211–220 of 246 posts
At some point, after repeated rounds of ineffective hire-and-fire cycles, it becomes impossible to avoid admitting that the problem is the management.
"I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil." I'll go with both... I think the guy made some real moves early on, but it's been a while since whatsapp and instagram. And since then, if the tales in Careless People are to be believed, so much smoke has been blown up his digestive endpoint that he's mostly smoke now.
His most innovative move was acquisition
I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages. I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stop…
Yeah, working harder to avoid a layoff in a big company doesn't really work out - by the time you know about the layoffs they've probably already made their decisions about who stays and goes anyway. Plus that higher rate of effort might be unsustainable and you end up leaving on your own accord anyway or burning out. Layoffs somewhat change the employment arrangement too for the people that stay: "we pay you the sam…
If it's a restructuring, nothing you do will save you or condemn you. The decisions are made via spreadsheet, and it's unlikely anyone in your management chain will be involved. In fact, if you're a high performer who's accumulated a lot of compensation, that might paint a target on your back. If you're a protected class, you might get passed over to minimize the risk of legal action.
If it's a decimation, you'll probably have a good idea whether you'd survive.
The takeaway is keep your ear to the ground, maintain some familiarity with where your company spends its money and how executives make decisions, and you might be able to tell what kind of reduction is in the cards and prepare for it. And also, keep relationships up with recruiters.
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Zuckerberg was never a great strategist. The only good strategic decisions that he was ever made were the acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp. Almost everything else was either completely misguided, way too late, or executed so poorly that it could never work. Meta is basically the Temu version of Google. Google also goes wrong a lot, and they are mostly resting on their big successes from years ago, but they stil…
Instagram and what’s app were two of the best purchases in American history though. It’s hard to overlook how well they worked out
I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages. I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stop…
This seems a pretty distinct corporate culture in the US. The companies pamper you in the boom, but dump you in the bust. When times are good, they shower you with perks yet when times are slightly bad, they lay you off like a replaceable line item. This is quite different from Europe or Japan, for instance.
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No, but did any of the other big companies? Google literally found the transformer architecture but had no idea what to do with it.
Google.com, Chrome, and Gmail we all very tasteful products. Gmail won more on storage space, but each of the products were distinctly fairly clean design for their time.
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> In the context of AGI, is it inevitable eventually? Sure, I would agree, unless some catastrophic event puts back our technological advancement. What if it’s not a catastrophic event, but technological progress just asymptotically approaches 0? What if there is a limit to layers upon layers of abstraction and at some point it just becomes too complicated to keep going? What if we all somehow decide that we don’t wa…
> What if it’s not a catastrophic event, but technological progress just asymptotically approaches 0? What if there is a limit to layers upon layers of abstraction and at some point it just becomes too complicated to keep going? Looking at history, there is not really an argument for progress to stop in the long term. I think I get what you mean, that further advancement gets more and more complicated and the human m…
That’s my point. We have no reason to assume that AGI exists within that limit. Certainly not enough to confidently state that it’s inevitable.
> I think I get what you mean, that further advancement gets more and more complicated and the human mind gets to a limit what it can comprehend and reason about.
That’s exactly what I meant!
>But lots of research and progress have been augmented by technology in the past 70 years or so, and I don't see a reason why it wont continue along that path
I agree that we’ve probably got a long way to go.
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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
His team then enabled lots of people to become influencers. Those influencers influence their followers to buy products (aka generate ad-revenue).
And that is the pure essence of the business model.
In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user. Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the…
> Amazon now mandates senior engineers to sign off on AI-generated code This will never work because then you are expecting the more experienced people to be reviewing endless slop coming from less experienced people. They will either do a bad job to comply or just quit
> reviewing endless slop coming from less experienced people
/s (just in case)
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I think Elon owns a lot of real estate in these guys’ heads. When you have $200B+ in the bank, little else matters others than being seen as a titan of industry IMO. I think the fact that Musk has Tesla and Spacex (even with all his extra curricular activities) makes a guy like Zuckerberg seethe that he’s just “the internet websites guy”.
Musk is not in their heads, the guy who died in 2011 is in their heads. You know the founder of Apple…