I don’t like to shit on people’s work, but given the amount of spam, fake accounts, and blatant abuse on their platform I do wonder what their oversight board actually does. A friend of mine had someone spoof their identity to write horrible things online, and it took two years, the police, and a letter from their MP to get Facebook to remove the profile. It’s a joke.

If you want a laugh, go back to their initial “Show HN” post. It made one person with the top comment rather infamous for being out of touch with his comment on “I could just rsync, why would I use this?”

Sometimes, I see some of the takes on here, and it’s hardly surprising that the fediverse isn’t particularly popular.

Spotify are somewhat responsible for their current position. They hired too many people, extended into markets they didn’t need to enter, and have a CEO that has blown money in places that didn’t need it. Let’s not forget that Spotify spent $300m on sponsoring FC Barcelona, which could have allowed Spotify to employ ALL of the employees it laid off for 1-2 years. Spotify had no need to give $200m to Joe Rogan, either! That’s half a billion spunked up the wall on decisions that have done nothing for the company but cause grief. Instead, they could have focused their efforts on paying more out to smaller artists that provide the long tail for their service, while also making deals to promote merch and tour dates where possible.

With that being said, if you think that Spotify didn’t play a huge part in making music streaming accessible you’re just being contrarian for no reason. They provided (at the time) a solid application, good connectivity with services like last.fm, and had the social connection sorted from the start. Once phones took off, Spotify removed the need for mp3’s for the majority of people, largely killing iTunes. Spotify was the winner of the music streaming wars.

Frankly, a lot of people were praising Spotify for their “good” severance package, but IMO shareholders should be livid, and should be calling for a new person at the helm.

But that’s practically true of any large tech company. It’s been conventional wisdom in the tech industry for over a decade that tech is cheap, people aren’t.

Do you think people actually want a progressive candidate?

The term “you get the politicians you deserve” is often correct, regardless of country and culture.

EDIT: Downvotes? I thought this place was better than Reddit… If you disagree, please highlight how the demand for progressive policies has been shown by the electorate…

It doesn’t surprise me all that much, as someone that works for a big tech company.

A small number of that will be IC’s and managers that keep the services going, alongside people that create FOH stuff. Alongside that, they’ll likely have a lot of people in data storage, data science, perhaps even research science. Put these across multiple continents and timezones, and you’ve likely got a few thousand.

The majority after this are likely upper management, sales and account staff (you’d be shocked at how many of these exist in media tech), and internal teams. Again, put these around the world, maybe even more so, as some account staff will work with people in local markets, so you’ll have people in dozens of countries.

Operationally, they need nowhere near this amount, but if you want to achieve “growth” you need all the supporting stuff.

Rarely. They’ll hire for some teams, but the roles were eliminated to directly reduce their headcount.

Companies want a revolving door of talent, but they also want fewer people…

Funny enough, that’s one of the reasons why big companies that heavily use AI didn’t initially invest heavily into LLM’s. They are known to hallucinate, and often hilariously badly, so it was hard for the likes of Google and co to put their rep behind something that’ll be very wrong.

As it turns out, people don’t care if your AI is racist, uses heavily amounts of PII, teaches you to make napalm, or gives you incorrect health advice for serious illnesses - if it can write a doc really well, then all is forgiven.

In many ways, it’s actually quite funny to project meaning and intent on AI, because it’s essentially a reflection of what it was trained on - our words. What’s not so funny is that the projection isn’t particularly nice…

I think it can definitely “work”, in that there will be a small number of people that use it. It won’t dominate any market, but it will exist, and it might even make some money. It’s ultimately a power play, by having an app in every market (video, social, maps, etc) he becomes more entrenched in tech.

It’s not an uncommon model, especially in smaller businesses that do a lot of things with a tiny bit of profit everywhere. With that being said, it requires competent leadership and an aligned team - and with Musk’s visible problems that won’t happen.

I liked Twitter. I know it’s a cesspit, but as a software engineer it was always the top company I wanted to work at. It didn’t work out (for several funny reasons), but for that selfish reason I’ll never forgive Musk.

IMO, Musk needs help. If he were a normal person, someone would have pushed him to leave work and find help. As the owner of three companies, responsible for tens of thousands of employees, no chance is he getting that help. He’s constantly baited and prodded by his fan boys, people like Rogan and Chappelle who can deal with that kind of fame, and the press that get content from his antics.

