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520 points OlympicMarmoto | 58 comments | | HN request time: 1.292s | source | bottom
1. procaryote ◴[] No.45072629[source]
The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reducing efficiency

If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else

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2. considerdevs ◴[] No.45072688[source]
Quite pessimistic view, but hard to argue against based on available data samples.
3. ◴[] No.45072691[source]
4. xxs ◴[] No.45072756[source]
I'd take zstd any time while I have facebook and friends blocked. The world is not black and white.
replies(1): >>45073288 #
5. wolvesechoes ◴[] No.45072763[source]
But isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company? Even if founders may had some other goals in addition to making money, as the time passes profit becomes the only goal, and usually more profit is being generated while doing bad and malicious things.

Problem is systemic.

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6. keysdev ◴[] No.45072791[source]
Depending on the founder. With Apple it can be reasoned that it only went down after you know who passed away.

Yeah its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing, but that is what the corporate model has being doing and how we ended up here.

replies(1): >>45074463 #
7. anttiharju ◴[] No.45072810[source]
Nokia (mostly networking-related things nowadays) touts - or at least used to, haven't kept up to date - itself as one of the most ethical companies around.

> But isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company?

So I suppose not really, no.

Additionally companies working on carbon-free energy might also serve as evidence. There are some big ones around.

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8. roncesvalles ◴[] No.45072912[source]
One of the better "service to humanity" opportunities for software engineers is to join a company like Meta or TikTok and perform awfully for as long as you can.
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9. sylware ◴[] No.45072999{3}[source]
I remember, nokia about to release the first smartphone, full linux with a clean plain and simple C written OS/platform... and... then nothing happened. I recall the user groups being puzzled on what was waiting nokia, they were ready, had it all super open source and LEAN open source, and the iphone happened and they were bought by msft... ??????????
replies(1): >>45073222 #
10. procaryote ◴[] No.45073041[source]
There are lots of profit motivated big companies that cause much less collateral damage. Facebook ranges from individualised harm like showing kids makeup ads when they delete a selfie, to macro scale harm like election interference

You could take a job designing landmines and you'd have a real hard time causing as much actual harm, as there just aren't enough wars going on to reach the same scale

11. ivolimmen ◴[] No.45073111[source]
I think I can say that this wasn't the case with Sun Microsystems. I never worked there but everything I read on tht company was positive. I gate the fact that Oracle (one of the worst) bought them.
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12. sim7c00 ◴[] No.45073222{4}[source]
the most ethical company still goes for profit and earn shittons.... the most fragrant turd still smells of shit
13. dkiebd ◴[] No.45073250[source]
Ah, the Europeans woke up.
14. dist-epoch ◴[] No.45073254[source]
Providing a service that billions of people value is making the world worse? Wow

What next, go work for TV stations and sabotage them?

Go work for McDonalds and make it inneficient?

Sabotage manufacturers of combustion-cars?

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15. saagarjha ◴[] No.45073264[source]
Yeah I'm making the world a better place by earning 500k a year doing a bad job to slow down this company. Look at how much good I am doing sorry I can't hear you over my paycheck clearing
replies(1): >>45073663 #
16. lm28469 ◴[] No.45073282[source]
Providing fentanyl to addicts is doing God's work then I imagine?
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17. atiedebee ◴[] No.45073288[source]
zstd can't really be attributed to Facebook. Yann Collet started work on it before joining Facebook, so it was kind of imported.

I am sure it made developing and standardizing the algorithm easier, but what makes it such a good (performant) algorithm is the design of the original creator.

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18. gorgoiler ◴[] No.45073398{3}[source]
Nokia Siemens Networks provided the Iranian Revolution with their lawful intercept equipment under a special contract. They may have a good overall ethical track record but they don’t have a clean sheet.
19. xeonmc ◴[] No.45073446{3}[source]
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
20. formerly_proven ◴[] No.45073464{3}[source]
On the other hand, the patent licensing kerfuffle (which I don't think was about any existing patents, just "standard policy") through the relicensing by Facebook was a drag on zstd's momentum.
21. StopDisinfo910 ◴[] No.45073468[source]
That’s an extremely reductive view.

Whatever you think of Meta core products, they pay a ton of people to work on various open source projects, do R&D on things which are only tangentially related to social media like VR or data center tech.

There is worse way to get a paycheck to do what you are interested in.

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22. StopDisinfo910 ◴[] No.45073486{3}[source]
> Additionally companies working on carbon-free energy might also serve as evidence. There are some big ones around.

Interesting exemple because the biggest investors in renewable by far are big oil companies.

So what should people do? Go or not go? Sadly, the world is never black and white.

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23. Garlef ◴[] No.45073490[source]
"It wasn't all bad. They built the Autobahn"
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24. LunaSea ◴[] No.45073507[source]
> tangentially related to social media like VR

This is in no way tangential.

