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Comment by Trasmatta | Hacker News Reader

All those billions spent on tokens by Meta, and not a single iota of value generated by any of it

I can’t tell if you’re complaining that Meta isn’t saving the whales or that their products aren’t good. If it’s the latter, you should double check their financials.

I guess maybe they can crank out more ads in their dystopian ad space of a social network site.

I love how confidently you say this, with no evidence provided (and I doubt you have any.)

Just a pristine comment section yap.

If there was a positive return on token spend they wouldn’t be capping it now would they?

It’s possible for something to have diminishing returns.

Having a speed limit does not imply the utility of driving is zero.

That does not follow. Many things have diminishing returns curves.

Yes, but a curve trends to zero. A cap is a step function to zero. I think they're saying there's no point in removing those diminishing return gains if there's still positive value to be had.

The cap would be around the point where marginal cost exceeds benefit.

How do you measure that? Benefit seems like an intrinsic value to me

Note that the person I'm replying to didn't say "positive return." They said "one iota of value."

In addition, as other commenters have pointed out, diminishing returns is a real phenomenon.

>I love how confidently you say this,

it's not that difficult to say it confidently if you use any of their services and applications because exactly nothing has changed.

For reference most labor productivity increases for the last 50 years amounted to about 2% per year. If a hypothetical FB engineer had doubled their productivity with their gazillion tokens that would be 30 years of productivity gains in one year. I'd wager the evidence would be quite evident if you opened any of their apps

Was there a new product released by Meta that we are not aware of? The last thing I read about was the Instagram account take-over AI-bug.

The only thing I’ve seen Meta release recently are spy glasses, and every employee who has worked on that product should be in prison (with a live 24/7 feed where the world gets to watch them wallow).

The times I’ve been asked to evaluate a prospective candidate and I see that product on their résumé, it’s been an instant veto, in the same category as working at Palantir.

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