As for Twitter, I don’t see it dying, until it fails to have a use for Musk. My initial belief was that his “everything app” would use Twitter’s account system to get all of its users, and then he’d sell Twitter and continue with the users - but that app isn’t ever happening. It’s just something he’s desperate to ditch, but his vanity and poor mental health won’t let him do it. For that reason, it’ll just be a zombie app.

Europe is a huge continent. What do you mean, exactly?

The UK is in Europe, and in many cities here the public transport options are terrible, with driving being the only safe option, as cycling is very dangerous on our roads.

There are also huge parts of France, Italy, and Germany where public transport is poor, expensive, or infrequent.

The firing and subsequent rehire/board change was clearly orchestrated in a way to benefit Altman and Microsoft. I don’t have the hate boner for Microsoft that most Lemmy users have, but it’s not a particularly great sign of a healthy tech company your “owner” feels the need to pull a stunt like this.

Given that Google researchers recently found an insane amount of PII within GPT4, it’s probably the least clean AI in big tech today…

I know they don’t do bootcamp any more, but Facebook were perfectly set up to move people between divisions by not hiring for specific roles, and doing team matching over orientation. It was a system that worked well, and being able to switch teams easily meant that people could jump from WhatsApp to Instagram to Ads with minimal friction.

In terms of numbers, definitely, but a phased rollout could work if it meant keeping services in KTLO, and moving people out gradually as you slow down internal hiring. Sadly, companies find it easier to just sack everyone, and then hire again in a few months.

As a counter-point, what new services or products have any of the FAANG companies released that the average person uses, over the last few years?

Big tech was built on a handful of runaway successes, and building on moonshot ideas, allowing engineers to work on “the next big thing” without fear of liability.

Now, if it doesn’t work, you get laid off. At least if you worked for a startup, you’d get enough equity to make a ton of money if it works out…

Pichal is shit, but so are Zuck, Tim Cook, Andy Jassy, and the two at the helm at Netflix.

Honestly, this is just big tech all over. I don’t think there are many people that work at FAANG companies any more that feel things are better than they were even 3-4 years ago. They are no longer idealised, and CEO’s have decided to take company failures out on employees instead of their inability to target long-term success. I’ve friends at Amazon, Google, and Apple - all say that their “culture” is basically dead.

IMO, we’ve reached a point where all of the big names in tech are now out of ideas. None of them have innovated in recent years, outside of (maybe) AI, and the culture of supporting moonshot ideas (where someone can work on something new/exciting and not be personally liable if it doesn’t work out) is now dead with layoffs in these divisions. The only incentive that big tech has any more is pay, and with no long-term stability and pay decreasing over time, I think we’ll see a shift away from FAANG and towards the new breed of tech. FAANG will become the IBM and Oracle’s of tech, and things will move on.

Sadly, I think you’re absolutely right. This feels orchestrated in a way that allows a select few parties to look like visionaries, while eliminating others from getting in the way.

We do a lot of orchestration of closed environments, so that we can access critical data without worry of leaks. We use Spark and Scala for most of our applications, with step functions and custom EC2 instances to host our environments. This way, we build verticals that can scale with the amount of data we process.

If I’m perfectly honest, I don’t know how smart a move it is, considering our org just went through layoffs. We’re popular right now, but who knows how long for.

It can be interesting at times, but to be honest if I were really interested in it, I would go back and get my PhD so I could actually contribute. Sometimes, it feels like SWE’s are support roles, and science managers only really care that we are unblocking scientists from their work. They rarely give a shit if we release anything cool.

I work for Amazon as a software engineer, and primarily work on a mixture of LLM’s and compositional models. I work mostly with scientists and legal entities to ensure that we are able to reduce our footprint of invalid data (i.e. anything that includes deleted customer data, anything that is blocked online, things that are blocked in specific countries, etc). It’s basically data prep for training and evaluation, alongside in-model validation for specific patterns that indicate a model contains data it shouldn’t have (and then releasing a model that doesn’t have that data within a tight ETA).

It can be interesting at times, but the genuinely interesting work seems to happen on the science side of things. They do some cool stuff, but have their own battles to fight.

Probably as much as I care about most other people’s thoughts on AI. As someone that works in AI, 99% of the people making noise about it know fuck all about it, and are probably just as qualified as Barack Obama to have an opinion on it.