular problem at any given time
Note that GP didn’t say Meta, the trillion-dollar company, they said Facebook, the social platform that won its generation of social platforms. One of those platforms was bound to win, just by the interconnected nature of social networks, and I think reasonable people can disagree on whether that success sets you up inevitably to make a trillion dollars or not.
Eh, I like some of Neal's books a lot, particularly Diamond Age is likely in any top ten I'd come up with. But this claim is basically only true in the trivial sense that wouldn't have any arbitrary creative work if its author hadn't created it.
So in that sense it's the exact same as Facebook. Without Neal somebody else would invented "post Cyberpunk" and without Mark somebody else would have invented whatever Facebook is - social media for your grandparents maybe?
Neal is "unique" but we're all unique, it's the least unique thing about us. He struggles to write satisfying endings, he leans too heavily on the rape-as-character-development trope, his novels have become flabby as his fame grew and presumably he was able to resist editorial demands more, he doesn't know as much about technology as he thinks he does... Like I said, "Diamond Age" would probably make my top ten, but that's not because it's flawless by any means.
I was really hoping for a Snow Crash movie. That project has been in development hell for years. Instead, we got Ready Player One, which is like Snow Crash for dummies. There's a trailer for a low-budget version of Snow Crash.[1] It's awful.
I don't hold out much hope for that project. Snow Crash is about a conspiracy between a media baron and a televangelist to take over the world. That would upset a lot more people now than in 1992.
I love Snow Crash too, for what it is, and I'm sure someone could make a worthwhile movie out of the concepts and ideas in there, but then I'm not really sure it's worthwhile.
But if someone is hoping for a scene accurate depiction I'm equally unsure it's possible, or that anyone would want to see it, between everything from the "radical" Carmageddon pizza delivery and variable rollerskate wheel sizes to the main character literally being named Hiro Protagonist.
It's a great nostalgic time capsule for me, which also spawned a lot of other great works, but I'm fine with leaving it as that.
I would love to see a proper version of Snow Crash get theatrical release or maybe even the high-concept-tv-series-with-ten-episodes treatment the big streamers are cooking up these days.
I believe I have accumulated two moderation strikes on my Facebook account for (relatively politely) calling out posts for being racist/xenophobic.
Both cases my comments were flagged as promoting hate, ironically. The appeal mechanism is a joke: you press a button, and two seconds later you get a notification saying your appeal was reviewed and denied.
After I reported a post, nothing happened, then I messaged the mods, and they agreed with me that the post should be taken down and they did.
A day after it was taken down, I got a warning message from Reddit that my report has been rejected, and I should stop falsely reporting content, or else.
I’ve experienced something similar in attempting to report very explicit and outrageously racist posts and comments. Zero action on blatant neo-Nazism (including specific threats of violence), and several lost appeals. However, far more benign posts and comments that don’t really violate the ToS are often flagged. This is quite prevalent on Instagram especially, which is quite worrying as it’s acting as a radicalisation tunnel for large numbers of impressionable young people. It’s almost as if the algorithm attempts to throw you into a far-right rabbithole because they know it boosts engagement.
Meh, what do you expect from a company that immediately pivoted to “free speech” and explicitly called out that it’s okay on their platform to call for firing gay teachers for being gay.
Because to do otherwise would just be too much of an assault on free speech apparently.
In other news the president signed an executive order that acknowledges flag burning is protected speech even as it promises to find a reason to prosecute people for it. Also trying to force the Smithsonian to stop talking about slavery,
I got a week long ban for calling someone out for being a Nazi. The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all. At the time I thought it was mere incompetence, but in hindsight, it seems more like intentional malice.
It's not intentional malice, it's just 2025 - an age where calling someone a fascist or a racist is worse than being one.
If that doesn't make a lick of sense to you - it's simple. The latter is an offense against a nebulous, undefined outgroup of people, while the former offends a particular person.
It's the same reason why someone can steal a dollar from a million people, but why you'd go to jail for punching the thief in the face.
This was back around 2019 or so, but you're not wrong at all. Back then Zuckerburg et al at least pretended to be against hate speech. It's so much worse now.
>The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all.
Content moderation at Meta is a joke now. I reported an account multiple times for hate speech. The account's photos were comprised entirely of racist caricatures of black people. Like absolutely vile, hateful shit.
Each time, I received a notification along the lines of: [paraphrasing] "We found that the account in question did not violate our community standards. Therefore, we did not take any action. Thanks for the report."
