If zuck wanted, he could solve it. Decimate middle management, downsize at a level of what musk did to Twitter and then _slowly rebuilt_ in order to pay attention to the culture this time, removing anyone that takes part in such behavior...
The company would be worth more (because smaller headcount) and likely even ship more, because the culture would be better.. I've never worked at Facebook though, I'm just an armchair analyst being judgemental from reading some comments.
Interesting wording, because he's not the owner. What he owns is enough voting rights that nobody can challenge his decisions.
And also interesting in the sense that, this is what he claimed to actually do a few years ago. He had a "year of efficiency" where he significantly flattened and restructured the org, losing tens of thousands of staff. At that time I even defended him precisely due to this reasoning - if execution is failing you need a reboot. Well he did the reboot and it is still failing.
Again, I'm just an armchair analyst, but in that year of efficiency,his aim was to reduce wastage, removing low performers etc.
That kind of trimming entrenches previous culture even more, which can be desirable - but not in this particular case where the culture itself is the issue.
At that point you can't trim, you need to decimate. The layoffs at that time were several waves of around 10% - unless I misremember?
If he instead did two waves with 40% each and slowly rebuilt from scratch, it'd be a different story.
Why is the problem assumed to be middle management? Maybe middle management is the only thing preventing the company going from successful dumpster fire to unsuccessful dumpster fire…
Because the issue is the culture, and the culture is entirely in the responsibility of middle management.
If an IC behaved like this then it's would've been the responsibility of the middle management to let them go when it started. So it'd still be on them.
And that's ignoring that issues like this have historically always started in middle management.
Also I suspect you're looking at it from an individual level: one middle manager on their own obviously cannot have enough impact to change this culture, so it's not the "fault" of any one manager. And that's the reason why the heavy handed approach is necessary, because the bad culture has settled. Anything any one manager may try to improve their ICs work life will inevitably get soured by the next level.
You may want to try out pi-agent and create custom extensions instead.
Then codify this behavior into a process which automatically gets run through.
I.e. $repo/origin as bare repo, then prompt to create a shell script which creates the worktree and cds into it, running the script you mentioned, instantiating pi in it.
Potentially define explicit phases for your workflow and show the phase in the UI - and quality gates for transitions. Eg force the implment to finalize phase to only happen if all tests succeeded. Potentially add multiple review phases here too, with different prompts. This progressively gets rid of more and more inconsistencies.
Still not a perfect solution, but on average I've had less and less to manually address with that workflow. Albeit at cost of tokens (multiple reviews phases obviously ingest all changes multiple time)
Pi-agents extensibility is just a lot better then the other harnesses, but you could obviously also just introduce a different orchestrator to do the same. For me, pi-agent was just the least amount of effort necessary to get it going.
Honestly the blowback against AI in "art" feels overblown to me, but I'm not someone that's actually appreciative of art in general (I don't visit art exhibits etc)
However, to understand their viewpoint you only need to think about what art originally meant: it is something with which the artist tries to convey something. It is - in is purest form - an expression of another person.
This is somewhat offset by "art" as a salaried job. But it's worth noting that this profession has generally been seen as a necessary evil to make ends meet.
Now AI art comes along and generally removes the humans expression from the equation. To the artist, this is like a complete perversion of what they consider core to their identity.
And artists have always been am incredibly loud minority - hence you hear their complaints a lot. Complaints which are understandable, but honestly are exaggerated. Esp. If you consider where AI will go from here over the next 10 years.
Well stated summary of the problem, but I don't understand why it is overblown. The human expression in art and the skill that it took are where it draws its value and beauty. If you change art so fundamentally that it reflects neither of those things, it is the end of art as we know it. It is not just the artists who are speaking out against it but people who love art. That's not everyone, which is understandable.
Edit: I think I misunderstood your intent, my original comment did raise this question. It happens that I'm sympathetic, but I thought the original post was overgeneralizing. I think people actually like generated images and they have their practical uses, they just can't take the place of art.
The blowback against AI in "art" feels overblown to me because the usage of AI art perfectly correlate with the same usage pattern as salaried art did.
It's used when the generated art is not seen as "art" but more of a tool.
This obviously is an issue for artists which lose potential customers, but that's overstated because - as you pointed out earlier too - a lot of people never would've paid for the art creation anyway...
Finally we can realize Harrison Bergeron levels in society and fill everything in our lives with content generated by the most average among us using an averaging machine.
I hate that creators are over represented in society because they, you know, create popular culture. Also, why does video entertainment need to be so over-represented by theater/public performer types who have a flare for drama? Doesn't seem right. Like just stop with the drama people (or is that drama, people?).
