This is what I call content based on 'garbage'. Because garbage is the random collection of peoples' stuff. You can try and make sense and commentary on a society through the garbage dump, but it's pretty superficial. It doesn't tell you a lot about any real person's motivations. So it's not a great basis for commenting on real people. OPs comments are on the collection of things that they happen to come across through news and social media. Sure it looks like a lot is happening, but look at any one person's or business's approach and it will make a lot more sense. Yes, I realize people are producing content that appeals to the 'garbage' mindset, but it's obviously theater. A system that writes 10,000 lines of code for you a week, is headline theater.
That's not how the legal framework in society works. Victims are compensated. The business pays. The precedent of wrongdoing is specifically established which means that further infringements can be quickly resolved.
The legal system does not seek to destroy the business, or individual criminal. Instead it wants them to be able to continue doing their other non-criminal stuff.
The legal system has two goals - to compensate individuals harmed and to discourage further violations of the law. This lawsuit seems to have fulfilled the first goal but fell flat on its face when it comes to punitive damages.
I think there's an axis of perceived wrongdoing here, and you and I fall on different points. Yours is more extreme, you say Meta was doing broad harm by exploring this activity, and want to see greater damages to scare other businesses off from the general territory of addictive interfaces. Mine is where we want businesses to continue to explore and develop 'sticky', compelling, user experiences but Meta went too deep in some specific ways.
EDIT: I see I'm mixing up the New Mexico case yesterday on sexploitation with the addiction case in Los Angeles I thought we were talking about here.
To start off with my personal beliefs... I agree - I see a much broader harm in how platforms try and make themselves addictive as I've worked on such systems in the past. I think the public and even most technical folks that aren't deep into engagement metrics underestimate how studied the field has been and how many iterations of approaches to daily engagement reminders, friction removal and FOMO have been worked through to get to the point we're at today. In my opinion, which absolutely isn't fact, this work is broadly unproductive at improving our daily lives - I can understand that there are some compelling counter arguments that these developments can be harnessed for good but I don't share them.
But, specific to this article and ignoring my personal beliefs - I still find this judgement to be severely lacking. I don't think this judgement is nearly noticeable enough to Meta to actually provide a significant impact on the way they do business outside of tidying up some specifically egregious corners and making sure they internally communicate moving forward in a way that appears to comply with the judgement. The judgement was enough when applied to this pool of users to make these specific users unprofitable in retrospect (e.g. Meta would have more money if it had refused to even do business with these users) but I'm also concerned that the pool of considered victims was so narrow that it excluded a significant number of similarly harmed victims and that the amortized damages end up being negligible.
I guess we have deep deep divisions on what everyone is doing in society, and what makes a 'good' society.
As I've aged, I've entered new-to-me territory where a good society needs to reflect the world as it is, so that its members have high survivability.
At the local family level for instance. When my kids were young. I had dreams of being super financially successful so that I could give them lots of nice things. I just don't want that for them anymore. Protection, and pandering, does not make a good lineage IMO. It's something of a leap I'm asking of you to connect this to my position here on Meta, but I've got other work to do, and I hope it's enough to convey my point.
> When my kids were young. I had dreams of being super financially successful so that I could give them lots of nice things. I just don't want that for them anymore.
That is a decision you had the freedom to make for yourself and your family. In this case, the millions of children didn’t get to make that choice and meta knowingly exploited that. I hope you see our point of view as to why meta doesn’t get the benefit of doubt here.
This was about Meta's platforms not doing enough to protect children from sexual material (and allegedly ignoring employee warnings and lying to the public about it), not intrinsically their addictive interface and compelling user experience. I suppose the actions necessary to protect children from exposure to sexual material/exploitation could limit their ability to make certain changes to their platform, eg tighter moderation would reduce the amount of content that could be uploaded, but they could also have just not allowed children on the platform (like how Facebook started) and then not worried about child exploration?
Meta knowingly hurt children for profit. It worked.
If we are in any way serious about technocratic solutions to social problems, this would be untenable, the company would be bankrupted, a new company would fill its place. No tears would be cried, nothing of value would be lost, half of hacker news would be chafing at the bit to build a better alternative for the newly opened market.
But that's not what happened. We allowed children to be knowingly hurt for profit.
Not hurting children is a pretty popular idea. So why don't you make that technical product for children based on this foundation, and blow Meta out of the water? I love your conviction. Good luck.
It's not sarcasm. I'm channeling you to a more productive focus for what I see as reaching beliefs/hopes. Try and make them happen instead of trying to convince other people they should happen. It will either temper/align them to the world as it is, or show the world what it can be.
