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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2902 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 19, 2024

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Does anybody know what actually happened to him? He seems to have gone a full 180 in every respect.

I think the way the press reported him was never really accurate. His hero was always Octavian and has been sporting a roman haircut for like 15 years now. He was known to take new hires on long hikes and was always somewhat outdoorsy.

He's the sort of guy who would decide that learning some hand to hand combat training is important.

But if you're a white guy doing a VC funded bay area tech company there are certain cultural expectations you need to conform to.

After 2016 he was personally blamed for Trumps election by many. In 2020 he spent 400 million of his own money in a scheme to oppose Trump that put him in some significant personal legal jeopardy.

It didn't get him back in good graces so I think his attitude now is "I don't need those people anyways".

It's common for famous people in California to play down personality traits that don't conform to the ruling consensus. A good example is someone like Stephen Spielberg who's definitely a loyal democrat, but he's a former eagle scout who loves guns. People tend to assume he was a pot smoking theatre kid when he was young.

I always thought the Roman haircut was just a meme, but apparently his kids’ names are Maxima, August and Aurelia lmao.

Sailer's was joking how funny it is that Spielberg has spend like a million bucks on luxury Italian shotguns but there's like 2 photos of him shooting one.

A few years ago he was on a Paleo diet shooting his own goats for dinner. I think he could better be described as "completely unmoored" rather than sailing in a specific direction.

As he ages I wouldn't be surprised if he fell into a silicon valley life extension or uploading cult. Except unlike the 90s maybe they'll really have the secrets of digital immortality.

How so? Doing MMA, getting ripped and wearing a chain might be orthogonal to what Zuckerberg is known for but 180?

He is also the biggest driving force behind open source AI right now. His latest model is nearly at the level of the closed-source alternatives. Requires hella hardware to run but still. That is the polar opposite of what I heard about Zuckerberg over the last 10 years: monitoring, stealing and selling personal information, etc.

The stealing/selling of information was never what got him in trouble -- early Facebook was literally giving it away for free, borderline open-sourcing it. Pretty libertarian in an 'information wants to be free' way, but I think they just did it because they figured their graph was really neat and wanted to share.

AFAICT there weren't really negative consequences either, apart from the Trump team using the features as intended -- to create a graph of potential Trump supporters to target political ads at receptive individuals, building an effective campaign with big bang for relatively few bucks. (ie. what the Obama campaign did on the last go-round)

You might not like it, but this is what peak (advertising) performance looks like -- now they do the same thing but keep it all under the hood.

Sure, but he was always politically a libertarian. He lobbied against banning Holocaust denial on Facebook until it became politically untenable for example because he believes in freedom of speech. I don’t think he’s very political, that means both that he’s not a lib and that he’s not going to sacrifice huge money for conservative causes like Elon. Plus he’s a Jewish guy with half-Asian kids so that likely sets an upper bound on how rightist he might go.

Huh, that's the first I'm hearing of Zuckerberg being libertarian. I guess I was successfully brainwashed in the past.

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