Modern inference engines can stream in weights from SSD in order to save on RAM, but this makes inference very slow, especially for the trivial single-session case. (Jury is still out on whether batching multiple sessions together can mitigate this well enough, but even then that's mostly helpful for the "running lots of inferences overnight and getting fresh results first thing in the morning" case. Which is interesting (the big third-party suppliers don't really offer a way of doing this at reasonable cost) but a bit of a niche.)
Nah, you can run the 24b - 35b class with between 90k and 256k of context with about 40GB and they are pretty good. Especially the MOE variants fit neatly in 40GB.
This would only work for anyone foolish enough to attempt to access content and services with their phone. You don't own your phone. It might has well be a company-owned device.
"But everyone uses their phone all the time!" Yes, and everyone will be worse off for making the obviously worse choice.
I'm still confused about what makes uBlock Origin Lite less powerful than uBlock Origin. I don't use it or Chrome in any case, but I would prefer to understand the difference.
Putin is uncowed, clearly. It's hard to know what the truth of things is. It's clear he's on his back heels in Ukraine and at home, but perhaps he still holds a strong position.
Who knows how these hits happen? Maybe the artist had a green light for a while but they hadn't been able to get a good opportunity. Do they operate like military or gangsters? I have a hard time telling the difference sometimes.
Are there mercenaries all over the world willing to kill for money from the various superpowers?
Or is it a more direct operation planned and executed in one sequence by intelligence members?
Services are really never safe. Or at best, they should be considered temporary. If you like what they provide, know that what they provide could become worse and/or more expensive. This is the likeliest scenario.
At best, you should use services on a temporary basis and never allow yourself to get entrenched. Once you're locked in, you are part of the product to be sold to advertisers. The "install base" that is used as leverage for these sorts of shenanigans.
There's a mad dash right now. Everyone is sprinting as fast as possible to invent and propagate the worst technology possible. Oh, you thought smart phones ruined society? Well good news, smart glasses are finally viable. You just won't believe what they'll come up with next, and everyone will buy it, and everyone will be worse off.
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
Meta: We created the portable Occular Torment Nexus. We believe you should always be present in the Nexus, even with others around you. And thanks to our partnership with Popular Glasses Company, you can be tormented in style!
Could you imagine? I know it won't happen but what if we get a statement that they suffered a catastrophic data loss and full service couldn't be restored for a week or something. It would be a modern miracle.
Wasn't there a multi-day outage some number of years ago? Or at least an entire day, or something like that. People were acting like it was the end of the world. I vaguely remember something like that happening, many moons ago...
there was. I think it was something with a key at a data center and a DNS config. You would think after that people would have learned to have their own website and POSSE everything outwards, but businesses in particular still think a Facebook/Meta presence is good enough.
It's a weird social psychology quirk. For whatever reason, the entire music industry has been captured by the delusion that mixing all the sounds louder is good. No one likes it, except for those guys. For reasons I'll never understand, the movie industry has been captured by the opposite delusion; they're going to pump dynamic range so high that you can only understand about half the dialogue in the movie. And of course, no one likes this.
The full dynamic range is nice if you actually want to experience it and have a system capable of reproducing it. A dedicated center channel with a few hundred watts of amplification behind it will cut through the ambient backdrop like a hot knife through butter. You can watch Transformers or MI3 at reference volume with crystal clear dialogue if you're willing to throw enough power at the problem.
What really would solve the movie issue is there was more standardised sound across different streaming services. Every single seems to have a different volume and compression / setup.
That and having an industry standard way to crank the center channel (user setting) when downmixing to 2.1
I have a decent[1] system with a dedicated center channel. Everybody complains that the mix is too loud if we tune for audible dialog on anything made in the past decade or so (MI3 bluray is fine, and I suspect that Transformers would be too).
