As a person working at social media I support this as well. I'm a hypocrite. I admit, but the pay is too good to find alternative.
Terms like "DAU" or "engagement" is common in our field and the primary objective is how to make users spend more time on our platform. We don't take safety or mental health seriously internally but only externally for PR reasons.
CEOs won't change that because the more time user spends on the platform, the more ad revenue it brings.
Try "I'm too greedy". You're the actor with the free will here. The subject of the sentencd shouldn't be "the pay". That is just an amount, a sum, that exists - neither too high nor too low. That is all in the eye of the beholder.
Individual action means absolutely nothing. This person shouldn’t be disparaged for making money for themselves and their family. Every single big corp that pays well is creating the torment nexus. You have to pick your poison. I personally draw the line at missiles and mass surveillance.
You may want to view action and sphere of influence. Does an individual have international or national influence? Probably not. How about within their community, home, or person? Probably, yes.
I want a good society and I think that’s will be made up of good individuals making individual action. So to me, this all starts at home with the individual’s sphere of influence.
The point of capitalism is that it incentivizes behavior at a large scale through the allocation of capital. That behavior could be bad or good.
The way to make sure that behavior isnt bad is to regulate the economy to ban it. Not to scold people who follow those incentives but then do nothing about the actual incentive structure
This is so sad to read. Knowing that the people actively making every aspect of life more monetized and addictive are acutely aware of the harm they create, yet are motivated by such base selfishness that they can ignore all that for the paycheck.
It recognise addiction (limited agency vs influence) and monetisation (economic rewards the primary means to influence behaviour) as problematic. It kind made “doing bad for pay” a premise of the system.
Large pay-checks incentivising bad behaviour is exactly another observable outcome of the same systemic issue.
I have yet to find examples of high pay where the pay is not actually to compensate for an immoral job, one way or another.
If you had to choose between two identical jobs and salary at a company but at big tobacco vs a hospital, which would you choose? I think most people would pick the hospital. Hence the only reason people work at big tobacco is either because of a genuine interest in their product (rare IMHO) OR because the pay is higher.
This applies to big tech too.
I am very curious if people here agree with my reasoning.
I worked at Russia's largest social media company as the founding Android developer. I quit as soon as I realized it was only going to get worse from now on after an acquisition and a very noticeable shift in user treatment. But that job was never about the money for me. The salary was just a nice yet optional bonus.
You don't sound psychopathic so I'm genuinely curious what you do with your money to keep your conscious clean.
Bevause I think your salary is practically blood money at this point.
Blood of the additional instagram girls with anorexia.
The additional children with severe myopia.
The additional people murdered by persons radicalized by media that had to polarize news to survive the loss in readership or by the false advertising of quality control on hate speech.
As a avid user of Tailwind and one who purchased Tailwind CSS Plus, it's very sad to hear.
OSS without founders having it's own managed software company is always a difficult position. (e.g. database vendors open source but also have their own company providing managed service and support allowing sustainable development). Hope of getting strong support from companies is unsustainable.
Curious what should be the business model for a library something like tailwind?
They could add a premium features but entry users not allowed to use certain features is a bad experience
Ops cost to number of server to manage is logarithmic but cloud cost is linear, so there's an intersection it starts to make less sense for cloud. Also equipment depreciation is tax deductible whereas cloud bill isn't. A year of EC2 instance bill is comparable to buying the equivalent server
Also there are vendors renting out datacenters so you do less of hardware management.
Having worked at two companies spending 250M+ on cloud bills alone, they try hard to decouple from cloud but many things are vendor locked
Hybrid has been the answer to both. It shouldn't be a binary decision. stateless compute workload can fairly easily be offloaded to private cloud.
> Also equipment depreciation is tax deductible whereas cloud bill isn't.
Genuine question out curiosity (I have a master in finance, but never practiced it) -- aren't both the cloud bill and depreciation all tax deductible, eventually? the bill 100% in that year and the depreciation spread over multiple years?
> Hybrid has been the answer to both. It shouldn't be a binary decision. stateless compute workload can fairly easily be offloaded to private cloud.
