Peak shitpost. Well played.

May 19, 2026 3:00 PM _Meta Employees Are Scrambling to Use Up Benefits Ahead of Ahead of Meta’s latest round of mass layoffs tomorrow, some employees are deserting offices, abandoning their work, and loading up on perks they might soon lose, several people at the company tell WIRED.

Two employees describe a widespread rush to use up an annual $2,000 flexible benefit, which can cover a variety of expenses including health and wellness activities. A separate triennial credit of $200 toward the purchase of audio gear has led to a scramble to purchase Apple AirPods and other headphones. Another source says Meta offices have been largely empty this week, as people prioritize polishing their résumés and gather offsite to commiserate with friends for what may be their final time as colleagues. Employees are variously “paralyzed,” “coasting,” and “panicked,” sources say.

Meta plans to lay off about 10 percent of its nearly 80,000 employees on Wednesday, with notices going out to affected workers’ personal and corporate email addresses at 4 am Singapore, London, or San Francisco time depending on their location, according to a company-wide memo sent on Monday. The cuts are coming at a time when the social media giant behind Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook is enjoying record-high profits.

But CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists that the company must free up cash to invest in AI data centers, and that Meta can perform just as well with fewer employees because of AI technologies that augment human labor.

Are you a current or former Meta employee who wants to talk about what’s happening? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at peard33.24 and ChaoticGoode.12. Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. The company has undergone three previous large rounds of layoffs since 2022, including as part of Meta’s one-time “year of efficiency” drive in 2023. But even though the latest round is smaller than a couple of those, it is drawing widespread scrutiny because it comes at a time of societal anxiety about AI’s impact on jobs.

Inside Meta, the imminent cuts are among several concerns that have sunk morale to unprecedented depths, according to 16 current and former employees who recently spoke to WIRED. Employees also have been frustrated by being “drafted” onto a new AI team without any choice and the rollout of surveillance software that tracks US workers’ laptop use to train AI models.

Meta also plans to internally restructure as it conducts sweeping layoffs, transferring 7,000 remaining staff to “AI initiatives” and converting more managers into individual contributors. That would bring the total number of those affected—either laid off or placed in a new role—to 20 percent of the current workforce, Reuters reported on Monday. WIRED independently confirmed this reporting. Some parts of the company have been told they won’t be affected at all.

But in recent days, employees who are bracing for changes have shared checklists internally about benefits to take advantage of, and are saving documents such as performance reviews and pay stubs, according to one worker. Some teams are meeting up at bars and restaurants near Meta offices in New York and Menlo Park on Tuesday and Wednesday to eat and drink away their sorrows, several employees said. Management has encouraged employees not to come into offices on Wednesday.

Update, May 19, 11:40 PM EDT: WIRED corrected the time zones when layoff notices will be emailed. _

A minor one and a component of Vitamin B12.

Have a normal, balanced diet if you aren’t extremely active. So yeah, just eat a banana. :)

I run a lot and a sweat a lot, so my electrolyte loss is fairly high. (You can see the buildup of salts on my gear after it dries and before I wash it.) Electrolyte supplements are great for athletes that can’t practically make up the losses with regular food intake.

But… To say that Gatorade and other electrolyte drinks are overused by people who aren’t active is an understatement. Many people simply do not need the extra boost of sugar and salts and it’s just going to get pissed out anyway.

The reason I am a bit vocal about this is that 1. People should actually eat a decent diet just to get these basic salts and 2. Electrolyte supplements are awesome, extremely basic but extremely overused. They are extremely important, but not in the way marketing departments say they are.

Sodium chloride is not the only electrolyte the body needs. It’s fairly important to keep a healthy balance: https://medlineplus.gov/fluidandelectrolytebalance.html

Horses, generally, really like apples.

Electrolytes are electrolytes. Your horse gets a fuck ton more salt and no sugar, but it’s basically all the same shit at similar ratios. The electrolyte compounds all need to be bioavailable so there shouldn’t be major differences there. The biggest difference is likely purity and contamination tolerances. (Contamination would be things like insects, small rocks or sand, etc: Things that would still be non-toxic, but generally reduced for human consumption.)

Edit: Still don’t drink the stuff. The ingredients are scaled for an ~1100lb animal so it should be a no-brainer to get the Gatorade instead.

Her wallet probably feels fine though.

Magnets, maybe.

Moab, I think.

