Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it
And you would be stupid not to.
One one hand, you can be that guy that says you declined a Meta job, and be stuck at your current salary level, watching people make more money around you, and realize that even people who are make less than you truly absolutely just DGAF that you declined a Meta job - sure, they will tell you its a good thing, but its not like you get rewarded for it with having more friends or social support, in the end you are just still another person to them.
On another hand, you can make enough money to secure a good life for yourself, create new accounts on social media websites if you want to talk about Meta in a more positive light, and find new friend groups that are easily accessible with having more salaries (just buy a BMW a show up to any BMW meetup and bam, new friends right out of the gate).
The 2024 election should be a clear indicator that people just simply DGAF about each other as much as people think.
Nope, sorry, I have absolutely had the option to do something similar and emphatically declined. I generally don't care to tell anyone this, either, outside the rare instances when it organically comes up as it did here. I want to see myself as a good person with a positive effect (as much as feasible) on the world, and taking such jobs is deeply incompatible with that.
Nope sorry, you still aren't having a positive effect unless you live a barebones selfless life dedicated to helping others. You purchase products from companies, use services, and do things for entertainment that all somehow negatively affect someone in some form and way.
Oh, you think that the arbitrary line your draw in your own life determines the standard for being moral? Well, welcome to the club with the rest of us. Its easy to make an argument that shifts the blame away from Meta - they offer a product that is completely optional, its up to the individual person whether to use it or not, so working for Meta is not immoral. Thats a line someone could draw in their own life, and there isn't a single argument you can make based in any sort of grounded framework for them being wrong.
This is tired and reductivist reasoning deployed only by those rationalizing wrongs, and immediately recognizable by nearly everybody as such. My kids could tell you what's wrong with this thinking. I believe that working a job where I would knowingly contribute to mass mental illness (including but not limited to inducing teenage depression and body image issues leading to suicide), the destruction of liberal democracy and free society, mass surveillance unlike anything constructed before in the history of mankind, and even genocide falls on the wrong side of the line. If you have convinced yourself otherwise, this is a weight you must carry. Acting so callously against your fellow humans always exacts a price, knowingly or not; it requires destroying part of your capacity to care for other people.
Anyone with kids could tell you that this is an ethically vacant position to hold. Particularly given the social network effects of not being on these platforms and the addiction engineering that goes into keeping you on them, especially at an age when you're prone to feeling insecure about your place in the world. The effects are pronounced in children, but still hold for adults.
Anyway, I think I've said all I possibly can to educate you. I hope you can take something from it.
Gotcha so basically what you are saying is that its not the parents responsibility to raise their kids, the society should be structured so that everything that the kid has access to be under tight legal control, from tv shows, to prodcuts they see in stores, to celebrities being legally required to speak and act a certain way, and so on.
TLDR, if you can do that much mental gymastics, you can probably do the same to justify you taking the Meta job.
> I work at a frontier lab and have rejected Meta interviews (for much higher salary) many times over the years
Good for you, but this is not the counter example to the wager that the parent proposed. It would be "I worked for a no-name company in a developing country and still turned down interviews from Meta".
The point is that there is a number for everyone to go against their "high level" morals (i.e stuff that is far removed from actually physically harming humans yourself). Anyone who says they don't have one (and not a buddhism follower) is lying.
As for BMWs, thats the idea - you can buy an M car with that salary and everyone who can't afford an M car is gonna wanna be your friend.
No - not everyone has a moral number, believe it or not. And no, most people don't give a shit about the car you drive, or want to friend you for it. Maybe in your social circles, but as someone in circles of both non-tech people and (literally) the richest bunch in tech - I promise, they don't.
What a truly sad mindset/worldview that you believe that to be true.
I've been offered to interview at these places several times but always declined. Some on principle but mostly because I didn't want to relocate and I don't want to work for a large company.
> Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it
Not OP but I can say with 100% truth and certainty that it wouldn’t matter how much money they offered - I would not work for meta. Some things matter more than money.
This is not true, most people care about climate change, even in the US (https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...). Maybe you think "if they care then why are they still driving/flying/eating meat/whatever" and I sympathize, but climate change is not an issue that will be solved by individuals taking responsibility, in the same way that wars still happen even when the vast majority of the population oppose them.
If you're wondering why they don't at least vote for someone who cares about climate change, I don't know. But claiming people don't care at all is not true and is self-defeating, because it makes people who do care think "I guess I'm in the minority, there's no point in trying".
>I guess I'm in the minority, there's no point in trying
Thats exactly how it is.
Look at the current politics discourse. Even now, in the presence of ordinary people, there can be a conservative who supports Trump, but you are supposed to be "nice" to them, because its all just political opinions, and those ordinary people are removed from the real destruction of lives that the current administration carried out for many people.
