Sorry, but "good people" who are involved with all the evil things Facebook does by working for them aren't good people. I know it's hip to absolve yourself of responsibility by saying "I just work here" or "I didn't work on that", but all these rationalizations don't fly as long as you're one of the quiet majority that does nothing to fight what Facebook does.
Seriously, techies seem to act on the same amoral plane as business executives and I wonder how you people manage to sleep at night.
Please don't morally posture over other people on this forum, first because it's bad for conversation, and second because we're all guilty, even those who don't work for Facebook.
I find it difficult to believe that the average Facebook employee is exposed to less media coverage about their own company than a member of the general public is. So the remaining possibilities are that the employee either agrees with the policy (in which case, we can question their judgment), or they're just trying to keep food on the table (in which case, we should wonder about how healthy the job market is).
There are more options than you've presented. There is also that the employee has perfectly valid and logical reasons for believing the policy isn't evil. In other words, the issue is you see the policies as evil with no possibility to see otherwise.
I use facebook to connect with my family and friends. I've unfollowed all overly political friends. I get no real or fake news in my facebook feed. If I worked at facebook I'd be proud of helping people to stay connected.
There’s no question that there are good things about Facebook, but I think a fully contemplative person would need to balance those things against the harms Facebook allows to exist on their platform. It’s not a black and white question of good vs evil, as much as it is “does what this company does (or not do), on balance, comport with my values of right or wrong?” Evidence of wrong-doing and questionable judgment by the company’s leaders is abundant. And at some point you can’t continue to work for a company without being complicit in its sins; after all, a company hires someone because they need them to help execute the company’s decisions.
What if you replaced “Facebook” with “the US federal government”?
Can you continue to work for the digital service without being complicit in the government’s sins? There is plenty of evidence of wrong-doing and questionable judgement by the government’s leaders, for sure.
Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?
The Government is subject to a Constitution that has an amendment process, and laws are made by elected leadership who can be voted out by the people.
Facebook is not a democracy, and given the corporate structure and differing voting rights of shareholders, it is practically impossible to replace the current leadership even if a majority of shareholders wanted to.
Moreover, the Government is immense and highly diverse in its missions compared to Facebook. I don't think anyone reasonably believes the sins of the CIA should be borne by, say, U.S. Forest Service park rangers. If Facebook had a public service mission that, among other things, provided essential services to the public like food and housing, perhaps the discussion would be different.
> Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?
Some might say that this is the desired outcome, but eventually management might see the writing on the wall and change the way they do business. Indeed, this is one of the key mechanisms of unionized labor - to bring management to the table for negotiation through the threat of work stoppage (striking).
I think the government is indeed massive with a diverse set of goals, but I think employees at Facebook may see their workplace the same way:
- They could work on something “good”, like trust and safety, community moderation tools, emergency response, etc.
- They could work on something user-driven or “neutral”, like Events or Groups which are used to organize anything from BLM protests to Trump rallies.
If they’re not actively designing privacy anti-patterns or trying to make the news feed more addictive, quitting would not really affect those problem areas.
I think organizing at the workplace is a great idea, and the threat of work stoppage could be a very real one if enough employees organize. But the idea of telling people to quit their jobs and distance themselves from the problem is very different from telling them to start organizing to fix the problem.
As others have said, there are other possibilities. Some good, some neutral, perhaps some bad (but in ways unrelated to how Facebook itself is considered bad).
A great many are there to build their skills and/or resumes, which is a lot more than just putting food on the table. There aren't many places where one can learn so much so quickly about certain technologies (like VR/AR) or how to run things at that kind of scale, and most of those (e.g. Google, Amazon) have their own ethical issues. Many other companies, including some HN darlings, were founded by ex-FB employees. Some of them are doing good things, for practically any definition of "good" you might apply.
Others are there because they believe in the good Facebook does as well as the bad. As you said, they're likely exposed to more information about what the company does, which means a lower percentage is of the "jealous columnist at NYT" variety. Facebook helps connect people and businesses in positive ways as well as negative. You might think the ratio is not high enough, but others can quite reasonably disagree and/or think it's worth their time to work on improving that ratio.
There are many other possible reasons as well. "Evil or trapped" is not a useful simplification.
A good way to look at this is to consider someone working for RJ Reynolds in the 70s. The pay is good, you are working on a product that people just seem to _love_, and everyone at the company seems pretty enthusiastic and committed. There is a little thrill to tell people where you work and have them tell you that they use your company's product.
Yes, some people may have concerns about the product and its long-term consequences to individual health and society, but those are just alarmist freaks and we can ignore them.
Yes, there are also those internal reports that you might have seen or heard about in chatter around the water cooler, but you are not an expert in that subject so really what do you know? And the experts the execs bring around on office tours seem to be OK with things.
Yes, everyone at the company uses the product and while you were not a heavy user of the product before joining you can't avoid it in meetings and daily work. You seem to be recognizing some of the negative symptoms of the product in your daily life a lot more these past few months, but that recent project you worked on was pretty cool and in your last evaluation you got high marks for 'impact' so it can't all be bad, right?