1: Powered by a Denon AVR, not separates if you want to "No true cinephile" me.
remember when HN was saying "nobody wants big smartphones, why does the industry keep doing this? iPhone 4 size is the perfect size"
hint - the industry is doing EXACTLY what (most) consumers want. there is a big difference between what a consumer tells you they want, and what actually they pay for
There are probably 100 times more people listening to billboards hot 100 on crappy headphones if not phone speakers than people who know what "dynamic range" means…
You're false. Research has shown that if people like sound A, they will like it even better when you play sound A louder.
The change in mixing and mastering can be largely explained by people changing the way they consume it. Eg. people watch more movies on netflix than in a cinema. People used to sit in a room with a record player, now they listen in their car or headphones while doing other stuff.
This is anecdotal at best; "those guys" will be using hard data just like tech bros with ecommerce sites do, and the data does not lie.
Compression sells better than high dynamic range else they would have stopped. This is true for every "nobody likes this" statement people make on the internet about things that are commercially successful nevertheless. Big phones (as someone else mentioned), mobile games, video game movie adaptations, AI music, Marvel franchise entries, funko pops, they're all running circles around people that don't personally like it and who are in circles of like-minded people.
When people listen to two pieces of audio they generally prefer the louder of the two. That doesn't mean they want you to turn up the volume dial for them. They can adjust the volume dial themselves, and if everything gets louder they'll turn down the volume dial to compensate.
There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.
CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place.
I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.
> CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases.
I know this can be hard for engineers to sometimes accept, but relationships (aka politics) are a key part of business. Rarely is one technical solution absolutely superior to another, making purchasing decisions come down to relationships.
Politics is also about compromise and managing a bunch of differing opinions/desires, which is one of the key skills of a CEO.
More engineers understand this than you may think. Many just dislike it. It doesn't fit with their disposition (for better or for worse) -- but they are not confused about the facts.
> Politics is also about compromise and managing a bunch of differing opinions/desires
Except, it seems, when it comes to the current AI zeitgeist. Then it feels a lot more like CEOs are taking a "my way or the highway" approach. Maybe they can compromise on just how necessary it is for all employees to use AI?
> It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t ... I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job.
But... that is kinda the job? CEOs are, first and foremost, the public face of the company. They're the one who talk to VCs / banks, regulators, major customers, the press. They're very highly paid PR reps / fall guys that shield everyone else, including the board of directors and all the VPs and SVPs, if something goes wrong.
For most companies, especially large companies, it's not important for a CEO to be good with software engineering, business development, etc. That, at least in principle, can be handled by other parts of the hierarchy.
> it's not important for a CEO to be good with software engineering
If you are the CEO of a company, you should have expertise in whatever your company does, and If your company is primarily a software company, then you should have expertise in software engineering. You cannot effectively manage something that you don't understand.
I wonder if business schools could ever start actually teaching this skill. So far they just largely operate as scams, held up purely by prestige and network value
I'm very sympathetic to cooperatives, have traveled/know the Mondragon people (largest coop federation), etc.
However, I think there's a reason why coops seem to succeed at smaller scales, but there are essentially no large innovative coops.
There are a few large boring coops, and some small innovative ones, but seemingly something is making the CEO/investor board model the one large innovative companies are all using.
I suspect that it's both (1) access to capital is far harder for coops, and (2) that workplace democracy and hardcore mission focus aren't fully compatible. That is, "you cannot serve two masters" without losing focus on one of them.
If a company accumulates capital, it becomes vulnerable to the principal agent problem, and coops are way more vulnerable here than centralized companies.
If a company doesn't accumulate capital, it doesn't scale in complexity. It can grow by having more people do more of the same things, but it can't move into markets that demand anything complex.
Coops can definitely succeed and even dominate at large scales with some minimum government protections. The largest dairy producer in the world is a coop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul
This seems hard to tease out from the fact that a) the majority of companies do not survive, b) the large, large majority of companies that do survive do not wind up being large or innovative, and c) there are far fewer coops than regular companies. If you assume equal chance of success between them, you’d still see vanishingly small numbers of large, innovative coops, because a small percentage of a small number is small.
