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

#451

Post by nickd2001 » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 10:56 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…

I found similar going from UK to USA - can-do positive attitude, enthusiasm is appreciated. (This was private sector). This was 20 yrs ago though. Having returned to UK I think its got better here at least in tech. Also if you take a (slightly tempered, not in-ya-face) US attitude back to UK , in the right workplaces this goes down well because people actually like positive enthusiastic colleagues. In the UK it can be hard though getting managers to not see this as a threat. When I first returned the American pro-active attitude I think caused me to bomb an interview because I (innocently and tactfully at least I hoped ;) ) asked what reason they were using technology X and had they considered Y , which I think they took as a threat, someone who'd be insubordinate whereas in the US they'd more likely go "good question!" and be glad someone cared enough to ask (at least in my experience). I behaved the same the following week when interviewing at a startup and naturally, got that job. ;) Since then I think I adjusted to balance being pro-active with careful not to rock the political boat. American positivity has to be seen to be believed. ;). When in the US I was both impressed by people's ability to stay positive in the face of very difficult challenges, but slightly bemused by the amount of unfair s** people would silently put up with too e:g in customer service jobs. ;)

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

#452

Post by webmaven » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 11:15 AM UTC

samplatt wrote: post #413

mr_gibbins wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can manage 15 minutes or so on my aging Oculus Quest but that's about it. There's a Netflix option on there, I can relax in a virtual cinema with surround sound and a screen sized big enough to feel like a cinema screen and I've not been able to watch anything because of the vertigo. I thought my kids would go crazy on it, perhaps I'm too old, out of touch etc. but they can do 15 mins max too. It's a novelty toy, q…

The Quest has a fairly low refresh rate, which is one of the main barriers to delivering a product that doesn't make you sick. Back when Carmack was leading the tech dev, they came out with a rule saying that they needed a working minimum of 90fps for MOST people to tolerate VR. The Quest headset screens operate at 72hz, iirc.

We've known for a long time that for actual use refresh rate (and secondary factors like jitter and tearing) is far more important than resolution, or polygons (and before it became a moot point, color depth).

But the demos and screenshots required to sell the idea aren't impressive if they don't look comparable to recent AAA games, so the wrong kind of hardware keeps getting crammed into the prototypes, and the target keeps moving so there is no opportunity for Moore's Law to solve the mismatch for you.

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

#453

Post by funcDropShadow » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 12:46 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #449

andruby wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only recommend you to read the book. It's amazing. It is so relevant for today, you'd be forgiven for not knowing it was actually published in 1992. But really, it's probably the best book I've ever read.

If we're going to see someone driving around with a nuclear bomb in their sidecar, it's more likely to happen in Russia than in the US, though.

But "Reason" is absolutely thinkable in the U.S.

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

#454

Post by minitoar » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 1:22 PM UTC

concordDance wrote: post #434

minitoar wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Buy shares of the other 499?

It’s also weighted by market cap which makes this a pain to manage.

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

#455

Post by marssaxman » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #377

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…

> t 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. Most people work for the pay. Thats why you pay people: to make them work on something they dont necessarily like. Not everyone needs to be or to act like an activist.

Some people are driven by more blatantly mercenary priorities than others, but most people prefer to perform work which aligns with their morality and gains them the respect of others; it's part of that whole "hierarchy of needs".

It is of course possible to meet one's higher-level needs in other parts of one's life, but if your career is actively opposing your values, it becomes that much harder to make up for what you are missing in the limited time remaining. If you can't make that balance work, burnout and depression are likely.

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

#456

Post by oldsecondhand » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 3:06 PM UTC

midoridensha wrote: post #429

alpha_squared wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm in a bubble, but most people I know who wear glasses don't actually enjoy doing so and would really rather not if they can avoid it. VR would have to be demonstrably superior to any alternative to justify wearing it for that long even if it was as light as a feather.

>Maybe I'm in a bubble, but most people I know who wear glasses don't actually enjoy doing so and would really rather not if they can avoid it. I think you're in a bubble. We have a way of avoiding glasses: contacts. But people choose glasses instead. I wear contacts, not glasses, but every time I ever talk to a glasses-wearer about why they wear glasses instead, they usually can't imagine wearing contacts and think…

Glasses need less maintenance than contacts, and aren't as weird to put them on, so it's an easy sell.

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

#457

Post by chis » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 3:25 PM UTC

raydev wrote: post #117

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am familiar with this org from my time at Meta and I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story.

> I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story. If this is all you are willing to say here, then there's no value to your contribution.

There's something weird about cost-cutting metrics where they just aren't as impactful as they sound. FB has enough money floating around that many teams will write big systems inefficiently in the name of "moving fast" and then go back to optimize later. This is also a hack for performance reviews as you get to claim impact twice - once for making the thing, and again for saving XX million dollars (even though it's just cleaning up your own mess). Management is somewhat aware of this hack.

I would say at FB it's shockingly easy to find a 10 million dollar efficiency win if you're looking for one, and I certainly shipped multiple things in that range. This wasn't really the probability team's charter though so they wouldn't get fully rewarded for it.

The probability team had some genius engineers working hard on some very interesting long-term investments, but AFAIK they hadn't really shipped any of their core products so they were a good target for layoffs. I am shocked FB fired the engineers instead of just moving them around though...

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

#458

Post by yamtaddle » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 3:27 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #258

yamtaddle wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weight, they can make you sweaty, may feel uncomfortable in other ways, look dorky as hell. Probably do a bunch of bad eyestrain-related stuff that we haven't figured out yet (or some have but are keeping it quiet). Serious motion-sickness issues for a fraction of users that's too large to ignore, even with top-notch goggles. When they're in the same size/weight/appearance ballpark as sunglasses, is when AR/VR glasse…

> AR/VR will put your computer everywhere. Sounds like a nightmare. And I already have frequent nightmares about my phone. The one where I need to do something urgently and the phone just gets slower and slower. It's a modern rehash of the dream where you are trying to run from something but your legs just get heavier and heavier.

I don't love it either but it seems inevitable unless it turns out to be impossible to make AR/VR glasses that are svelte enough for people to actually wear in public, and I wouldn't bet against it—I expect most of us in 1995 didn't believe we'd have many-core computers with gigabytes of ram and disk and with near-zero-latency touchscreens and all-day+ (for typical use, at least) battery life in devices with about the same volume as a cigarette packet, just ~12 years later.

Otherwise, the future of at least "consumer" computing is surely computer-as-overlay/HUD-on-reality, very likely with a side of being able to toggle totally virtual environments on and off at will ("Siri, take me to my office") which is what I meant by the computer being everywhere, rather than just having Internet access everywhere. Unless we crack some kind of really good brain/computer interface before we solve the VR-goggles-suck problem, which I doubt, but who knows.

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

#459

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 3:30 PM UTC

Eisenstein wrote: post #430

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Retinal scans do not help; however, 'eye tracking', which is currently available in Quest Pro and should filter down to the consumer tier headset in a year or two, does. When Meta knows what you look at, and for how long, and in which patterns, then advertising will legitimately have some 'next level' shit to work with.

The role of the retinal scans, I expect, has more to do with identifying which human is in the headset. In the metaverse, biometrics of that sort will be like cookies that you can't clear.

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

#460

Post by tasuki » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

autotune wrote: post #136

tasuki wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends and sometimes people organize events and they invite me on Facebook and it works and makes my life a tiny bit better.

Then you submit a post on FB that none of these old friends or acquaintances like or comment on and wonder why you suddenly feel like a leper afterward.

That hasn't been my experience.