511–520 of 675 posts
John describes exactly what I'd like someone to build: "To make something really different, and not get drawn into the gravity well of existing solutions, you practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers." As a thought experiment: * Pick a place where cost-of-living is $200/month * Set up a village which is very livable. Fresh air. Healthy food. Good schools. More-or-less for the cost that someon…
Honestly sounds like a very cool Science fiction concept.
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Providing a service that billions of people value is making the world worse? Wow What next, go work for TV stations and sabotage them? Go work for McDonalds and make it inneficient? Sabotage manufacturers of combustion-cars?
Providing fentanyl to addicts is doing God's work then I imagine?
The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reducing efficiency If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else
dont shit talk my goat like that
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One of the better "service to humanity" opportunities for software engineers is to join a company like Meta or TikTok and perform awfully for as long as you can.
I think a better service to humanity is to excel at your job even if you end up at a socially corrosive org like Meta or Tiktok but donate a decent chunk of your paycheck to effective altruist charities that save lives.
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That’s an extremely reductive view. Whatever you think of Meta core products, they pay a ton of people to work on various open source projects, do R&D on things which are only tangentially related to social media like VR or data center tech. There is worse way to get a paycheck to do what you are interested in.
> tangentially related to social media like VR This is in no way tangential. VR is Meta's way of trying to move social media from web to VR in a Second Life way. And you can believe me that there will be advertisement in the "game".
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Unfortunately people have ideas, projects, and solutions that they care deeply about. Like it or not, some tact when dealing with these things goes a long way.
> Unfortunately people have ideas, projects, and solutions that they care deeply about. This is true of course, but this is also true for the “search for truth” in science. Do we fail to point out the flaw in the reasoning of someone’s life's work for fear of offence? The truth is the higher ideal that must be strived for! In the same way, an idea is only good once it has been challenged. It may fail and dissolve, it…
Also, software engineering is a field where there’s rarely some ideal truth we’re trying to achieve, and indeed even in science, people do often fail to point out flaws in reasoning for fear of offense.
The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reducing efficiency If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else
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"It wasn't all bad. They built the Autobahn"
Few more years and they would've finished Polarbanen. The northern Norway railroad connecting Trondheim to Tromsø, far inside the Arctic Circle. Giving us $50 trains to Tromsø instead of $500 planes. But my enthusiasm diminished after learning that they worked thousands people to death.
I have some bad news to tell you about the overall number of dead related to that government
The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reducing efficiency If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else
That’s an extremely reductive view. Whatever you think of Meta core products, they pay a ton of people to work on various open source projects, do R&D on things which are only tangentially related to social media like VR or data center tech. There is worse way to get a paycheck to do what you are interested in.
That you can get paid and have fun doing it, doesn't make the product better.