Yes, anyone who wants to protest any use of AI whatsoever in software development, just on pure principle, is on the fringe at this point. It is a tool and needs to be used responsibly but it’s no longer credible to say that it has no use or can’t be used responsibly.

Wow I’m starting to feel bad about that time I asked AI to make a joke about scatology & eschatology sounding similar.

From good ol’ Liberal Fig Leaves, LLC

Displaying tit can lose 70% again.

I would like to think that not every prestigious filmmaker is vulnerable to the AI propaganda, but

What a condescending opener. Whatever you think of George Lucas, he’s made some cool stuff, he did it the old fashioned way, and he’s not constrained by resources. But rather than listen to what he has to say on the topic, this guy begins with the presumption that no, George must be deluded from swallowing propaganda.

I’m hardly George Lucas’s biggest fan but this writer can blow me.

I agree with everything that you’re saying and yes they have a lot of money. Do you see what I’m saying about how this could require millions and millions of moderators at the kind of scale they operate? A significant portion of humanity is on social media.

Meta earns about $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit. How many mods would $60bil actually buy?

Let’s work with a total cost of $50k per moderator. This is very conservative since only a fraction of that would be salary (the rest insurance, HR, management, taxes, equipment, etc).

If they spent their entire profit on mods, they could hire 1.2 million. Is that enough to moderate several billion? Maybe.

Now should we consider costs they could actually sustain? Taking their entire profit to zero is, understandably, not possible for any company. I think this is where most people just wave their hand and say “who cares” or “fuck em” or just assumes they have infinite money.

But to seriously consider this… it’s just a very big challenge for anyone to pull off.

Yes it’s a thing with more than one challenge.

What would 200 million moderators cost? At a modest salary of $50k annually it’s in the trillions. They literally couldn’t pay that.

Fair enough. But I think we’d be just as upset to see pedos organizing in unpaid content.

I want to be clear I’m not promoting Meta’s decision here by any stretch.

There is an interesting problem with human moderators though. Once the entire population of Earth is posting on social media, are there enough humans to ever moderate it? You might say oh sure, because the average person might only post occasionally and human moderators could be dedicated full time so they’d outweigh users by factors. But that kind of ignores influencers who also generate content full time.

I really don’t see how there will ever be enough humans to do this right. Or if there are, they will have to number in the hundreds of millions to keep up. The bit about all humans posting is not really hyperbolic at all. Zuckerberg already has 1 billion of us.

I disagree - there’s a massive corpus of science fiction behind it. Protomolecule!!

Indeed. Your point?

So typical of these clickbait headlines. Every time I see a headline about how someone melted down, it turns out to be someone who sputtered for half a moment in the middle of an argument. Same for any headline talking about how someone was “absolutely eviscerated” in a debate. Setting aside the metaphorical license, it’s always just a case where their opponent made a good point somewhere during an argument. There might be no reaction from anyone. Just whoever agrees with that point will say “yes he was eviscerated.”

Fucking clickbait.

“just made up” if you mean arbitrarily defined, sure. It’s not like a “bit” that has an irreducible objective definition.

However it does have a definition in whatever context you’re looking at and is very real, so I can’t really agree with your whole comment.

Yes the definition could be changed to jack up prices, but prices can also just be changed.

Dollars are “just made up” too and have varying value in different contexts to different parties. Are they “not real?” Would we hand wave away the entire financial section of the news and say bah, these “dollars” are fake anyway?

For some people, there is no difference between $1000 and $3000. Both are amounts they won’t miss, and availability of the SteamBox is low right now so they’re happy to pay it to get faster access. Tell them they can get a more powerful gaming PC for $3000 and they don’t care. They want to try the Steambox and money is no object.

Basically, don’t necessarily attribute to stupidity what can also be explained by wealth.

Yeah these interaction are becoming quite fraught because there is extreme danger of AI use just shifting the burden from one person to another. That guy wrote the code super fast with AI, but you had to do an additional round trip during code review with him to eliminate that weirdness. He gets a bonus for doing twice the work in half the time, you get nothing.

You didn’t touch a nerve. I’m not close to anyone there and couldn’t really care less. You just revealed profound ignorance. We don’t have perspectives to share because you don’t have one. Your point of view is made up of narratives you’ve seen other people articulate online, and I’ve read the same stuff. I’m not an apologist because my point of view is better informed and more complex than your own. Maybe you’ll grow to a point of understanding the difference. I hope you do. Because having life and death certainty about things you aren’t directly informed about is a dangerous thing.

Oh well, you should actually talk to some of them sometime. A lot of very bright, otherwise decent kids go straight from college to Meta and they think they’ll be doing good. One guy I knew spent his entire job working at keeping ISIS from using Facebook to organize. He didn’t go home at night thinking he was a terrible person.

Of course Meta is just a caricature of an evil corporation from a distance but it becomes more complex the closer you get to it.

With the great reality distortion field they had going there, the problem for a lot of staff was not ethics but perception. They were good people thinking they were doing good work but lacked perspective (not ethics themselves).

Of course someone can say “everyone should know FB is evil, there’s no excuse” but this is a classic case of “I can’t imagine why anyone would ever think something different than what I think.” Which, in itself, is just a lack of perspective. Funny how basically all humans suffer from that. You can chip away at this problem by asking yourself “why would a reasonable person think that?” instead of just going around saying “well then you’re stupid / evil” anytime anything outside your POV comes along.

Hackathons are not working more. They’re supposed to be a liberal period to work on whatever seems interesting to the workers. In Meta’s early days, they were a big part of their culture and Zuck in particular fed on them.

I don’t expect everyone to know anything about Silicon Valley hackathons, but no, they’re not just “more work.” However when people are already crushed by what’s going on at work, they don’t have a lot of creative energy just looking for an outlet.

In my experience, no one working for Meta does so for “spirit.” There are two kinds of people there:

1. Extremely smart and business savvy, there to make lots of money and pretty good at doing so. These people tend to be a little older and more cutthroat. They don’t have “spirit” to be crushed. They will stay or leave on financials alone.

2. Younger crowd, largely straight from college, working across product, engineering, and other operations roles. These folks don’t have “spirit” per se - they have operated on large paychecks and a high energy work environment full of the brainy types they roomed with at college. A posh office full of free amenities is half of what kept them going and the other half was youthful hormones fueled by each other and a general sense of being on top of the world by virtue of working there.

THAT last part has been crushed, but it is not what I would call “spirit” or “soul.” More like a collective delusion that fed on its own momentum. Like anything else so divorced from reality, it was always going to crash. It’s amazing they kept it going as long as they did.