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Comment by strict9 | Hacker News Reader

Off base when considering the likes of Palantir and many others.

Not a fan of the person or many of Meta's business practices. But Meta has given a lot back with Llama and PyTorch, among many other open source contributions. Which others in the space are not doing.

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> Llama [...] among many other open source contributions

Llama is not Open Source. Don't buy Meta's marketing that's trying to dilute the term. Llama is only available under restrictive terms that favor Meta.

Fair point. I cannot amend my original comment but you are correct in that the weights have restrictions which go against the nature of Open Source software.

Just because you give a lot does not mean you don't take a lot.

React made quite a mess of the web just so we couldn't browse with JavaScript disabled, thereby allowing Facebook to track us through those like buttons that popped up everywhere.

Are there hidden barbs in llama and pytorch too? I'm not close enough to them to know.

It was probably inevitable even without React. Easier to serve the same JSON to my web application and iPhone/android apps, Teams bot, etc.

Not a fan of Facebook or React (though React Native is IMHO the one eyed among the blind for cross platform mobile development), but I think that's a bit far fetched. I do think Facebook has (or had?) genuinely an engineering culture that wants to give something back.

This is true. I've been to several conferences where FB sent engineers to talk about their open source projects or how they used a particular language or framework.

I remember the conflicted feeling of strongly disliking their products and leadership but liking their contributions. Same energy but more intense in both directions many years later.

So metaphorically speaking RN is an eye up over everything else?

From my personal experience, yes, but your mileage may vary. I tried to like Flutter multiple times, but can't. Capacitator etc feel fairly hacky. All the other options are comparatively obscure.

It helps that I like React alright. I don't think it's particularly well designed or enjoyable to use, and I hate debugging React code, but it's manageable with good development practices. Same goes for JS/TS. Not great, not terrible.

React is the defacto standard of web development for a reason. That's not the reason you can't browse the web with JS (it would be Angular if it wasn't React or others). And just because you use React, doesn't mean Meta can track you.

Their point was that (i) React becoming the defacto standard played into the hands of Meta, who are interested in tracking people. (ii) Tracking is made easier by running arbitrary JavaScript in the browser. And (iii) before SPAs were big (pre-React), more people used to completely disable JS in their browser.

Not saying I buy this theory. Just trying to explain what I think they were alluding to, as I had the impression you missed it and went in a different direction.

React was released in like 2013. We were well on our way to the web being unusable with JavaScript disabled by then.

I'm not sure their tech contributions in any way offset the various scandals they've had with data and like, actively targeting teens when it appears they're in a vulnerable state. Who cares about friggin 'open source' Llama when they've done evil stuff like that. Their 'social credit' is way deep in the red, esp with people who have no knowledge of those contributions.

They are incredibly ruthless and shameless in my opinion.

2 different topics, who you are (as a person, or company or other group of people) isn't some scale where you add + and - and judge final number.

Bad/evil deeds define us 1000x more than positive ones and thats our lasting legacy and how we are/will be judged.

I agree with all of that.

The point was to counter the statement that Meta is the most ruthless and shameless of all companies.

The most ruthless and shameless company would not give back a lot of useful free open source software for hobbyists and companies to use.

Yes they would? Mega corps can afford to commoditize various layers which prevents competition from accessing any profit. Meanwhile Meta et al can capture that profit in their own layers instead.

Bread and circuses to keep the people happy while they do they shady stuff behind closed doors. This is millenia old. Can't say that as fact but it certainly looks that way when you examine their record.

Remember when they were into swaying elections, giving extra data to Cambridge analytica? Here's more

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/12/business/facebooks-y...

Also even before that, FAIR had quite the reputation as a great ML lab, especially in NLP.

Llama was kind of a forced hand though. Yknow, when the model was leaked?

Maybe for the original, now obsolete, version. But nobody forced them to release Llama 2, 3, and 4.

First, the only model creators ones who have not "given back" in the way you mean, are OpenAI and Anthropic, everyone else has at least some models in the open.

Second, I would argue that it's strange how we are discounting the contribution of OpenAI and Anthropic, because being the first to show that something valuable is possible actually counts for quite a lot in my book. Competition and open-source copies are nice, but the value add attribution in ai labs feels really strange at times.

What Meta has given, so far, are decent copies, which mostly serve their own needs and are making it harder for the above companies (who actually have to generate revenue through AI efforts, because it's all they do) to exist. And that's fine and all, Meta can do what they want to the degree the law permits, but I have a hard time understanding them as the good guys in the AI space, unless I squint very heavily.

I don't think it's a big stretch to say that Meta has not only been more successful than Palantir at mass surveillance, but has also likely caused a greater magnitude of harm (a lot through negligence) when considering events like the genocide in Myanmar.

Imagine the abyss you'd be staring into to do the full analysis of that. Geez. That's dark.

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