Bees use flight movements and body wiggles to help their brains learn and recognize visual patterns with remarkable accuracy, according to University of Sheffield research that could reshape how next-generation artificial intelligence is developed.
What really sucks is the label "low performer" that will get attached to the reason you got laid off at Facebook. That was an intentionally cruel thing to do to people who lost their livelihoods.
Personally I'm not sure why people are fixating on this particular point - companies rarely tend to lay off their high performers. Sometimes they might axe entire divisions and that would include both high and low performers, but whenever it's not that the implication is clear.
I did spend the first half of my career in banking though, so maybe I've got a different baseline.
Surely it damages Meta - I can't see why they would do it. Investors might care - but there are specific channels for communicating with them and it isn't clear that they would believe the narrative.
Microsoft are doing the same thing, so I presume there's a reason for it.
The flipside of labeling people let go as "poor performers" is that you make the people still on board look like "high performers" by contrast. This increases the social value of being an active Meta employee. In that way, you could see it as "brand building". Because they will pitch themselves as employing only "the best of the best" and this reputation can be used to recruit people who want to take the gamble of potentially benefitting from that.
By damaging the reputation of the people they lay off in order to improve their own reputation, it's almost a form of reputational theft. It's unethical but I can see why they are doing it.
If you take a job at Meta, try to understand that the company can and will screw you if it benefits them so be prepared to do the same in turn. Never forget that Meta is not a great company in the sense that it is technically excellent. What I mean by that is that their technical excellence is not a product of their culture but a necessity of operating at scale.
What makes Meta great is that it's one of the most ruthlessly managed companies in its class. It knows how to thrive in legal and ethical gray areas. This is the primary thing that its culture selects for and as a result it is a master at that art.
So use them like they use you and don't fall for their non-sense about being mission driven or making the world more open and connected. It's a fleet of pirate ships. Nothing more.
- t. resigned from Facebook twice in my career in order to work at "better" (by my standards) companies.
I really don't understand why it was necessary to publically mention why these folks were being laid off. Being laid off is humiliating enough as it is, without the added cruelty from ones former employer.
I was laid off from Intel in early 2023. As far as lay offs go, it was handled as well as can be expected during those times. I left with my dignity intact and I would jump at an opportunity to work there again.
I don't think this is so much about this ONE ad but rather, it contributes to the overall feeling that real connections, like art, music, and architecture, are being lost daily. Music programs are constantly being cut. Architects can't find work. Woodworkers can't make a living making custom furniture. Sam Ash music stores are shuttering ALL their locations.
This! Music programs throughout the US, are getting cut. AI has fundamentally (and not in a good way) changed the artistic landscape in ways that we cannot recover from. My soon to be high school graduate daughter, was so looking forward to pursuing her artistic passions in college, and now is taking a gap year to really understand if that is something she still thinks she can make a living at.
Not to be glib, but the "starving artist" has been a thing for a lot longer than AI (or even Apple) has been around. While I hope your daughter can indeed find a way to make a living from her passions if that's what she wants, taking time to give a good hard think about that (and for that matter whether or not trying to make your passion your job might ruin the passion) isn't the worst thing she could do.
I think there's also something to be said for the fact that while I agree school music programs should not be facing the cuts they do – and that's a battle I was fighting when I was in school too – digital music technology (and its analogs in video and photography arts) have probably been a net positive in terms of bringing the capability to create art to more people than just school programs on their own. When you can make art without consuming resources, without needing large studio spaces or especially in the case of music an entire band of other people, that can give freedom of expression to people that would otherwise have been prevented from participating in the arts because of their circumstances.