Everyone who works at FB (ok, let's say IC2 and above) knows what is going on. Everyone who has been there for more than two or three years feels the relentless pressure to increase 'engagement' no matter the cost. Most are a bit unsure about the whole 'vision' thing Mark keeps talking about and they have enough self-awareness to see the cult-like aspects of the company, but the pay is very good and it can be a thrill at times to have access to either the audience or systems of such size and scope (e.g. let's count the files in /tmp across 1 million+ systems just because hypershell lets us...)
At what point in your career at RJ Reynolds do you realize that you are actually doing evil and check off box 2? At what point do you admit to yourself that what you do day to day has negative long-term consequences for society? When you do realize this what do you do?
(Disclaimer: worked at FB a while ago for a long enough period of time that the actions of sociopathic management eventually overwhelmed the 'protecting these systems protects activists and persecuted people from their evil governments' story I told myself and so I bailed.)
At the end of the day, you need enough people to care. But plenty are happy with finishing the work, or absolving all the messiness of real world and focus on the engineering work, which is simply more pleasant (and fits to their liking). Work is hard enough, why adding extra stress unless the company is doing something obviously illegal?
So you think that this person was the absolutely last good person at Facebook, and that every one of the other 48,000+ are evil? Do you also believe that every single US government employee, including Dr. Fauci and the inspectors general who regularly report on wrongdoing, must be evil because they're involved with what the Trump administration does? And what on Earth makes you think the majority at Facebook is quiet about any topic least of all this one? Interesting notions, to say the least.
It seems to me that there are three stories here. One is that some small group of employees were violating policy by preventing certain users from being flagged or banned when they should have been. One is that an employee caught them. The third is that the employee was fired - apparently for conduct around the disclosure rather than the disclosure itself, but that's beside the point. The point is that it's absurd to assume that the first and third stories are totally representative of how every single person remaining at Facebook is, while the one that connects them is assumed to be an anomaly that could never possibly happen again.
It's not just the US at risk here. I feel like nobody here pays attention to what China does. Look at all the tensions between China and... Literally nearly every country around them. This isn't a US-only problem.
I'm not sure a bunch of techies who have no clue about geopolitics and have zero interest in the welfare of the US or even European or non-Chinese populations to be the arbiter of what's okay or not okay. Apple/Google are turning a blind eye because they're in this to make money. They don't give a shit about our rights or our security.
National security issues override your freedom to use a spying app by a country's primary geopolitical opponent. That's just how it is. You paint China as this innocent party and the US as the sole aggressor, which is utter hogwash. I'm not sure whether you're intentionally or just ignorantly ignoring all the things China has done and continues to do in the past 20 years such as stealing IP, price dumping, etc. They're not the good guy here and anybody outside China should be wary of them.
> I wonder why one would chose a phone with Ubuntu Touch over some non-linux phone.
This is a false equivalency. If you don't like Ubuntu Touch. Try Mobian (Debian) or Manjaro for Pinephone. The Linux phone is still in its infancy, but its prospects now are far better than they've ever been. And even if it's in a rough state right now, my next phone is going to be Linux simply because of how much control Google takes away from users (let's not even get started on Apple).
I'd say it's worth it to use JoyCons even if you're emulating the games on PC. When they're not drifting, they're great controllers (if a bit cramped). I sold my Switch but I do miss the flexibility of holding my hands in whatever lazy position I wanted or using the gyro for aiming.
That said, it's trivial to use any other control or input device. You just might run into issues if a game requires motion control. I'm not sure but you might even get away with using a Wiimote, but I'm not sure what the controller support looks like there.
They're right to be paranoid. Nintendo is one of the few game companies that's extremely aggressive about protecting their IP (particularly when it comes to emulation and ROMs). They've forced a lot of sites to stop distributing ROMs of games for their consoles and I don't doubt they'd come down with a massive life-ending hammer if they caught whiff of piracy in the Switch emulation scene.
If you say that, then I don't think you've paid attention to what they did to ROM sites in recent years. No other company has been as aggressive as they've been on this front.
I'd love to switch to ZFS, but the RAM requirements are absurd. I don't have a separate storage server, and I'm not really to sacrifice 10GB of RAM (1GB/TB of storage if I'm to believe what I find through Google) on my home desktop just for it when the vast majority of my data could probably handle a rotted bit or two.
I did briefly try ZFS on my laptop a year or so ago, and it ate up half of my RAM permanently. Since it was already fairly limited, that wasn't a sacrifice I wasn't willing to make either when I have plenty of backups anyway.
That RAM is needed only when you run deduplication (you have to store the checksums of blocks that you deduplicate somewhere). If you don't, the RAM requirements are similar to other filesystems.
On your home desktop, you don't have to run dedup. You will get still the bitrot protection.
Why wouldn't I want deduplication though? "You can use ZFS just fine, just turn off one of its most useful features." Really? And I'm being downvoted for it. Thanks, guys. You realize my home desktop is doubling as my storage, right? Which goes back to RAM requirements being an issue.
Chances are, that you don't have many users saving the same or slightly modified version of a file on the same storage. For a single person, it doesn't make much sense.
> "You can use ZFS just fine, just turn off one of its most useful features."
