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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

#321

Post by jimbokun »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #202
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 current bar is “if you know I’m expecting to hear from a person don’t paste unedited ChatGPT outputs and hit send.” Everybody wants to send out the efforts of their corner-cutting, but nobody wants to receive them. Most people know when they are doing it. If you feel the need to obscure your LLM usage, it means you didn’t put enough of your own voice and work into the final draft and you need to do something about…

A lot of time I will just say “Gemini/Claude is telling me…” just like I would for a Google search result. Sometimes helpful to use the common wisdom embedded in the LLMs as a starting point for the discussion.

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

#322

Post by stevenhuang »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #165
mat_b wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it's not preventable. Technology is always an arms race. If you don't create it, someone else will, and then they'll have the advantage and subjugate you, so you might as well be the one to do it first. Whatever it is that you're trying to prevent, someone is going to do it if it gives them power.

What’s not preventable? What do you think I am saying, exactly?

[flagged]

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

#323

Post by jimbokun »

DragonStrength wrote: post #193

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…

That and the large technology companies don’t really have many ideas for new software or features that will make them more money. Can only increase profits by reducing costs.

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

#324

Post by Animats »

zmmmmm wrote: post #263
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…

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…

The low execution quality of Meta's metaverse effort surprised me, too.

But they wanted it to run on their relatively weak headgear. A good metaverse needs a decent gamer PC, a serious GPU, and a few hundred megabits per second of Internet bandwidth. (I've written a Second Life client in Rust, so I'm very aware of the system requirements.) Facebook needs to serve a user base which is mostly phones and people with weak PCs. Not Steam users.

If you have to squeeze it onto underpowered hardware, you get something like Decentraland or R2 or Horizon - low rez, very limited detail, small contained areas. Roblox has made some progress on this problem, but it took them two decades, even with a lot of money.

The real problem with metaverses is that a big, realistic virtual world is a technical achievement, but not particularly fun. It's a world in which you can spend time and meet people, but the world is not a game. It has no plot or agenda. This throws many new Second Life users. They find themselves in a virtual world the size of Los Angeles, with thousands of options, and are totally lost. It's not passive entertainment. As Ted Turner (CNN, TBS, etc.) used to say, "the great thing about television is that it's so passive."

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

#325

Post by teaearlgraycold »

jimbokun wrote: post #312
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t know what your values are but I’m sure you can find some company that is at least morally neutral in its mission. However you might have to accept lower pay.

But to clarify I meant “work you can be proud of” when I said “good”.

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

#327

Post by jimbokun »

loeg wrote: post #170

Mark hates leakers, so it is kind of intensely funny that the NYT seems to have a direct line to probably dozens of ICs. Ultimately, it's hard to keep secrets shared with 70,000 employees.

Employees seeing wave after wave of their coworkers laid off. You won’t win much loyalty that way.

This latest one releasing the NUMBER and DATE of the layoffs a month in advance without naming WHO is a whole new level of stupid. Let’s deliberately maximize the level of anxiety in our employees and reduce their trust in us to zero.

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

#328

Post by Eufrat »

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 will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless.

I really doubt this. There’s too many people who suffer from motion sickness to make this payoff. 33% of the population suffers from motion sickness to varying degrees and current mitigations including blowing a fan at suffering users, is an unrealistc barrier to causal usage.

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

#329

Post by rixed »

apsurd wrote: post #36
matusp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we have state. There are many technologies that we, as a society, decided to control in various ways. You can't just build a nuclear weapon for example. There is no particular reason why we let tech bros control many aspects of our lives, apart from legal inertia. LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how w…

The State are the people and the people want tech billionaires because they want the same chance at being that (tech) m/billionaire. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires; I cannot get around that issue toward collective action, toward myself contributing to an answer. I'm stuck. I can't unsee its truth =/. The individual will choose enrichment. We all will.

No we won't, and that's why we had free software in the first place. Many people dream of a community not of being forever singled out.
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