“How do we opt out?” - Meta employee
Poetic justice, or "dogfooding"
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, information load and things on THAT wave length the problem with that situation is obvious but I realised then that is not at all obvious to the average public. 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.
There is zero understanding or consensus of acceptable practices around that sort of thing baked into societal norms right now.
DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team matching). There's a reason why the average tenure is <2 years.
It's a toxic and fear based culture. You join, the people around you are already thinking how to scapegoat you. People gatekeep actual work and save it for political favorites and everyone else on the outside is stuck cooking up bullshit projects. If you do manage to find work on your own, people will immediately start scheming to steal it
I say this as someone self employed that burned almost $1000 on tokens last month. And had. A lot of fun doing it.
My cofounder and I get to “only” pay $200/mo to build our product while the hyperscalers burning tokens like crazy stave off price rises for people like us - thanks Zuck!
> 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 so many A.I. agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said.
Maybe the first to be laid off should be the ones that thought it made sense to track token consumption. Goodhart's Law doesn't even apply in this scenario because that's a dumb metric whether or not you're using it to evaluate employees.
You do have a choice, and by staying you are making it. Stop playing at being a victim.
No CAPTCHA, no Javascript, no DDoS directed at blog, no geoblocking
https://static.nytimes.com/narrated-articles/synthetic/artic...
Ford style assembly lines made the work of the factory workers more miserable. Partially automated cashier did the same thing.
I don't think there is any point in trying to resist automation, as the efficiency benefits are too important.
Ooof. Famous last words.
I don't understand why he's struggling so hard with this stuff. AI shouldn't be forced on its employees or users. It should be something available to them, but not forced. I don't understand why he's burning time on so many bizarre things. There's plenty of things that could yield dividends with LLMs like optimizing them for speed while retaining serious accuracy, by coming up with new techniques. If he did that, and made a model that was exceptional at programming, he could compete with Claude Code easily, or Codex. Instead, I get the feeling he has no idea what he wants and is just burning funds endlessly.
He could have had a cool Meta Verse, but he also could have just bought Second Life and had it prebuilt. Now he technically has the pieces, but not the focus he needs. Bro needs to delegate this fire to someone else before the ship sinks.
If I didn't know better, the memes about him being a robot are actually true, and there's a safeguard that sabotages him from making any usable AI as a failsafe to prevent him from building a primitive AI inferior to himself that could kill humanity, plot twist is he doesn't know he's AI.
- Renamed a well known brand. - Wasted billions of dollars on cartoonish third grade glitchy and buggy VR world claiming it's the future.
And now he's all in on AI and now models are closed sources. Because.
My current theory of tech layoffs is that over the last decade or so, churn-inducing practices like stack-ranking have gone out of vogue. One can speculate as to why this happened. Perhaps generational made middle management unwilling to do the dirty work? Nevertheless it happened.
However, companies still want to, and some would argue need to, eliminate low performers, so now they periodically do a companywide reduction in force and frame it with whatever justification is handy, macroeconomic conditions, AI, whatever.
This hypothesis would explain phenomena like companies hiring aggressively during or after a layoff, and why the layoffs keep happening year after year.
Also, avoid using Meta Pay aka Facebook Payments, where a user can send a payment to another user via the Messenger app. Someone sent me money a few weeks ago, and a two weeks alter they still have the payment marked as "Completed" on the sending side, and "Cancelled" on the receiving side. I told the sender to just do a chargeback with their bank because Facebook basically stole the money. Don't use Meta Pay for sending payments to anyone. Then when you try to open a "case" about it, you call a call center in Indonesia and the people have no access to see anything about the transaction, they just send it up the chain, only to have an automated response telling you to do something that the web site doesn't even offer as an option. I don't think there is any humans in the loop, besides the Indonesian call center that has no access to any of what you're calling about.
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/nbc-5-responds/meta-users-contin...
I think the last good move Meta made was buying IG. Maybe not good for IG users but absolutely a great move for Meta. Not quite as good as Google buying Youtube but it's up there. Best $1 billion any company has probably spent.
But Facebook is a graveyard of conspiracy theory Debras, anti-vaxxers and your racist uncle just posting links all day. Sharing links was a contentious decision and it clearly improves short-term engagement but (IMHO) it destroys the platfrom's initial purpose of keeping in touch with friends and family.
Let's not forget too that Meta spent probably billions on building its own crypto (ie Libra). But that was just a taste of what was to come. The Metaverse was one of the largest boondoggles in corporate history. $70B+ with no product-market fit. It was an entirely ego-driven "build it and theyw ill come" moment from somebody who doesn't know waht to do with the empire he's built who is surrounded by Yes Men.
Facebook and AI feels a lot like Microsoft and mobile. Microsoft just completely missed the boat based on poor leadership and conflicting priorities (eg wanting one Windows code base for all devices). Facebook has a huge corpus of human communication and engagement, which should be a treasure trove for building AI but I don't think anybody really believes Meta knows what they're doing or will get anywhere doing it.
I've seen in this in big tech companies: big initatives get well-funded. Seasoned veterans swoop in and cash the fattest checks (in bonus stock) until the entire thing falls apart. Think Google Wave.
What I really think is going to kill these companies is the corporate layoffs or, rather, what they represent. They represent big tech companies turning into Corporate America where politics defines your careers, the company seems incapable of doing anything due to competing fiefdoms (a la Intel) and middle management just reorganizes every 6-12 months so nobody in management ever faces the consequences of their actions.
Monitoring your employees keystrokes with AI ins't going to help either. But management (or the consultants they end up paying) are never going to come to the conclusion that the problem is management.
Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other)
The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency.
For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the world", and what we did mattered. Sure the exhorbitant salaries and constantly rising stock value didn't hurt, but honestly other than the FIRE cultists, for most of us the difference between 200k/year and 800k/year didn't feel much day to day (other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg). No, most people were missionaries not mercanaries.
2021 was the first crack. The comps went crazy, half the industry turned over, and the ones who didn't felt a bitter sting where it became blatantly clear that all the new arrivals were just in it for the $$$, and the companies were willing to pay for the backfills but not to reward the loyalty of the missionaries.
Then came the yearly layoffs, chipping away further, and reminding every employee that they're at the mercy of a spreadsheet and the whims of people 3 levels above them in the org chart, in spite of the economic reality of their product, or their personal productivity.
And now we're here, and it's clear that all of the above is still relevant. The old-timers that hung around see that their personal output doesn't matter, their product's PnL doesn't matter. All that matters is 1) the company's AI strategy (and if they're not part of it, they're secondary), and 2) tokenmaxing.
How can anyone find joy in this environment unless they're purely in it for the comp?
I couldn't. I left my big tech job in December after 15 years, and have not been this happy at work since pre-COVID.