Yeah, its a hell of an experience many people should have. (Many people probably also shouldn’t.) At the core of it all, I believe that being able to view problems through a very different lense is a big part of how psychedelics work when used for deep therapy. In many cases, I could see and interact with my emotions and feelings like they were an independent thing. I could almost visualize and touch my own emotions. Being able to see through my problems and get closure for issues that were supposed to be long in my past was a very beautiful thing. Trippy stuff, quite literally.

Also, (and this is really for others that are reading this) I am not really joking with my personification of a mushroom. I used to think that was just some crazy burned-out hippy talk, but there is so much more to it than that. Yes. A mushroom talking is absolutely a hallucination. That isn’t what that literally is though…

It’s more of a very primal, internal dialogue. It’s like the voice that we choose not to listen to when we have a “gut feeling” about something and can’t vocalize the concern. It’s the voice in your head that always knows the right decisions to make even if we brush it off through a normal day. That is the mushroom talking and it’s got a really powerful voice if you ever choose to follow Alice down that rabbit hole far enough.

I attribute mushrooms to finally breaking my years long journey as a fairly committed alcoholic.

The decisions or realizations people can have during an intense trip tend to be really sticky for a very long time regardless if it’s a good trip or a bad one. It’s the nature of the beast.

But mushrooms be like you described sometimes. I won’t go near the dosages I was taking when I was kicking booze. 1-2 grams every once in a while is just fine for me.

After my last power trip (+5 grams) I saw what I needed to see and probably will never go in that range again. It was a life changing trip and thankfully not a bad one. However, when the mushrooms speak to you like that, you listen. They told me I was done and I was ready to heal on my own.

LPT, keep a stopwatch going for psychedelics. I’ll start a timer on my phone when I drop and it helps snap me out of any kind of time related disorientation as I peak. For your average time dilation stuff, it’s awesome. If I can’t see my phone, then time probably is the last thing on my mind.

Japan seems to be having more success: https://www.futura-sciences.com/en/this-new-japanese-weapon-can-neutralize-the-fastest-machine-ever-created_17488/

Still, the technical challenges are exactly the same. While I can’t find many more details, it being ship mounted is a significant step forward and it seems to imply that some of the more serious issues have been solved. (A demonstration is just a demonstration and anything other than it being able to hit a target ship is just speculation.)

000, 666 and 900-999 are invalid area numbers and any digit group of all zeros is also invalid. Thanks for playing!

I am making a slightly different point and have a bias to this perspective: https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/publications/SD/19230.pdf

I am saying that an SSN can be part of a larger validation scheme, not the only key to the castle. Specifically for government sites, SSNs can be linked to IRS data to verify places of last residence. A person generally needs to verify multiple items that are referenced by the SSN before basic authentication can be established and set by the user. (This is part of the full Authentication, Authorization and Access Control triad.)

An SSN is just a broad level identifier. If you look at many laws around the release of SSNs, the redaction is usually in place to prevent the linking of different documents and other data points.

If I released my SSN in this chat, I could be fully doxxed in a matter of seconds. It’s mainly because there are many legal systems in place that use an SSN as a primary key, of sorts. (It’s a bit more than that, as SSNs can be duplicated in some circumstances.)

So to say, at a high level, an SSN is considered private is absolutely correct. However, it’s so easily referenced and obtainable it really isn’t fully private either.

If I was to generate a full list of every possible SSN in the US (which I have done, multiple times), that list is effectively useless to anyone who obtains a copy of it. So, by itself, an SSN is effectively public.

SSNs are generally considered public information but how the SSN is linked to other information is usually the more difficult bit to find and it’s generally pay-walled. (Any jackass with a business license and a credit card can usually buy background check information for ‘hiring’.)

But no, it shouldn’t be solely used for authentication. That is just dumb. However, it can be used as part of a larger verification and validation scheme while building authentication/authorization profiles. In most systems that I have seen that use full or partial SSNs, it is always linked to several other identifiers that need to match.

Memes are the communist gateway drug.

I have one highschool GPA.

Sick! That would be a fun show. I was able to catch (probably) one of the last Sasha and Digweed shows that are probably ever going to happen and it was a good throwback to younger times.

Seeing artists now that I listened to during the birth of the rave music scene, now that I can afford it, is amazing. Unfortunately, it reminds me of how old I am. The last Sasha and Digweed show was packed full of people my age and it was exactly like an old-school wearhouse party. (The after-party even went to 6-7AM.)

(I didn’t take them) But we even had random people basically just shoving free pills (supposedly molly) at us too. Chances are it wasn’t malicious, but rarher more of a “spread the love” vibe.