Remember when facebook was busted playing silent audio so the app could stay active in the background? I honestly don't think there's a company I trust less than facebook/meta. And it's because the rot is at the top, and has always been there.
>The other issue, that Facebook was running a silent audio stream in the background, is also called out. Grant says this was unintentional, and that it was not being used to keep the app alive — yet it did as a byproduct of the bug.
How much issue tracking and scrum management and engineering work and code review and testing and deployment and maintenance went into accidentally streaming silent audio that you only stop doing after you got caught and have to claim all that successfully tested and deployed work was unintentional, without ever explaining the actual innocuous purpose of streaming silent audio and paying for all that extra bandwidth?
I was just reading a comment on HN yesterday about how MacOS had so many bugs. I guess they don't have issue tracking, scrum management, engineering work, code review, testing, deployment, and maintenance either.
I hate FB, but not everything is always a sinister plan, although this could have been. I will repeat: "with Facebook, who knows."
There is a huge difference between accidentally shipping a bug, and accidentally shipping a fully functional distributed end-to-end silent audio streaming system that works at Facebook's scale. They are in no way comparable. All the intricate crosscutting interoperating client, server, and middeware components of an end-to-end Facebook scale silent audio streaming pipeline do not just accidentally emerge without anybody noticing and magically dovetail together perfectly because nobody was paying enough attention to detail.
Large distributed systems don’t spontaneously assemble themselves without anyone understanding what they’re doing or intending for it to happen.
>I will repeat: "with Facebook, who knows."
Apparently we all know the obvious except for you. And you're not living up to your user name, which perhaps should be "rationalizer" not "rationalist". Instead of begin rational, you're bending over backwards to implausibly carry the water for Facebook beyond all credulity. It's a bad look, and shows you're vastly underestimating the complexity of developing distributed streaming software at that scale. So I will repeat what rsynnott said:
>And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.
i mean theres kind of no way around it. how else are you gonna get the training data you need? the only way to bootstrap ai is to tag the data with bio-ai first (humans).
different companies 'launder' it differently: with voice, it was done by "accidental" voice assistant activations. i guess with glasses, maybe there will be less window dressing this time. after all, it is clearly pitched to see what you see, at all times of the day.
similar controversy happened with the various roomba products, although arguably that was a combination of data harvesting + lazy engineering.
There are lots of ways around it, like adding a transparent “training mode” that a user can enable with consent, legitimately purchasing training data, etc.
The root cause is that meta didn’t want to pay the fair market value for those videos and just stole them from its users by burying it in TOS.
If they were honest about their intentions most people would say no or demand payment for providing something of value.
That would be good. A YC company is paying people to do just this. You know the data is being uploaded, so you can avoid e.g. your kids coming into frame.
Really it should just be in the UI. Click Upload this and get 10c/minute or whatever for the video. Choose what you upload. That'd be closer in effect to using social media.
"deck" is the fairly normal word throughout the EDA industry. i reckon it's because such things used to be literal decks of punchcards, but i know less about EDA history than programming history.
actually, it really is not neccesarily a 'hardware company' thing. ive been in 'hardware companies' where the rtl was just as available for viewing as the rest of the firmware/software.
in big hardware companies, things start getting siloed, but that probably has more to do with big companies (seemingly invariably) operating as a union of fiefdoms (dunbar-number-ification?)
Great for you surfin' musk's hype wave while he turns the world into his own fascist dominion. At least you made some bucks along the way! Those come certainly in useful - albeit are quickly depleted - once you live in a totalitarian world where every interaction with the monopolistic oligarchic big-tech-state monster requires a bribe, probably in shitcoins. (see the Russian oligarchic state that the US is quickly progressing towards - apparently Russians have no word for "bribe", as it's common practice to give gov agents "gifts" if you want anything being done.)
We already live in an oligarchy. The difference between us and Russia is that their government controls the oligarchy. Here the oligarchy controls the government.
Also please stop throwing around the fascist word for everything, good lord it’s tiring and cringe.
but doesn't the empirical evidence reject this premise?
if the greatest minds of earth, in their wisdom, have all collectively concluded that the smartest thing for them to do is make as much money as humanly possible, then evidently the greatest calling for mankind is... to be wealthy!
and the older i get the harder it becomes to argue with such a perspective... hmm... maybe i am getting closer to wisdom? haha!
You assume that what smart people _do_ is the same as what humanity _ought to do_.
Even if every genius on Earth spent their days trying to get rich, that would show something about incentives, institutions, fear, status, and survival. It would not automatically prove that wealth is mankind's highest purpose.
Rats also optimize for calories when the maze is built that way. That does not make cheese (or whatever rats prefer) the meaning of life.
Modern capitalism often acts like the scoreboard is the game. That confusion is one of civilization's recurring clown acts.
“The smartest people pursue whatever is incentivized, therefore the current incentive structure is humanity's greatest calling.”
Yeah, no. The smartest people on earth didn’t convene and design this system. What we have now is just a fragile equilibrium we collectively stumbled into. There’s no reason to think it’s final, unless you've come to assume history ends with you...
> It feels so much better to ask humans a question then the machine
I could not disagree more! With pesky humans, you have all sorts of things to worry about:
- is my question stupid? will they think badly of me if i ask it?
- what if they dont know the answer? did i just inadvertantly make them look stupid?
- the question i have is related to their current work... i hope they dont see me as a threat!
and on and on. asking questions in such a manner as to elicit the answer, without negative externalities, is quite the art form as i'm sure many stack overflow users will tell you. many word orderings trigger a 'latent space' which activates the "umm, why are you even doing this?" with the implication begin "you really are stupid!", totally useless to the question-asker and a much more frustrating time-waster than even the most moralizing LLM.
with LLMs, you don't have to play these 'token games'. you throw your query at it, and irrespective of the word order, word choice, or the nture of the question - it gives you a perfectly neutral response, or at worst politely refuses to answer.
That’s a level of paranoia that I can’t really understand. I just do my research, then for information I can’t access, don’t know how to access, or can’t comprehend, I reach out. People have the right to not want to share information. If it’s in a work setting and the situation is blocking, I notify my supervisor.
> many word orderings trigger a 'latent space' which activates the "umm, why are you even doing this?" with the implication begin "you really are stupid!"
You may have heard of the XY situation when people asks a Y question only because they have an incorrect answer to X. A question has a goal (unless rethorical) and to the person being asked, it may be confusing. You may have a valid reason to go against common sense, but if the other person is not your tutor or a fellow researcher, he may not be willing to accommodate you and spend his time for a goal he have no context about.
Remember the car wash question for LLMs? Some phrasing have the pattern of a trick question and that’s another thing people watch out for.
