It makes sense to rebrand anyway, because I'm sure they don't want people to only think of "that social media site" for all of their other ventures. Just like Google rebranding as alphabet
I think for Google the more meaningful other brands are the actual product ones, like Waymo, Nest, YouTube, Calico, Verily. Those are the ones that benefit from being able to distance themselves a bit from being "a Google company" and all the baggage that comes with that, eg an assumption that it'll be shuttered at some point, will pivot massively into ads, whatever.
I don't think Meta has nearly that need. It's "other companies" are Instagram and Whatsapp, which are basically in the exact same space as Facebook.
I don't think Google really "rebranded" in the same kind of way, since Google is still their brand across the vast majority of their product offerings and the signs on Google offices still say Google. Seems like the Alphabet thing is more about letting the "other bets" be under a higher umbrella, and possibly other reasons related to financial engineering etc.
The rebrand came at a time when "Facebook" was mainly associated with either tremendous scandal (Facebook Files, ad fraud, Cambridge Analytica, Rohingya and Tigray genocides, etc.) or a social media platform increasingly dominated by the elderly.
I think it was a desperate lunge away from that toxic brand toward ANYTHING else. Zuckerberg put his money on VR, given the pandemic and the mild success of Oculus.
Betting big on the metaverse in particular was a mistake, but it might have helped keep the Facebook stink off of products like WhatsApp and Instagram, which remain pretty popular among mainstream audiences.
Ethical vegetarians are exactly the people who might like meat but refuse to eat it because of the impacts. Maybe you mean "natural" vegetarians - people who just don't like meat any way so don't eat it
Because there is often a large tech component to it. The United States and Israel have two of the most advanced high-tech sectors in the world and they are playing a large role in this conflict.
That's a legitimate question and it has no good answer. Not just Sudan. There is an ongoing genocide in Myanmar, against the Rohingya. There is an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in china. None of those get nearly the amount of coverage the genocide in Gaza gets, or, now the war in Iran and Lebanon.
I have no idea why. I have recently started to grow a bit paranoid and wonder whether I am being manipulated by the media I consume. That would not be a huge surprise, I'm willing to bet most people are influenced by some of the things they read online.
Anyway this is an interesting question that has to be answered: why only Gaza, and not the other genocides?
If you really cared about those other conflicts, I'd expect to see you mention them more often in your comments. Are you sure you actually care about them or you just want people to stop talking about Gaza?
Super easy answer: because only on Gaza your government openly sides with the perpetrators, arms and finances them, the media justify them, laws are passed to curb criticism and punish boycotts, and people in online discussion forums bring up always the same debunked arguments and rhetorical devices to divert the attention [1], blame the victims and justify the perpetrators. It's the disagreement that fuels the discussion, the obvious contrast between the right position and the official statements and public propaganda.
1- of which yours is a classic example: "why talk about this and not about something else?"
Because the west (our political and economic system) supports this war, and does so much more loudly than the war in Sudan,which is funded by the UAE, also a US ally, but a far less visible and consequential one. Nobody is visible working the media or politicians to win people over for the UAE every day, unlike Israel.
The aggressor in the Gaza genocide is also pulling the rest of the west into new wars in the region. The war is also deeply connected with our defense and tech industries.
Also, the conflict around "the area from the river to the sea" in it's entirety is something like 140 years old, with western countries having played a driving role since the very beginning. The Sudan conflict on its own has no such history. (The colonial history of Africa is a different story)
Generally, I think it's reasonable to pay more attention to conflicts where the own side is in the wrong. I don't need to demonstrate or raise awareness if my government is already acting like I'd want it to.
Why are you building tools for other humans? Why are they programming in this world where you aren't programming but are also an insanely productive programmer?
Thats exactly what we as software engineers do. We are constantly automating ourselves out of a job. The trick is that we never actually accomplish that, there will always be things for humans to do.
We're discovering so much latent demand for software, Jevon's paradox is in full effect and we're working more than ever with AI (at least I am).
Software engineering is being automated. But building intelligent automation is just starting. AI engineer will be the only job left in the future as long as there are things to automate. It's really all the other jobs that will be automated first before AI engineer.
Most knowledge worker use computers today to do their work, but we don't necessarily call them computer or software engineers. I think it will be something like that, but the economy will need to adapt and grow in order to accommodate it.
OP compared AI to interns, and how they need to guide it and instuct it on simple things, like using unit tests. Well, what about when AI is actually more like an ultra talented programmer. What exactly would OP bring to the table apart from being able to ask it to solve a certain problem?
Their comment about people who don't operate like them being out of a job might be true if AI doesn't progress past the current stage but I really don't see progress slowing down, at least in coding models, for quite some time.
So, whatever relevance OPs specific methods have right now will quickly be integrated into the models themselves.
I don't disagree, aspects of that will be automated, but two things will remain:
Intent and Judgement.
Building AI systems will be about determining the right thing to build and ensuring your AI system fully understands it. For example, I have a trading bot that trades. I spent a lot of time on refining the optimization statement for the AI. If you give it the wrong goal or there's any ambiguity, it can go down the wrong path.
On the back end, I then judge the outcomes. As an engineer I can understand if the work it did actually accomplished the outcomes I wanted. In the future it will be applying that judgement to every field out there.
I mean, real algo trading shops use "AI" to do it all the time, they just don't use LLMs. While I'm not the GP I think the idea they're trying to express is that the nuts and bolts of structuring programs is going away. The engineer of today, according to this claim and similar to Karpathy's Software 3.0 idea, structures their work in terms of blocks of intelligence and uses these blocks to construct programs. Nothing stopping Claude Code or another LLM coding harness from generating the scaffolding for a time-series model and then letting the author refactor the model and its hyperparameters as needed to achieve fit.
Though I don't know of any algo trading shop that relies purely on algorithms as market regimes change frequently and the alpha of new edge ends up getting competed away frequently.
(And personally I'm a believer of the jagged intelligence theory of LLMs where there's some tasks that LLMs are great at and other tasks that they'll continue being idiotic at for a while, and think there's plenty of work left for nuts and bolts program writers to do.)
My trading agent builds its own models, does backtesting, builds tools for real time analysis and trading. I wrote zero of the code, i haven't even seen the code. The only thing I make sure is that it's continuously self improving (since I haven't been able to figure out how to automate that yet).
If an LLM could be profitable trading why wouldn't the creators use it themselves and not release it? It'd be by far the most profitable thing they could do.
How technical do you need to be with your optimization statements and outcome checking? Isn't that moat constantly shrinking if AI is constantly getting better?
You're making the mistake of thinking that the place you're headed is your destination. When you look back (I hope) you recall fondly your younger days adventures where you had 2 bucks and an open road. The best adventures happen when we don't expect them because we're on the way to the 'important' thing.
We very rarely correctly identify in advance what the important thing is.
I disagree that I'm making that mistake - I'm saying that 5 days in some foreign city can be filled with adventure just like 5 days on a bus through unknown areas can be.
reply