The problem is that knowing the right people to get investment does seem to have utility coops struggle to get, I think? maybe CEOs are basically like producers on movies who are just there to network for you.
Coops tend to have better aligned incentives for employees on every step of the ladder. They'll tend to be more conservative about R&D but ensure that money that's being spent is being productive for the continuing health of the company since instead of that budget being "corporate's money pile" it's your potential profit share.
I think there's also a tendency towards longer tenure and higher value employees due to the investment in the company's future being a sort of central tenant of their attractiveness.
Generally, yes. Also the gap between the employee and executive class is a lot smaller instead of unnaturally inflated like it is in most private equity companies.
Maybe, but not necessarily for this reason. Even in a worker-owned coop, someone sets the overall direction. And how is that person going to be selected? It's still going to be largely politics.
In software I can imagine a worker-owned consultancy, but not a product company. It would imply staying in one place working on one product for your whole life, which doesn't sound inspiring
A company need not be a single product, and working in a worker-owned cooperative need not be a lifetime commitment to a single firm (though cooperatives ideally will have less turnover than firms owned by capital separated from labor.)
Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers.
If this sounds crazy the C suite + board already vote on who gets hired into the executive team, vote for the direction of the company, and vote for their compensation packages (hint, they never decrease them).
Why shouldn't workers be legally enabled to do the same? What is the justification to this? I'm curious to hear it because the only way people can justify the current system is declaring that some people are actually more deserving of prestige, money, and benefits while others deserve to suffer.
With income inequality increasing, healthcare outcomes worsening, and children literally becoming stupider isn't it time to question the current system and ask ourselves if this is the society we truly want?
There is academic research on this too if you're curious but it's mostly in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
But yes, there isn't much "evidence" because this system hasn't been tried en masse; however if you look at our current neoliberal hellscape, it's pretty hard to imagine it doing worse. Also neoliberalism wasn't really "tried" either, it was thrusted upon us by a group of individuals that wanted it.
One thing to keep in mind is that society can change quite quickly if you want it to. I'm sure the children that died working in factories during the 1800s never imagined such a society where children are valued, cared for, educated, and protected but it did happen.
It has happen before and it can happen again. It only happened because people were willing to fight for it.
The rules are allowed to be changed at anytime if we deem so, a better world is possible.
Why does this argument never apply to neoliberalism?
That was never put to a vote but it still thrusted upon a country where the results are what you would expect: the worse income inequality ever seen in the history of the nation, life expectancy has increased, deaths of despair have reached record highs, more children go to bed hungry, healthcare is being ripped from civilians, and corporations are legally allowed to poison and kill civilians (health insurance companies with their death panels, manufacturers causing cancer valleys) with zero legal repercussions.
So yeah maybe we should actually go the extreme into the other direction, if democracy is good enough to lead nations it's good enough to run businesses. If you're a worker IDK how you would argue otherwise. Being able to keep your boss/leadership accountable by voting for them out seems like a win for every workplace metric imaginable.
Imagine how better of a company Meta would be if Zuckerberg wasn't allowed to waste billions accomplishing nothing. In a just society he would have been voted out, but in a neoliberal society he is granted an insurmountable amount of wealth.
I'm sorry but this society sucks and acting like we can't do better, be better is beyond pathetic.
Based on what you say, it should be easy to find data showing the superior performance of coops for employees in terms of wages, benefits, profit sharing, etc, right?
Health care is a different topic and yes, socialized healthcare systems seem to perform better across the board.
Where is the data that neoliberalism helps people? Like can't you see how stupid this argument is? Current system is terrible for the vast majority of workers, but we aren't allowed to change this system why exactly? Especially regarding a system that was never discussed or debated? God damn this is pathetic. What you are doing is like the number one tactic elites use to squash any ideas of creating a better world.
The idea that opponents of neoliberalism have to recreate all aspects of society and consider every potential edge case isn't realistic, and it's not how systematic change actually occurs.
