Careless People

Reception of the book and narrator

• Many commenters found the memoir gripping, darkly funny, and shocking: bizarre scenes that seem invented until you verify they really happened, with the author adding insider context.
• Others disliked the narrator: they saw her as self‑aggrandizing (e.g., childhood shark-attack story), bad at her job, and morally compromised by helping Meta do harmful things for years.
• Debate over whether she presents herself as fundamentally “good and idealistic” or as someone mainly disappointed by colleagues’ incompetence rather than their ethics.
• Some see the book as partial atonement; others as self‑serving whitewash from a “careless person” trying to distance herself from damage she enabled.

Meta/Facebook culture and decision‑making

• Recurrent themes: casual indifference at senior levels to atrocities linked to the platform, tech‑bro values, US‑centric worldview in global politics, and routine sexual harassment.
• Anecdotes: unbriefed UN speech with an improvised promise of free refugee internet that devolved into an absurd attempt to sell it; sycophantic board‑game sessions; attempts to woo China, including offering to let Chinese authorities monitor global Facebook data.
• Several see Meta as uniquely bad among big tech due to its core ad/engagement product and Zuckerberg’s unchecked control; others argue many large tech firms share similar moral failures.

Streisand effect, law, and accountability

• Strong focus on Meta’s attempt to suppress the book, widely seen as a textbook “Streisand effect” that dramatically boosted its visibility.
• Speculation that lawyers likely warned against this but were overruled; discussion of perverse incentives for lawyers to “do something” and weak coordination with PR.
• Frustration that executives can allegedly mislead lawmakers under oath with no real consequences, framed as class-based, selective enforcement of the law.

Power, wealth, and fragile egos

• Long discussion of ultra‑wealthy figures who cannot tolerate losing trivial games, interpreted as narcissism, deep insecurity, and the pathology of life in a bubble of yes‑men.
• Historical parallels drawn to aristocrats, emperors, and dictators demanding constant demonstrations of loyalty and deference.
• Many argue extreme success is a mix of talent, work, luck, and moral flexibility; obsession with “always winning” is seen as both a driver of success and a symptom of psychological damage.

LLaMA, Meta, and “open source” AI

• Concern that widely used tools (PyTorch, LLaMA) tie AI ecosystems to Meta.
• Sharp disagreement over whether LLaMA is truly “open source”: critics point to undisclosed training data, missing training code, and a restrictive license that makes genuine forking or retraining impossible.
• Others accept “open weights” as pragmatically “open enough” compared to fully closed models, though several worry this dilutes the meaning of open source and crowds out genuinely free models.