Agreed. You can quit. That is always an option. "Gotta pay the bills" is definitely valid for some small subset of the us population but that certainly doesn't apply to software engineers in a hub like the bay or seattle. These people delude themselves into thinking they "must" have their ridiculous Meta pay to pay for their $2.5M house and their current lifestyle. Golden handcuffs and turn the blind eye to what they are doing.

I like your take. I see this same thing playing out across many parts of the world.

Dont hate the player hate the game

It is about incentives and rules of the "game" that drive things. Sure, there are a few evil people but the vast majority of it is normal people responding to broken rules/incentives. Probably you and I both fall in this category :)

> Dont hate the player hate the game

To be clear, you can absolutely hate the player in addition to the game. That's for you to decide on a case-by-case basis. It's just important to recognize the broader context, especially if want to leave a positive impact.

Especially as we could all... stop playing, and then the game would end.

Fatten up that wallet with 500K a year and tech stock RSUs and people pretty quickly forget about their morals. Seriously, they tell themselves the same story: "ah this is just temporary. I can make big money for a couple years then get out." But 2 years turns to 5, then they buy a house in the Bay area and now they're stuck. Same thing for Seattle.

I dream of the day when people wake up to see TikTok and Instagram are as bad or worse than smoking.

Agreed. Great summary. Postmodernism and everyone tearing down all systems to their roots is fun... until you have no structure left.

Maybe? I really don't know. I don't want to believe it but the data and just looking around in public and seeing the scroll addition seems to indicate otherwise?

How did you get into this? How would you recommend transitioning from FTE to this life?

I don't know how everyone doesn't see this. I pray. I hope. One day people look at you in complete repulsion and dumbfounded that we gave anyone, let kids unfettered access to social media. Absurdity.

Because it's very far from being Tobacco.

Tobacco has zero utilities, meanwhile Facebook is heavily used for connecting families and sharing small life events.

Saying it is the same as Tobacco isn't useful. It's an exaggeration, which makes it hard to take the argument seriously.

Millions of people find Tobacco a very pleasurable experience. Not just addicted cigarette smokers. It increases social lubricity, brings people together at parties... It helps connect new friends together and can strengthen existing bonds. It's not uncommon to celebrate events with a cigar anywhere in the world.

I don't see social media being a whole lot more useful. Cool you can share some photos, and organize some events, but you can do that without Facebook and all the unnecessary shit that goes along with it.

With that kind of thinking, meditation is like a cigarette. Running is like a cigarette. Drinking water is like a cigarette. Cue the original point of how unhelpful the analogy is.

I really appreciate this comment. Now in my 30s, I was not even aware of EA or Rationalist groups in my 20s but your description of a person high on the smell of their own farts and putting logic as king was me. The world is so chaotic that it felt good and right that I could lean on something "true" like logic. It took me to the "correct" answers according to logic but very misguided answers as I see them now. Humans are driven by emotions and the world is probabilistic so relying so heavily on logic just seems so misguided now that I'm older.

By the way, "the world is probabilistic" is one of the key lessons of the rationality community. (Infinite certainty would require infinite amount of evidence, according to the Bayes' Theorem.) When you find someone on internet trying to assign probabilities to their beliefs, chances are you have met a rationalist.

It has been clear from the beginning that Meta's supposed desire for an open source AI, is just a coping mechanism for the fact that got beat out of the gate. This is an attempt to commoditize AI and reduce OpenAI/Google/Whoever's advantage. It is effective, not doubt, but all this wankery about how noble they are for creating an open-source AI future is just bullshit.

You're wrong here. Meta has released state of the art open source ML models prior to ChatGPT. I know a few successful startups (now valued at >$1b) that were built on top of Detectron2, a best-in-class image segmentation model.

It’s because Facebooks complementary good is content (primary good is ad slots) and if somebody wins the ai race they can pump out enough content to jumpstart a Facebook competitor with a ton of content.

but they've _always_ released their stuff. Thats part of the reason why the industry uses pytorch, that and because its better than tensorflow.

In the same way that detectron and Segment anything is an industry standard.

Sure, for LLMs openAI released a product first. but its not unusual for meta to release useful models.