Once again, the Q is this. Where is the evidence that neoliberal economics has helped Americans? Income inequality is at its absolute height, along with deaths of despair.
I'm sorry but why are you personally defending such a sick society? Did you vote to implement neoliberalism in the 1970s or what? Where you the one who told Ford to tell NYC to suck it?
This is a shallow dismissal of GP’s point. The point is more, “we aren’t sure it won’t work because it has never been tried,” which is much less of a straw man to argue with.
“Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers.”
That sounds more like there’s no evidence that it won’t work than an unequivocal claim that it will.
Well... there is historical evidence that centrally planned dictatorships are not a very responsive form of government.
Now, corporations usually have the problem of competition, so if they aren't responsive (or at least responsive enough), they get out-competed by those that are. Is that enough to make them different from governments? Perhaps, but I don't know.
If you don't think there are competitions in dictatorships you are extremely sheltered. The competition in a dictatorship is whether you stay alive or not, just like in a corporation is whether you become homeless and die or keep a roof over your head.
Worker owned cooperatives have a variety of ways of doing this. Voting directly, electing people, etc. The main difference is that the cooperative typically doesn't buy the myth that the person making the high level decision needs to be paid 1000x the workers.
Given the zeitgeist is controlled by a handful of Capitalists who also happen to be sociopaths intent on bringing back feudalism and chattel slavery... No. "The People" are so propagandized that we simply cannot know what The People would do unless we turn off the great distraction machine constantly inundating us all with propaganda.
I’ve worked with CEOs in multiple large companies. I wouldn’t wish that job on my worst enemy. Nonetheless, someone needs to do that job and the intersection of difficulty and masochism is beyond what most people can do or endure. Many people try and fail. Their job, at the end of the day, is to eat an endless stream of shit sandwiches with a smile and a plan.
Much of the “competency” of a CEO in practice is to be able to accept the relentless drama and abuse without turning into an emotional wreck. Yeah, they have to make decisions, but that isn’t the part that makes the job difficult. That role takes an insane toll on the human spirit, and very few can do it for any length of time.
The cush job is often being CEO adjacent. You get most of the perks but also avoid most of the emotional abuse and drama.
This feels too soft. Each of these things has truth in it, but isn't some of this self-created? Where are these shit sandwiches coming from? A lot of these problems are the result of overpromising, breaking rules and skirting regulations, underestimating the difficulty of things they have no expertise with, asking people to solve problems with no resources, hiring more chefs rather than more cooks and dishwashers, of mismatches between good profitable product and exec exit. The idea that it makes sense for the CEO's (or really any leader's) core competency to be absorbing drama and pain is something we should think more about. Sometimes you hear that a good manager blocks and shields for their team, you have to wonder why the team always needs so much protection from their own company and processes.
in a team of 10, you can know everyone's current work, their thoughts on it, etc.
in a team of 100, you can maybe know everyone's name, if you're lucky. you probably have an idea of what their group is working on.
in a team of 1000, you will not know most of the people who come to you with problems. A room of pale faces, all very emotional about one thing or another. they've had a long hard battle just to speak to you, and care very much about what you do, but you've literally never met them. Of course, you have subordinates, and in turn they have theirs. But how can you accurately diagnose problems in that chain? they are only telling you what you want to hear, problems may be their fault, they may but their subordinates fault, it may be a business reality, you barely have any way to know. All you know is you have another meeting at 3, and then at 4, and then at 5, and all of them will be full of people you don't know who potentially emotionally care very much about every word you say, for good and for bad.
I don't hold much empathy for higher-ups, for other reasons. But its clear to me man was not meant for this. Large orgs are almost destined to be dysfunctional, as they move beyond "you have to study hard and make a real effort to remember everyone" to "no matter how much you try it is literally impossible to remember everyone, more people are being hired and fired each day than you can keep up with"
I personally know a lot of people (n>15) who are the CEOs of their own companies (ignoring unsuccessful ones). If I broke these into a couple groups, I mostly still see competent, hard working people:
Group 1: company stays small, like a ma & pa shop or small service, with few employees. This is a mixed bag of really hard working individuals and scumbags. The scummy ones aren't breaking any laws or doing anything nefarious, they just found a financial opportunity and shoved themselves in as a middleman and just subcontract out everything and do literally nothing except sit to the side and collect a paycheck.