This is not an anomaly, by the way. I've interviewed many multiple Meta staffers (including senior leaders), and can find little evidence that leadership actually read "Snow Crash" and/or even cared about virtual worlds. Even after spending tens of billions claiming they were building the Metaverse.
I think anyone who says there is nothing interesting in Rand either didn’t read it or is acting in bad faith. Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead are uniquely fascinating even if you don’t agree with her stance.
Chris Hedges is a self reported socialist. So makes sense they would not like books negative on socialism. But you can be a socialist and still engage with competing thoughts. Just like a capitalist can review Marx and admit the ideas are important/interesting.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.
One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
Literally every person I have any respect for as an intellectual has described Ayn Rand as slop.
I have yet to hear positive things come from anyone who isn’t a libertarian. The sort of person who identifies with the characters because they could also envision themselves doing a monologue that lasts 45 pages.
Both Rand and William McGonagall are widely regarded as are uniquely fascinating.
In a layered complex world both the above statement and the statement that there's little of interest in Rand's books for socialists, for hedge fund traders, or for the majority of people with a background in political science, can be true.
Stephen Fry, well known for his love of the English language and breadth of eclectic interest, when discussing the Scot said:
I am too kind to you and to [McGonagall's] memory to reproduce the entire poem'
(The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within [NY: Gotham, 2007], p. 153), and further:
Almost everything that can go wrong with a poem has gone wrong here. One might argue that McGonagall has brilliantly memorialised a doomed and structurally flawed bridge in congruently doomed and structurally flawed verse.
His poem is a disaster for a disaster: it is the Tay Bridge, crashing hopelessly to its destruction and dragging every innocent word with it.
It is not buttressed by metre, rhyme, sense or reason and even as we read it we feel it collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and ineptitude.
(p. 154, as above)
Regardless of anyone's position on the political stance of Rand, her written works deserve little more than to be the subject of atrocious parody of her robber baron sick o' fantasy, the breathless bodice ripping drama of trains repeatedly entering and being reversed out of tunnels against a soundscape of a geared steampunk stock ticker of yore.
I dunno who you were talking to, but the RL research areas I worked in had some definite Neil Stevenson fans.
but then we weren't the pricks who thought you could make up for a shit lighting setup with polygon count cough any screenshot from horizon worlds cough
There's precious little value for those types to read stuff like "Snow Crash".
It's like the people saying "It's obvious these STEM people didn't take humanities courses". Well, yeah. The dream for the incoming freshman at Stanford's CS program isn't to graduate with a degree. The dream is to have some VC come onto campus, see some BS project the freshman cooked up, tell the freshman "You're literally Jesus Christ, and I want to fund your startup" and drop out with access to millions in funding and a network of people who can give more funding when the original round dries up.
Humanities courses and reading humanistic conceptions of how tech could go wrong doesn't get you millions of dollars. Reckless abandon does.
Meta has extremely opaque account policies. For example, I bought the Meta Raybans a month ago. It kept telling me the AI features were not available in my region, even though I am in San Francisco. I joined Facebook in 2006, and I have used my account for the Oculus headset without a problem. But no matter what I did, the AI function of the Raybans wouldn't work.
I ended up creating a brand new account just for that, and it worked fine. No idea why it would work with a brand new account and not with my old account in good standing, never suspended or warned about anything.
I have recently had a need to create an Instagram account. I logged in from my home IP and it was recognized as coming from Vietnam (my home IP has been the same since 2016, always with the same ISP). Everything was in Vietnamese and I had to spend half an hour figuring out how to switch it back to English. But in the home feed I still got only Vietnamese influencers, and there was nothing in the settings to change that. I got assigned to Vietnam for life.
Well, I did nothing with the account except setting up the profile and following some people. Then I logged in to the account on my phone, which of course is not from Vietnam. Bam, account suspended for violating the TOS. I appealed, after one day got a message that the ban was upheld because I did violate the TOS.
I guess no Instagram for me. That's probably for the better.
There's a mid-sized international bus company over here and once I bought a ticket for the wrong day, realized only after payment. I simply called the phone number, the lady spoke my language, reissued the ticket for a different day, that's it.
I was shocked that customer support can work like that.
my best guess is, you could've connected from a different ip once 10 years ago and it improperly geolocated that ip as being in a tiny country and now it thinks you're secretly from that country even though you've been accessing the site from a US ip forever. it's the only plausible reason i can really think of. unless they set up a "country estimation" ai or a similar newfangled system and it's convinced for some reason you're actually not american. it's too out there but you never know
Last time meta blocked my account was because I gave away free framing lumber after demolishing my poorly framed basement. Somehow it got flagged and that was that. Thankfully I don’t give a damn, and now never will.