I'd also point out that while AI (like any disruptive tech in the arts) may have introduced bad changes, there are also cases where it's allowed for artistic expression that would have been impossible before. My favorite recent example is Billy Joel's new "Turn the Lights Back On" song and video. Watch the video and the obvious thing that jumps out at you is the de-aging / replacement effects. But if you close your eyes and really listen to the music too, you'll discover not only did they play with de-aging visually, but they also played with de-aging his voice. And though the whole song as he ages up in the song, his voice is also changing to match each era until it returns to the present day. That's a cool, artistic and emotional use of AI technology that just wouldn't have been possible before the tools we have now.
I'm with you in that music and art programs should be invested in and not cut. They were already being cut when I was a teenager in the 90s and it really held back my own music practice.
But in terms of your daughter pursuing an art career, was she hoping to work in commercial art? Like at an animation studio or graphic design house? Because I don't see AI taking jobs from artists doing work that ends up in galleries and museums. All of my friends that are professional visual artists here in NYC work with physical materials that go onto physical walls in galleries, and I don't think any of the AIs are going to take away from making 30-foot textile sculptures or oil paintings or immersive performance art transformations of galleries. They might even enhance the toolkit some of my friend's get to use.
And depending on what she considers making a living, she probably won't for a very long time as an artist regardless of AI. There's a huge gap between the artists making $100k on a painting and the long tail of those just holding on making enough to survive. But the one thing all of them have in common is that they really couldn't do anything else in their life, they're fully committed to it, it just would be impossible for them to not be artists. Maybe I'd suggest her going through the Artists Way [1] during her gap year while she tries to figure out if it's what she wants to do! The framing of it can get pretty, I don't know, annoying, weird, but the exercises over the 12-weeks I found to be helpful.
Recording and mass production made “I want to be a musician” similar to “I want to be a pro football player” by the middle of last century (“big band” style being popular, and live radio, kept the career alive for a while)
It cut the value, monetary and social, of anything but great talent and skill down to almost zero, where one middling ability had had substantial value. It shifted the reward for it almost entirely to the tip-top of the skill hierarchy.
I think the level most people engage with music making (a hobby, for themselves primarily) will survive just fine. Some of the already-tiny set of paying jobs it composition, especially, may be in trouble, but that was already a rare career.
One more opinion in the mix. I grew up in extreme poverty as a child who also happened to have a keen interest in music. I could never develop this keen interest because of course, the cost of instruments was too much for my mom to handle.
That same kid also got to watch Pete Townsend (and others) get superstar status, while breaking instruments during a performance. It was heartbreaking to me that he didn't just donate those instruments to disadvantaged kids and still bothers me today.
So, while I understand the intention of the ad, when you couple that, with Apple products being too pricey for a lot of people, yeah, it bothered me.
The only reason I'm using JetBrains at all right now is because Rider is cross platform. With Microsoft announcing the discontinuation of Visual Studio on Mac, I get really tired of the context shifting between Visual Studio at work and Rider at home.
Additionally, are the costs of Visual Studio over Rider. My work pays for my Visual Studio Subscription, which does not allow for personal use. The JetBrains Ultimate sub is affordable for me, but this AI integration has me rethinking this.
Boggles my mind that they lacked the foresight to seriously consider whether this was a good move or not. I always considered them extremely developer friendly, but with this latest move, I'm not so sure.
I wouldnt just write them off for one goof. It can happen to anyone. In the grand scheme of things this is a new market that is growing and adapting accordingly.
I have a feeling that's one of their goals, if you watch the launch video you can see they're really trying to make their offering as flexible as possible.
Maybe I was too young but honestly I didn’t care at all. Was it colorful and super contrasted ? Yes. But it was not, at least to me, ugly.
Sure, coming from gray OSes from the 90’s, it could have appeared as "childish" but I really think this was just because people somehow internalized that "pro = sad gray". And for what its worth, I’m still convinced that we never had something better than the slightly 3D beige controls of Windows XP.
Now, any app is more colored than Windows XP but nothing is coherent anymore, there is no more "OS look" anywhere, it’s just the applications, their colors and their branding. Even Apple is losing this battle update after update.
I think it (metaphorically) says something about how we lost control of our computers.
