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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

#311

Post by jimbokun »

mathgladiator wrote: post #212
menloshark wrote: post #198

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 ma…

OR join meta, sell your soul, stay for 7 years, then retire and be done with work forever!!!

Will they still be offering enough compensation over the next 7 years for that to be true?

Not sure their stock price will continue to rise as it gas in the past.

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

#312

Post by jimbokun »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #256
mathgladiator wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OR join meta, sell your soul, stay for 7 years, then retire and be done with work forever!!!

I 100% understand the appeal of freedom from external pressures that retirement offers. But at the same time all the (many) people I know that retired early mostly just goof off and struggle to complete any of their many projects. And don’t get me wrong, I love goofing off. Been doing plenty of it. But given my inevitable death I have to appreciate a little external pressure forcing me to do good work.

What corporations even offer “good” work any more? In the sense of not making the world a net shittier place.

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

#313

Post by cybercatgurrl »

georgemcbay wrote: post #217
asveikau wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago when following what Zuckerberg did occupied more space in my brain, it struck me that he can "hate leakers" but not look inward and change his behavior in a way that doesn't upset people and make them want to leak. He is a very reactionary guy, and not a "how can I be the change" or "what did I do to cause this" kind of guy. I thought of this during his various scandals at the end of the 2010s. Everything w…

> The best PR is not being an asshole. I wonder if he's thought about it. There are a lot of people in the world who lack basic human empathy to such an extent that it is nearly impossible for them to just not be an asshole. I don't know for sure if this applies to Mark Zuckerberg but based on all the second-hand anecdotal information I've heard about him "empathy" as he understands it is a product branding feature r…

hard to do anything about when it’s in your genetics. it’s a form of neurodivergence just like any other. and to deny it is just furthering the stigma against people with high cognitive empathy and low affective empathy

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

#314

Post by rixed »

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…

  The thesis of Idiocracy is that society gets dumber in the future because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined
I don't remember the movie taking side on the nature vs nurture debate. The thesis is that intelligence is _inherited_.

Friendly reminder that plenty of nurture is inherited too.

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

#315

Post by jimbokun »

erentz wrote: post #210
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…

Seems AI has made it cheap to produce information but now you have to spend more time parsing the information. And it’s now the less competent/useful people spending less time producing more information with the more useful people spending more of their valuable time parsing that information. This is why I’m skeptical of LLMs ever becoming a net benefit in most organizations.

Calling it “information“is generous.

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

#316

Post by Forgeties79 »

trollbridge wrote: post #249
Forgeties79 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the market always finds a way That may be the case but every day LLM’s feel less like the next big thing and more like 3D printing. Here to stay, but not nearly as ubiquitous and earth shattering as people made it out to be. If I had to guess right now, I would say LLM’s are more significant than 3D printers, but less significant than the Internet.

I'd say that's a pretty accurate analysis. Something that is easily generated by an LLM obviously has low value and there is no moat. Agentic coding is a bit different, particularly if a great deal of effort and intelligence goes into it, but that's a quite different thing than just cranking out slop apps.

Yeah there is no doubt that some companies are going to radically change their operations because of agentic coding in particular. But the revolution that is being promised, and the investment that has gone along with it, is going to smash against some pretty nasty shoals of reality sooner rather than later

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

#317

Post by dag100 »

senordevnyc wrote: post #257
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that one change requires every user to click on their friends profiles to see updates x 2.1 billion daily users and say 4 family friends checked and it takes 1 second to click that is 291,000 8 hour workdays lost per day to humanity. Around 100,000,000 work days per year humanity looses out on putting to productive use. And I am REALLY underestimating the time lost to this. Facebook is stealing low end 100 million…

How can you steal time from humanity when they freely chose to use your product? You don’t owe people a perfect product that doesn’t “waste” their time when compared to some arbitrary standard of how it should be.

Your argument is effectively saying "how can lowering the quality of my product affect customers when they freely use it?".

If you use Facebook regularly, you are locked into it because unless you manage to convince your entire friend network to move to some other social media with you, you will have to "leave them behind".

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

#318

Post by marcosdumay »

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

> Technology amplifies power

Some technologies concentrate power, some technologies distribute it. "The WWW" is still too coarse of a category to have just one of those effects up there.

Some people just don't show the capacity to handle nuance or complexity.

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

#319

Post by somewhatgoated »

marcosdumay wrote: post #306
zmmmmm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to judge culture during a period of serial downsizing because it will always be toxic in that context. But what you tell aligns with what I have inferred over a period of many years observing, even during times when they were growing: at a high level, Zuck gives the right signals of a successful tech CEO. He's smart, insightful, talks well (now) and appears decisive and willing to back long term bets into…

> This is incompetent execution of an untested idea. VR will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless. But did you expect Facebook to have any competence on making it? Even if the timing was correct, what differentiator do they have? And then the CEO throws a world-changing amount of money without even an idea (because "a VR world!" isn't an idea). Did you expect any of that mon…

VR won’t be huge someday. We won’t live to see it at least. We also won’t experience quantum computing having a real world impact. We also won’t see humanoid robots doing any meaningful real world work. There also won’t be a Mars base in our lifetime or datacenters in space or underwater. There won’t be any flying cars either.

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

#320

Post by HWR_14 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #306
zmmmmm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to judge culture during a period of serial downsizing because it will always be toxic in that context. But what you tell aligns with what I have inferred over a period of many years observing, even during times when they were growing: at a high level, Zuck gives the right signals of a successful tech CEO. He's smart, insightful, talks well (now) and appears decisive and willing to back long term bets into…

> This is incompetent execution of an untested idea. VR will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless. But did you expect Facebook to have any competence on making it? Even if the timing was correct, what differentiator do they have? And then the CEO throws a world-changing amount of money without even an idea (because "a VR world!" isn't an idea). Did you expect any of that mon…

> Even if the timing was correct, what differentiator do they have?

Being willing to put $80 billion on the line is a differentiator. It can subsidize hardware, hire talent, acquire companies, etc.

There were definitely ideas beyond just "VR good". But frankly, giving some of the high level employees he had (Boswell and Luckie and Carmack among others) $10billion each to make VR products they think should exist is something that would probably work

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