Ps: some couple happily picked up 100 or so 2x4 studs of various lengths to build a greenhouse for their garden with.
If they suspend everyones accounts, the Internet will be a better place.
“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.”
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
I made a whatsapp business account yesterday, started a test advertising campaign. Went to log in to the developer area, "Your account is banned, there is no appeal". And whatsapp customer services says "Your account is fine and there are no issues and this ticket is closed"
I really, really don't understand why you have to make a facebook account in order to get access to the developer area, and now I get to watch my advertising spending tick up with no way of accessing anything about it.
I have been locked out of my account for 5+ months -- and customer support has been a Kafkaesque nightmare. I am still locked out. (Oh, and I've spent $1M+ in paid META ads...)
Haha... it's crazy. And I have friends at META who've been trying to help, and they themselves get in a customer support hell as well. It's wild. $1.9T company.
On one level this is amusing. But what if both accounts are owned by the same person impersonating Neal Stephenson? My understanding was that he was not on any social media. Did that change at some point?
Had a similar experience with meta. Extremely opaque decision making, terrible UX. Account permanently disabled ... did not follow community standards, literally on sign up to get a dx account.
It's difficult after an experience like that to see how they are so successful. Is it because their users are so addicted and ad sellers will do anything to get onboard ? It's probably just a few dark patterns here and there to bump up impressions at will.
That's designed for nerds. Like Matrix and the other platforms that will never see mainstream adoption because they lack product management and crazy distribution.
I loved this game! I still have the original rulebook. That my AD&D 2nd ed. books, Star Frontiers and Gamma World boxed sets may be my most prized possessions.
Cool! I had to look "Uncle Al catalogs" up. I remember seeing ads for Car Wars, but never played it myself. There were so many neat games back then.
Gamma World was really neat and timely given how fearful we all were of nuclear war. I remember watching Road Warrior at the time and thinking that Gamma World could actually be the world we live in.
Dragon Magazine would occasionally have articles on Gamma World too. So much food for the young imagination.
More cyberpunk than this would be for the official author side to be a `.onion`, with a vanity subdomain that took a borrowed farm of GPUs a week to compute, and an RSS/Atom reader feed from that, plus a Fediverse/Mastodon account for the normies that you host yourself from an offshore data haven, paid for with mixed BTC, and a Reddit account just to keep some twerp from grabbing your name, all of which you access exclusively through Tor Browser, from a dedicated/compartmentalized immutable device. :)
But I'm sympathetic to authors feeling they have to be on the popular social media platforms. I don't know about big-name authors like Mr. Stephenson, but when I looked into writing fiction myself, the advice for new and less-known writers was to actively work marketing on all of Twitter/X, Instagram, especially TikTok (BookTok), and others.
(I decided it was too much demoralizing work, to not only write novels, which is grueling, but then to have to play games with TikTok influencers, if you want enough people to actually read the product of your suffering.)
Twitter is "lenient" with ban evasion because it runs on cognitive load and they have no time to deal with it themselves. It's just completely beyond cognitive capacity of its controlling parties(including financial owners) that it could appear that they are chill with speeches it hosts as well as unilateral cultural influencing capabilities it has.
I've opened a ticket with Microsoft regarding a M365 Business account and an actual person called me within an hour and fixed my issue right away, and I am not even exaggerating here. It was a trivial issue and I am not claiming it's always like this, but it CAN be like this.
Business account though. Everyone else is just a waste of time to provide support to.
I'm a regular consumer who bought a Dell Precision laptop (which still kicks ass btw, to their credit for all their faults) and they bent over backwards because I purchased through their business side. A shipping delay got me a 100 dollar discount, and another hiccup got me 150 dollars to spend at Dell. Bought a business grade 4K monitor from them that also kicks ass and has imperceptible latency in CS:GO/CS2 with the laptop.
Sometimes even in a bleak corporate world there can be good customer service. It's the exception rather than the rule too often.
I called MS support once because some random dude managed to get my son's account registered under his "family", and then locked my son out of being able to update his own machine.
The MS support guy literally tried to get me to password crack the random dude's account. Like, he wanted me to help him guess the guy's password so we could log in as him and change his family settings.
The Microsoft family/organisation situation is fucking ridiculous. If you somehow get enrolled in either, good luck ever ridding your device of it.
For literal years after leaving university, my windows install was still linked to my uni despite multiple attempts to fix it. All this, because I logged in using my university Microsoft account once.