VR is Meta's way of trying to move social media from web to VR in a Second Life way.

And you can believe me that there will be advertisement in the "game".

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25. StopDisinfo910 ◴[] No.45073529{3}[source]
What’s the issue with advertisement exactly?

It’s completely tangential at this point. Meta dreams of a metaverse but most of their investments have gone to solving foundational issues with VR.

If Meta wants to pay for that, well, I’m not going to bite the hands that feeds VR research. My starry-eyed teenage years are thankfully far behind me.

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26. ksec ◴[] No.45073652[source]
Facebook seems to have strange relationship with most Americans while the rest of the world is quite happy with it. Including both WhatsApp and Instagram.
27. komali2 ◴[] No.45073663{3}[source]
Activism doesn't require participation in a poverty cult. Any socialist in a nation like the USA or the UK is by someone's lens a champagne socialist. Let's not participate in this tired trope.
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28. gellybeans ◴[] No.45073673{4}[source]
I used to watch commercials during my starry-eyed teenage years as well. I used to think ninja turtles was anything but a 20 minute ad for toys when I was in preschool.

Ads are actually horrible. Holy moly I'm so glad I can just ublock my way through the sea of garbage that is the internet nowadays. The fact there are people still indoctrinated by commercials makes sense, I'm just sorry you see that as a marker of maturity.

29. komali2 ◴[] No.45073684{4}[source]
> What’s the issue with advertisement exactly?

Advertisement isn't showing you something you might be interested in. Advertisement is an industry of psychoanalysts spending untold man hours of effort crafting ways to psychologically manipulate the population into serving the needs of a given corporation.

Instagram doesn't just show you cool clothes you might want to buy. It leverages dark pattern ux to keep you engaged with the app well past any healthy duration, and shows you content designed to enrage or arouse you to keep you in a mental state that will increase engagement and possibly lead to you engaging in shopping therapy.

Advertising is releasing psychofauna into the world of YouTube kids to get your children obsessed with brand characters that they absolutely must have physical representations of. Or it gets even darker than that, look up Elsagate.

Maybe advertising wasn't evil when it was a sweet potato hawker shouting their wares into the market. Now it's an entirely different beast and it is anti human and evil.

30. wafflemaker ◴[] No.45073752{3}[source]
Few more years and they would've finished Polarbanen. The northern Norway railroad connecting Trondheim to Tromsø, far inside the Arctic Circle. Giving us $50 trains to Tromsø instead of $500 planes.

But my enthusiasm diminished after learning that they worked thousands people to death.

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31. zaphirplane ◴[] No.45073756{3}[source]
Advertising has existed and powered tv and radio before the internet. That’s great / grandfather territory for some
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32. esperent ◴[] No.45073821{4}[source]
The issue isn't advertising, it's targeted advertising which is a very different and far more problematic beast than the advertising of your grandparent's time.

In the interest of not getting bogged down in semantics, let's just always assume that when people say "advertising" in this era, they mean "targeted advertising". Then we can avoid yet another tired attempt at excusing Meta's behavior.

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33. A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 ◴[] No.45073859[source]
Hmm? What value? And for whom?
34. Hammershaft ◴[] No.45073914[source]
I think a better service to humanity is to excel at your job even if you end up at a socially corrosive org like Meta or Tiktok but donate a decent chunk of your paycheck to effective altruist charities that save lives.
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35. kriops ◴[] No.45074015{3}[source]
A better service to humanity yet is taking that money and spending it on whatever is valuable to yourself, thus providing more people with the opportunity to sustainably work for a living. Capitalism and all that.
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36. cedws ◴[] No.45074116[source]
But Meta’s connecting the world… by keeping them inside doomscrolling.
37. sapiogram ◴[] No.45074129{4}[source]
> Giving us $50 trains to Tromsø instead of $500 planes.

It's only $50 if the government pays for the rest of the ticket. $50 per passenger won't even cover track maintenance. Source: My ass, but I still think I'm right.

38. bonoboTP ◴[] No.45074243{4}[source]
Who said anything about socialism? There are many ways to criticize Meta from non-socialist angles.
39. redleader55 ◴[] No.45074348[source]
I find this kind of comment revolting - if I owe something, I owe it to my family and my parents, so if Meta comes to make me an offer and I accept it, it's my business and no one else's. Strangers on the internet, instead of judging people based on the company they work for, and divide them into "good" and "bad", should get off their high horses and join these companies, if they are capable, and change them from the inside if they think they are doing bad things.
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40. ToValueFunfetti ◴[] No.45074352{4}[source]
There is no reason to expect "buy stuff you want" to be more charitable than charity. At a glance, the stuff itself obviously takes up a good chunk of the money and much is going to end up in the hands of people who already have plenty.

You emphasize "sustainably", but how is it more sustainable to give 500k/year to capitalism until you don't make that much / retire / die? In either option, that 500k/year is there until it isn't. With charity, you'd help more people but it would be no more or less sustainable.

