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

Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 566 posts

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

#451

Post by bravetraveler »

zerreh50 wrote: post #66
bachmeier wrote: post #12

> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make…

It will get really funny when they start imposing an exact number of tokens as a quota, where too little means you are an outdated luddite and too much is inefficient and wastes money

I'm skipping the LLMs/extra steps and simply waiting for the PIP; $EMPLOYER can go ahead and say exactly how many pieces of flair, sorry, tokens they think I need to do my work. It's exactly 0 but I'd like to hear their joke.

Not at Meta but see hints building towards similar madness. War Games, it is. How about chess instead? I'm not big on market manipulation.

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

#452

Post by senexox »

Eufrat wrote: post #328
marcosdumay wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is incompetent execution of an untested idea. VR will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless. But did you expect Facebook to have any competence on making it? Even if the timing was correct, what differentiator do they have? And then the CEO throws a world-changing amount of money without even an idea (because "a VR world!" isn't an idea). Did you expect any of that mon…

> VR will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless. I really doubt this. There’s too many people who suffer from motion sickness to make this payoff. 33% of the population suffers from motion sickness to varying degrees and current mitigations including blowing a fan at suffering users, is an unrealistc barrier to causal usage.

I love the quest and was just using it about an hour ago. Even beyond motion sickness, it is not the same experience as it was when I first got the quest.

There is a habituation that happens the entire experience becomes far less immersive feeling. I have used the quest so much I don't really feel the immersion anymore at all. I had just found youtube 360 videos of the sphinx and great pyramid last night. I wish I would have watched this a year ago as it would have been so mind blowing. It is still fun but it is nothing like what it use to be. I don't feel like I "go" to the places anymore.

It reminds me quite a bit of the way marijuana was such a different experience the first few times vs the 500th time.

So even if you don't get sick, the magic wears off in about a month and people stop bothering. The experience is so consistent with people getting bored after a month. I can say from experience that this has nothing to do with the lack of content but something to do with the way the brain adjusts.

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

#453

Post by rwmj »

zmmmmm wrote: post #366
somewhatgoated wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR won’t be huge someday. We won’t live to see it at least. We also won’t experience quantum computing having a real world impact. We also won’t see humanoid robots doing any meaningful real world work. There also won’t be a Mars base in our lifetime or datacenters in space or underwater. There won’t be any flying cars either.

I can't tell how serious you are. But I'm curious - thinking of your past self (depending how old you are), what would have said about the current AI revolution 10 years ago? Eg: the chances that fully agentic generalised automated software engineering would become orthodoxy? What chance would you have given it happening by 2026?

We're still waiting for "fully agentic generalised automated software engineering".

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

#455

Post by doublerabbit »

Eufrat wrote: post #328
marcosdumay wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is incompetent execution of an untested idea. VR will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless. But did you expect Facebook to have any competence on making it? Even if the timing was correct, what differentiator do they have? And then the CEO throws a world-changing amount of money without even an idea (because "a VR world!" isn't an idea). Did you expect any of that mon…

> VR will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless. I really doubt this. There’s too many people who suffer from motion sickness to make this payoff. 33% of the population suffers from motion sickness to varying degrees and current mitigations including blowing a fan at suffering users, is an unrealistc barrier to causal usage.

I have the Valve Index and had to buy prescription lenses to put inside to allow me to play without my glasses.

The first company to have auto adjustment lenses to my eye sight will get my money. when I can use it with my current eye sight and without having to buy accessories, I'll root for VR.

I am tired of this hypocrisy world.

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

#456

Post by [deleted] »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #403
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"

Most Meta employees do not support invasive features without opt outs in their products. Some try to argue against it. But ultimately there is only person who gets to decide. You might as well blame the entire US population for certain problematic actions of the president.

[deleted]

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

#457

Post by ulfw »

Aurornis wrote: post #166
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…

> She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop. This is the root frustration spreading across workplaces everywhere. Before AI the only way for someone to generate a design document, Jira ticket, or pull request without investing a lot of their own time and effort into producing what you saw. LLMs came along and…

If it's 12 pages of bullshit I know it's AI and I don't bother reading it. Simple as that.

The world is turning stupid and the tech world is at the forefront of it.

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

#458

Post by [deleted] »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #370
asveikau wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago when following what Zuckerberg did occupied more space in my brain, it struck me that he can "hate leakers" but not look inward and change his behavior in a way that doesn't upset people and make them want to leak. He is a very reactionary guy, and not a "how can I be the change" or "what did I do to cause this" kind of guy. I thought of this during his various scandals at the end of the 2010s. Everything w…

He probably has the same thing as Elon Musk, aspbergers to be honest. Eh I just looked it up, and apparently he does. Come to think of it, maybe Steve Jobs as well, he was insanely eccentric.

[deleted]

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

#459

Post by solid_fuel »

trollbridge wrote: post #247
erentz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems AI has made it cheap to produce information but now you have to spend more time parsing the information. And it’s now the less competent/useful people spending less time producing more information with the more useful people spending more of their valuable time parsing that information. This is why I’m skeptical of LLMs ever becoming a net benefit in most organizations.

Well, you can use LLMs to parse LLM-generated slop. They make nice summaries. I have taken this approach to people who send me obviously generated LLM text; I simply run it through an LLM, paste the summary, and ask them "Is this an accurate summary?" and then I ask the for their original prompt.

This puts the LLM providers in a great position of:

     -> [PROVIDER] ->  -> [PROVIDER] ->
They're getting paid to encode some inane prompt into paragraphs of text, and then they're getting paid again to summarize that back into something with even less value than the original prompt. And they're making money hand over fist because people are happier to play that game rather than just pushing back on the jerks sending them pages of generated garbage in the first place.

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

#460

Post by sunrunner »

luckylion wrote: post #443
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious: would you consider yourself autistic?

Is that a tell? Sounds very much like my reaction to that behavior, but I always assumed it's because I'm german.

Perhaps a quick visit to https://german.millermanschool.com could sort this out
Post reply on HN