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Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

bbc.com

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Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#651

Post by dredmorbius »

OJFord wrote: post #563
kridsdale1 wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what’s happening. Snow Crash has an omniscient 3rd person narrator. A protagonist (but not THAT Protagonist!) is named Y.T. (street nickname for Yours Truly) and her mom doesn’t matter. She’s environmental set dressing.

Called YT by someone other than herself?

I'm not sure she's actually addressed as such by others in the story, but it's how the narrator addresses her. And IIRC how she introduces herself to the hero protagonist (Hiro Protagonist) on first meeting.

In a later work she's referenced as Miss Matheson.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#652

Post by mikestorrent »

PaulHoule wrote: post #573
baliex wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly terrifying. I'll admit I was expecting one of the near-15.62 options to be "acceptable". How wrong I was; I should have seen that coming. As one of the below comments says, you just don't know what level of snooping is going on. If you're reading this $CEO, hi!

It's the kind of list an LLM might make up.

...because it was fucking trained on Neal Stephenson, not the other way around, guy.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#653

Post by metamate100000 »

LucidLynx wrote: post #22

I have a serious question to anyone working at Meta and reading this: HOW can you still work at this company!? Why don't you quit this very toxic company, and start working at another place or even on your own? I genuinely don't understand... Let just Meta die!

I work at Meta, on a key system in one of the main products.

I think when I went in, it was too interesting a system/opportunity to not do it. I was open to many roles and interviewing, and I just really wanted to understand how it works.

I don't touch ads, I don't touch integrity, or any of the "dodgy" stuff. I used to hate Facebook (and then Meta), and not have accounts on any of their platforms (bar Whatsapp), until I joined. I care about doing good and making a positive impact in the world (don't think I'll do much at Meta though). I'm probably the closest to a 180 on this you can imagine.

And... I don't have a good answer to why I still work there? It's an interesting anthropological exercise? My everyday is working with great people on a facet of a product that is entirely wholesome and inoffensive? When I came in, I found that my coworkers (locally, in my team/sister teams) were extremely talented, hard working, and cared a lot about the systems being good. Yes we are all pissed off by the recent changes, a couple people left (not mainly due to these changes though). I mean, the people just seem entirely normal? I don't imagine it's so different to working elsewhere. People are not obsessed with money or in any kind of dire situation, they are not grappling with hard moral questions about the value of money versus corrupting the world.

I guess I just feel like I'm not contributing to the awful stuff? I think you tend to get used to your everyday life and see the stuff around you in your little bubble. I guess if my part of the product gets better, Meta sells more ads and then has an incentive to do bad stuff, I suppose?

Anyway, yeah. Open to other convincing opinions about why I should feel awful for what I do and quit my job, and the right way to think about this (genuinely!).

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#654

Post by taude »

siren2026 wrote: post #458
taude wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what industries are you going to switch to, and it is just to get like healthcare, or soemthing... I've been contemplating the same. Saved my whole life. But I still don't feel like I have enough saved for a long retirement (i'm in US, and not planning on moving abroad for cost of living improvements, like you hear so many people around here tout).

how much have you been saving so far? I talk to a lot of people that saved 10M$ and still feel this is not even close to enough.

Ha, if I had $10M, i'd be way gone. Pretty sure I could live my lifestyle for the next 30 years on that. I could live it on $5M, pretty easily. But where I'm at, I'm at the fringe, even if I have to move to Canada for healthcare when I'm old. And I'm saying this from having a house paid-off (where the taxes went up something like 40% last year -- and I'm guessing will keep going up?).

I'm not convinced living in the US that all the financial planning algs that big finance institutions are using and going to hold up in the future, and curious how it works for a whole generation. But time will tell. So far the cycle always corrects itself. I'm especially curious how it works when there's going to be a lot more early to mid-50s employees being forced into retirement, who are going to be living a long time, yet.

I'm especially paranoid about my prospects of retirement if the market dives 50%. It's happened in the past, and plenty of old hacker news articles about how it really screwed up people's retirement plans. Look back at Stock market returns for some tech companies from 2000 - 2014. That's a big span to fill.... ( I think I read somewhere that the market return for 2000 - 2010 was just over 1% year, someone should fact check that, though).

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#655

Post by GS523523 »

grog454 wrote: post #490
staplung wrote: post #412

Reminds me of one of the more brilliant passages in Snow Crash , describing work in "Fed Land"... ''' Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this m…

> occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section No eye tracking in this dystopia I guess.

Was going to reply the same. These authours don't spend enough time thinking their fantasies through.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#656

Post by cindyllm »

GS523523 wrote: post #655
grog454 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section No eye tracking in this dystopia I guess.

Was going to reply the same. These authours don't spend enough time thinking their fantasies through.

[dead]

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#657

Post by ribosometronome »

nullsex wrote: post #625
ribosometronome wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>identify with the villains in media. Zuck looking at the metaverse and thinking hey that’s a good idea! Are there many stories where the bad guys create the metaverse? AFAIK, Stephenson coined the term in Snow Crash and there it was built by the main character and his buds. The Matrix, I suppose? Though I think Zuck's (immediate) vision and who he identifies as is way more Hiro Protagonist or James Halliday.

Zuck was gushing about Ready Player One. It's as if the villain was written for him.

RPO's "bad guys" weren't the creators of the metaverse but a corp trying to win the contest to take it over. Halliday is flawed but a large part of the novel centers around that and he intentionally creates the contest in part to try ensure the metaverse ends up in appropriate hands, no?

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#658

Post by michaelt »

semiquaver wrote: post #445
staplung wrote: post #412

Reminds me of one of the more brilliant passages in Snow Crash , describing work in "Fed Land"... ''' Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this m…

Always thought it was weird for the omniscient narrator to refer to her as “YT’s mom”

Isn't that Stephenson driving home the faceless drone, cog-in-the-machine characterisation of YT's mom?

I mean, literally not giving the character a name fits right in with the alienating working conditions of the quote above, and the fact YT's mom is working on a software cog with no understanding of the machine it fits into.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#659

Post by rwmj »

everdrive wrote: post #17

I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.

It's been obvious for a long time that if you get a tech salary you should be saving for financial independence, meaning saving aggressively (above 50%) and investing that in a low fee tracker fund. Like planting a fruit tree, the best time to start was a decade ago and the second best time is now.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#660

Post by soundworlds »

siren2026 wrote: post #400
jjulius wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of people in these comments who would be happy to be "paid well" to contribute to what's inarguably a huge net negative worldwide is exactly how the company got to this point. It's astonishing how many people value a ton of money over doing something good. Everyone who talks about setting values aside for cash is the problem. Gross.

One of my good friend "Metamate" argument is that "if he doesn't do it, another engineer will do it. Might as well take the money". But at least they all seem to acknowledge it is a terrible company and they know they are working on something terrible (which is beyond me why you would accept to do that).

This is the same argument I hear about too-fast AI rollouts. "If we don't adopt AI, then we will lose to the business that does."

It is so obvious how competition dynamics naturally ends up as a fight to the bottom, and yet so many people are happy enough clocking in to this grind, then trying to forget about it the moment they clock off.

I totally understand this from a survival standpoint - but choosing to work at Meta is likely not "the only job you could get"

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