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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

491–500 of 566 posts

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

#491

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…

I tried using it last week to make a simple Yu-Gi-Oh! website, that shows decks, lets you rate them, register users, etc. kinda like masterduelmeta.com and I enjoyed using it, but definitely did not enjoyed making it. I didn't felt a sense of ownership or dopamine from nailing the styles just right, or making the cards shimmer when you hover them. All jobs can generate income. What led me follow this one job in parti…

> it now feels that the most effective way to do that is for only $99.99/month, and that price needle is only going to move further upwards as capabilities increase.

That's not how economics works.

That can happen briefly with monopolies and ossified markets, but there is typically always an alternative that will seek to break in and grab market share.

Chinese tokens are pretty cheap and they'll gladly undercut US hyperscalers.

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

#492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Meta employees do not support invasive features without opt outs in their products. Some try to argue against it. But ultimately there is only person who gets to decide. You might as well blame the entire US population for certain problematic actions of the president.

> You might as well blame the entire US population for certain problematic actions of the president. The equivalent would be blaming those who chose the current president. Which would be an entirely reasonable thing to do.

By that logic, you should blame the people that use meta’s products.

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

#493
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I wanted to receive copy paste from a bot I wouldn't message you, why are you trying to sneak this in?" You reminded me of American colleagues that lie and say things are good when they are bad lol. Unable to be straight to the point. You're upset at the waste of time yet you thank them?

Just curious: would you consider yourself autistic?

Not everyone not conforming to your preferred style of communication is autistic. What is up with the internet trying to diagnose people?!

The parent is right. The reason society as a whole is way too comfortable with overstepping social boundaries, is because people think it’s somehow rude to confront others. It makes no sense. Sometimes you gotta say it how it is, because quite frankly the real rude person is the one copy and pasting a ton of AI output into your communication so you have to parse that and then try and figure out the original intent between the lines. How is that acceptable but saying “don’t do that to me?” is not?

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

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verbosity and repetitiveness? Which tools are you using? Tell it that you want a succinct professional email and it will do that. Give it examples of your own writing and it will match that style. If there's something you don't like, tell it to rewrite the part differently. Theses are literally the things language models are best at.

> Tell it that you want a succinct professional email and it will do that. Give it examples of your own writing and it will match that style. This is not what the parent I replied to indicated, nor what people usually do.

There's no reason to assume that their output is as bad as whatever you have come to expect.

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

#495
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 a…

My rule is more about expansion ratio and effort.

I will generate an LLM output that organizes scattered information and thoughts, resulting in 1.25x the text. I then read and edit it, generate executive summaries, and send it.

It saves effort for me in organizing, formatting and summarizing, and the LLM is producing more structure than content.

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

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea is also that parents with lower intelligence will value education for their offspring less and care less about whether their kids learn to read well, etc. Educated people can neglect their kids. And less educated people can still recognize when education is valued by society. Now look around. Do you feel like we're living in a society that values education? Did the successful people that kids see in their…

But, all your exceptions, at best prove the rule. Just go and observe out in the world. That is why I said it is happening in real-time. I think you are not looking at what's in front of you. Teacher's pay? Teachers were never highly paid. It is quite clear that many of the families of kids in low performing are not families that push education or reading or any of that sort. Yes, you can have a well-to-do family whe…

> Teachers were never highly paid.

Teachers never got rich, that's fair, but there was a time, at least in my culture, when teachers were usually one of the most highly regarded and respected people around, on a similar level as priests and doctors.

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

#497
post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, have you heard about the drone warfare in Ukraine?

There is a lot more then 3d printing going into that.

Yes, but would they have been able to develop the production capacity for resistance without it?

Certainly seems like the advantages of 3D printing came in clutch exactly when they were needed.

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

#498
post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, eventually these products will be more integrated into business workflows and have access to all the context, so the three paragraph expansion probably will be a significant improvement upon the original input. And either that person won't be employed anymore, of the thing they were asking for in the first place will be automated for them. I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we int…

This is a pretty gross privacy violation but it's also just... So depressing.

My employer already records every scrap of communications, I'm running everything on corporate infrastructure, and they sent the information to me.

Giving the AI knowledge of the org chart, who works on what, how they prefer to communicate, what their goals/biases are, is no different than what every ape implicitly collects in their own head.

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

#499
post #210

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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.

Well, you can use LLMs to parse LLM-generated slop. They make nice summaries. I have taken this approach to people who send me obviously generated LLM text; I simply run it through an LLM, paste the summary, and ask them "Is this an accurate summary?" and then I ask the for their original prompt.

Telephone game

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

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, eventually these products will be more integrated into business workflows and have access to all the context, so the three paragraph expansion probably will be a significant improvement upon the original input. And either that person won't be employed anymore, of the thing they were asking for in the first place will be automated for them. I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we int…

As these products improve, one person sending the output and not the prompt will remain useless. The prompt captures the intent and level of real consideration of the person sending it, the receiver can augment that with additional information if they want to.

That's like saying I should just send the English teacher a description of what my essay will be about, instead of actually writing it.

It seems like no one responding to this understands scoped context retrieval.

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