ZFS has many useful features. They come with a price though, because there's no free computation (see also laws of thermodynamics). It is then a matter of deciding, which features you want or need, and are willing to pay the price for.
You obviously are not willing the pay the price for dedup (lvmvdo asks for similar price, so it is not ZFS-specific), so why are you complaining that you cannot use it? ZFS still has many more useful features.
You also have another option: add RAM to your desktop. It is cheap. Then you will be able to use that one feature.
> I hate the cargoculting on this fucking site.
Sigh. I'm actually btrfs fan, all my data are on a btrfs volume (at work, we do use ZFS though, so I do have the experience). But that doesn't mean I won't point out something that the other club does well.
> I'd love to switch to ZFS, but the RAM requirements are absurd. I don't have a separate storage server, and I'm not really to sacrifice 10GB of RAM (1GB/TB of storage if I'm to believe what I find through Google) on my home desktop just for it when the vast majority of my data could probably handle a rotted bit or two.
Please explain where this number comes from. I run ZFS on boxes with as little as 4GB of RAM, which are also doing all sorts of other things in addition to ZFS.
As with all filesystems on Linux, more RAM means more cache, and if you have free RAM you will benefit from a dynamically resized filesystem cache. That RAM is however not required and the cache can be evicted under memory pressure.
> I did briefly try ZFS on my laptop a year or so ago, and it ate up half of my RAM permanently.
ZFS will use all available RAM for caching, unless you tell it otherwise (zfs_arc_max[1] or similar[2]), but it should release it when the system requires it[3].
Probably Linux. I don't understand how people put up with things like PulseAudio. If I use Windows, the audio sinks behave like I expect them to. They use the device I expect them to. They don't mysteriously set the volume to some bizarre level that has nothing to do with anything when I start a new program, or change the video I'm watching on YouTube, or open a new video in VLC. Whenever I use any audio-capable application, it's like I'm rolling dice as to which device it'll choose to use and what volume it thinks I want it to be at, and none of it has anything to do with previous usage or what I want it to do. What is this crap? Also, if you want to configure anything, have fun trying to figure out what magical command-line incantations will do what you want it to do. Because the GUI tools are all utter crap and don't do anything useful.
Heavy PulseAudio user here, and occasional developer on the project. Pulse is very unlikely to be doing what you describe itself, it is probably something further up the stack in your desktop environment or whatever that is helpfully trying to manage Pulse for you, or alternatively some plugin that your distro added. This sort of demonstrates one problem with Linux - the fragmentation.
OTOH, my Windows 10 computer displays almost exactly the behaviour you describe - when plugging headphones in, some applications will inexplicably continue using the speakers. Volume levels change without any obvious reason between different connections of the same device. Sometimes I have to select the speaker output and then the headphone output and it will magically start working. All of that would be fine, except for the real problem: there is basically no way for me to properly debug and solve this problem, whereas solving your problem on Linux would be relatively trivial for anyone with a bit of experience, even if it is in fact a bug in Pulse.
> there is basically no way for me to properly debug and solve this problem, whereas solving your problem on Linux would be relatively trivial for anyone with a bit of experience, even if it is in fact a bug in Pulse.
I've never been able to debug any of this. I think "a bit of experience" is putting it lightly. I have no idea how to fix any of this and none of the documentation helps. Imo, between "being configurable but being impossible to configure" and "not configurable except for the most important bits, but at least you get a GUI that makes sense and does what you want and expect", I prefer the latter. I don't want to become a PA developer before I'm able to make it do what I want.
Also, if you dive into the Windows 10 sound settings, you can set the default device and the volume for every application and it'll never deviate from that unless you explicitly change it again. This is how it should be, and I don't understand why PA isn't capable of this as far as I can see.
And if a program deviates from that setting for any reason, the only other reason why it could deviate is because the program itself has changed it, and you just need to check that program's settings. There's two places to check. On Linux? No idea. Infinite possibilities.
> Also, if you dive into the Windows 10 sound settings, you can set the default device and the volume for every application and it'll never deviate from that unless you explicitly change it again.
Yes, I've dug deep in the Windows 10 sound settings many times. I promise you, it regularly deviates from it, in ways that don't seem at all deterministic. Your solid belief in Windows 10's sound system not containing any bugs doesn't jibe with my experience of it :)
As mentioned in my previous comment, I suspect there's something other than PulseAudio causing your issues, like some external tool (possibly bundled as part of a desktop environment) trying to manage the sources/sinks/volume. Because of that hunch I'd probably suggest your distribution's bug tracker as the appropriate place to report the issue, as it's likely an issue of integration.
I'm just a regular user sand my experience is more like yours. PA used to be terrible but for the last 5 years, at least, I've had no problems with it.
I just started using MS Win last year and sound is such a pain to configure in comparison, for me.
Can't relate to the Pulseaudio comment. In 3-4 Years of using it on multiple Machines it has "surprised" me maybe once. (Because of a dock that advertised itself as an audio output despite not having speakers/headphones plugged in)
Seriously, techies seem to act on the same amoral plane as business executives and I wonder how you people manage to sleep at night.