671–680 of 799 posts
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I think quite a few folks missed or have forgotten that Snow Crash is a satire on the cyberpunk genre AND society at the same time
nueromancer tried to be edgy and serious, snow crash is weird and fun
And as Gibson later said ~00s, cyberpunk's moment is past and now it's boring. (At least according to him, but that counts for something)
It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much). In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing l…
In AI supervised workplaces, you will be written up for a first or only offense. There may be enforcement thresholds that mean you don't hear about it immediately, but your every action is kept on record for when you do pass those thresholds. This sounds nightmarish, but you can always quit. The trouble is that billionaires dream of free economic zones and entire countries run this way, where they can finally feel "safe".
If Meta employees think these 30 minute surveillance breaks will actually be honored, think again. Just using one may trigger increased surveillance. Put yourself in your paranoid employer's shoes. If your employee says, "Hey, could you please not watch what I'm doing for the next little bit", that's when you make sure the hidden microphones and surveillance cameras are pointed right at them. Maybe you don't show anyone the evidence you collect during these surveillance "breaks", but you can always use other infractions to deal with employees for what they do when they think they're not being watched.
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This is something that genuinely runs the gamut across different companies—plenty don't even know the serial numbers of company-owned machines, never mind which devices individuals have, while others do effectively have live feeds of every employee's screen available to managers at all times. In between you have many businesses that manage their devices but only insofar as to enforce some basic protection and reserve…
Isn't Facebook training their AIs on their finest engineer's computer use so the AIs can become better computer users? In this case, the more insidious yet subtle risk and attack vector for humans using these Facebook computers, is that Facebook begins to use this data to discriminate (legally) on performance metrics. They can then use these to automatically disseminate performance improvement plans, lead to higher p…
Are they learning to procrastinate by browsing hacker-news before starting to actually work so that in the future some models will replicate this behavior.
Do toilet breaks count towards the 30 minutes?
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.
I'm 40 and I am DESPERATLY trying to get out of tech. I love building stuff and I don't even mind AI. However, the industry has just changed so much in the past 2 decades that I find it insufferable. The leetcode grinding interviews. The bureaucracy. The weird psycho finance people who poured into the industry over time. I just can't stand being a Jira ticket coding monkey anymore. I'm trying to do my own thing and g…
Hang in there and stay with it.
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I quit tech at 40. I still do cool things with technology, but now at a community-owned grocery co-op. I can't recommend leaving tech highly enough. My cortisol levels are so much lower than they used to be. I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. I only work more than 40 hours a week if I feel like it, which I sometimes do, because I actually enjoy my work now. I ma…
> I don't have to schedule my life around EMEA and APAC meetings outside of my normal hours. Oof, this one is a knife to the heart. One of the biggest drawbacks of BigTech (and many other industries) is the goddamn time zones and early / late meetings. It's subtle and creeps up on you. It starts out having to take an occasional late meeting to sync up with someone in India who isn't answering your E-mails... then it…
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!
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.
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Meta is straight evil. It undermines the institutions of democracy and it negatively impacts its users mental health, all in service of selling your data to advertisers so they can better goad unnecessary consumption. If I learn you work at Meta, I will judge you as at best lacking a moral compass and treat you appropriately. Apple has problems, but is a lot closer to morally neutral. Ditto for Netflix. Amazon has ho…
not to defend zuck but its a common misconception that meta sells data advertisers dont see the personal data they buy for ad placement
There are many, many use cases of having a CSV dump of the data, but in reality, all of it boils down to either reselling the data, or marketing a product to the demographic in the data.
The 3rd use case is that of palantir but let's not get distracted.
So, meta is not selling data is like saying netflix is not selling movies (its actually buying them). Technically true, but a shallow understanding.
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…
Did everyone like this Stephensen in this thread? I read Cryptonomicon and Seveneves, mostly. They slogged for me a bit. But I love what he writes about, so willing to try another one (even if he doesn't have an editor). It sounds like this could be topical 2027 read. I have a long summer ahead of me.
If you want to read six pages of detailed musings on how the character learned ballroom dance and their design for a special milk-dispensing spoon for eating cereal without it getting soggy, establishing the character is the kind of person who designs spoons in their mind as they eat breakfast, then Stephenson is for you.
If you want the character to get to the damn ball and get told the secret coordinates so we can get moving with the plot already, Stephenson might not be for you.