True liberation is upon us! All are now equal to our over-represented thinker/creator/commentator types. AI brings 'the golden age of equality' Harrison Bergeron has prophesized.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEgOuZzjI8o We have learned we don't need to hold people back like that story. Just destroy any trace of the extraordinary by flooding everything with the mediocre and filling everyone/everything with AI induced loss of meaning and malaise. Finally, no more creator types interjecting meaning/intention into our culture. Just auto-generated culture for us please! Get drama people out of our drama productions! Musicians out of our music! Artists out of our art! And most of all extraordinary out of all of it! Only average by the average! Finally we are reaching the ideal world of Harrison Bergeron!
Thank you techbros for realizing yet another once thought only a parable science fiction story into our reality. It's really great getting to live through all this. Super glad.
The inclusion of a timestamp in v7 makes collisions impossible unless the generating systems think that the time is the same down to the millisecond, which makes the temporal distance quite relevant.
Plenty of systems end up generating multiple UUID's in a single millisecond.
The issue with UUIDv7 is that you also have significantly less entropy since you only have a 62 bits (sometimes less, depending on implementation) of "random" data. So while the time aspect of format lowers the chances of collisions, generating two UUIDv7's in the same millisecond (depending on implementation) have a significantly higher chance of collision than two UUIDv4's.
It's still incredibly unlikely, but it's also incredibly unlikely you generate two matching UUIDv4's, but it does happen.
TLDR; It's possible to generate matching UUIDv7's, don't assume otherwise.
But essentially, using UUID v7 you actually have less risk of collisions than with UUID v4.
Because of the birthday paradox, if you have N bits of randomness, you can expect a collision approximately after (2^((N/2)-1)) random numbers.
With v4, you have 122 bits of entropy over all time, so will see a collision after 2^60 allocations, approx 1.2 x 10^18.
With v7, you sacrifice 48 bits of entropy to give you 74 bits of entropy every millisecond, so you will see a collision after approximate 2^36 allocations per millisecond, approx 6.8 x 10^10 per millisecond.
You could argue that the risk of a collision is too high per millisecond because it's likely that 68 billion UUIDs are generated every millisecond. And maybe I'd agree. But the counter argument is that with v4 you'd expect a collision after 2^24 milliseconds, or 280 minutes, allocating at the same rate of 68 billion UUIDs per millisecond.
Obviously "all time" is longer than "280 minutes", so v7 is actually statistically less likely to cause collisions than v4, even though it seems counter-intuitive because it has a smaller space devoted to entropy. The key insight is that the time provides bits that are guaranteed to be unique, so only collisions within the same timestamp are significant, and every bit used to provide known-unique values is worth 2 bits of entropy.
Sorry if I worded poorly but you’re definitely less likely to run into a collision with v7, but it’s not impossible, which is what I was trying to point out.
Isn't that the other way around? People back then had more contact with the darker reality we live in - hence it was more relatable.
Current generation of people in the west have been completely sheltered and protected by the establishment for all their life and have completely forgotten that isn't something natural. With every generation since WW2 this has gotten more pronounced, and at this point people unironically go onto the streets to demonstrate for counties with "less then clandestine governments". They cannot comprehend the reality of living as a powerless victim in a world which will callously destroy them- for no reason whatsoever - because they've been protected from it all their lives.
Or maybe I'm just reading your comment wrong and you meant the same, idk
Yes, you are. Their point is orthogonal to whether people in other times or places typically have/had it worse in terms of agency, fairness, safety, etc. Their point is about the flexibility and natural variation of the original oral medium as opposed to the crystalization of written text.
Is that really true? I find that more and more TV series have a lot more gruesome elements in there nowadays, also ones aimed at not-only-adults like Stranger Things for example. And horror movies moved from being a niche thing to Hollywood.
I guess I was too unclear with my comment... Because I can see were you're coming from.
Eg. BBCs Black Mirror - which is obnoxiously turning out to be more of a prediction then a cautionary tale - is definitely in the range of "darker content" in the vain I was talking about.
But the target demographic is adults.
The old stories are meant to relate to you. The whole reason they were being told to very very young kids (<6yo) was to make them understand the unfairness of the world in order for them to hopefully be on guard against it when it matters.
They also weren't really fantasy in nature, even if we consider them to be fantasy nowadays. And that's a big part of why a series like stranger things feels inapplicable here - unless I miss remember it's setting.
Wasn't it fundamentally just entertainment? More about spectacle then actually relating to the viewer?