As someone in the burbs + middle america, Facebook still has a frustrating grip on many of the community social communications which tend to take place in private Facebook groups (Girl Scouts, community HOA, etc.)
There is a whole world out there, full of people who call Wi-Fi the internet. Nearly all of them do many things better than you, and most of them wouldn't treat you with contempt just because you find small talk difficult, can't swim or can't dress well on a tight budget.
Think about what kind of image your present to them and if it's really how you would like them to see you. Just honestly.
can't wait for ai juries, 12 different ai models by different companies & they all have to reach the same conclusion, but one of them is a 300m parameter 2 bit quantized model and keeps hallucinating, causing an eternal hung jury
You would start by reading the complete terms and conditions of service. Somewhere in there is a paragraph that states that your account can be suspended and/or terminated at any time for any reason, or no reason. Then you find the paragraph that limits you to mandatory arbitration. You conclude that you're wasting your time if you attempt to sue anyone over this. Eventually you realize that you're better off without a FB account.
For any legal action you should find a lawyer. Many lawyers will be happy to meet briefly with someone to figure out what they can do for you or if they should point you to somebody else. In this case such a meeting is likely to be very brief indeed, the chance of success is negligible and the likely costs are sky high.
For people missing the irony here, the term “metaverse,” that Meta is named after, was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book “Snow Crash.”
In the book, the metaverse is a VR version of the internet with an emphasis on accurate sword fights and realistic facial expressions.
If Mark Zuckerberg didn't exist, we'd still have Facebook. Someone else would have done it.
But if Neal Stephenson didn't exist, we'd not necessarily have what he created. That's how unique his ideas are.
And Meta, billions of dollars later, is still no Metaverse...
> If Mark Zuckerberg didn't exist, we'd still have Facebook.
Yes, because multi-trillion dollar companies are completely natural and spawn almost at random to whatever nerd happens to be working on a particular problem at any given time
Note that GP didn’t say Meta, the trillion-dollar company, they said Facebook, the social platform that won its generation of social platforms. One of those platforms was bound to win, just by the interconnected nature of social networks, and I think reasonable people can disagree on whether that success sets you up inevitably to make a trillion dollars or not.
Eh, I like some of Neal's books a lot, particularly Diamond Age is likely in any top ten I'd come up with. But this claim is basically only true in the trivial sense that wouldn't have any arbitrary creative work if its author hadn't created it.
So in that sense it's the exact same as Facebook. Without Neal somebody else would invented "post Cyberpunk" and without Mark somebody else would have invented whatever Facebook is - social media for your grandparents maybe?
Neal is "unique" but we're all unique, it's the least unique thing about us. He struggles to write satisfying endings, he leans too heavily on the rape-as-character-development trope, his novels have become flabby as his fame grew and presumably he was able to resist editorial demands more, he doesn't know as much about technology as he thinks he does... Like I said, "Diamond Age" would probably make my top ten, but that's not because it's flawless by any means.
I was really hoping for a Snow Crash movie. That project has been in development hell for years. Instead, we got Ready Player One, which is like Snow Crash for dummies. There's a trailer for a low-budget version of Snow Crash.[1] It's awful.
I don't hold out much hope for that project. Snow Crash is about a conspiracy between a media baron and a televangelist to take over the world. That would upset a lot more people now than in 1992.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8WYiYcaRY4
I love Snow Crash too, for what it is, and I'm sure someone could make a worthwhile movie out of the concepts and ideas in there, but then I'm not really sure it's worthwhile.
But if someone is hoping for a scene accurate depiction I'm equally unsure it's possible, or that anyone would want to see it, between everything from the "radical" Carmageddon pizza delivery and variable rollerskate wheel sizes to the main character literally being named Hiro Protagonist.
It's a great nostalgic time capsule for me, which also spawned a lot of other great works, but I'm fine with leaving it as that.
That trailer is brilliant for what it is.
I would love to see a proper version of Snow Crash get theatrical release or maybe even the high-concept-tv-series-with-ten-episodes treatment the big streamers are cooking up these days.
I would watch a full-length movie of Snow Crash in the style of this trailer!
I think it may be a high school student project.
Since I saw Into The Spiderverse, I’ve been hoping for a Snow Crash with that animation style.
Different book/author, but if you haven’t seen A Scanner Darkly then give it a go
I'm still waiting for a Spawn reboot and universe now that Dune finally got a big budget version. Apparently Voltron too.
Don't give up hope.
