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Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

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Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#131

Post by karmakurtisaani »

mrweasel wrote: post #23

The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what? This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg: > trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four mon…

I think one reason Google has been so successful is that the original founders did what they knew best and built a great startup, then stepped down and left the company for people who know how to run a corporation. I imagine these are very different skill sets.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#132

Post by sneak »

Has Zuckerberg ever deliberately invented a successful product using skill and taste?

His original moneymaker was sort of happenstance, a right-place-right-time quick hack that lucked out, got traction, and raised enough money to scale out, BIG, with essentially the same concept that he lucked upon.

Instagram and WhatsApp, both absolutely successful beyond imagination, were acquisitions. Same goes for Oculus.

Has Zuckerberg/Meta ever once themselves deliberately sat down and invented and built something great masses of people want? Facebook doesn't count; that was happenstance. He didn't hack that together in a day to get a billion users, or perhaps even to build a "product" at all.

They tried doing hardware with that Echo Show knockoff, afaik nobody really bought it. They tried the metaverse thing, and, again, nobody really wanted it. (I'm still not convinced it doesn't have legs; the way they did it was obviously not it.)

React and zstd don't count, obviously.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#133

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

fullshark wrote: post #118
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

And therefore unable to be criticized by OP?

Nothing wrong with criticizing people! Many smart people do bad things that deserve criticism. But if you trick yourself into thinking they're not smart, that their success is just pure happenstance and anyone could've done it in their shoes, you're going to end up very confused about the world. People talk a lot about how silly the $100M pay packages are, for example, but Zuckerberg paid $76M per employee for Instagram in 2012 ($110M inflation-adjusted), and in retrospect that was clearly a worthwhile bet.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#134

Post by detourdog »

Not impressed with the quote from Zuckerberg. I see it as a very shallow analysis. I think the stated goal of Agentic development is too amorphous to know what might work. I assume they thought there were too many voices in the development so they had layoffs only to find that wasn't the issue. Why would layoffs make work happen faster.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#135

Post by badnew »

chilmers wrote: post #81
lumost wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's a common missconception that engineers spend most of their time producing code based on documented requirements in jira tickets. I'd believe that a complete automation of this aspect of our industry would only be enough to provide a 10-20% boost in productivity. Still impressive, but within the range of "Our team improved our CI, build times, development process etc."

This is a bit like going back in time to the beginning of the industrial revolution and estimating the impact of a mechanisation based on comparing the speed of early mechanical looms vs. a skilled human. It takes years or decades for the automation of an artisan process to shake out, because it involves rethinking how everything around the now-automated process happens, and because the benefits involve the automatio…

Except that LLMs are only being trained to do things that humans can do, not things that humans cannot do.

I have heard a lot of claims like this, where we cannot imagine the benefits of AI because the work will look so different to how it is now, but I have yet to see that actually demonstrated anywhere.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#136

Post by goldenarm »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #56
goldenarm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is AGI really inevitable ? Claiming something is inevitable is a great way to disarm critical thinking.

Well, if progress stops it can be avoided..

What is our definition of progress ? We were progressing against world hunger but we decided to shut down efforts against it last year. Is it progress to invest $1T into semi-accurate plagiarism machines trained on stolen data ?

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#137

Post by mcculley »

jjulius wrote: post #64
mrweasel wrote: post #23

The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what? This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg: > trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four mon…

>I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. Why is this an either/or? Those aren't mutually exclusive.

It does not have to be either one. Zuckerberg is simply not a great leader, apparently. This is not surprising. Few people can run big companies. There is a huge spectrum between "dimwitted" and "great CEO".

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#138

Post by vitally3643 »

ModernMech wrote: post #107
croes wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s innovative about ads?

I dunno if it’s exclusively his innovation, but Zuckerberg’s insight was that you could actually lie to your users by presenting yourself as trustworthy, while having malicious intent to violate their privacy by selling their data to advertisers, and there are no business repercussions for doing so.

That's literally just a con. People have been doing this since the dawn of history. The only unique bit is the sheer scale it's happening at now

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#139

Post by beej71 »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #67
mrweasel wrote: post #23

The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what? This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg: > trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four mon…

[flagged]

How do you figure? Do you know either of these people?
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