Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

ericlippert.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 482 posts

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#421

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

rippercushions wrote: post #259
paganel wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before memegen there was a strain of what I would call inauthentic positivity Too lazy to check, but did memegen appear before or after the whole Google+ debacle? Because from the outside Google did seem to drink a lot of its own Kool-aid back then (before and during the first stages of the Google+ launch). In a way, the current discussions around VR remind me of those times, lots and lots of smart people refusing…

Memegen predates Google+. And there were lots of people loudly saying that the emperor has no clothes, but the VP in charge didn't care and many mandates forcing people to work on G+ were issued anyway.

You don't have to work on G+. No one is forcing you.

(Oh wait, yes they were.)

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#422

Post by nmfisher »

alisonatwork wrote: post #345
kelnos wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally. It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it. I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employmen…

I've often wondered this, especially when I quit a company out of principle, expecting that I wouldn't be the only one. But even when an entire department quits en masse, it turns out that none of us are ever as important as we thought we were. The guys on the top who make the real decisions are on the top because they are experts at driving their vision forward regardless of whatever happens underneath or around the…

Upvoted for "Break the Build Joe" and "Rewrote It In Rust Rob".

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#423

Post by midoridensha »

sangnoir wrote: post #312
kelnos wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally. It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it. I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employmen…

> It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it Show me a big tech company (or any MNC) that is not "building something that is bad for the world". The broader question is why do people keep working for big tech, and that has been answered many times before (lots of money, smart colleag…

>The broader question is why do people keep working for big tech

Also, if the alternative is "work for a small company", some of us have tried that before and that hasn't been very good either, just for different reasons (terrible pay, abusive management, toleration of sexual harassment, etc.).

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#425

Post by random314 »

ericlippert wrote: post #239
rob74 wrote: post #91

> Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring multiple billions of dollars into vaporware called “the metaverse”. News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”. You can somehow feel that he has been dying to say this for years, but couldn't while he wa…

I see your point and don't mean to be argumentative, but a couple small corrections. First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years. Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my opinion internally, though I haven't been broadcasting it either. The first thing I said in our team group chat when we'd heard this announcement was (context, I am much older than most people on the team) "…

I am a huge fan of your work, Eric. I started out in PL and ended up in ML, working on far less impactful projects than you did :)

However, I don't believe metaverse is a waste of time, at least for business users. This can eliminate all office space use in about 5-10 years if the hardware and software is ready, which it very likely will. Or maybe a wall to wall LED screen will do the trick for remote social presence, making the headset redundant.

It can spill over from the office to personal lives like the PC did. But anyway, hope you continue to work on cool things.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#426

Post by random314 »

nmfisher wrote: post #422
alisonatwork wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered this, especially when I quit a company out of principle, expecting that I wouldn't be the only one. But even when an entire department quits en masse, it turns out that none of us are ever as important as we thought we were. The guys on the top who make the real decisions are on the top because they are experts at driving their vision forward regardless of whatever happens underneath or around the…

Upvoted for "Break the Build Joe" and "Rewrote It In Rust Rob".

Break the Build Bob would have a better rhythm :)

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#429

Post by midoridensha »

alpha_squared wrote: post #283
wilsonnb3 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR goggles are going to continue getting lighter, smaller, and more comfortable to wear. Soon enough they will be more comparable to glasses than goggles and plenty of people wear glasses for 12-16 hours a day.

Maybe I'm in a bubble, but most people I know who wear glasses don't actually enjoy doing so and would really rather not if they can avoid it. VR would have to be demonstrably superior to any alternative to justify wearing it for that long even if it was as light as a feather.

>Maybe I'm in a bubble, but most people I know who wear glasses don't actually enjoy doing so and would really rather not if they can avoid it.

I think you're in a bubble. We have a way of avoiding glasses: contacts. But people choose glasses instead. I wear contacts, not glasses, but every time I ever talk to a glasses-wearer about why they wear glasses instead, they usually can't imagine wearing contacts and think glasses are just fine. I've never heard anyone complain about them. And just looking around me, most men wear glasses; it's usually women that wear contacts.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#430

Post by Eisenstein »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #401
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helping an advertiser trick kids into spending their time in a pupil dilation monitor/retinal scanner so that ads can be optimized for impact based on biometric markers isn't amoral, it's immoral.

I know it's an accepted sci-fi trope and people (including advertisers) genuinely believe it's the future, but advertising doesn't work that way. When you peel back the layers and figure out how this sausage is made, underneath it's just sociology and broad target audiences. (Age, sex, location, social status.) Retinal scans don't help solve this problem.

Retinal scans do not help; however, 'eye tracking', which is currently available in Quest Pro and should filter down to the consumer tier headset in a year or two, does. When Meta knows what you look at, and for how long, and in which patterns, then advertising will legitimately have some 'next level' shit to work with.
Post reply on HN