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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#181

Post by tardedmeme »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #80
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so long ago, I have come to a rather unpleasant realization that whether a lot of that will happen, will depend heavily on whether the ones currently trying to make technology control every facet of our lives decide to allow society get dumber first ( think Idiocracy, which AI very much could allow ) or not in which case it is anyone's guess, because people will still have some basic skills and memories of what c…

The thesis of Idiocracy is that society gets dumber in the future because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined and smarter people systematically have fewer children than dumber people, i.e. literal evolutionary selection against human intelligence over many human generations. This is clear in the first several minutes of the movie. People who recognize that this is what that movie is saying often then condem…

That's the story they used in the movie. It's possible that real life will arrive at a similar situation by completely different means.

Also did you think about why dumber people might have more children? A large part of that reason is national policy choices.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#182

Post by pdonis »

worik wrote: post #139
pdonis wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all Here's the problem: you can't. First, people have disagreements, often very fundamental ones, over what "benefits us all". There's no way to resolve many such disagreements short of brute force. Second, "enforce"--note the last five letters of that word--means some people are given the power to do things to other people that, if anyone e…

> Here's the problem: you can't. It is not possible to "enforce" a "value system". True. But we can have a value system we share that benefits us all. We can work together to improve our welfare as a whole. > Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power. That is untrue. We must have webs of trust, and within those webs there are power hierarchies. The trick is that those hierarchies must…

> It is not possible to "enforce" a "value system".

That's not what I said. What I said was that you can't enforce a value system "that benefits us all"--because "us all" will never agree on what value system that should be, at least not once you get beyond small groups of people. But of course you can just declare by fiat that your preferred value system "benefits us all", and ignore objections, and if you have enough brute force at your disposal, you can enforce it. You just won't be enforcing a value system that actually "benefits us all".

> We must have webs of trust

Yes.

> within those webs there are power hierarchies.

Only if you let that happen. But in a sane web of trust, you don't--because in a sane web of trust, everybody understands that power--in the sense of someone you trust doing something that harms you, simply because you're unable to prevent them--is a betrayal of trust.

> This is a problem that has been wrestled with, and solved, several times in human history.

I disagree. I certainly don't see the Republican Militias in the Spanish Civil War as solving this problem.

> that does not mean we cannot work together for good things

Of course we can. But our ability to do that without violating any trusts is limited, often very severely, by how many people we can get to agree with us, without any force or coercion being applied, on what "good things" to work together for. Unfortunately utopian dreamers and "revolutionaries" throughout human history have failed to recognize this basic fact, and their attempts to make a better world have always resulted in mass suffering and death.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#183

Post by thih9 »

krupan wrote: post #23
thih9 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One attempt was open source. Or perhaps libre software? I guess it is not a success since only one of these looks mainstream.

Free/Open Source software is very mainstream now I'm not sure what you mean, but maybe we are taking too much of it for granted?

I meant that “open source” achieved pop culture level recognition. Libre software never did, most people are still unaware of the difference or don’t care.

A popular claim against open source is that it alone is insufficient to prevent abuse (here: accumulation of power).

Recent decade has shown many cases of that, with corporations adopting open source projects without giving power to their users; e.g.: Android or cloud services.

Perhaps if we understood open source less as a process and more as a movement (so: if libre software movement was more popular) things would be different.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#184

Post by [deleted] »

echelon wrote: post #126
xtracto wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Pretty soon you won't even be able to use your Linux. Everything will be attested. I want to rescue this snippet. Few of us remember the "fight" and discussions that happened when Firefox first pondered the idea of allowing encrypted video on the platform. Same with Linux. This was when The powers that be forced Netflix and other video distributors to introduce that opaque tech in the web. The same thing happened wi…

> But we as a society are indeed slowly and steadily giving away our rights of many, for the rights of few cartels. Increasing geopolitical multi-polarity may force big tech to give up ground. The EU and ASEAN in particular should be hitting Google et al. with the regulatory hammer. When we get clearer heads back in power (Lina Khan was great, but moved much too slow), they ought to carve the tech cos into Baby Bells…

[deleted]

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#185

Post by sterlind »

codemog wrote: post #167
saltyoldman wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the right way to look at things now. It might not always have the right track record, but AI built coding is more likely to have all the right permissions in place by default, most likely to copy existing patterns in your codebase, most likely to use the highest performance patterns and on top of all that, the spec will match what was asked of it.

