Posted by dlx 1 day ago
Hooking keystrokes, mouse, screenshots on a local machine is what every decent journaling or timesheet app already does, and nobody cares because the file stays on the user's machine. Meta isn't getting dragged because they figured out how to instrument work laptops. They're getting dragged because they're the ones holding the logs, and "just for training" is a promise that hasn't aged well anywhere it's been deployed the last ten years.
Annoying side effect — the genuinely useful version of this, local activity logs you own for your own records, gets lumped in with bossware every time this comes up. Most freelancers and consultants I know would pay for the former. Most of them would quit over the latter.
They don't even understand what these people do.
It is delusion and lies all around.
if they continue to share their work through open releases despite the leadership change, i hope we get to benefit with their work.
not quite optimistic about the result as i wonder if on aggregate we all consistently interact with computers the most efficient way possible. maybe to beat captcha or scraper detection through mimicry perhaps.
“ The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.”
i've heard it described that evil is that which believes itself to be good without exception. i think i'm starting to agree...
As far as I understand, there is plenty of research there in disciplines raging from social studies through psychology to game theory and economics, as well as informal simulations, that strongly suggest that human interactions are positive to participants pretty much if and only if those interactions are repeated, which realistically only occurs if participants are circumstantially close already - same neighborhood, same job, family, friends, same school, etc.
One-off interactions are almost invariably toxic with at least one of the participants getting cheated, bullied, or otherwise harmed.
So the whole premise of connecting people unconditionally, including anonymously, automatically, and from opposite sides of the world is inherently broken and doomed to do a lot of damage.
So even Meta's self proclaimed mission is damaging to society if followed, what could possibly at that point be expected from what they actually do, given the combination of basic facts that the primary purpose of any business is to make money, Meta's specific notoriously evident disregard towards ethics, their position as an advertisement business and entertainment provider, being deep into enshitification and market saturation, and of course actual honest mistakes to boot.
> One-off interactions are almost invariably toxic
I think these claims are too strong. I can believe that there's less incentive to treat people well when you don't expect to repeat interactions.
To give a mundane counter-example: last week I had a flight where I chatted on-and-off with the person next to me. I had zero expectations of repeat interactions with them following the flight, and it was still a friendly and courteous exchange, on both sides.
I will say that I feel for the folks who work at Meta...I can't help but to feel they have long jumped the shark.