Group 2: large company, making a name for themselves with hundreds of employees. I only know one guy who meets this category, and he is incredibly talented and hard working
Group 3: wildly successful, international company. Again I only know one guy, so I can't generalize, but he is super lazy. I think this is what y'all are referring to when y'all are hating on CEOs. To give him some slack, he was hard working when we met, and he actually made numerous companies, but this one exploded and now he lives in luxury. He hasn't lost his moral compass, but he doesn't really needs to work hard anymore either.
I should caveat that all of these folks who I know built their company. They weren't hired into one and fought their way to the top with politics or anything. Maybe I surround myself with ambitious people rather than politically toxic people, because otherwise I think it is odd that every single one of the many CEOs I know built their company, rather than getting the seat in a different way.
So, we live in the economy where everything is done by labour that receive minimal acceptable wages, while all the profits are collected by the ruling class who do nothing except constantly kissing each other asses.
on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have.
What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them.
I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into more money consistently.
>convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them
And it should be noted that many of these people lending money are in a similar situation of not being required to have any qualifications. Sure, some of them have worked their way up through sound investment after sound investment, but many of them were either born into their position or simply got lucky at some point along the way. Just think of all the money investors threw away pursuing crypto and NFTs for example. Many of those investments were transparently stupid from day 1.
Investing has some nuance, it’s not a homogeneous thing. It varies from insanely conservative to high risk gambling. I like to think everyone involved with NFT type investing is fully aware they are gambling.
Often, they are good at taking things, keeping things, misdirecting and setting boundaries (especially communication boundaries). They are good at keeping their positions.
This is a broad range of skills and to actually be a CEO, you need to really hone these skills and be among the very top. To be good at those, just enough to qualify for a modest CEO role at a small start-up, you generally don't have the time to be good at anything else.
Saying that you don't need any skills is mischaracterizing it. You don't need any value-creating skills, yes, but you need significant value-capturing skills.
I can imagine a world were all companies become empty of workers and only executives remain and they would just have meetings with each other while they starve and would explain it away as a new diet they're on. There would be no petrol and they would be forced to walk to work and would say that it's their new fitness routine... And they would all believe each other.
Most of them got into a prestigious school on legacy, paid for by wealthy parents. Many were above average IQ, but by no means geniuses. They had access to computers earlier than others, due to said affluence. They seem unable or unwilling to comprehend they're overwhelmingly on average, "nepo babies" to steal a term from the world of entertainment.
I think it's private schools in general. Even those from second and third tier ones, which can filter more by means than the elite ones, find themselves atop companies. It's the natural access and the natural ability to socialize with other private school personalities. Their definition of capable leader is a particular type of leader. They can make and take jokes, but particular types of jokes. They hide each other's shortcomings, insecurities, guilt whereas people from other backgrounds, even people they like and think highly of, tend to serve as a mirror.
Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though. It would be nice if we could have that person with access pitching without them also being in charge of running a company, product development, or managing people. But then it would require the same of the investors. The investors would then need to evaluate products and ideas and markets. And the markets would have to reward that. Things would need to be different.
I think CS is a little unusual in that places like Berkley are ranked highly. (Interestingly, Harvard has a rather low CS rank and Zuck was in the process of transferring to psych because he can't handle anything quant, but due to FERPA no one will call him out even as he repeatedly steps outside the law)
>Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though.
I think part of the issue is that a big chunk of startups are straight up grift. My complaints about gatekeeping aside, I think if I had a legitimately good idea I could either submit to yCombinator or talk to contacts who've cashed in stock and get investors.
That's mostly due to the fact I'm well known for valuing authenticity though and my personal brand is such that folks would take my proposal seriously.