CEO: "Bring me the head of whomever is responsible for this metaverse fiasco!" :)
"Uh.. that would be you, Mr. Zuckerberg"
What an ironic error to happen to a creator of cyberpunk dystopia. And also to Mr. Stephenson.
I believe I have accumulated two moderation strikes on my Facebook account for (relatively politely) calling out posts for being racist/xenophobic.
Both cases my comments were flagged as promoting hate, ironically. The appeal mechanism is a joke: you press a button, and two seconds later you get a notification saying your appeal was reviewed and denied.
Had this happen to me on Reddit.
After I reported a post, nothing happened, then I messaged the mods, and they agreed with me that the post should be taken down and they did.
A day after it was taken down, I got a warning message from Reddit that my report has been rejected, and I should stop falsely reporting content, or else.
I’ve experienced something similar in attempting to report very explicit and outrageously racist posts and comments. Zero action on blatant neo-Nazism (including specific threats of violence), and several lost appeals. However, far more benign posts and comments that don’t really violate the ToS are often flagged. This is quite prevalent on Instagram especially, which is quite worrying as it’s acting as a radicalisation tunnel for large numbers of impressionable young people. It’s almost as if the algorithm attempts to throw you into a far-right rabbithole because they know it boosts engagement.
Was this within the last couple years? How much you wanna bet the appeal is handled by an AI.
Its probably just a variant on a placebo button.
Where if you have the temerity to complain, you’re immediately labelled a rebellious non-conformer and banned forever.
Meh, what do you expect from a company that immediately pivoted to “free speech” and explicitly called out that it’s okay on their platform to call for firing gay teachers for being gay.
Because to do otherwise would just be too much of an assault on free speech apparently.
In other news the president signed an executive order that acknowledges flag burning is protected speech even as it promises to find a reason to prosecute people for it. Also trying to force the Smithsonian to stop talking about slavery,
I got a week long ban for calling someone out for being a Nazi. The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all. At the time I thought it was mere incompetence, but in hindsight, it seems more like intentional malice.
Are you implying that being banned from Facebook is a bad thing?
even if you would think people should be happy about being banned, they always get annoyed
https://medium.com/luminasticity/facebook-deleted-my-account...
I'm pretty sure they are implying that it might be a bad policy to not ban nazis.
Depends on the reason. I'm saying that banning someone for calling out a Nazi and not banning the Nazi is a bad thing.
It's not intentional malice, it's just 2025 - an age where calling someone a fascist or a racist is worse than being one.
If that doesn't make a lick of sense to you - it's simple. The latter is an offense against a nebulous, undefined outgroup of people, while the former offends a particular person.
It's the same reason why someone can steal a dollar from a million people, but why you'd go to jail for punching the thief in the face.
This was back around 2019 or so, but you're not wrong at all. Back then Zuckerburg et al at least pretended to be against hate speech. It's so much worse now.
"Everyone I disagree with is a nazi"
>The person openly praising Hitler did not get banned at all.
Content moderation at Meta is a joke now. I reported an account multiple times for hate speech. The account's photos were comprised entirely of racist caricatures of black people. Like absolutely vile, hateful shit.
Each time, I received a notification along the lines of: [paraphrasing] "We found that the account in question did not violate our community standards. Therefore, we did not take any action. Thanks for the report."
Yeah, OK. Gross.
Why would they restrict speech?
Your policies help to enable one genocide in Myanmar and suddenly people expect you to have standards.
I don't think I've ever gotten a response from a corporation other than "this totally obvious Nazi adjacent content seems fine to me".
"Shoot the messenger!"
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This is not an anomaly, by the way. I've interviewed many multiple Meta staffers (including senior leaders), and can find little evidence that leadership actually read "Snow Crash" and/or even cared about virtual worlds. Even after spending tens of billions claiming they were building the Metaverse.
Some background: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/05/horizon-worlds-meta-horizo...
They are still quoting Fountainhead and thinking they are intellectuals.
A few years back Chris Hedges did a showshow/podcast or something and he was forced to finally read in depth a lot more Rand.
I love his defeated responded of "It is amazing just how pedestrian those books are. There is nothing interesting in them.".
Hedges is always worth listening to even if you won't always agree but he does make doomers look like utopian optimists.
I think anyone who says there is nothing interesting in Rand either didn’t read it or is acting in bad faith. Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead are uniquely fascinating even if you don’t agree with her stance.
Chris Hedges is a self reported socialist. So makes sense they would not like books negative on socialism. But you can be a socialist and still engage with competing thoughts. Just like a capitalist can review Marx and admit the ideas are important/interesting.
