this seems a little hyperbolic without knowing details. they probably already cut around 5% every year for performance anyway (their performance reviews probably just came out). i could pretty easily see the rest of the reduction being unprofitable businesses like VR that they don't want to invest in anymore, it might not be due to AI at all
Given facebook/Zuckerberg’s history it’s tough to give them the benefit of the doubt. From day one it’s been ruthless, harmful ambitions and business practices. It is a bad company that does bad things.
They also burn capital at insane rates on projects nobody wants then fire everybody involved (see: the metaverse, the very reason they rebranded to that dumb name)
I can pretty much agree with everything you said in the first line
but for the second, I guess I don't consider that terrible? they make risky bets, pay people tons and tons of money to try them, then if it doesn't work out they shut down the projects and let the people go? that feels like every startup except the employees actually get compensated. if that's driving the extra layoffs, it's hard to feel too bad for people who have probably been paid millions already
who cares? I'm saying the people that take the jobs for the incredibly risky bets (and everyone knows what is risky) understand the tradeoff--if the bet doesn't work their job is at risk. In the meantime they get paid millions of dollars. That seems like a fair situation to me
You make fair points there. I think what bothers me is that they can be so irresponsible with money/their projects, but still somehow manage to make very high margins, and yet they continue to just lay off thousands at a time like this repeatedly. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it other than typical “number go up” nonsense.
The fact is Facebook had serious red flags going up that the AI boom has papered over (for now?) as well. They don’t make a lot of sense to me.
I don’t know how to tie this all together to be honest. It’s a lot of feelings/emotional response. But frankly it just feels cruel how they treat their employees and our society, so it colors my perception of everything they do.
meta has laid off 34,800 people in just the large scale rounds we know about in the past 5 years.
they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross.
There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.
there's quite a bit loaded in your term of "computer" that doesn't really work. if a watch or headphones can eventually be called a computer, then a software-based car running on a battery can certainly fit under that definition.
Right, but clearly the tech & regulatory environment was such that the use of a general purpose computer beyond the infotainment screens wasn’t going to add enough value.
If self-driving had worked, and a fully vertically integrated tech stack could have controlled your “mobile experience” end-to-end, maybe a different story.
“Siri, take me to pick up Grandma from her flight. Let me know when she lands and send her an iMessage when we’re five minutes away.”
I feel like your original comment was phrased as "Apple wouldn't build this", when in reality I think (we might mostly agree) is that they would build it ideally, but it might be too early or it might not be a good strategic business to be in.
Outside of the premium brand/build quality, I think Tesla was actually a successful proof of concept of what they could have done or could do. Computer/software-powered, battery-charged, integrated hardware/software, principled product tradeoffs, new retail model, advances in charging technology. Big parallels to the first iPhone. You even heard the same complaints from consumers when the first iphone came out ("I want my buttons/physical controls back", "The battery/range dies too quickly"). Apple may not want to be in the car business, but I think Tesla showed that cars could just be computers now
Indeed, Tesla is probably the bull case for an “Apple Car”. IIRC there were rumors a decade ago that Apple even considered buying Tesla rather than develop “Titan” entirely in-house.
But I think Tesla shows the limits of Apple’s approach in the car market: Imagine a Model S that is maybe 50% better across design, materials, features, UX. That’s still not a “leapfrog” product the way the iPhone was years ahead of the smartphone competition when it was launched. It couldn’t justify also being 50% more expensive.
it's any technical specialist in any field in my experience. my partner is a doctor (not a kind that needs great people skills) and I see the same problems. luckily I have worked with many many developers so it's quite easy to deal with
Lots of people are super sensitive to the “fishiness” of fish sauce. I can taste it with just a few drops in a large dish. I love it now, but it took a while to get used to
Nah fish sauce is different. You can give most midwesterners fish and chips or worcestershire and they’ll be fine with it. But many will find fish sauce initially pungent and repulsive until they get used to it
the top level comment is fine. the lame guy's comment was a promotional chatgpt-generated useless tl;dr that added zero information and linked to his own blog post
This whole thread is trainwreck. Your initial comment is three simple sentences with very little room for misunderstanding yet here we are. Then there is a comment on that comment which is self-promotion of LLM-trash published as blog post. One would think should an easy donwvote, but it is not. Then, a dude who pointed out this lame self-promotion is donwvoted into oblivion, because what? Bunch of people cannot think of three seconds and use their eyes to try to understand what's lame about that?
"this" doesn't indicate which one it's referring to. Obviously they understand the effects of "move fast and break things", so it makes sense it would refer to the other one. Doubly so they quoted one but not the other, which is often done in contexts like this to indicate you're repeating it verbatim because you don't understand it well enough to paraphrase.
In that case, scrolling down, the other replies don't get it quite right either. An alternate way of phrasing that one would be "innovation over stability/perfectionism". It came from Facebook, where users can tolerate some minor breakage, in an era when they were cranking out all sorts features and overtaking MySpace. I think the idea is generally understood to be a good thing in the startup stage where the goal is to disrupt existing competition - if you take too long to get to market, whatever you're doing might not matter anymore.
Crazy that someone would use this pseudonym while at the same time saying that all society's problems are caused by socialist and Communist conspiracy.
I don't really understand where you are going with the fundamentalist vs. empiricist holy war narrative. Medical science is very empiricist, but it is conservative.
Yes they will miss rare cases or where symptoms aren't quantifiable or where no understood biological mechanism exists. Yes you can take on research and treatment yourself with the risk associated. No a bunch of anecdotal evidence on experimental treatments do not substitute for structured research. No you won't come back here in 3 years if you develop serious side effects that would have been identified in clinical trials and tell everyone you were wrong.
’fundamentalist’ has religious connotations which I did not intend, I meant deduction from first principles not foundational orthodoxy. My expression was there was tension not completely discrete factions, there is clearly some empiricism used in medicine. One of the difficulties in getting published is defending a position and it’s easier to do this with a mechanism of action which I think slows things down too much. The pace of progress on my conditions might as well be none at all. Still no cure for a condition that’s been known about since Hippocrates.
So I’ve been doing this for over 4 years now, and commenting on this with this account for a bit less than that, so far no serious unwanted side effects other than the usual ones for semaglutide which went away. Of course that has a survivorship bias but in the forums people do often tell others what they’re about to try and we would notice if they stopped showing up.
> My expression was there was tension not completely discrete factions, there is clearly some empiricism used in medicine. One of the difficulties in getting published is defending a position and it’s easier to do this with a mechanism of action which I think slows things down too much.
There is always tension between objectives in real-world systems. There are essentially two frontiers in our healthcare system--a core of educated professionals that are conservative and move slowly with ample evidence behind decisions, and a wide range of laymen who are comfortable with personal risk (e.g. bodybuilding community). I have respect for both, and they work together. The core will always have too many false negatives and the horizon group will have too many false positives. Saying the balance right now slows things down too much needs more support as an argument, there will always be things on the roadmap for medicine and there will always be edge cases that can't get addressed perfectly
From what I've seen medical researchers are champing at the bit for new areas of treatment that they think are promising and they just need the smallest amount of convincing evidence to research. If they don't have it for something you think is valuable, collect the information in a systematic way and find someone to send it to.
I totally agree. When I was going to school while working, I'd often stay late, or come in on weekends (and stay late). I loved that feeling of peacefulness. Same feeling I got when I would take a walk for a break while staying up for an all nighter coding in the computer lab in university. I think those horror-ish feelings (and same with the dystoptian pictures of american suburbs), really only work if you haven't actually experienced those places.
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