I met a LOT of people who went to places like Stanford who basically... they always meet the metrics, at the expense of all else.
Anyways, I think in general we try to generate too many
"startups" when we're really striving for small businesses.
But because the funding is the truly difficult part, we hyperfocus on that.
Meanwhile, I've seen plenty of startup ideas that while benefiting from the Ycombinator social network, have initial costs such that you could hit up a few rich friends who've known you a while with a solid business plan and get bootstrapped... but that would require domain knowledge and the respect of your peers, two things many founders lack ;-)
Quite frankly speaking and acting as if you are from the upper crust is itself a criteria for success. It might be fine to say that this is not a skill, but people can definitely tell and they select for it.
I spent most of my time in government, and I was quite shocked in private industry how enthusiastically nearly everyone had taken to the class divide. It was a bit like A Brave New World. Even when resenting it, the lower class totally bought into the mythos of the upper class. It was very clear I would never be an executive at my company, but at the same time, my particular company was riddled with incompetent and corrupt executives.
I didn't feel or sound like one of them, and I refused to lie or bullshit. And every one of them could tell, and it forever marked me as an outsider.
>acting as if you are from the upper crust is itself a criteria for success
Define "upper crust"? Because I'm reading this as "old money", and a lot of the "old money" people I've met aren't actually generating much of it right now... they're just tending to investments purchases when the family horse glue factory or whatever got sold in the 1890s.
It's not difficult at all to become one, and the work involved in being a CEO is not particularly difficult in comparison to senior technical work at all. The only thing that is harder about being a CEO is the responsibility. I'm sure being the CEO of Microsoft or whatever is plenty difficult and demanding in many ways, but most CEOs are not that, and speaking just from experience most CEOs and CTOs are clueless morons.
With that said, I've been programming for 25 years and I've only been a CEO for 3, so take what I said with a pinch of salt.
I do think people overestimate titles like this a lot, though, and it really comes down to what the company actually does and what is demanding for that company at that position/role. The CTO of a some-bullshit-as-a-service company may as well be straight out of college, because they're likely doing something trivial that literally anyone (including LLMs) could put together. The CTO of a well-used and reliable streaming service that handles a meaningful part of the world's Internet traffic is obviously solving a more interesting and demanding problem, and their decisions are going to be more important.
It's difficult in the sense that it's rare and much of it is out of your hands. That's a very different kind of difficulty than honing a technical skill. I'm happy to call it something other than difficult, but most of those engineers would not succeed in becoming CEOs -- whether or not they would actually do a good job at it.
Years of ZIRP, QE, bailouts and stymulus money muddled the waters a lot. Add to this the Old Boys (and Girls now) Networks, a culture that values getting money fast as the ultimate value, the prevalence of politics and you end up getting a boatload of bad CEOs.
There was a time when I used to recommend "Out of the Crisis", a book from Demming, to business leaders.
Problem is, "Out of the crisis" still assumes as a premise that companies compete on the quality of their products, that making money comes from actually making and selling stuff. That leaders are not the anti-intelectual morons that believe that absolutely any thing can be explained with a 15 minutes deck, that math and statistics are passtimes for weird geeks that don't add "business value" and because of that, is a book that could have steered us toward a better world in the 80s, but now it is completely useless, because its recipes can't handle the level of degradation things goto into.
He's the face of bad CEOs because people like to make up things about how bad he is. The Social Network, a major 2010 biopic about the early days of Facebook, famously cut his college sweetheart and now-wife out of the story in favor of a fabricated character arc involving an ex-girlfriend who does not exist.
Poor Marky Z. always getting a bad rap. Let s/he who hasn't made zillons getting billions of people hopelessly addicted to social media while facilitating a genocide or two and generally destroying the world order as we know it throw the first stone.
From your tone, it sounds like you may just be intending to warn me that it's cringe not to agree with any criticism of Zuckerberg? If that's so, I have to respectfully disagree; I think this is a bad attitude that leads towards being poorly informed about the world.