Can you elaborate on that? I'm studying for saa-c03, and I was shocked by how expensive egress out of aws can be.
It doesn't mention mistranslating, so it's difficult to know the root of the problem is AI "struggling".
> It doesn't follow our translation guidelines.
> It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost.
I believe this is the root of the problem. There are define processes and guidelines, and LLM isn't following it. Whether these guidelines were prompted or not is unclear but regardless it should've been verified by the community leaders before it's GA'ed
That's not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that LLMs just can't constitute a punctually Japanese understanding of text like that guideline and speak in Japanese with native fluency no matter what. I just know this from knowing both sides of English-Japanese language pair. And I find that somewhat fascinating in a sense.
I'm surprised by that. I use ChatGPT for communication with Japanese clients and I was mistaken for a native speaker more than once. I make almost no corrections other than changing the punctuation from western to fullwidth, although to be fair it's mostly simple and technical language.
Wow. That's crazy. I would be very interested in a blog post on this subject if you ever wrote one. I wonder how this affects the perception of LLMs in Japan
I took this to mean it's not translating things consistently. Like, a button in Firefox might say "Show all downloads" or "Open previous windows and tabs". These were localized a certain way, but an AI has no ability to check that. It will just translate them anew, which might be the same or it might translate it to something synonymous, but which then confuses users searching for the "Display all downloads" button or whatever.
Curious to know how's the development experience been post-migration?
Was there additional friction due to lack of tooling in on-prem that would otherwise available in the cloud env for example?
The founders of the company still have a controlling stake in the business. External shareholders have little leverage.
Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten both Gmail and Google+. But more importantly, it allowed them to offer much higher total comp packages by issuing more stock on the go. I think they're prisoners of the stock market only insofar that if the stock stops going up, they're gonna have a harder time hiring and retaining talent.
In a way, it's the employees holding the company hostage. They're simultaneously complaining about innocence lost and stating their implicit preference for this outcome by demanding top-of-the-line comp.
If you want to be paid the same as at Microsoft or Facebook, you become Microsoft or Facebook.
> Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten ... Gmail
And in retrospect, was that really a good thing? Short-term, yes - I remember how much better it was than the alternatives. Long-term, we ended up in a situation where email = GMail for most users, and this in turn gives Google undue leverage and strangles competition.
It's the sad reality of the society we live in. Money matters the most. Nothing else.
Kind people always get taken advantage of at work. Others take credit and then left abandoned once there's no more value to the company. I guess that's just capitalism.
Agreed. We call those people assholes. We try our best to avoid hiring those people and we weed them out of our company as fast as possible if they're discovered. We also try to have as flat a structure as possible so nobody is taking credit for anyone else's work and ideally many of us are working together so we all share the glory or frustration when something goes well or not.
I do think the flat hierarchy thing is commendable for many reasons.
That said, don't think that just because you (try to) have few bosses that there isn't some form of hierarchy in which people don't take credit for other people's work.
Sure, maybe there's no boss by title that people suck up to and take credit for stuff to look good to them. But there very definitely will be the "alphas" in the group that everyone looks up to and wants to look good to and the taking credit for stuff will be done to impress those people.
So, if you weed out this kind of stuff successfully well enough, again, I commend you. But I doubt it's as complete as you may want to think. It's just a different looking game of favours and sucking up to with less easily visible (can't just look at title to figure out who to suck up to) lines.
For some people this will be positive as they're good at figuring out who to suck up to in that situation while others may need the title to figure that out. I bet many socially awkward / socially less aware people find it easier to navigate titles they can read in an org chart than sniffing these out of the "sociosphere".
Never has a colleague taken credit for the work I've done. On the contrary, often in demos and other presentations they've thanked or acknowledged my support even when they didn't need to if they were the driver. I know the world can be harsh but my work life experience gives me no reason at all to be cynical.
Terms like "DAU" or "engagement" is common in our field and the primary objective is how to make users spend more time on our platform. We don't take safety or mental health seriously internally but only externally for PR reasons.
CEOs won't change that because the more time user spends on the platform, the more ad revenue it brings.
Only way is to regulate it.
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