Ok, well let's think about this with the same framework I'm trying to bring to the discussion above: system dynamics.
Your comment has the effect of being flippant, condescending, and seemingly callous to the subject matter. When called out, you have backed up to an alternative explanation which is, again, massively condescending (I don't need channeling mate, certainly not from you).
You have not engaged with the content in a good faith manner.
So, standing back and looking at your comment in terms of its effects rather than what it claims to be its effects (AND the effect that making those secondary claims have - doubling down on condescension), it looks more like you're trying to bully me into changing my behaviour and viewpoint without meaningfully engaging with the content.
Ironically, I'm feeling psychological reactance, so your comments polarized me against you (see the Backfire Effect) and deepened my convictions.
I won't engage with bullies any further but to call them out, I'm hesitant to bring the conversation down to this level and give you any kind of air to begin with, but I think it's important to analyze discourse as it happens.
It's very hard to think they wouldn't do something harmful to children again if the economic incentives aligned. For corporations it's just so easy to say sorry, and in the worst case they know an irrelevant fine will be placed in order not "to destroy the business".
Yeah compared to the case in LA today where one person was awarded 3M for getting addicted to instagram. The verdict here seems about 4 orders of magnitude too small.
Your opinion isn't particularly important in our legal system. Since your comment expresses a preconceived notion of the
accused's guilt. It would disqualify you from a jury, and undermine your legitimacy in a judicial, defensive and even prosecutorial function.
Isn't it reasonable bitterness? He invested a lot of his own life on a promise that didn't pan out, and there's probably a lot of people in that community. Leadership comes with responsibility and consequences.
Content marketed at wannabe startup founders tends to be encouraging and panglossian. It's good to see here what you're signing up for if you succeed with some degree of traction.
That's why I use insults with ChatGPT. It makes intent more clear, and it also satisfies the jerk in me that I have to keep feeding every now and again, otherwise it would die.
Careful there. I've resolved (and succeeded somewhat) to tone down my swearing at the LLMs, because, even though the are not sentient, developing such a habit, I suspect, has a way to bleeding into your actual speech in the real world
To be honest “no dummy” is how you would swear at a 4-year-old.
I often use things like: “I’ve told you no a bilion times, you useless piece of shit”, or “what goes through your stipid ass brain, you headless moron”
I am in full Westworld mode.
But at least when that thing gets me fired for being way faster at coding than I am, at least I’d haves that much frustration less. Maybe?
It does. But then, it's how i talk to myself. More generally, it's how i talk to people i trust the most. I swear curse and insult, it seems to shock people if they see me do it (to the llm). If i ask claude or chatgpt to summarize the tone and demeanor of my interactions, however, it replies "playful" which is how im actually using the "insults".
Politeness requires a level
of cultural intuition to translate into effective action at best, and is passive aggressive at worst. I insult my llm, and myself, constantly while coding. It's direct, and fun. When the llm insults me back it is even more fun.
With my colleagues i (try to) go back to being polite and die a little inside. its more fun to be myself. maybe its also why i enjoy ai coding more than some of my peers seem to.
Great info. This is one of those things that it is much faster for an individual to take into their own hands to prove out, rather than waiting for the system to provide us with an answer. Too many decision makers who are unlikely to all be aligned with our own individual interests.
"The null reference was my billion dollar mistake responsible for innumerable errors, vulnerabilities and system crashes" (paraphrasing). I don't know. This design choice exposed the developer to system realities, and modern language approaches are based on decades of attempts to improve on it, and they are not necessarily better. Safer yes, but more weighty.
Can anyone suggest a better approach for a situation like this in the future? What's better than exposing addressing the problem with a light solution?
"The problem isn't the concept of 'null', but rather that everything can be null, which makes it impossible to distinguish between the cases where null is an appropriate and expected value, from the cases where null is a defect."
Which system reality? Plenty of architectures don't have a concept of a null pointer at the hardware level. Other architectures provide multiple address spaces, or segmented memory addressing. Even when a null pointer exists at the hardware level, it doesn't have to be the zero address.
Null pointers are a software abstraction, and nowadays we have better abstractions.
What a strange-to-me announcement. I just submitted my first feedback comment last night, after using the platform for two years, where I said the responses were too long and padded with dramatic phrasing, and if it shortened them I could guide it better. Then today they announce this.
One of the worst ideas I've heard in a while. A company with the premier LLM, asking companies to outsource the platform running all
internal communications. What does OP think we are all doing here in business? This is the Ycombinator community edition of Rodney King's famous "Why can't we all just get along".
Seems like a fantastic idea of OpenAI other than, like, why would anybody else go along with it? It would be like giving all our emails to an ad company or something.
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