What magical AI are you using? That’s not my experience at all.

there is a significant learning curve to using AI well. learning to stay skeptical and keep your brain on, developing an intuition of how much free reign to give it, writing ironclad specs and design docs and keeping them updated, making work easy to inspect, the tone you use talking to it, using one agent to critique another's work, etc.

basically, AI will produce slop if left unattended. but it's not really its fault.. it's a process failing, like not supervising the interns. using AI the Right Way(tm) is a mental workout, quite a bit slower, but extremely rewarding (ime.)

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#186

Post by loeg »

synergy20 wrote: post #94

from a different perspective, there are way more people who are truly miserable these days comparing to these who earn probably more than half a million per year on average. we must live in parallel universe.

I don't think the median Meta employee earns more than $500,000. Certainly a big chunk do.

Just to envelope math some of this: getting GE (~15%?) ratings at IC5 (plurality of employees) in a SWE/PE role in a west coast metro (95-100% pay scale) puts you somewhere around $550,000 with a flat stock price. (But most employees will get lower ratings.) I haven't run the numbers with the smaller 2026 refreshers and revised "Checkpoint" rating scale.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#187

Post by crooked-v »

saltyoldman wrote: post #157
echelon wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for myself and I absolutely love AI. I'm able to get 3x the work done. Greenfield stuff appears almost immediately. My job is providing value to customers, not worshipping at the cathedral of software that will last forever. Nothing lasts forever. Start treating software as ephemeral. It'll click. This doesn't mean write low quality, unmaintainable software. It just means focus on getting stuff to your custome…

This is the right way to look at things now. It might not always have the right track record, but AI built coding is more likely to have all the right permissions in place by default, most likely to copy existing patterns in your codebase, most likely to use the highest performance patterns and on top of all that, the spec will match what was asked of it.

I can't even get LLMs to reliably use tool calls instead of bash, let alone follow existing patterns in a codebase.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#188

Post by Aurornis »

fidotron wrote: post #33
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this. Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory. In practice we have no cho…

> Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this.

There has not been "an effort to stop people noticing this". The Unabomber Manifesto has been available everywhere and published across mediums from the start. The topic beat to death by everyone from anarchists to eco-fascists to internet edgelords since it was released. It has also occupied a place of debate in academia, being studied and criticized in a lot of courses.

The Unabomber Manifesto wasn't even a particularly good critique in this topic. It just happened to become a popular one because he was a terrible person who murdered a lot of people and wanted to murder a lot more. The common criticism of the manifesto is that it was a bunch of cliches tied together with some writing that appeared eloquent, and then he forced it into notoriety by being a literal terrorist.

It doesn't stop comments like this from implying that he was on to something or the next step of implying that there's some broader conspiracy to stop us all from noticing that he had a point. The latter conspiracy breaks down when you look at how much everyone knows about the manifesto and how it has been reprinted and discussed to death for years. He even wrote and published entire freaking books from prison.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#189

Post by jp57 »

They mention Meta's layoffs, which probably have more impact on employee morale than the AI stuff.

My current theory of tech layoffs is that over the last decade or so, churn-inducing practices like stack-ranking have gone out of vogue. One can speculate as to why this happened. Perhaps generational made middle management unwilling to do the dirty work? Nevertheless it happened.

However, companies still want to, and some would argue need to, eliminate low performers, so now they periodically do a companywide reduction in force and frame it with whatever justification is handy, macroeconomic conditions, AI, whatever.

This hypothesis would explain phenomena like companies hiring aggressively during or after a layoff, and why the layoffs keep happening year after year.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#190

Post by alex1138 »

asveikau wrote: post #179
loeg wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's any possible way to behave to satisfy every single employee of tens of thousands.

Can't please every human alive, so I might as well not try to do any better. This is a very Zuckerbergian take.

He'd please a lot more people if the feed hadn't been filled with crap - out of order, at that - that nobody ever subscribed to in the first place, causing them to miss actual posts from friends (whatever you think of 'social media', his website is fucking broken) for YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS
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