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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#391

Post by dingaling »

alex1138 wrote: post #190
asveikau wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't please every human alive, so I might as well not try to do any better. This is a very Zuckerbergian take.

He'd please a lot more people if the feed hadn't been filled with crap - out of order, at that - that nobody ever subscribed to in the first place, causing them to miss actual posts from friends (whatever you think of 'social media', his website is fucking broken) for YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS

FB works perfectly well for me.

80% of posts in my FB feed are groups or people to which I've subscribed or followed.

10% are interesting things it suggests outside that core, which I then follow.

10% are suggestions that I don't find interesting and which I mark as such.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#393

Post by BlackFly »

anon84873628 wrote: post #379
dodu_ wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, take my single sentence, blow it up to 3 paragraphs with LLMs, and then the person reading it can have an LLM summarize it in a single sentence. What the fuck are we even doing anymore?

The thing is, eventually these products will be more integrated into business workflows and have access to all the context, so the three paragraph expansion probably will be a significant improvement upon the original input. And either that person won't be employed anymore, of the thing they were asking for in the first place will be automated for them. I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we int…

As these products improve, one person sending the output and not the prompt will remain useless. The prompt captures the intent and level of real consideration of the person sending it, the receiver can augment that with additional information if they want to.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#394

Post by zmmmmm »

ffsm8 wrote: post #308
zmmmmm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to judge culture during a period of serial downsizing because it will always be toxic in that context. But what you tell aligns with what I have inferred over a period of many years observing, even during times when they were growing: at a high level, Zuck gives the right signals of a successful tech CEO. He's smart, insightful, talks well (now) and appears decisive and willing to back long term bets into…

He is the owner though. If zuck wanted, he could solve it. Decimate middle management, downsize at a level of what musk did to Twitter and then _slowly rebuilt_ in order to pay attention to the culture this time, removing anyone that takes part in such behavior... The company would be worth more (because smaller headcount) and likely even ship more, because the culture would be better.. I've never worked at Facebook…

Interesting wording, because he's not the owner. What he owns is enough voting rights that nobody can challenge his decisions.

And also interesting in the sense that, this is what he claimed to actually do a few years ago. He had a "year of efficiency" where he significantly flattened and restructured the org, losing tens of thousands of staff. At that time I even defended him precisely due to this reasoning - if execution is failing you need a reboot. Well he did the reboot and it is still failing.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#395

Post by stingraycharles »

adastra22 wrote: post #364
stingraycharles wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be referring to something specific I’m not aware of, could you elaborate? A Google search didn’t reveal anything specific other than them using famous author names for expert review.

It's the nature of the product itself. It's a key logger software. That's literally what it does -- take every input on your computer and route it to their servers.

Right, I was just confused by your use of the word honeypot.

“keylogger mode” is optional, and to my understanding, you always see a visual indicator in the text area.

it doesn’t take every input as far as I know, and security firms don’t consider it a threat.

but point taken, it’s not for people with privacy concerns.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#396

Post by vasco »

nlawalker wrote: post #236
Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

You have to call it out when you see it, politely and charitably. "Hey, thanks! This is a great overview, and I actually asked ChatGPT before asking here and got a lot of the same information, but what I'm really looking for is..."

"If I wanted to receive copy paste from a bot I wouldn't message you, why are you trying to sneak this in?"

You reminded me of American colleagues that lie and say things are good when they are bad lol. Unable to be straight to the point. You're upset at the waste of time yet you thank them?

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#397

Post by __mharrison__ »

stingraycharles wrote: post #279
pinkgolem wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, i struggle with spelling/wording and ask the LLM to proofread a lot. I often send out the LLM version, but still check if it contains the original thoughts correctly. It's not a bad way to extend your vocabulary & catch spelling mistakes

> I often send out the LLM version, but still check if it contains the original thoughts correctly. Please don’t do this. You probably aren’t aware of how bad this can land. It’s not just about containing your original thoughts, it’s about the verbosity, repetitiveness, and absurdity of it all. Grammarly is a much better tool for these kinds of purposes, and it actually guides and teaches you to improve your writing…

The irony that this response has a very common LLMism...

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#398

Post by moring »

ahartmetz wrote: post #64
krupan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody had to legislate Free software into existence in order to protect us. Wise people saw the need and did something of their own accord. We are still free to do this!

It seems like one needs a big machine farm and a vast corpus of training data with a lot of manual curation to get started creating a competitive LLM, plus whatever technical expertise that I don't even know about. The stuff that makes LLMs exist now and not earlier. It might be possible to organize all that with volunteers and some paid work, but how in practice? Stallman seems kind of out of the game at this point…

> It seems like one needs a big machine farm and a vast corpus of training data with a lot of manual curation to get started creating a competitive LLM, plus whatever technical expertise that I don't even know about. The stuff that makes LLMs exist now and not earlier.

"big machine farm" reminds me of folding@home, which needed the same and got it.

"manual curation" is what Wikipedia did, as well as the free software community.

"technical expertise" is present in the free software world too. It is sparse since it is sparse in the world as a whole, but it exists.

"no Linus Torvalds figure" might be the main problem ATM.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#399

Post by Bombthecat »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #392

"Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, ..." “How do we opt out?” - Meta employee Poetic justice, or "dogfooding"

You can opt out by clicking through those 9 pages, each with a confusing form and buttons.

And on the next update we either just enable it again and make you go through the process again :)

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#400

Post by Thanemate »

echelon wrote: post #147
abalashov wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work by myself and feel no joy in using AI.

I work for myself and I absolutely love AI. I'm able to get 3x the work done. Greenfield stuff appears almost immediately. My job is providing value to customers, not worshipping at the cathedral of software that will last forever. Nothing lasts forever. Start treating software as ephemeral. It'll click. This doesn't mean write low quality, unmaintainable software. It just means focus on getting stuff to your custome…

I tried using it last week to make a simple Yu-Gi-Oh! website, that shows decks, lets you rate them, register users, etc. kinda like masterduelmeta.com and I enjoyed using it, but definitely did not enjoyed making it. I didn't felt a sense of ownership or dopamine from nailing the styles just right, or making the cards shimmer when you hover them.

All jobs can generate income. What led me follow this one job in particular was the joy of turning nothing into something, and it now feels that the most effective way to do that is for only $99.99/month, and that price needle is only going to move further upwards as capabilities increase.

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