The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned • Hacker News Board

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#431

Post by midoridensha » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 8:46 AM UTC

fallingknife wrote: post #298

kelnos wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you trying to do that won't hurt anyone (well, aside from the bank account of the person paying you, but that's on them). Building a dystopian VR-based social network hurts a lot more people. I would hope we have better ethics than to work on things that harm others for truckloads of money. Then again, a lot of people still work for Meta (and Twitter, and...), so I guess ethics is pretty lacking.

How, exactly, does building a VR social network harm anyone?

It only harms people if people choose it.

Just look at all the harm caused by the game SecondLife. Oh wait, it hasn't really caused much, if any, because it's not exactly popular.

I predict their VR social network will be even less popular.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#432

Post by nivenkos » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 8:48 AM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #233

dnissley wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can somehow feel that he has been dying to say this for years, but couldn't while he was still working for Meta... It's a pretty common sentiment in my experience here, de rigueur even. Expressing it in the way he does here is definitely frowned upon though -- one of the most interesting cultural traits I've noticed that Meta has fostered is an awareness and avoidance of cynicism. When people comment internally…

I felt this way about the entire United States when I moved here from Europe. The standard stance in the UK is cynical, dry, and too-cool-for-school. Try-hards are despised. The US was different and very refreshing. Enthusiasm and optimism can be expressed without embarrassment, and having a too-frequently-cynical stance is looked down on. I felt a step change again moving from academia to industry, but perhaps it go…

On the other hand, I found US engineers were way more likely to try to exaggerate their own work and push for promotion, etc. whereas the EU had more team solidarity.

Like working with US engineers there was one who deliberately put meetings at bad hours (time zone difference), or would "accidentally" send the invite to your pager email instead, etc. to make others look bad.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#433

Post by midoridensha » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 8:50 AM UTC

fleddr wrote: post #256

a4isms wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the same thing as people say about fires. When you put out a fire you are a hero. When you prevent the fire in the first place, everybody thinks it's business as usual and nobody understands why you are needed. I got a dose of very cold water about this thirty years ago when I was building payware that improved developer productivity. I gave a presentation about its ROI, and afterwards, a developer walked up t…

It's accounting bias/culture. Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%. According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books. Who is to say that this 20% of freed up time is used productively? Or used on things that incr…

>Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%.

>According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books.

Right, this is why developers should NOT get 2nd monitors.

Even better, the business can save another $30k by not getting the developers any monitors at all.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#434

Post by concordDance » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 8:50 AM UTC

minitoar wrote: post #412

killingtime74 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is illegal on some stock exchanges. You are free to only buy your shares there. Also you are free to buy stocks on exchanges that do allow it but don't have two classes. No one is forcing anyone to buy Meta

Sorta. Meta is a component of the sp500. It’s pretty difficult to avoid buying that.

Buy shares of the other 499?

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#435

Post by musha68k » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 8:53 AM UTC

version_five wrote: post #276

kelnos wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally. It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it. I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employmen…

"Big tech" - particularly facebook and google, I think are widely considered to be at worst actively evil and at best responsible for the race to the bottom in the internet experience and public discourse that's happened over the last 15 years. But they also appear to pay really well, have locally cool problems to work on, and have lots of work that has no relevance to destroying society, e.g. all the AI research the…

Somebody correct me if I’m wrong but hasn’t ML research ultimately been a result of public funding, at least to the largest extent?

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#436

Post by squeaky-clean » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 8:53 AM UTC

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #401

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helping an advertiser trick kids into spending their time in a pupil dilation monitor/retinal scanner so that ads can be optimized for impact based on biometric markers isn't amoral, it's immoral.

I know it's an accepted sci-fi trope and people (including advertisers) genuinely believe it's the future, but advertising doesn't work that way. When you peel back the layers and figure out how this sausage is made, underneath it's just sociology and broad target audiences. (Age, sex, location, social status.) Retinal scans don't help solve this problem.

I mostly agree with your point, but it's a bit more specific than that. I used to work in airfare advertising and we could target ads at people who were interested in certain locations. You searched for flights to Paris and they were $600 and didn't purchase? Well now there's a weekend deal where it's $450 and we'll bid on Instagram ads that target you. You've flown to Europe, Asia and North America? Here's some Latam flight ads. Flew to Chicago over the Christmas holiday? We'll show you some Chicago flight ads next October.

We didn't get access to the actual user lists, but the queries you could build in your ad bids could include these factors. We were also in a special "Ads For Travel" partner program, so we probably had bid options not available to the average FB ads account manager.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#437

Post by Eisenstein » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 8:54 AM UTC

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #404

whakim wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's inevitable in the long run, the question is just whether those breakthroughs come too late for Meta (my guess is they will). The salient point is that given enough time, hardware limitations won't be an obstacle to a metaverse-like something.

I'll just leave a comment here about flying (and self-driving) cars. Some things aren't waiting for technological innovation.

Flying cars aren't a thing not because we can't practically do it, but because it is an absolutely horrifying idea to turn the average driver into a pilot with an aircraft that they are in charge of maintaining. (Or was that your point?)

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#438

Post by midoridensha » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 8:54 AM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #162

apohn wrote: post #3

I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest w…

A friend had a job where a team there just let things fail rather than prevent fires. Lots of raises and praise for literally not doing their jobs.

It sounds like they did their jobs exactly the way management wanted them to do their jobs. The proof is that they received lots of praise and raises.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#439

Post by concordDance » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 8:57 AM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #396

kelnos wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally. It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it. I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employmen…

> It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it. Facebook is a giant privacy-violating advertising company that demonstrated repeatedly that it was bad for the world long before Meta happened. And yet they attracted a huge amount of great talent who knew going in what FB was. Microsoft…

> Facebook is a giant privacy-violating advertising company that demonstrated repeatedly that it was bad for the world long before Meta happened.

The "bad for the world" stories I've heard turned out to not have substance (Cambridge analytica and the "harmful to young girls" study). Are you aware of something else?

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#440

Post by midoridensha » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 9:05 AM UTC

pronlover723 wrote: post #386

> News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles This to me sounds similar to "I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers" ( https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=164a442a-1b90... ). That was wrong or "people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours" ( https://qz.com/593329/choice-quotes-from-a-1985-new-york-tim... ). Looking around the beach and especiall…

>This to me sounds similar to "I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers" That was wrong

>or "people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours"

Exactly. It's also just like how "people don't want to wear 3D glasses in a theater". That was wrong too: every single movie today is in 3D.

Oh wait... No movies are in 3D now. They tried (for a 2nd time) and failed and gave up.

VR goggles might get some popularity for gaming, but the "metaverse" thing is just dumb.

AR, however, makes a lot of sense if they can make it convenient. I would love to have some cycling glasses connected by BT to my phone, which show a simple moving map display as I'm riding in the city so I know where to turn, instead of having to stop every so often and pull out my phone to look at where I am.