111–120 of 337 posts
A custom-built AI would be pretty good at replacing a CEO. Think of all the things a company could do if they reduced overhead by that much?
Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them…
I skimmed the article, guilty, but I think what I got from it is that CEOs will CEO? No disrespect meant, I’ve seen your name here often and thoroughly enjoy the folklore that you share, but I don’t understand what context you reacted to. Cheers.
That's common with newer engineers (and now, non-engineers). I believe that Mr. Dunning, and Mr. Kruger had something to say about it.
I also spent most of my career at hardware-oriented companies, and shipping hardware is orders of magnitude more difficult than shipping software.
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He's the face of bad CEOs because people like to make up things about how bad he is. The Social Network, a major 2010 biopic about the early days of Facebook, famously cut his college sweetheart and now-wife out of the story in favor of a fabricated character arc involving an ex-girlfriend who does not exist.
Poor Marky Z. always getting a bad rap. Let s/he who hasn't made zillons getting billions of people hopelessly addicted to social media while facilitating a genocide or two and generally destroying the world order as we know it throw the first stone.
If you're interested in discussing the specific claims you're making, I really don't think that billions of people are hopelessly addicted to social media, and I would love to hear your basis for claiming this. My understanding (from e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2) is that genuine compulsive use of social media is quite rare, and most people who describe themselves as "addicted" are just regular users who enjoy it but kinda feel like it's a waste of time.
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This is true. I have always prided myself on writing concise, high-Quality code, because it tends to be quite debt-free. So far, LLMs seem to deliver code with "Louie Da Loan Shark"-levels of tech debt.
You can actually get high-quality code out of them -- at least with Claude; not had a great experience with Gemini -- but for complex tasks requires riding them very, very hard and really understanding where things can go wrong and poking at them repeatedly. Iterate, iterate, iterate.
That describes my last week. What made it most annoying, was the need to release through TestFlight, because the memory issues would not appear, when tethered. Also, I was checking in constantly, because I had to revert and reset the context, several times.
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He's the face of bad CEOs because people like to make up things about how bad he is. The Social Network, a major 2010 biopic about the early days of Facebook, famously cut his college sweetheart and now-wife out of the story in favor of a fabricated character arc involving an ex-girlfriend who does not exist.
Yeah and Justin Timberlake was a co star. You’re really beefing about a movie almost 2 decades old?
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No, it implies that you give workers the means to dictate the direction of the company. That is what workplace democracy does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers. If this sounds cr…
Where’s your real world evidence of all these benefits of coops? Because I would love for it to be true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler#Semco_1990%E2%8...
There is academic research on this too if you're curious but it's mostly in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
But yes, there isn't much "evidence" because this system hasn't been tried en masse; however if you look at our current neoliberal hellscape, it's pretty hard to imagine it doing worse. Also neoliberalism wasn't really "tried" either, it was thrusted upon us by a group of individuals that wanted it.
One thing to keep in mind is that society can change quite quickly if you want it to. I'm sure the children that died working in factories during the 1800s never imagined such a society where children are valued, cared for, educated, and protected but it did happen.
It has happen before and it can happen again. It only happened because people were willing to fight for it.
The rules are allowed to be changed at anytime if we deem so, a better world is possible.
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CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place. I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives wan…
Knowing which ass to kiss at the right time is an important skill not everyone has.
Knowing which ass(es) to kiss when: $9,999,999
And that's how CEOs justify their exorbitant compensation
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Poor Marky Z. always getting a bad rap. Let s/he who hasn't made zillons getting billions of people hopelessly addicted to social media while facilitating a genocide or two and generally destroying the world order as we know it throw the first stone.
From your tone, it sounds like you may just be intending to warn me that it's cringe not to agree with any criticism of Zuckerberg? If that's so, I have to respectfully disagree; I think this is a bad attitude that leads towards being poorly informed about the world. If you're interested in discussing the specific claims you're making, I really don't think that billions of people are hopelessly addicted to social med…
> Meta Settles Lawsuit That Claimed Social Media Addiction Screwed Up Schools
> On Thursday, Meta settled a lawsuit brought by a Kentucky school district that claimed the tech giant’s social media platforms have created a mental health crisis at its schools.
> The case was considered the first of its kind and a bellwether (a case that is representative of a large pool of lawsuits and will be a test for future litigation). The plaintiffs argue that social media platforms have had a major negative impact on the mental health of school-age children, which in turn has caused a burden on the education system, as American schools were forced to redirect resources to counter this problem.
> The settlement comes shortly after Meta lost a key bellwether social media addiction trial. Back in March, a judge in Los Angeles ruled that Meta was liable for the adverse mental health effects a now 20-year-old suffered after getting addicted to Instagram from an early age. The representatives of the young woman argued successfully that it was Meta’s deliberate design choices, like the infinite scroll and face-altering filters on stories, that had exacerbated her addiction and subsequent mental health issues like self-harm and depression.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People#Myanmar_genoci...
> The military junta in Myanmar was facilitated by Facebook to post hate speech that sought to foment sexual violence and promote genocide against the Rohingya. "Myanmar would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived" Wynn-Williams writes.
> Wynn-Williams argued that Facebook failed to moderate hate speech against the Rohingya in Myanmar, including the use of the racial slur kalar. She noted that the company only had two Burmese language moderators, both based in Dublin, for the entire country, and claimed that one of the two moderators gave a pass to hate speech while removing pro-human rights content. She further claimed that she raised concerns that the moderator was "in cahoots with the" junta, only to have her concerns dismissed by the content team. Additionally, she claimed that her efforts to have Facebook's Community Standards rules translated into the Burmese language were resisted by the company communications team, who told her that "Myanmar isn’t a priority country" in the region.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
> In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.
> The data was collected through an app called "This Is Your Digital Life", developed by data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research in 2013. The app consisted of a series of questions to build psychological profiles on users, and collected the personal data of the users' Facebook friends via Facebook's Open Graph platform.[2] The app harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles. Cambridge Analytica used the data to analytically assist the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
> Other advertising agencies have been implementing various forms of psychological targeting for years and Facebook had patented a similar technology in 2012.
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https://www.the-independent.com/tech/facebook-manipulated-us...
> Facebook manipulated the emotions of hundreds of thousands of its users, and found that they would pass on happy or sad emotions, it has said. The experiment, for which researchers did not gain specific consent, has provoked criticism from users with privacy and ethical concerns.
> For one week in 2012, Facebook skewed nearly 700,000 users’ news feeds to either be happier or sadder than normal. The experiment found that after the experiment was over users tended to post positive or negative comments according to the skew that was given to their news feed.
> The research has provoked distress because of the manipulation involved.
> Studies of real world networks show that what the researchers call ‘emotional contagion’ can be transferred through networks. But researchers say that the study is the first evidence that the effect can happen without direct interaction or nonverbal clues.
> Anyone who used the English version of Facebook automatically qualified for the experiment, the results of which were published earlier this month. Researchers analysed the words used in posts to automatically decide whether they were likely to be positive or negative, and shifted them up or down according to which group users fell into.