The young adults/teenagers are both 10+ years older then the target demographic of the old tales, and won't relate the story to themselves because it's too disconnected from reality? At least that's my impression.
If stranger things ended with everyone dead and no happy ending then sure but no, everything is fair and the heroes always win. Horror has always been mainstream fyi, it’s not a recent invention
Think about all the serial killer and urban crime movies in the ‘80s and ‘90s, or the film noir of the postwar period.
TV is more complicated, but cop shows like the early seasons of Law and Order and all of SVU, NYPD, and then later The Wire and The Shield were pretty gritty.
Video games have always been a mix of squeaky clean Mario and Zelda and gory content: Think Doom, Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, Postal, etc.
Fwiw, there are a lot of highly frugal people in eg the surfer/kiting community (example!) which do indeed spend pretty much nothing where they're visiting for their hobby.
And they do often smell and leave trash behind.
So I can imagine that being true if you're living in one of those hotspots... It's a hard topic though
> On the other, too many customers are complete racist dicks to people who they perceive as not "belonging to their country"
nunez alluded to the reason why people will do that. And no, it's not racist in the way you're trying to frame it.
The callers are angry that they're being forced to talk with people which don't even speak their language well enough for it to be a non-issue. Despite being paying customers.
Because the company had a genius MBA which wanted a bigger bonus, so they outsourced/offshored it.
These workers may not deserve this treatment, but it's completely understandable - and the foreign workers ARE the representative of the company doing this shit. And thus... Framing this behavior as racism will not help your message whatsoever.
1. The price would not be double. It'd be at most a marginal change.
No company I've ever seen has more the a single digit percentage of their revenue in customer service
2. The customer was never given the decision wherever theyd be willing to pay ~1-5% more for better service, hence entirely useless to discuss
3. How the hell do you think that makes the people calling customer service racist? Or was my comment too challenging for you to read and comprehend?
You're making the assumption people with accents are necessarily foreign-based workers. You can be a US or Canadian citizen and have an accent.
I worked in a call center in Canada servicing Americans, I was born in Canada and lived here my entire life and I can assure you I definitely sound canadian but customer still accused me of being located in India, a place I have never even visited. So I don't think customer opinions on the matter are 100% justified and fair.
> So I don't think customer opinions on the matter are 100% justified and fair.
Neither do I though? I said it's understandable. Abusing people - even just verbally - is pretty much never justifiable.
But that still doesn't make the people doing so racist.
They're just angry (justifiable) and venting it at the representative of the company they're angry about (less so). Framing this issue as racist will just alienate all discourse, that was my point.
It's unlikely to be racism, since the customer likely has no idea what the representative's race / skin color is. OP's point was (I believe) that the customers he's talking about would not behave that way if the representative sounded sufficiently native to the customer's own nationality. "Xenophobic" might fit better.
I worked in call centres for Telus and Shaw. I’m a white guy from southern Ontario. I’ve had at least 100+ calls where a customer went on a racist tirade directed at me. I think you’re underestimating how much of a role racism plays
> It wouldn't even think to ask the question as to why a person may do that, if the jacket was returned, or if recompense was offered. A human would.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. I've definitely had dialogue with llms where it would raise questions along those lines.
Also I disagree with the statement that this is a question about capability. Intent is more philosophical then actuality tangible, because most people don't actually have a clearly defined intent when they take action.
The waters of intelligence have definitely gotten murky over time as techniques improved. I still consider it an illusion - but the illusion is getting harder to pierce for a lot of people
Fwiw, current llms exhibit their intelligence through language and rhetoric processes. Most biological creatures have intelligence which may be improved through language, but isn't based on it, fundamentally.
Urm, isn't that a terrible example? LLMs are better at poetry and rhyming then most people trying their best...
Also you're thinking with an extremely short time horizon there.
All jobs which are centered around computers will be impacted the same way programming is today in the medium term. It's just a question of time until the data is gathered and tooling is adjusted. Because every company that's currently employing people to do something with software will start to use that data as training material, and a few years later they'll be swallowed along.
So that means eg bookkeeping is still safe... I sincerely doubt it'll be like that in 2035. It'll probably still be somewhat safe in 2030 though
I suspect most industries aren't quiet filled with people like the author though, most people treat their job as... Well, a job.
If zuck wanted, he could solve it. Decimate middle management, downsize at a level of what musk did to Twitter and then _slowly rebuilt_ in order to pay attention to the culture this time, removing anyone that takes part in such behavior...
The company would be worth more (because smaller headcount) and likely even ship more, because the culture would be better.. I've never worked at Facebook though, I'm just an armchair analyst being judgemental from reading some comments.
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