I liked reading Rand much as I liked reading Tolkien. Now if I try to read either, the fantasy just doesn't work anymore.
Oh and even back then Atlas Shrugged was too damn preachy.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.
One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
Hey them be fighting words… about Tolkien, not Rand.
I would also put it in the category of too long. Bit of a commitment to pick it up and read cover to cover.
Literally every person I have any respect for as an intellectual has described Ayn Rand as slop.
I have yet to hear positive things come from anyone who isn’t a libertarian. The sort of person who identifies with the characters because they could also envision themselves doing a monologue that lasts 45 pages.
Both Rand and William McGonagall are widely regarded as are uniquely fascinating.
In a layered complex world both the above statement and the statement that there's little of interest in Rand's books for socialists, for hedge fund traders, or for the majority of people with a background in political science, can be true.
Stephen Fry, well known for his love of the English language and breadth of eclectic interest, when discussing the Scot said:
(The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within [NY: Gotham, 2007], p. 153), and further: (p. 154, as above)Regardless of anyone's position on the political stance of Rand, her written works deserve little more than to be the subject of atrocious parody of her robber baron sick o' fantasy, the breathless bodice ripping drama of trains repeatedly entering and being reversed out of tunnels against a soundscape of a geared steampunk stock ticker of yore.
I discovered William Topaz McGonagall after learning his surname was given to Harry Potter character Professor Minerva McGonagall.
I was... astounded. Here, truly, was the Florence Foster Jenkins of poetry writing, destined to fame for all the wrong reasons.
Meta's recent strategy is more reminiscent of Rainbows End.
I dunno who you were talking to, but the RL research areas I worked in had some definite Neil Stevenson fans.
but then we weren't the pricks who thought you could make up for a shit lighting setup with polygon count cough any screenshot from horizon worlds cough
There's precious little value for those types to read stuff like "Snow Crash".
It's like the people saying "It's obvious these STEM people didn't take humanities courses". Well, yeah. The dream for the incoming freshman at Stanford's CS program isn't to graduate with a degree. The dream is to have some VC come onto campus, see some BS project the freshman cooked up, tell the freshman "You're literally Jesus Christ, and I want to fund your startup" and drop out with access to millions in funding and a network of people who can give more funding when the original round dries up.
Humanities courses and reading humanistic conceptions of how tech could go wrong doesn't get you millions of dollars. Reckless abandon does.
Back when I was growing up, tech people read things like Snow Crash all the time. I guess I need to update my priors.
Tech people vs startup types.
Those used to be the same people.
Who has time to read when it's about 'Move fast and break things..." /s
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You forgot to finish up the comment with mention of someone being a boomer.
Meta has extremely opaque account policies. For example, I bought the Meta Raybans a month ago. It kept telling me the AI features were not available in my region, even though I am in San Francisco. I joined Facebook in 2006, and I have used my account for the Oculus headset without a problem. But no matter what I did, the AI function of the Raybans wouldn't work.
I ended up creating a brand new account just for that, and it worked fine. No idea why it would work with a brand new account and not with my old account in good standing, never suspended or warned about anything.
I have recently had a need to create an Instagram account. I logged in from my home IP and it was recognized as coming from Vietnam (my home IP has been the same since 2016, always with the same ISP). Everything was in Vietnamese and I had to spend half an hour figuring out how to switch it back to English. But in the home feed I still got only Vietnamese influencers, and there was nothing in the settings to change that. I got assigned to Vietnam for life.
Well, I did nothing with the account except setting up the profile and following some people. Then I logged in to the account on my phone, which of course is not from Vietnam. Bam, account suspended for violating the TOS. I appealed, after one day got a message that the ban was upheld because I did violate the TOS.
I guess no Instagram for me. That's probably for the better.
There's a mid-sized international bus company over here and once I bought a ticket for the wrong day, realized only after payment. I simply called the phone number, the lady spoke my language, reissued the ticket for a different day, that's it.
I was shocked that customer support can work like that.
Is it possible your FB account has been compromised for a while? Is your ISP's RIR whois information correct?
my best guess is, you could've connected from a different ip once 10 years ago and it improperly geolocated that ip as being in a tiny country and now it thinks you're secretly from that country even though you've been accessing the site from a US ip forever. it's the only plausible reason i can really think of. unless they set up a "country estimation" ai or a similar newfangled system and it's convinced for some reason you're actually not american. it's too out there but you never know
Some GEOIP databases are rotting, near as I can tell.
I’ve got a proxy on random machine in a OVH DC in Oregon. Always properly geo-located to Oregon - until a few months ago.
