761–770 of 936 posts
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It boggles the mind that this kind of management is what it takes to create one of the most valuable companies in the world (and becoming one of the world's richest in the process).
It all makes much more sense when you start to realize that capitalism is a casino in which the already rich have a lot more chips to bet and meritocracy is a comforting lie.
Meritocracy used to be a dirty word, before my time, of course, but for different reasons than you may think. Think about the racial quotas in college admissions and you’ll maybe see why the powers that be didn’t want merit to be a determining factor at that time.
Now that the status quo is in charge of college admissions, we don’t need those quotas generally, and yet meritocracy still can’t save us. The problem of merit is that we rarely need the best person for a given job, and those with means can be groomed their entire life to do that job, if it’s profitable enough. Work shouldn’t be charity either, as work needs to get done, after all, and it’s called work instead of charity or slavery for good reasons, but being too good at your job at your current pay rate can make you unpromotable, which is a trap just as hard to see as the trap of meritocracy.
Meritocracy is ego-stroking writ large if you get picked, just so we can remind you that you’re just the best one for our job that applied, and we can replace you at any time, likely for less money.
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Giving 1.5 million salary is nothing for these people. It shouldn’t be mind boggling. They see revolutionary technology that has potential to change the world and is changing the world already. Making a gamble like that is worth it because losing is trivial compared to the upside of success. You are where you are and not where they are because your mind is boggled by winning strategies that are designed to arrive at…
But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it. At least the others can kinda bundle it as a service. After spending tens of billions in AI how has it impacted a single dollar on meta's revenue?
Zuckerberg either doesn't have the resolve for changing the business, or just keeps picking the wrong directions (depending on your biases). First Facebook tried to pivot into mobile, pushed really hard for a short time and then flopped. Then Facebook tried really hard to make the Metaverse a thing, and for a while, but eventually Meta stopped finding it interesting and significantly reduced investment. Then AI was t…
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It's really difficult to wrap one's head around the cash they're able to deploy.
They “deploy” much more than what they generate. Their cash position has gone from $44bn to $12bn in the first six months of the year and are now getting other people to pay for datacenters https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-taps-pimco-blue-owl-29...
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It's important to analyze decisions within the context at the time, not the modern context. When Facebook went into gaming, it was about the time they went public and they were in search of revenue. At the time, FB games were huge. It was the era of Farmville. Some thought that FB and Zynga would be the new Intel and MIcrosoft. This was also long before mobile gaming was really big so gaming wasn't an unreasonable be…
You're right about Instagram, I did forget them. That was a huge get. Was that skill or luck though?
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Indeed, for big valley tech companies it's crucial to have a new business developing in the wings which has plausible potential to be the "next big thing." They're desperate to keep their stock price from being evaluated solely on trailing twelve month revenue, so having a shiny, ephemeral hype-magnet to attract inflated growth expectations is essential. So far, it appears the psychology of investors allows the new t…
> as long as there's a new new thing to replace it as the aspirational vehicle. Like any good mark in a con game, tech investors want to believe. Yea, but it seems like the new new thing needs to get progressively bigger with each cycle, which is why I think the shell game is almost over. They really can't overpromise much more than they did with the AI hype-cycle. It feels like a startup valuation in that having a d…
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Indeed, for big valley tech companies it's crucial to have a new business developing in the wings which has plausible potential to be the "next big thing." They're desperate to keep their stock price from being evaluated solely on trailing twelve month revenue, so having a shiny, ephemeral hype-magnet to attract inflated growth expectations is essential. So far, it appears the psychology of investors allows the new t…
Or every investor just expects the other investors will fall for this, but the result is the same: number go up so buy more. It could be no one really falls for it at all.
It can take a long time for the stock market to actually be corrected but I know one thing and that is, bottom it would be corrected some day and maybe they would call it the bursting of a bubble
I'm somewhere in the middle on this, with regards to the ROI... this isn't the kind of thing where you see immediate reflection on quarterly returns... it's the kind of thing where if you don't hedge some bets, you're likely to completely die out from a generational shift. Facebook's product is eyeballs... they're being usurped on all sides between TikTok, X and BlueSky in terms of daily/regular users... They're comp…
> They're competing with Google, X, MS, OpenAI and others in terms of AI interactions Am I the only one that find the attempt to jam AI interactions into Meta's products useless and that it only detracts from the product? Like there'll be posts with comedy things and then there are suggested 'Ask Meta AI' about things the comedy mentions with earnest questions - it's not only irrelevant but I guess it's kind of funny…