181–190 of 655 posts
Turns out you don't actually need top-tier engineering talent if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly?
Maybe it was needed until recently and today the scale and monopoly is sufficiently well oiled that a couple 1M$/month programmers with some clankers can ship some new buttons and keep it running?
This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope you…
The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating. When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide.[98] Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people.[99] The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the platform "a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate".[100]
"If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call?" Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer? I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.
> Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer? It is in fact common to do personal things on work PCs. The senior manager spending 5 days visiting that foreign office is logging into his personal netflix account, and video calling his wife and kids. He ain't carrying a second laptop to do it. That middle manager, with a report who needs a widget delivered tomorrow, and purchasing aren't…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice dodge. I'm directly addressing OP's original comment that "all anyone at Meta does is give girls depression." It's almost as if it's not that reductive... even though you just made the same reduction... Want to answer the actual question?
I remember before FB was a thing and sharing photos with your friends was a huge pain in the ass. We had dozens of different websites in this days from MySpace to some weird ones that you've never heard of before. They all did the same thing as FB even to the point of having a very similar UI. The whole "damage to the world" thing is lost on me. I was in college when FB came out and we all were eagerly trying to get…
This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope you…
Truth be told, the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React. I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.
Oh yes, I would color Meta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_emotional_manipulatio...
"Company over country!" -- Mark Zuckerberg https://www.yahoo.com/news/book-zuckerberg-called-company-ov...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In case you care, what you're doing is called causal impotence https://philpapers.org/rec/NORTIO-18 . Then you can also search why it does matter.
Where do you draw the line? You're a TVC in the kitchen at Meta? All you do is give girls depression? You work at a business that buys ads on Meta? Is all you do is give girls depression? Even if you work in a non-profit branch specifically to do out-reach for kids or something?? How far separated from Meta do you have to be to not be reduced to doing nothing but giving girls depression?
The Principle of Double Effect[0] is essential in such cases, because it helps determine when cooperation with evil is remote or proximate, and when such cooperation with evil is morally permissible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time. Maybe it's unlikely they'd create those working elsewhere, but I think it's much more unlikely that someone else at Meta would have created the same thing without those people there.
> People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time. Exactly. The fact that they worked on Meta's (then Facebook's) payroll does not make what they've done, or themselves, automatically as bad as some other things some other people at Facebook / Meta did. And the bad things that some people did at Facebook / Meta are also due to their own choices, not by the virtue / sin of working for a…
I kind of disagree. You're associating yourself with these people, supporting the same machine. If you actually disagree with the machine, then don't work there in the first place. Not to mean these people are inherently evil or whatever, people have different circumstances, people reflect, sometimes change and people don't always think before acting, it's only human. But everyone who worked there while having other opportunities available, because the pay was better or whatever, definitively should reflect on what imprint they want to leave on the world really.
From there, the natural executive question becomes: "How do I make as much of my engineering organization as possible fit into that 30%?"
This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope you…
Agreed, what a damage to the world.