Now YouTube insists I’m in France. Which is quite entertaining, ads wise.
Last time meta blocked my account was because I gave away free framing lumber after demolishing my poorly framed basement. Somehow it got flagged and that was that. Thankfully I don’t give a damn, and now never will.
Ps: some couple happily picked up 100 or so 2x4 studs of various lengths to build a greenhouse for their garden with.
I got blocked for sending a post asking if anyone wants to grab a lunch when I'm back in (location).
Tangential, but a decade ago I lost my original Amazon account, because I bought bandages. Yes bandages.
I'd had it for 5 years, no excess returns, no issues. I click add and go to checkout... banned.
Some reasons about religious icons flashed on my screen. It was red cross bandages ffs!
And why ban me, and not the seller?!?
Calls, emails resulted in confused but unhelpful people.
They must have assumed it was a scam, like those Nigerian prices offering free gold.
If they suspend everyones accounts, the Internet will be a better place.
“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.” - Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
I made a whatsapp business account yesterday, started a test advertising campaign. Went to log in to the developer area, "Your account is banned, there is no appeal". And whatsapp customer services says "Your account is fine and there are no issues and this ticket is closed"
I really, really don't understand why you have to make a facebook account in order to get access to the developer area, and now I get to watch my advertising spending tick up with no way of accessing anything about it.
I have been locked out of my account for 5+ months -- and customer support has been a Kafkaesque nightmare. I am still locked out. (Oh, and I've spent $1M+ in paid META ads...)
You seem to have funded your own demise
Haha... it's crazy. And I have friends at META who've been trying to help, and they themselves get in a customer support hell as well. It's wild. $1.9T company.
Not surprising. The larger the company the more complex it typically gets at all levels. Probably take 7 months of paperwork to swap a light globe.
On one level this is amusing. But what if both accounts are owned by the same person impersonating Neal Stephenson? My understanding was that he was not on any social media. Did that change at some point?
Assuming https://nealstephenson.com/social-media.html is real, he has social media accounts (linked from that page).
That domain has been registered since 2000, it's probably real.
It links to a google plus account, it's probably not updated promptly.
That Facebook page is the one managed by his publisher.
He also has (had?) a personal one he used that just got suspended.
Huh. Posting a screenshot of the tweet just got my FB account suspended.
Maybe the first sign of AI running full amok will be Meta canceling all its accounts in a runaway state of algorithm-induced internal paranoia
Update, 3:03pm PT:
Stephenson's Facebook account has been restored within the last 1-2 hours. (I've been checking since the morning.)
But the irony goes on forever.
IIRC Sharon Stone got suspended on Bumbl for impersonating Sharon Stone.
well its obvious a rogue AI at Meta has gained awareness and just fired the first shot of the simulacrum wars by taking out Stephenson.
The key was spending 14 billion to hire a guy who hasn’t actually built AI
"Preliminary Roko Enforcement"
Tbh authors should have blogs with RSS-feeds I can follow to know when new stuff is coming out.
Way too many only post content on Facebook on Goodreads. Or even worse, the only notification comes from Amazon.
Had a similar experience with meta. Extremely opaque decision making, terrible UX. Account permanently disabled ... did not follow community standards, literally on sign up to get a dx account. It's difficult after an experience like that to see how they are so successful. Is it because their users are so addicted and ad sellers will do anything to get onboard ? It's probably just a few dark patterns here and there to bump up impressions at will.
And then went straight over to X, another social media silo, to post that his other social media account at the other silo was banned.
What a world we live in.
Megacorp turf wars. It's silos all the way down.
There's always nostr.
That's designed for nerds. Like Matrix and the other platforms that will never see mainstream adoption because they lack product management and crazy distribution.
Normie design and hyper distribution always win.
Reminds me Shadowrun.
I loved this game! I still have the original rulebook. That my AD&D 2nd ed. books, Star Frontiers and Gamma World boxed sets may be my most prized possessions.
Throw a few Uncle Al catalogs on the pile and we’d have similar childhoods. Gamma World was actually pretty amazing.
Cool! I had to look "Uncle Al catalogs" up. I remember seeing ads for Car Wars, but never played it myself. There were so many neat games back then.
Gamma World was really neat and timely given how fearful we all were of nuclear war. I remember watching Road Warrior at the time and thinking that Gamma World could actually be the world we live in.
Dragon Magazine would occasionally have articles on Gamma World too. So much food for the young imagination.
Did you ever try the CRPG Shadowrun Chronicles games?
I did not. I didn't get into computers until much later. Though I did die of Typhoid a bunch of times on the Oregon Trail when I was in junior high.
