401–410 of 1001 posts
His unscripted talks were amazing. Everytime I watched them I was thinking "ok, the official Meta announcements are corny, but there is still someone that still cares about what is the actual end result;" that's why I was still semi-positive about Meta. Well, I guess not anymore.
Really shows what that brings to a corporate shitshow that is Meta.
”It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I…
Ironically I felt reassured reading this. "[...] I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after [...] evidence piles up" especially resonates with me. While I rationally understand it's just corporate bureaucracy / politics, sometimes I still wonder if I were just a bit more capable I'd be more persuasive. If John fucking Carmack cannot move the bureau…
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Is this a classic middle management malaise where everyone gets paid so well they don’t want to stir the pot? The bureaucracy and protection of today’s money cows which only clouds them from seeing tomorrow’s cows that will rescue them from certain obscurity? The Clayton M Christensen solution to big companies ignoring obvious problems is to have isolated small teams “infrapreneurship” who aren’t under the pressures…
The only experiences I've seen of intrapreneurship didn't solve these problems, since funding was guaranteed and their leadership basically worked for the "parent" company.
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>I think Portal is a perfect example of how slow to adapt the company has become. It's a fantastic video conferencing device, certainly the best at its price point. We happened to enter the pandemic with this device already available for sale, but we completely failed to capitalize on it. Thanks for your insight, but the Portal failure shouldn't be surprising. There are a large number of people who would never want t…
> There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure Have you ever heard of Whatsapp? More than a billion people use it for private communication daily. Maybe not in the US, but elsewhere on the planet. You know who owns Whatsapp? Meta does.
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Wouldn't be surprised if SD, GPT-3, and other recent releases were what pushed him over the edge and prompted him to leave. He must have felt like he was watching a lot of cool things happen without him. If I had another 30 IQ points I'd be climbing over walls and sneaking into buildings at night to work on this stuff.
I believe he talked about starting work on AGI at the time he went part-time at Meta, long before GPT-3. I encourage anyone to try out some AI related stuff, genius IQ not required. It's still a young field so there aren't yet huge towers of knowledge to climb before you can do anything. The core ideas are actually super simple, requiring nothing more than high school math.
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Ironically I felt reassured reading this. "[...] I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after [...] evidence piles up" especially resonates with me. While I rationally understand it's just corporate bureaucracy / politics, sometimes I still wonder if I were just a bit more capable I'd be more persuasive. If John fucking Carmack cannot move the bureau…
I'd suggest you get off the carmack idol worshipping horse. Just because he failed doesn't invalidate your thoughts and opinions.
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I interpret this as strong circumstantial evidence that companies who start out as engineering centric and claims to be meritocratic eventually deteriorate into good ole nepotistic power play and a sea of bureaucracy. It’s quite entertaining to observe even John Carmack go through this very relatable frustration.
It's interesting how universal this pattern seems to be.
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I'd suggest you get off the carmack idol worshipping horse. Just because he failed doesn't invalidate your thoughts and opinions.
That didn't seem to be the implication. Carmacks name carries weight, and we're talking about navigating beurocracy and politics. My own thoughts and opinions tell me that they don't matter in those two domains
Carmack is only one guy. Maybe his voice might be worth a little more, but your voice also matters, so don't be so quick to despair.