Meta's plan to erase 5% of workforce starts today Meta has confirmed to The Register that today marks the start of a mass redundancy process with thousands of workers getting the chop. Word of looming job cuts emerged last month when CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees in a leaked memo that he intended to “move out low-performers faster” and “raise the bar on performance …
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Now, I'm wondering if the Zuck has decided that - due to Meta drinking it's own kool-aid - the increasing internal use of 'AI' justifies a reduction in headcount of 5%.
I'm not a fan of the AI thing, mainly as IMO all it will let us do in the medium to long term is forget how to think for ourselves and pass even more control into the hands of the 'AI Wranglers'.
It's rough on the people about to get RIFed, but probably better for everyone else in the long term as the sooner Meta fucks up by relying too much on it's own and 3rd party AI, the better!
We don't need AI to stop thinking for ourselves.
Do you still know someone's phone number by heart, or do you just click on the Contact entry ?
Do you know their birthday, or do you rely on FaceBook to send you a reminder ?
We are conveniencing ourselves to death.
With the best of intentions, of course . . .
Low performers like …. Zuckerberg.
Let’s see the ROI for your AI investments… and what happened to the Metaverse??
Oh and endemic harbouring criminality within your environment… and Meta’s multiple breaches of data protection, data hovering up etc.
… and running a hateful cess-pit.
Would imply that fact checking would have to continue in other locations.
I can imagine non-US Meta tagging demonstrable falsehoods while the US Meta promoting the same non facts as gospel. Altogether rather schizophreniac.
Possibly save the Z† some letters "Meta confirmed it was expunging facts in the USA."
† odd that was also painted on certain invading tanks. But also having a bunker (in Hawaii) not such a coincidence.
Just an anecdote, but a bunch of my (UK based) family members have recently left facebook and moved to some other social media thingy in protest against the removal of fact checking in the US. (No idea which one they've moved to, I'm not on social media apart from lurking on El Reg forums.)
I junked Facebook - as it was already a Cess-pool of abuse, AI Soft-Porn reels, criminality, fraud and shit-posting…. Before the fact checker debacle.
I didn’t feel the need to go elsewhere and an uptick in use of my time and general well-being is the outcome.
Highly recommended.
Anecdotally, a number of friends have been sharing their blue sky details; a few have dropped off Facebook altogether.
Personally, since the election - and despite not being in the USA - I've seen a large uptick in the amount of right-wing political posts. Mostly from the USA (and mainly involving people crowing about how the democrats have been "owned"), but there's also been a lot of Reform and even Tory posts.
There's also been a lot of crap AI generated stuff - "I'm 130 years old, and I baked a cake for the first time", or "This couple has been married for 5 zillion years", being posted by multiple accounts. Quite what the point of these is, I don't know; I'd guess it's like-gathering so that these accounts can be used for phishing scams/political propaganda, further down the line?
Either way, my block-hammer has been in overdrive, and things are slowly starting to settle. But it does genuinely make me worried about how much junk is being crammed down people's throats, and it's definitely pushed me closer towards switching Facebook off.
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