Im sorry but your epistemics are very wrong. Providing a free service with no strings attached to nearly every website in the world adds a ton of value, possibly more than Cloudflare’s market cap. And the fact that a free product can lead to profits, when other companies make the choice to pay more, does not remove that worldly contribution.
You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks, you don’t like it when research is suppressed. Hard for Meta to do anything right on this topic.
I’m just saying that some companies might release more information if the reaction wasn’t always adversarial. It’s not just meta. There’s a constant demand for outrage against big companies.
I don't want to beat a dead horse, since sibling commenters have covered this, but I'd implore you to imagine the spectrum of reactions which Meta _could_ have had when discovering their research indicated they were having a negative impact on people.
Some of those reactions on that spectrum would lead to greater human flourishing and well-being, others of those reactions would lead to the opposite. Now think about the reaction they actually _did_ have. Where on the aforementioned spectrum would their actual reaction fall?
Zooming out, how have they reacted to similar circumstances in the past when their own internal research or data indicated a negative impact on people?
The continued "outrage" is that they've exhibited a recurrent pattern across myriad occurrences.
I think if it weren't suppressed and released alongside some real, substantive changes for improving child safety it might be seen as Meta finally deciding to do something about it.
It's also worth pointing out this comes hot on the heels of the internal ai chatbot <> children memo leak [1] so people might not be likely to give them the benefit of the doubt atm...
We also don't like it when this happens: "their boss ordered the recording of the teen’s claims deleted, along with all written records of his comments."
Where is this free market you're talking about ? Is it the ones with all the lobbies spending billions to get ahead ? Or the one where the government friends get the juicy contracts ?
Agreed, but I suspect that this is an intuitive reaction to the fact that the markets are largely rigged in favor of the well connected. Of course, to the well-connected, this situation can be described as a "free market", but it isn't free in the same way it should be for the vast majority of people.
Even in popular tech-- the internet-- we're seeing a wave of regulation and surveillance that will certainly stifle future growth for the small guy. You still see a lot of positive sentiment with regard to the "old internet".
“Free markets” are a conceptual tool. People don’t like how the tool is being used in America (and tbh globally).
I’ve always associated HN with a more humane side of the tech industry, relatively more concerned about the wellbeing of society at large.
Big tech is long past having a positive impact, and well into crony capitalism/oligopolies/regulatory capture/maximizing exploitation and rent seeking.
Tech? The one built on open source? Where people give away their code and time for free? That's the one that's capitalism-positive in your head? Maybe today once tech has become big money, but I wouldn't say traditionally.
Free markets are an utopia. This becomes more obvious the more you study.
What really surprises me is how much of HN swallows the whole capitalist propaganda without ever questioning it. Maybe the promise of the journey from the garage to billionaire is too enticing.
American capitalism in the 2020s is no such thing. It's goosing this quarters numbers so the management can get their incentive bonuses and stock and buying buying business advantage from the legislature.
That's why there's no such thing as regulatory capture or monopolies or rent-seeking, right? They just don't happen in capitalism, because they are inefficient.
The best way to increase efficiency is to externalize costs. E.g. by polluting the environment with your coal plant. The taxpayer takes on the burden of the cleanup and the company gets pure profit. So efficient. Capitalism is beautiful.
I’m really, really starting to question how much of an Ultimate Flex “good for companies” is, when it comes at the expense of: standard of living, worker’s rights, privacy, a safety net, and everything else America lacks due to its single minded focus on being “good for business.”
Correct. As a well off person paying out the ass for "great insurance," the system is absolutely drastically worse than other developed countries. A complete joke.
So it’s not about whether you “have the money” but whether you happen to have one of those rare employers offering platinum plated health plans. I suppose in that narrow case, US health care may be good.
You can spend three days in a luxury suite at the #1 ranked hospital in the world, while their top docs screen you for everything. You literally have full access to whatever the Mayo Clinic offers.
> I suppose in that narrow case, US health care may be good.
Yes, that narrow case of millions of tech workers like myself.
You're not gonna believe this, but you are paying for it. Every dime your employer spends on your insurance is one dime they're not paying you in cash.
> You're not gonna believe this, but you are paying for it. Every dime your employer spends on your insurance is one dime they're not paying you in cash.
You're not gonna believe this, but you are paying for it. Every dime your employer spends on taxes is one dime they're not paying you in cash.
As somebody who has money and lived in the US, absolutely.
The system is a joke. It takes forever to get MRI appointments. Everything has so much bureaucracy. You fill out forms and make calls and get letters and all this bullshit.
Meanwhile, I can just book stuff online instantly now that I live in europe.
And it's visible in outcomes, too. Life expectancy in the EU is around 5 years higher than in the US.
Every single time I've went to a practice in the US, the first thing I had to do was fill out stacks of forms. I've never had to deal that here in the EU. Has that really changed in the past five years?
I’m in the US and it’s the same for me. Every single doctor I visit, it’s the same stack of papers with the same personal information and health history.
Profit for the founders and the shareholders is the only definition anyone cares about in the states.
The idea that a business could be considered successful by just providing a living wage for its owners and employees or contributing to the community is not a consideration.
People in this country see a single person startup making a few million dollars to be a greater success story than providing for the lives and well being of 20 employees for a decade.
It's the opposite. An LLM is better at CEO stuff than working code. A good developer + LLM instead of CEO can succeed. A good CEO + LLM instead of developer cannot succeed. (For a tech company)
Is that a fact? I mean, see the linked article; even the company whose whole business model lies in convincing people that that _is_ a fact is kinda saying “yeah, perhaps not”, with vague promises of jam tomorrow.
