I know. My weakness isn’t necessarily waiting time, but time spent on dull work like housework. My brains starts going “BOORRING!”

I don’t doubt that in some situations, when everything else is primed - the product is good, the market is there, and awareness is the only thing lacking - advertising can make a difference.

For every anecdote like your friend’s, though, I can produce a hundred where millions just went into a hole for absolutely nothing.

You just passionately restated the exact misconception I described. Okay, I guess.

I got a lot of garbage when I didn’t know what I was doing and just tried AI once or twice a week with lazy prompts, expecting perfection without iterations. I’d huff and crow about how I had to fix things, whereas now I just tell it what to fix, or even better how to get it right the first time. I’ve built up my library of skills and prompts and refined them quite a bit. The models keep getting smarter. You should really look at your tools and methods - sounds like you’re stuck in 2024.

I didn’t read this as “people who like it in some situations being forced to use it in other situations,” but rather people who are against it as a whole being forced to use it at all. And yeah those folks are going to have a bad time, and won’t be in their jobs long. Just facts.

For those of us on the outside looking in, 99% of what we see is Zuckerberg and we hate him and we think oh well anyone who works for him must be a miserable asshole. But Meta is a big place where some ~70,000 people work, and their experience of working there is not actually 99% made up of tossing Mark’s salad. I’m sure some parts of the company are better to work for and some are worse. A lot of people there have a great experience most of the time. When I’ve visited the campus it has had high energy and it comes across as a place where a huge number of very smart, high achieving young people have been assembled all together, with more money than god has behind them to build the next big thing. To somehow turn all of that bad is actually noteworthy.

It exists. I’m unconvinced that it’s “important.”

Internet advertising has taught us a lot. Every single part of it is trackable so you can see what value you’re getting from it. And that value is tiny. This is why internet ads are a mess. It’s a fuck-shit stack of deceptive trash because that’s the only thing that can actually bring home a fraction of a penny. Display ads are like chemical suits: they do nothing!

I said it was effective at cranking out software, not at training the next generation of engineers. However obviously the terms of engineering are changing so it would also be a mistake to automatically think we should train them exactly as we did before. Some people saw compilers as the same thing: it’s an abstraction layer! How is anyone going to know what’s actually happening in the CPU anymore?! Well, they don’t actually need to.

Christ I hate these people. I work with a guy who constantly says “You gonna tell me marketing and branding doesn’t matter? Apple is the most valuable company in the world!”

Like that makes ANY sense…

It’s getting really bad. The software engineers I work with have been telling me that they now have their coding agents running 24/7 and it sucks for them because they never really clock out anymore. They know that if they don’t periodically check in and set the agent on to the next task, or solve some glitch, that it will only sit there for 8 hours until they come in next day and deal with it, and then they’ve lost that 8 hours. They’re able to do a lot with AI but it is not always fast. So they feel pressure to babysit their AI task flows all the time.

My thought was Jesus Christ what kind of energy is it consuming for these things to be running like that nonstop. I’ve stopped myself from using AI to look up one fact because it would be a waste of energy. But these guys have agents running agents running agents and they’re just crunching and crunching constantly.

It’s effective in terms of cranking out software. I’m talking about skilled senior engineers managing this directly. They know what they’re about. But at what cost?

So many people are already functionally hooked up, even if it is happening through their eyes and not a direct wire. Prove me wrong, everybody: don’t touch any of your devices for a week. It’s nigh unthinkable now but I remember times when the internet didn’t exist, cell phones didn’t exist, I had no cable TV, no game console, and would only turn on my little black and white Mac to write a paper for school. We listened to music a lot, socialized in person, smoked a lot of… various things, had a lot of sex. It’s a rather poor trade we’ve made if you ask me.

Japan. Layoffs are extremely difficult to pull off there. You have to show poor performance by the individual involved, and the standards for that are very rigorous. The government knows that unemployed people immediately become their problem, so they just demand that if a corporation wants to employ someone, they have to be willing to enter into that in an open ended arrangement. So unions aren’t the only way.

$50 sounds like a ridiculous commission under any circumstances. There are more numbers that we need before we can really judge the situation though. It’s not like $50 went to your friend and $14,950 went to their boss’s pocket. Surely there’s a cost to manufacture whatever it is being sold. Still, there’s no way that 0.3% is a reasonable sales commission.

It’s an interesting case for leftists because there is no means of production to be seized. Nothing needed to create websites or apps is hard to get or proprietary. If anything, the means of production is capital itself, because only by paying people can you direct a lot of them to spend time on any particular thing. I wonder if communism has already addressed this case somewhere. I’m hardly educated on the topic.

It isn’t just about making the information understandable though. They can read a pie chart just fine. As the article says, you have to wrap it in the right emotional frame for them to care. “Get your freedom shot.” If you have to dress it up in a bunch of biased language to get them to believe it, well… I can’t say I’m an authority on the definition of “propaganda” but dressing shit up that way seems to qualify to me.

The question here is why weren’t Google and the Mac and eBay all originally invented in Europe. Not why don’t the tech barons of 2026 all live in Europe.

The question is even more pointed because some of the people who invented the above were immigrants from Europe. Why did they have to leave to do their world-changing work?

Google was world-changing before it was the big tech nightmare it is today. So stop hiding behind the glory of GDPR and face the actual question.

I know what you mean because my skin crawls every time I see intelligent people studying how to actually get through to stupid people. There has been a movement among science educators to figure this out, sparked by the realization that “just showing people the data doesn’t work.”

Unfortunately, some have really self-flagellated on this, saying it’s an arrogant approach: “the only reason you don’t agree with me is you don’t have enough information.”

I have trouble feeling bad for giving people information.

But I do applaud the effort to figure out what will work here. We can’t be squeamish about tricks and framing devices when the forces of evil are more than willing to firehose the public with emotional propaganda.

I guess the news here isn’t that propaganda works, but that propaganda works for the truth, too.

For years, Meta has been hell for smaller companies trying to hire, because Meta would routinely offer $100k over the market rate, and hire people just to hire them. I swear about half a dozen times I interviewed people and made them job offers only to realize afterward that all I accomplished was giving them a bargaining chip for their negotiation with Meta.

Now it’s the reverse. People are out in the cold searching for work while Meta dumps all those people they overhired back out into the market, where their time at Meta gives them an edge. Yes, we can hate Meta all we want but it still looks good on a resume.

And yes life is different on tech wages but these are still people with bills to pay and families to feed. My HCOL property taxes are equivalent to some people’s entire mortgage.

They certainly think they do a lot of good. We sit off in the distance reading the latest Reddit threads about whatever latest outrage has happened, and it looks all negative to us. But from their point of view they are serving 3 billion people’s needs to connect and network.

I’m not saying I see it that way. But you seem to imply that they all know they work for an Evil Empire but they truly don’t see it that way. There are a lot of young people there who don’t look past the cachet of working for a well known and successful company. And there are wiser ones who genuinely believe the good outweighs the bad.

Yeah another thought to have though is that 8,000 Meta employees suddenly on the market makes life harder for other people who’ve been laid off and are still looking for work, some of them for a whole year without success.