When the magic wears off
All start-ups are born out of a moment of magic. Someone with an idea has the ability and energy to create a ‘minimum viable product”, gathers a small team around them and, along the way, dazzles investors with a feat of financial prestidigitation. The seed capital turns from a trickle to a flood.
Then, the investors demand to know how the trick works, the small team wilt under the incessant demand for “performance”, the magic wears off, and we have to get down to the serious business of making money.
Back in the early days of Facebook, who would have imagined this conversation:
A recent exchange in an Australian Senate committee …
Meta’s global privacy policy director Melinda Claybaugh & Greens Senator David Shoebridge ….
Meta asked to confirm they had been scraping the public posts Australian adults had made as far back as 2007…
“The truth of the matter is that unless you consciously had set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the text from every public post on Instagram or Facebook that Australians have shared since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private,” Shoebridge said.
“That's actually the reality, isn't it?”
“Correct,” Claybaugh replied
Source (via Mark E) https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2024/meta-grilled-over-australian-posts-used-to-train-ai.html
When we go to work with a new employer, we can only know what they tell us, but we will nonetheless be associated with their activities, whether we know about them or not.
“Without the magic, there is no work worth doing.”
That explains so much!