111–120 of 164 posts
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FDR essentially pioneered the modern use of the omnibus bill by threatening to veto any assistance to the poor/elderly that didn't include social security. Basically his goal was to make the poor starve if social security didn't pass, and blackmail politicians into being forced to vote for it. Of course this was all predicated on the other prong, which was the 'switch in time that saved 9' where he also threatened to…
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It would be incredible to think that Mark Zuckerberg genuinely thought their Metaverse/VR investment was going to be akin to Xerox's bayarea PARC campus (developer of modern networking / GUI &c). I guess both were ultimately profit-negative financial disasters.
It's easy to get caught up in your own hype when you're surrounded entirely by people who always tell you what you want to hear.
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In a zero interest rate environment, literally any return on investment justifies spending. If interest rates are 3.8%, the company needs at least a 3.8% return every year on your yearly compensation to justify your job.
Not if they are compensated during the year. Grocery stores have slim margins, but if you make 10k after selling 1M worth of stock buy turn over that stock 12 times a year that’s ~12% annual ROI not 1%.
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Surprised it took this long. I feel bad for the employees, but I can’t remember the last success they had. Metaverse, VR, throwing absurd money at AI and for what?
Their last success was acquiring Instagram in 2012. Every new effort since then has been hemorrhaging money. They get away with it because they have two limitless money faucets in Facebook and Instagram, but their product strategy as a whole has been a disaster.
WhatsApp can be dubbed a success as well, and Oculus wasn't a flop. And, what does that tell you about the company? They can only acquire and integrate products. Why? Because Leetcode (LC). Fk LC, Hard!!!
All there is are layoffs because of interest rates and concerns about the economic outlook. Companies using "AI" as a fig leaf justification and people are apparently falling for it.
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I was laid off from Atlassian this/last week. Since then I've been playing Satisfactory for 12 hours a day. Crazy thing is, I delivered optimizations that saved 1m USD over the last 12 months, with another optimization in-flight that would save another 1m USD. I thought that was enough to protect me from layoffs/PIPs - I guess no one was counting. AI is just an excuse for layoffs which IMO CEOs are trying to use to r…
Your problem was that you tried doing work. What you want to do as an employee is make it so they can’t fire you not that you are actually useful.
reality - companies are choosing to spend money on CAPEX (i.e infrastructure things hoping that they can ride an uncertain wave into the future) and not spend on OPEX (humans)
reality - AI agents are not doing human jobs.
reality - money | debt is now more expensive. hence if you were spending more of it on OPEX stuff you would rather reduce that
reality - more coasting jobs in tech. demand for stuff that still needs to get done is super high - workers just need to get more distributed and not hoarded at the big paying firms
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Mark Zuckerberg is no longer the kingmaker that he was during Facebook's peak, and he is desperately trying to create the next platform to be the one in power once again. It would be sad if it wasn't so unbelievably destructive to everything it touches.
Curious to see how they can turn moltbook into a money maker. Do they sell ads to agents?
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I was laid off from Atlassian this/last week. Since then I've been playing Satisfactory for 12 hours a day. Crazy thing is, I delivered optimizations that saved 1m USD over the last 12 months, with another optimization in-flight that would save another 1m USD. I thought that was enough to protect me from layoffs/PIPs - I guess no one was counting. AI is just an excuse for layoffs which IMO CEOs are trying to use to r…
Your problem was that you tried doing work. What you want to do as an employee is make it so they can’t fire you not that you are actually useful.