If you're interested in discussing the specific claims you're making, I really don't think that billions of people are hopelessly addicted to social media, and I would love to hear your basis for claiming this. My understanding (from e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2) is that genuine compulsive use of social media is quite rare, and most people who describe themselves as "addicted" are just regular users who enjoy it but kinda feel like it's a waste of time.
> Meta Settles Lawsuit That Claimed Social Media Addiction Screwed Up Schools
> On Thursday, Meta settled a lawsuit brought by a Kentucky school district that claimed the tech giant’s social media platforms have created a mental health crisis at its schools.
> The case was considered the first of its kind and a bellwether (a case that is representative of a large pool of lawsuits and will be a test for future litigation). The plaintiffs argue that social media platforms have had a major negative impact on the mental health of school-age children, which in turn has caused a burden on the education system, as American schools were forced to redirect resources to counter this problem.
> The settlement comes shortly after Meta lost a key bellwether social media addiction trial. Back in March, a judge in Los Angeles ruled that Meta was liable for the adverse mental health effects a now 20-year-old suffered after getting addicted to Instagram from an early age. The representatives of the young woman argued successfully that it was Meta’s deliberate design choices, like the infinite scroll and face-altering filters on stories, that had exacerbated her addiction and subsequent mental health issues like self-harm and depression.
> The military junta in Myanmar was facilitated by Facebook to post hate speech that sought to foment sexual violence and promote genocide against the Rohingya. "Myanmar would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived" Wynn-Williams writes.
> Wynn-Williams argued that Facebook failed to moderate hate speech against the Rohingya in Myanmar, including the use of the racial slur kalar. She noted that the company only had two Burmese language moderators, both based in Dublin, for the entire country, and claimed that one of the two moderators gave a pass to hate speech while removing pro-human rights content. She further claimed that she raised concerns that the moderator was "in cahoots with the" junta, only to have her concerns dismissed by the content team. Additionally, she claimed that her efforts to have Facebook's Community Standards rules translated into the Burmese language were resisted by the company communications team, who told her that "Myanmar isn’t a priority country" in the region.
> In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.
> The data was collected through an app called "This Is Your Digital Life", developed by data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his company Global Science Research in 2013. The app consisted of a series of questions to build psychological profiles on users, and collected the personal data of the users' Facebook friends via Facebook's Open Graph platform.[2] The app harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles. Cambridge Analytica used the data to analytically assist the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
> Other advertising agencies have been implementing various forms of psychological targeting for years and Facebook had patented a similar technology in 2012.
> Facebook manipulated the emotions of hundreds of thousands of its users, and found that they would pass on happy or sad emotions, it has said. The experiment, for which researchers did not gain specific consent, has provoked criticism from users with privacy and ethical concerns.
> For one week in 2012, Facebook skewed nearly 700,000 users’ news feeds to either be happier or sadder than normal. The experiment found that after the experiment was over users tended to post positive or negative comments according to the skew that was given to their news feed.
> The research has provoked distress because of the manipulation involved.
> Studies of real world networks show that what the researchers call ‘emotional contagion’ can be transferred through networks. But researchers say that the study is the first evidence that the effect can happen without direct interaction or nonverbal clues.
> Anyone who used the English version of Facebook automatically qualified for the experiment, the results of which were published earlier this month. Researchers analysed the words used in posts to automatically decide whether they were likely to be positive or negative, and shifted them up or down according to which group users fell into.
It's on my mind because they're releasing a sequel in October, and Aaron Sorkin has not (as far as I've seen) acknowledged that much of the original was not true nor promised to be more accurate this time around. I'm pretty confident that it's going to be about the same mix as last time, and I'm going to have to go around saying "actually the scene where Zuckerberg did suchandsuch terrible thing wasn't real", and people will respond by insinuating that it's lame for me to care.
Can you expand on this? Aren't there plenty of "not-amazing-but-definitely-not-evil" organizations out there which need talented engineers?
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