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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

#191

Post by loeg »

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.

Do you want to prevent leaks, or achieve some other goal? If you want to prevent leaks, this isn't an effective approach. If you want to achieve a different goal, that's fine, too, but orthogonal to the stated goal. For leaks, it's probably better to just restrict communications to the necessary distribution and understand that anything widely distributed is more or less public.

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

#192

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> People who recognize that this is what that movie is saying often then condemn it for being Nazi-adjacent pro-eugenics propaganda.

In this respect, that movie is a great filter for virtue-signalling low-intelligence societal rejects.

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

#193

Post by DragonStrength »

Well, yeah, management sees a weak labor market and imagines the ability to fire all those troublesome engineers. Remember, especially in recent years, tech management is made up predominantly of grads from a select set of "elite" universities, whose caliber is determined mostly by how rich the parents are. It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain. The idea engineers with years of education are as fungible as manual labor has been tried again and again with the same results. LLMs won't change that.

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

#194

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…

> we can have a value system we share that benefits us all

If "us all" is a small enough group, sure. It doesn't scale, though.

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

#195

Post by Avicebron »

Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

My default is that I won't copy and paste anything that's AI generated in communications. I kind of think that's the line. Use whatever you want in the background, but I want to communicate with the synthesis of your thoughts.

I think this is a reasonable standard to hold, otherwise, like many before have said...send me the prompt. It's actually more interesting/better I know a coworker is struggling to communicate about something.

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

#196

Post by loeg »

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.

Claude with the 4.7 model is getting pretty good.

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

#197

Post by xingped »

jp57 wrote: post #189

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…

Oh don't worry your pretty little head, stack-ranking and churning are still _very_ in vogue with the tech companies.

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

#198

Post by menloshark »

Here's how things play out: Zuck gets some idea, he's surrounded by a bunch of yes men who say "yes, this will definitely change the world", then it turns into this optics game of kissing the ring. You ask yourself "how could they blow 80B on the Metaverse like that", this is how.

DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team matching). There's a reason why the average tenure is It's a toxic and fear based culture. You join, the people around you are already thinking how to scapegoat you. People gatekeep actual work and save it for political favorites and everyone else on the outside is stuck cooking up bullshit projects. If you do manage to find work on your own, people will immediately start scheming to steal it

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

#199

Post by Tenoke »

codemog wrote: post #173
Tenoke wrote: post #163

In 2019 I suggested[0] you might reach AGI if you train on computer usage - mouse movement, keypresses, what's on the screen etc. - and it sounds like Meta are kind of trying some form of it. 0. https://svilentodorov.xyz/blog/human-imitating-task/

A lot of people had this idea. You’re going to have to take a vague idea to fruition if you want the props you’re looking for.

Can you point me to them? I couldn't find anyone writing a version of that idea back then, I'd be curious to read how others framed it.

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

#200

Post by ceejayoz »

Aurornis wrote: post #166
Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

> She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop. This is the root frustration spreading across workplaces everywhere. Before AI the only way for someone to generate a design document, Jira ticket, or pull request without investing a lot of their own time and effort into producing what you saw. LLMs came along and…

> LLMs came along and erased that assumption. Now you don't know if that e-mail, that 12-page design document, the 100 or 1000 line PR, or those 10 Jira tickets were written by someone who invested a lot of their own time into producing something, or if they had their AI subscription generate something that looked plausible.

Oh, we know. It's pretty clear in many cases.

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