Same with global warming. People are far removed from the real effects, so most people just don't actually care.
And in the same way that all the anti vaxxers who got covid and urged others to take the vaccine before they died, people need to get hit over the head with reality before they start to care.
The only way forward that doesn't involve mass famine/death is some low level societal control that forces people to behave for fear of real consequences.
> Honestly, at this point, having natural disasters with destruction and death is probably the only way to make people care
We already have them. People just claim they're chance effects with no connection to climate change.
The problem with refuting it is that they are chance events, there's no way to definitively say "this was caused by climate change", because it's always possible it would have happened anyways. It's the upwards trend in frequency and severity that we can definitively point and say "that's caused by climate change", but that's too abstract for most people to understand.
This may get buried here, but there is one important distinction missing from all these articles.
Win 11 Pro allows you to enable local login, and disable all the intrusive microsoft stuff. Ive been on win 11 for the past 5 years and don't even remember my microsoft password at this point. IIRC you still have to set one up when you first install, but then once you switch to local login, any time you open up a microsoft app it makes you login in the app.
Its not a "good" solution, but given that Win11+WSL2 pretty much lets you run any software out there, its worth while doing.
Microsoft is even trying to get Windows IoT / Embedded to be MS accounts vs local. The same method for disabling ease of local user accounts are being enabled there.
Windows IoT still forces all the useless trash to be installed ... such as XBox game bar. I have to spend every few months going through the means to disable this trash via the registry so it can be automated in air-gaped systems.
Original Window Embedded, pre-IoT branding, allowed full customization. Now it is near equivalent to standard desktop.
You have to pay me to use Windows OS ... even with gaming.
Or don't bother with the above - install Windows 10 without an online account and just unplug the network card. Download the Win11 upgrade binary. Run the upgrade and keep clicking no to the many (but not excessive) times it suggests to create a Microsoft Account.
Time intensive, but doesn't require much knowledge or pulling hardware.
There is easier method. Set up local account during creating Win bootable install device via Rufus. During actual Win install it skips all steps about crating local account. Done.
I bought a returned, "Like New" laptop for my wife. Some Lenovo, higher end consumer laptop. The onboarding process was terrible. Something like, the wifi drivers were not included. I had to create a local account to download the drivers. But there's no ethernet port. Luckily had a USB to Ethernet dongle.
I thought to myself...yeah no wonder someone returned this.
I hear you. I've had laptops where one could not even install the Windows 11 OS on using the official Windows 11 ISO on a bootable usb key, because there was this weird nvme driver required. Which required you to make an additional usb key (of modify your bootable usb key) with the weird nvme driver to load during Windows 11 setup. Luckily the top brands (HP, Dell, Lenovo) have pretty good support asssistant software for once you got Windows 11 running with internet those tools will install the rest for you.
Kinda related: back on Windows 7 I did add my MS account to Credentials Manager out of pure curiosity. But there was nothing else that could be done beside storing login and password. Even Windows Live applications bundle hold login data separately from Manager.
So I removed that account but when W10 was released, it was offered during initial setup of upgraded system. Windows still stored information about that account somewhere.
And yes, there are system tools still present today in W11 that allows users to create additional local accounts beside the default one set during installation - that's mmc snap-in (terrible name) local users and groups or net user for console. But I totally get it and support: people don't want to be forced for an online account out of the box, for a local workflow.
However its the statement that "Google lost its moral compass" has never really been true.
Its pretty clear at this point that companies solely respond to economic tides, which are governed by what people truly want. And Id argue that people in general have lost their moral compass (in the sense of how they vote, in politics and with their wallet, not what they say)
Mac OS is adding support because they realize that they are gonna miss a good portion of consumer base to windows laptops running on Nvidia Spark since people can get the perfect machine for gaming and dev.
The big thing with Windows laptops is historically, they were slightly more sluggish than Macs because the os/hardware wasn't optimized. On desktops with enough performance, Windows has been king ever since WSL2, considering you can do everything with that system (WSL2 can even run I3WM if you care enough since they have an X server).
Now with Spark and ARM, you can pretty much get a perfect laptop that supports gaming as a first party, can run any windows only software (like CAD for example), and also has WSL2 which is very natively integrated with windows to where it supports CUDA with native like performance.
My general goto for tasks that are n level complex is to have the agent store summaries after every generation. I do this for interacting with websites - Ill sit there and type text for the agent to correctly inject js to do something on a website, and every iteration is asyncronously writes a history in a background thread of what it has done and what the result was. On every invocation, it injects that context.
VW is for people that can't afford a BMW or Audi.
BMW/Audi is for people who can't afford a Porsche
Porsche is for people that can't afford a Ferrari.
Once you understand that ladder, just stay off of it, and its all good.
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