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. _

SearXNG is a local option and is fairly easy to get a container running for it.

It’s not the cleanest, but it will let you search about anything that is searchable if you allow it. (It’ll aggregate results from ~244 different search engines so beware. It’s a “metasearch” engine.)

It can be a bit slow at times (especially if all the things are turned on), and is a bit like Google in its infancy. However, there aren’t ads or promoted results. It’s fairly raw, if you are into that kinda thing.

Getting the API working with Python can be a pain at times due to its bot control mechanisms and strict header checks. (I believe they default these features ON if someone accidentally makes their instance public or something like that.)

The opening comments are overshadowed by the Solow Productivity Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

What exact is the goal here? You kinda just rolled right into install instructions without context…

Gross. A Facebook link. This is one of the few times I would have considered another layer of jpg a good thing.

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.

69% of developers report losing 8+ hours weekly to inefficiencies—20% of their time (Atlassian, 2024)

Yep. If there is any company that knows what it takes to drive inefficiencies, it’s Atlassian. (Fuck them and their software.)

Please don’t teach kids to insert all-caps words into their sentences. If you need to emphasize a word on the Internet, you can italicize.

I just need something that mostly works and doesn’t have a huge learning curve. The web-dev aspect is something I really don’t want to think about, but, is something that I can dive into for hyper-customization if needed.

Do a look-through of that XML folder as well. Images could be base64 encoded in those XML files. I remember several instances where XML was used as a template “language” for old style GUIs. (When XML and HTML diverged, a lot of that kind of thing was happening.)

There are some kind of instructions in this video that go through a logo change process. I don’t know if this helps, but I tried: https://youtu.be/QrobPTgu7C0

Also, does it use some kind of database? The images seem like they would be small enough to jam into a blob and just store alongside regular inventory information. If there is a database, it’s probably third-party. If it’s third-party, I would see if it had its own installer packaged inside of the application installer itself. (A third party database would likely be outside of the main app folder.)

Just dumping random thoughts.

Lulz. The picture is AI slop with a dash of editing.

These findings suggest LLMs can internalize human-like cognitive biases and decision-making mechanisms beyond simply mimicking training data patterns

lulzwut? LLMs aren’t internalizing jack shit. If they exhibit a bias, it’s because of how they were trained. A quick theory would be that the interwebs is packed to the brim with stories of “all in” behaviors intermixed with real strategy, fiction or otherwise. I speculate that there are more stories available in forums of people winning doing stupid shit then there are of people losing because of stupid shit.

They exhibit human bias because they were trained on human data. If I told the LLM to only make strict probability based decisions favoring safety (and it didn’t “forget” context and ignored any kind of “reasoning”), the odds might be in its favor.

Sorry, I will not read the study because of that one sentence in its summary.

When I use it, I use it to create single functions that have known inputs and outputs.

If absolutely needed, I use it to refactor old shitty scripts that need to look better and be used by someone else.

I always do a line-by-line analysis of what the AI is suggesting.

Any time I have leveraged AI to build out a full script with all desired functions all at once, I end up deleting most of the generated code. Context and “reasoning” can actually ruin the result I am trying to achieve. (Some models just love to add command line switch handling for no reason. That can fundamental change how an app is structured and not always desired.)

Mexico is turning into Texas, it seems.

Of course they read. Do you think those ticked tock subtitles are going to read themselves when they “do their own research”?

Oh, was I using the correct lingo for hundred year old methane powered shit gushers? I had no idea. Lol!

use spent oil reservoirs

Ok, that lead to some giggles thinking about some company drilling in the future thinking they were about to hit a strangely untapped oil field.

Add a hundred years of methane pressure build up and that could be really interesting gusher.