foobar_______

Preach. I think I left a nearly identical comment yesterday in another thread. "well, the other companies do it too so they're not that bad" is absurdity. "that got shit on my couch, but he didn't shit in my mouth so he's not really that bad" just seems so misguided.

The marketing has really, really worked for so many developers that will proudly and unironically proclaim that Anthropic are the 'Good Guys'.

I am not sure about all your talk about Nazis and such - seems a bit much.

But I do agree with the general premise. Instead of Meta being seen as a signal for being a high-quality engineer, I hope the signal being sent is more like: engineer who is so money hungry they are willing to abandon almost all sense of responsibility and reasonable character.

Painful levels of irony. These people sit at their computer all day scheming and coding ways to grab any new bits of data they can with the intent of capturing everything they can about the user's friends, location, wealth, hobbies, etc. to push more targeted ads.

I never thought about it as obedience to authority, but ya maybe that is it. I still kind it would fall under the greed bucket where they are willing to submit to their corporate kings if it means they get more RSUs and the new car and the bigger house. Social media might be the single largest factor in the current disintegration of community and connectedness at scale.

Thanks for the answer. Hmm, that is what I expected, but that's totally logical but a shame that people who have any amount of self-reflection on their work's impact are the first targeted for layoffs.

Serious question - I know this will come off as inflammatory but I am genuinely curious. Do you ever talk to coworkers about the addictive, polarizing nature of Meta recommendation feed algorithms? There is pretty solid research around teen health (specially girls) around how many problems it causes.

Is the pay just so good you turn a blind eye? Honestly, I can understand that if I am being honest. But I don't see as many people being clear about this. I assume people are delusional on their impact for the dollar signs are so big they will look away from the hurt they help cause.

Thank you for the "real speak" section. Accurate and hilarious.

Agreed. they are better at the PR game. Some developers are grasping at straws looking for ways to not feel guilty and justify their usage of LLMs is from the "good guys". Anthropic is currently filling this role but eventually people will see behind the smoke and mirrors and release its not all that different from OpenAI or some of the other AI labs who are willing to sacrifice any amount of ethics if they mean they get the right paycheck or stroke their ego that they were on the team that built digital god.

Preach. The hypocrisy is startling. I think people started at these companies maybe years ago with "good intentions" and are willing to turn a blind eye. But now, given just how glaring clear it is, I don't think it is really excusable anymore. To be clear, people can work wherever they want including these companies but what kills me is the hypocrisy. They are pathological liars to themselves if they somehow think they aren't complicit.

This very closely resembles my philosophy. I too downplay vegan/veggie because I don't want to cause a stir.

well said. Thanks for this comment. I am trying to be more like this.

Same. I was hoping for this. As much as social media frustrates me, the content can be great at times. I want an aggregation tool where I have strict control on the output. Give me the content minus the addictive never ending scroll with inflammatory posts. Basically, I want a benevolent curation of media on my terms.

why don't they have donate pages or venmo QR codes at the concert? I am serious. I don't want more stuff. I don't need tshirts. I don't need trinkets. I legitimately love music and want to support, but it is so difficult. Best I can find is digital sales of an album that doesn't cost them any manufacturing/shipping costs.

Agreed. You can quit. That is always an option. "Gotta pay the bills" is definitely valid for some small subset of the us population but that certainly doesn't apply to software engineers in a hub like the bay or seattle. These people delude themselves into thinking they "must" have their ridiculous Meta pay to pay for their $2.5M house and their current lifestyle. Golden handcuffs and turn the blind eye to what they are doing.

I like your take. I see this same thing playing out across many parts of the world.

Dont hate the player hate the game

It is about incentives and rules of the "game" that drive things. Sure, there are a few evil people but the vast majority of it is normal people responding to broken rules/incentives. Probably you and I both fall in this category :)

Fatten up that wallet with 500K a year and tech stock RSUs and people pretty quickly forget about their morals. Seriously, they tell themselves the same story: "ah this is just temporary. I can make big money for a couple years then get out." But 2 years turns to 5, then they buy a house in the Bay area and now they're stuck. Same thing for Seattle.

I dream of the day when people wake up to see TikTok and Instagram are as bad or worse than smoking.

Agreed. Great summary. Postmodernism and everyone tearing down all systems to their roots is fun... until you have no structure left.

Maybe? I really don't know. I don't want to believe it but the data and just looking around in public and seeing the scroll addition seems to indicate otherwise?

How did you get into this? How would you recommend transitioning from FTE to this life?

I don't know how everyone doesn't see this. I pray. I hope. One day people look at you in complete repulsion and dumbfounded that we gave anyone, let kids unfettered access to social media. Absurdity.

I really appreciate this comment. Now in my 30s, I was not even aware of EA or Rationalist groups in my 20s but your description of a person high on the smell of their own farts and putting logic as king was me. The world is so chaotic that it felt good and right that I could lean on something "true" like logic. It took me to the "correct" answers according to logic but very misguided answers as I see them now. Humans are driven by emotions and the world is probabilistic so relying so heavily on logic just seems so misguided now that I'm older.

It has been clear from the beginning that Meta's supposed desire for an open source AI, is just a coping mechanism for the fact that got beat out of the gate. This is an attempt to commoditize AI and reduce OpenAI/Google/Whoever's advantage. It is effective, not doubt, but all this wankery about how noble they are for creating an open-source AI future is just bullshit.

Exactly. I barely know who this actress is. To me, it sounds like the tens of thousands of other white american voices. How is the remotely too similar?

So much negativity. Is it perfect? No. Is there room for improvement? Definitely. I don't know how you can get so fucking jaded that a demo like this doesn't at least make you a little bit excited or happy or feel awestruck at what humans have been able to accomplish?

You help me feel sane. People, it is a commercial. Nothing more. Don't get your panties in a bundle. If you don't like it, change the channel, don't buy their product, go outside on a hike. The things people get upset about today is fascinating. GO OUTSIDE

This is clear as day. If they got an early lead to the LLM/AI space like OpenAI did with ChatGPT, then things would be very different. Attributing the open source to "good will" and Meta being righteous seems like some mis-founded 16 year old's overly simplistic ideal of the world. Meta is a business. Period.

I agree with your analogy. Also, there is a quite a bit of "standing on the shoulders of giants" kind of thing going on. Every company's latest release will/should be a bit better than the models released before it. AI enthusiasts are getting a bit annoying - "we got a new leader boys!!!!*!" for each new model released.

Yeah if I had to stack rank 'obscene' energy consumption technologies, Bitcoin would be number 1 and AI would be pretty low on the list.