If it’s not a scam and the people behind this aren’t fooling themselves, the way this makes sense is that the YC companies they replicate are going to be requested from multiple clients. And each one gets the same code, with some white labeling on top.
No, at the time I was growing up, the music industry was being blamed for corrupting the youth via explicit lyrics and music videos. And there was a whole big discussion around making movie ratings more and more detailed. It turned out that the movie rating media hue and cry all came from mostly from one conservatively funded think tank.
This social media ban looks very reminiscent and I think it is all about creating a surveillance state, controlling the population to only see images and video in a centrally approved way.
These companies need to do what's best for shareholders, which means do the most addicting and damaging thing. Besides that, we have almost 20 years of evidence of attempting to fix it.
Where it's gotten us is that social media is a tool for the president to broadcast threats of genocide to millions of people. Banning or restricting that kind of platform is not the same as the PATRIOT act.
Yep. While. Below the age of 16 can be potent, some of the most impacted people I have ever meet were well over that age when social media came along. This is not an age thing, it is the very core of those businesses.
Can't help but notice the trend of tech companies shaving employees at an accelerating pace.
Nobody wants to admit this (and there's a lot of reasons it could be temporary factors like "overhiring"), but to me this seems primarily if not exclusively driven by AI. You just can't say that to HR.
The bigger question is if this keeps accelerating, can the industry and broader economy handle so many jobs disappearing, so fast?
It's share price juicing, plain and simple. The evidence for AI displacement is thin, while the longer-term view of American enterprise is incredibly dim (the fact data sovereignty is now common vernacular as opposed to tinfoil-hat bullshit when I started discussing it almost a decade ago is anecdotal evidence enough to me, but just go look at EU/APAC spooling up their own clouds/services for more evidence), and those in power know that the business cycle is teetering on another, larger collapse after ~15 years of growth. It's all about getting that share price as high as possible to cash out before the downturn, and making a big to-do about handing over leadership to "the next generation" before the economy implodes.
Cynical? Yeah, but I fail to see evidence to the contrary yet.
> The bigger question is if this keeps accelerating, can the industry and broader economy handle so many jobs disappearing, so fast?
No, but smarter economies are already adapting. These companies make money through "butts in seats" licensing schemes, and their continuous layoffs and devaluing of labor in the face of constant price hikes are scaring businesses in other sectors into following suit with layoffs of their own. Eventually one or more of them will cross the trust thermocline (my money is on Microsoft), at which point numbers will collapse so fast that everyone else suffers for it as the larger economy panics. Think a bank run, but on XaaS licensing as companies downsize and cut their cloud bills, which in turn causes those companies to downsize, which slows economic engines in other tertiary industries, who then cut their headcount and licensing bills, etc, etc.
It's going to be a vicious cycle, but the thinking seems to be that doing this will depress the value of technical labor (some of the last highly-paid labor out there) between a glut of supply and AI offsetting some costs, with the assumption that consumers/workers will suck it up, cut back somehow, and make it work again.
Except that can't happen this time around. Fifty-odd years of American boom-bust cycles have left workers - especially younger workers - with nothing left to cut to survive. The cost of necessities is already unaffordable on current wages, and there's this expectation that we'll figure out how to cut down even further on our paychecks while still paying record prices for everything. The math doesn't work anymore, and so this downturn is going to hurt exponentially worse than the COVID, 2008, dotcom, S&L crisis, or stagflation turned out.
Microsoft hired a lot of people post-covid. Googling, they went from 125k employees in 2017, to 163k in 2020, to 221k in 2022, and have been mostly steady in size since then (latest number from 2025 is 228k).
How "temporary" is overhiring? I think that they could probably cut quite a bit from the company, and it might actually improve their output.
They keep doing cuts but their employee count in 2025 is still higher than whenever we identify "overhiring" to have occured? Meanwhile, we know US hiring is on the downswing the past few years.
Doesn't sound like a company that actually cares about "overhiring". More that where they hire is shifting.
It's driven by attempting to outinvest eachother in AI, which is very different. They're not replacing job functions by AI. They're dropping more and more stuff on the floor, abandoning it and using the money to invest in datacenters (ie. paying NVDA and a few others).
But they're not replacing these employees. That may come, in the future, but it's not what's happening. This is freeing up money at any cost to products.
We're in a recession. We're not going to admit we're in a recession until it's over (or worse, until it goes on long enough to qualify as a depression), because that's how the powers that can call a recession work.
And no, we cannot handle it. Not without a major overhaul of policy, New Deal style. Will we get that? Who knows.
Should also keep in mind the secretary of war publicly stated the department's aim is "maximum lethality, not tepid legality".
Politics aside, anyone in the supply chain shouldn't be surprised they have a role in illegal killings, because that's literally what they said they're doing.
They will compensate agent engineers just like they compensated all of the developers, artists, academics, and editors that created the data models are trained on.
If we are living in a democracy and in majority are able to live democracy, then yes. If on the other hand most people are not willing or unable to live democracy, then we will get stuck with corruption.
This data is going to get leaked in a breach. It will be used against you in a court of law. It will be used for training and (regardless of what anyone says) will be used to fire you once the AI can do your job.
And when all of the above happens Meta will be absolved of any responsibility.
I don't understand how it's legal either. I guess we need laws against it yesterday.
It doesn't have to get leaked. They can sell it and use it as another means to identify Internet users. Meta is pretty infamous for identifying, tracking, and understanding user behavior. We are kind of past the point where these companies care at all. If you think the push to add age verification to operating systems is an unrelated giggle I envy you. Something something Cambridge analytica.
They could perfect it in house and then roll it out as a product. The way people type and use a mouse are pretty identifying especially when coupled with other things.
I do agree screenshots themselves are less useful for that.
I would be highly surprised if they don't do this already for bot detection... but again, if they want to do it to track people on the internet, the data that would be useful is data from the internet, which they have an incredible wealth of -- not a dataset that is several orders of magnitude smaller from their internal employees' desktops.
For me, it's not even cost necessarily. If they decide to change the product they offer, the old one is gone. I refuse to use anything for personal use that's not at least _available_ as model weights.
Bingo. This same scenario with IOT hardware/software requirements and the ever changing software updates where features get added/removed (and firmware), etc would have so many here up in arms!
> Full refund if we can't deliver.
It would be more interesting if they charged more, so there is a plausible reality in which it works.
The question is, how many sales do they need before the rug if it's a scam? It's hard to believe they'll get away with more than one round.
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