lanthissa

meta has laid off 34,800 people in just the large scale rounds we know about in the past 5 years.

they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross.

There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.

never ever forget theo's gpt 5 hype video and then him having to walk it back.

its very clear that theres money or influence exchanging hands behind the scenes with certain content creators, the information, and openai.

in new york you're not remotely right.

the suburbs around new york are some of the richest in the world. Scardsale, every town near the ct border, rye, huge parts of li, montclair nj and the towns around it.

the average household net worth in westchester which is a huge county is $1m, thats on the same tier as wealthy parts of any major city.

Sames true of the suburban sprawl of the bay area and dc.

this isn't accurate.

america has a wealth per adult of 551,350 germany has a wealth per adult of 256,180

if you exclude the top 10 highest wealth holders in each country its 543,385 vs 252,811.

america's a rich country compared most other countries its also got huge wealth in equality because its top .001% is something that doesn't exist anywhere else

i dont think you need to make it malicious, this is what not having enough compute looks like in practice.

its true of gpt5, its true of why antigravity rate limits, and its true of claude.

there is no possible action thats not user hostile when you dont have enough compute. You either reject customers which is hostile and kills your companies growth or you do the best you can with what you have.

its not like these companies under built, they're building as fast as they can.

people pay them to use it, they find that positive

theres a lot of things to critique about the us, but the f35 isn't one of them.

Over the past few years we have seen it operate with impunity over multiple countries. It astounding to me that in the 12 day war and the iran conflict there hasn't been issues from maintance alone.

We dont know how well the F35 holds up against patriots or s400's, but what we do know for certain is that against virtually everything else it unstopable.

More so when you realize the us has 600 and is making another 200 a year, and in a real war, you would lose some but theres rough parity between the number of s400 systems that exist, and the number of f35s that exist, and all those s400's will never be in teh same war or same place.

its not though if you're working in a massive codebase or on a distributed system that has many interconnected parts.

skills that teach the agent how to pipe data, build requests, trace them through a system and datasources, then update code based on those results are a step function improvement in development.

ai has fundamentally changed how productive i am working on a 10m line codebase, and i'd guess less than 5% of that is due to code gen thats intended to go to prod. Nearly all of it is the ability to rapidly build tools and toolchains to test and verify what i'm doing.

theres a famous painting about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son

in a competitive market they would have been unified a long time ago. google has been making slow steps at doing this apple wont until google does

for cerbras, can we call them chips? you're no longer breaking the wafer we should call them slabs

same thing that happened during the industrial revolution, you pay enough of them to 'protect the law' vs the rest.

i never really understood the billionaire yacht hate.

Once you buy a yacht 450 million dollars of ownership in a company you had goes to people who built a beautiful thing that exists in the real world and you're on the hook for employing a lot of people to maintain it.

I take a lot more issue with accumulation and hoarding of wealth than the spending of it.

you can get a job as a long haul truck driver in texas with no education and paid for training paying 80-100k and live in an area where houses cost 300k, within 5 years starting from zero with no education you can own a home and have a nest egg big enough to become an owner operator or invest in a small business.

so thats the floor for anyone willing to put in a few years of work.

the us is 16% of global manufacturing by value with 4% of the population, i dont know how this fact isn't brought up more.

on a population weighted basis the us manufactures more by value than china.

A bunch of people salivating for a world where the us was 52% of world gdp, not because it was great, but because the rest of the world was ash.

i think its just that its new year and year of the linux desktop is a meme (in the actual definition of the word kind of way) and the meme is growing over time

the 'slop' is generally at either end of the extremes of video length, either shorts or multiple hour videos.

shorts get paid by the view, ppl put on long videos to fall a sleep to and youtube premium does a rev share based on watchtime of the premium user.

this is why you have like 10 hour playlists and white noise videos.

isn't gemini 3 flash already model shrinkage that does well in coding?

thats the joke

yeah they really shouldn't be blockading their neighbors while claiming every country around them is their sphere of influence and openly interfering in their allies domestic politics while leveraging their size to force other countries to accept asymmetric economic deals...

the flip side of that, right now ai coding agents try to generate code, not software.

it seems semi intuitive to me that a typesafe, functional programming language with referential transparency would be ideal if you could decompose a program to small components and code those.

once you have a referentially transparent function with input/out tests you can spin on that forever until its solved and then be sure that it works.

i think theres a huge section of tasks which required you pay high salaries for which are gone.

just thinking from the finance world, in 2010 no knew how to program on the desk and no one knew sql, and even if they did the institutional knowledge to use the dev systems was not worth their time. So you had multiple layers of meetings and managers to communicate programs. As a result, anything small just didn't get done, and everything took time.

by 2020 most junior guys knew enough python to pick up some of the small stuff

in 2025 ai tools are good enough that they're picking up things that legit would have taken weeks to do in 2010 because of the processes around them not the difficulty and doing it in hours. A task that would take an hour to do used to take multiple meetings to properly outline to someone without finance knowledge and now they can do themselves in less time than it took to describe to a fresh cs grad.

Those tasks that junior traders/strats are able to do now that would have taken weeks or months to get into prod going through an it department i'm seeing cost drop 90% everyday right now. Which is good, it lets tech focus on tech and not learning the minutia of options trading in some random country

i dont think this should matter, plenty of conglomerates have brands across quality levels.

think old navy, gap, banana republic.

the quality difference is important for the conglomerate same with netflix vs hbo, the corporate benefit is being able to save on costs around like amortizing the corporate side of things (accounting, marketing, real estate, research ect)

if you want to compete with google it seems like ad space is the single most important thing to push out quickly.

no matter what openai does if its not accepting customers the ad budgets will flow to meta amaz and goog and be used as weapons against it.

they're deep into a redesign of the gemini app, idk when it will be released or if its going to be good, but at least they agree with you and are putting significant resources into fixing it.

ads always start on only the free version, then either the free version has a minor fee that slowly gets ratcheted up over time or the paid version gets ads and theres a higher no ad tier version added.

for whatever reason gemini 3 is the first ai i have used for intelligence rather than skills. I suspect a lot more will follow, but its a major threshold to be broken.

i used gpt/claude a ton for writing code, extracting knowledge from docs, formatting graphs and tables ect.

but gemini 3 crossed threshold where conversations about topics i was exploring or product design were actually useful. Instead of me asking 'what design pattern should be useful here', or something like that it introduces concepts to the conversation, thats a new capability and a step function improvement.

sounds smart, but this a false premise because its not zero sum and theres this magical thing called taxes that allow you to reap the benefits of a more productive system.

If you have free public transit and that enables more economic activity or more disposable income to be funneled into services that boost the tax rake of the city the gains can offset the cost. This is an equation none of us have the info to do as randos online and its pointless to claim otherwise.

and even if your point was true free buses are a partial subsidy to low income people like you suggest in nyc its busses are a predominantly taken by low income individuals (source https://blog.tstc.org/2014/04/11/nyc-bus-riders-tend-to-be-o... subway nearly everyone, and ride share has their own tax as well.

so what it like working at meta?

you see content about openai everywhere, they spent 2b on marketing, you're in the right places you just are used to seeing things labeled ads.

you remember everyone freaking out about gpt5 when it came out only for it to be a bust once people got their hands on it? thats what paid media looks like in the new world.