I'm running a Cities Without Number campaign now, but I sure do steal a lot from Shadowrun.
People go where they’re treated best
More cyberpunk than this would be for the official author side to be a `.onion`, with a vanity subdomain that took a borrowed farm of GPUs a week to compute, and an RSS/Atom reader feed from that, plus a Fediverse/Mastodon account for the normies that you host yourself from an offshore data haven, paid for with mixed BTC, and a Reddit account just to keep some twerp from grabbing your name, all of which you access exclusively through Tor Browser, from a dedicated/compartmentalized immutable device. :)
But I'm sympathetic to authors feeling they have to be on the popular social media platforms. I don't know about big-name authors like Mr. Stephenson, but when I looked into writing fiction myself, the advice for new and less-known writers was to actively work marketing on all of Twitter/X, Instagram, especially TikTok (BookTok), and others.
(I decided it was too much demoralizing work, to not only write novels, which is grueling, but then to have to play games with TikTok influencers, if you want enough people to actually read the product of your suffering.)
Friend of mine complain about twitter and then turn around and send me twitter links.
Headdesk.
X is pretty lenient with the banning though.
It seems like the best of the worst.
Twitter is "lenient" with ban evasion because it runs on cognitive load and they have no time to deal with it themselves. It's just completely beyond cognitive capacity of its controlling parties(including financial owners) that it could appear that they are chill with speeches it hosts as well as unilateral cultural influencing capabilities it has.
The problem with all big companies nowadays... Getting to a real (competent) support person that can help is almost impossible :-(
I've opened a ticket with Microsoft regarding a M365 Business account and an actual person called me within an hour and fixed my issue right away, and I am not even exaggerating here. It was a trivial issue and I am not claiming it's always like this, but it CAN be like this.
Business account though. Everyone else is just a waste of time to provide support to.
I'm a regular consumer who bought a Dell Precision laptop (which still kicks ass btw, to their credit for all their faults) and they bent over backwards because I purchased through their business side. A shipping delay got me a 100 dollar discount, and another hiccup got me 150 dollars to spend at Dell. Bought a business grade 4K monitor from them that also kicks ass and has imperceptible latency in CS:GO/CS2 with the laptop.
Sometimes even in a bleak corporate world there can be good customer service. It's the exception rather than the rule too often.
I called MS support once because some random dude managed to get my son's account registered under his "family", and then locked my son out of being able to update his own machine.
The MS support guy literally tried to get me to password crack the random dude's account. Like, he wanted me to help him guess the guy's password so we could log in as him and change his family settings.
That was the only "help" he could provide.
The Microsoft family/organisation situation is fucking ridiculous. If you somehow get enrolled in either, good luck ever ridding your device of it.
For literal years after leaving university, my windows install was still linked to my uni despite multiple attempts to fix it. All this, because I logged in using my university Microsoft account once.
"Today in 'you can’t make this stuff up,' Meta has suspended my Facebook account because they suspect me of impersonating someone noteworthy"
As someone in the burbs + middle america, Facebook still has a frustrating grip on many of the community social communications which tend to take place in private Facebook groups (Girl Scouts, community HOA, etc.)
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There is a whole world out there, full of people who call Wi-Fi the internet. Nearly all of them do many things better than you, and most of them wouldn't treat you with contempt just because you find small talk difficult, can't swim or can't dress well on a tight budget.
Think about what kind of image your present to them and if it's really how you would like them to see you. Just honestly.
It may not be how they want to present themselves, but it's clearly how they are.
Clearly the counter-AI that counteracts the ban happy AI isn’t in place yet
can't wait for ai juries, 12 different ai models by different companies & they all have to reach the same conclusion, but one of them is a 300m parameter 2 bit quantized model and keeps hallucinating, causing an eternal hung jury
How would one go about suing in cases like this?
You would start by reading the complete terms and conditions of service. Somewhere in there is a paragraph that states that your account can be suspended and/or terminated at any time for any reason, or no reason. Then you find the paragraph that limits you to mandatory arbitration. You conclude that you're wasting your time if you attempt to sue anyone over this. Eventually you realize that you're better off without a FB account.
For any legal action you should find a lawyer. Many lawyers will be happy to meet briefly with someone to figure out what they can do for you or if they should point you to somebody else. In this case such a meeting is likely to be very brief indeed, the chance of success is negligible and the likely costs are sky high.
"for impersonating someone noteworthy"....
Why is their no libre clone of facebook?
There is, but creating the software was never the hard part.