Mark Zuckerberg

The Independent hangs a trillion-dollar-plus price tag on the case — a number almost no one in the thread believes will survive a courtroom. What they can't wave away is the paperwork underneath it.

A Facebook engineer who worked on the relevant team from 2017 to 2019 says the cited documents are real, and that safety projects with evidence behind them were 'cancelled or turned backwards to maximize harm' whenever they cut into Time Spent.

The piece argues Meta runs on 'vibes-based management,' reading Zuckerberg's line that agentic-dev progress 'hasn't really accelerated in the way we expected' as proof the AI-driven layoffs were a blunder — and claims AI chief Alexandr Wang was put 'in charge of the entire company.'

Ex-Meta engineers in the thread call it a shallow, sensationalized wrapper of a Reuters report: the quote doesn't support the headline, and the Wang claim is unsupported.

Meta's Brain2Qwerty v2 reads typed sentences off non-invasive MEG brain scans: 61% word accuracy overall, 78% for the best of nine volunteers, versus 8% for prior non-invasive methods. Each participant wore the helmet ~10 hours and typed ~22,000 sentences to train it.

The catch a reader flagged: it's an incremental gain on existing techniques, and the MEG scanner is a room-sized machine that has to sit in a magnetically shielded chamber, nowhere near a keyboard replacement.

After her memoir, a Meta-paid arbitrator ordered Wynn-Williams to stop promoting it at $50,000 per criticism — over $11 million, more than she and her husband have earned in their lives. So at a UK festival she sat on stage for an hour and said nothing.

Cory Doctorow frames it as a Streisand-effect self-own. The thread's skeptics aren't defending Meta so much as noting his essay never once mentions Meta's side — that she signed an NDA, took severance, and that he overstates the China claim.

Wynn-Williams' new federal suit alleges Meta surveilled her for over a year, sending people to her public appearances to photograph her, while seeking $50,000 per claimed breach of a non-disparagement deal.

Meta says she's using the courts to sell books. The thread's skeptics agree she signed an NDA and took severance a decade ago. The counter is harder to dismiss: a company that pays staff to photograph a critic who says nothing is doing exactly what she accuses it of.

An estimated 4,000-5,000 software engineers, out of about 25,000, now sit in a new 6,500-person org doing data labeling and RLHF. The autonomy-to-labeler whiplash is the part people on core infra and security teams can't stomach.

Add keystroke and mouse tracking with no opt-out, rolled out in late April, and a CISO who resigned the day after an AI support flow let attackers hijack Instagram accounts.

The flip: a former Meta engineer says the well-run orgs were all acquired — the homegrown ones were always the mess.