41. lyu07282 ◴[] No.45074463{3}[source]
> its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing

> it only went down after you know who passed away.

I mean that's kind of ironic. You believe that Jobs was a great and decent person who led Apple to be roses and rainbows. Outside this cult of personality it was a company that engaged in unethical and monopolistic business practices just as anyone else did, walled-garden lock-in of their platform, intentionally making their devices impossible to repair, planned obsolescence, slave labor conditions in manufacturing, etc. etc.

So the point is untrue, its the benevolent dictator delusion, just like there are no benevolent political authoritarian leaders so are there no benevolent CEOs either. Because the system itself is the issue, authoritarianism/capitalism. If you are a conservative/authoritarian you believe in the former if you are a liberal/libertarian/capitalist you believe in the latter.

42. CPLX ◴[] No.45074500[source]
The best way to serve humanity in your professional life is serve humanity in your professional life.

In other words, be useful. You don't have to worry about "being good" or "doing good" though many do and it's quite admirable to do so. But that's not the bar you have to clear.

The bar you should try to clear is to be useful. If what you're doing all day is helping people have shelter, or raise families, or be more healthy, or have more knowledge, or even be entertained or amused, you're being useful to people.

If what you do all day ultimately serves to make people poorer, more divided, more addicted, and more unwell, then what you're doing is not useful, it's harmful.

If what you're doing all day primarily contributes, even indirectly, to making people's lives worse, then nothing you do after that will erase it. Arguments to the contrary are just rationalization.

43. CPLX ◴[] No.45074554{4}[source]
The idea that all decisions under capitalism are value-neutral is ludicrous.

By your definition, selling arms to dictators and using the money to buy a yacht and private security qualifies as "service to humanity."

44. AuryGlenz ◴[] No.45074592{3}[source]
As we all know. People regularly overdose on Facebook and die.
replies(1): >>45075604 #
45. tonyhart7 ◴[] No.45074596[source]
john carmack maybe old but his competency/talent is 100x times bigger than you OP

dont shit talk my goat like that

46. dataflow ◴[] No.45074648{3}[source]
So you mean like buying moral offsets, kind of like how people buy carbon offsets, to achieve morality-neutral jobs? Sounds like a brilliant idea - I'd definitely want to know I'm saving at least as many lives as my company's product is killing. Have you considered recording the morality offsets on a blockchain? Could be a great startup.
47. waltbosz ◴[] No.45074686{3}[source]
In my experience, the metaverse offerings are a boring ghost town.
48. ◴[] No.45074737[source]
49. procaryote ◴[] No.45074814{4}[source]
> thousands people to death

I have some bad news to tell you about the overall number of dead related to that government

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50. procaryote ◴[] No.45074844[source]
The core product is somewhat relevant though

That you can get paid and have fun doing it, doesn't make the product better.

51. procaryote ◴[] No.45074891[source]
Or take almost any other job.

If you can get a well paying job at meta, you have other options.

52. zaphirplane ◴[] No.45075004{5}[source]
people should use the correct words
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53. esperent ◴[] No.45075245{6}[source]
They are. The meaning of words changes over time, and with context. When talking about advertising on the internet, it's all targeted advertising (except some tiny unimportant fraction). There's no need to type "targeted" every time, it's redundant.
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54. Bigpet ◴[] No.45075604{4}[source]
Could you try to address the obvious point being made instead of trying to obfuscate? There's plenty of bad outcomes besides death. Not all fentanyl users die. If some fent wholesaler were to provide unrefutable evidence that Noone died from his fent you wouldn't go "Oh alright then, nothing wrong with what you're doing".
55. wafflemaker ◴[] No.45076349{5}[source]
You tell me, I'm from Poland. Talked to many older people, who remember the war. One thing that caught my attention, because it surfaced with every single old person I asked about the war: Germans/Nazis were horrible, but Russians/Soviets were an order of magnitude worse.

Funny thing that now many people don't even know that it was Russia and Germany BOTH that started the war. And they were supposed to attack Poland simultaneously, but Stalin, PR animal that he was, delayed Red Army's attack by one week, thereby creating the legend that it wasn't Russia that started the war.

56. anttiharju ◴[] No.45077317{4}[source]
I think people should do/go where they have a peace of mind, whatever that place may be.
57. saagarjha ◴[] No.45081691{4}[source]
I don't think you need to be poor to protest injustice. I just think that joining Meta so that you can "bring it down from the inside" is unlikely to be effective and very easy to justify to yourself.
58. zaphirplane ◴[] No.45081930{7}[source]
I don’t know why it’s so important to you to conflate the 2 and have privacy invading advertising synonyms with any form of advertising.

I don’t think we have crossed the threshold to make them synonymous, feel free to provide data to back that claim globally not in some hip Silicon Valley I don’t own a tv market. My quick search shows targeted isn’t there