May 19, 2026 3:00 PM _Meta Employees Are Scrambling to Use Up Benefits Ahead of Ahead of Meta’s latest round of mass layoffs tomorrow, some employees are deserting offices, abandoning their work, and loading up on perks they might soon lose, several people at the company tell WIRED.

Two employees describe a widespread rush to use up an annual $2,000 flexible benefit, which can cover a variety of expenses including health and wellness activities. A separate triennial credit of $200 toward the purchase of audio gear has led to a scramble to purchase Apple AirPods and other headphones. Another source says Meta offices have been largely empty this week, as people prioritize polishing their résumés and gather offsite to commiserate with friends for what may be their final time as colleagues. Employees are variously “paralyzed,” “coasting,” and “panicked,” sources say.

Meta plans to lay off about 10 percent of its nearly 80,000 employees on Wednesday, with notices going out to affected workers’ personal and corporate email addresses at 4 am Singapore, London, or San Francisco time depending on their location, according to a company-wide memo sent on Monday. The cuts are coming at a time when the social media giant behind Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook is enjoying record-high profits.

But CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists that the company must free up cash to invest in AI data centers, and that Meta can perform just as well with fewer employees because of AI technologies that augment human labor.

Are you a current or former Meta employee who wants to talk about what’s happening? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at peard33.24 and ChaoticGoode.12. Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. The company has undergone three previous large rounds of layoffs since 2022, including as part of Meta’s one-time “year of efficiency” drive in 2023. But even though the latest round is smaller than a couple of those, it is drawing widespread scrutiny because it comes at a time of societal anxiety about AI’s impact on jobs.

Inside Meta, the imminent cuts are among several concerns that have sunk morale to unprecedented depths, according to 16 current and former employees who recently spoke to WIRED. Employees also have been frustrated by being “drafted” onto a new AI team without any choice and the rollout of surveillance software that tracks US workers’ laptop use to train AI models.

Meta also plans to internally restructure as it conducts sweeping layoffs, transferring 7,000 remaining staff to “AI initiatives” and converting more managers into individual contributors. That would bring the total number of those affected—either laid off or placed in a new role—to 20 percent of the current workforce, Reuters reported on Monday. WIRED independently confirmed this reporting. Some parts of the company have been told they won’t be affected at all.

But in recent days, employees who are bracing for changes have shared checklists internally about benefits to take advantage of, and are saving documents such as performance reviews and pay stubs, according to one worker. Some teams are meeting up at bars and restaurants near Meta offices in New York and Menlo Park on Tuesday and Wednesday to eat and drink away their sorrows, several employees said. Management has encouraged employees not to come into offices on Wednesday.

Update, May 19, 11:40 PM EDT: WIRED corrected the time zones when layoff notices will be emailed. _

SearXNG is a local option and is fairly easy to get a container running for it.

It’s not the cleanest, but it will let you search about anything that is searchable if you allow it. (It’ll aggregate results from ~244 different search engines so beware. It’s a “metasearch” engine.)

It can be a bit slow at times (especially if all the things are turned on), and is a bit like Google in its infancy. However, there aren’t ads or promoted results. It’s fairly raw, if you are into that kinda thing.

Getting the API working with Python can be a pain at times due to its bot control mechanisms and strict header checks. (I believe they default these features ON if someone accidentally makes their instance public or something like that.)

A minor one and a component of Vitamin B12.

Sodium chloride is not the only electrolyte the body needs. It’s fairly important to keep a healthy balance: https://medlineplus.gov/fluidandelectrolytebalance.html

Horses, generally, really like apples.

Electrolytes are electrolytes. Your horse gets a fuck ton more salt and no sugar, but it’s basically all the same shit at similar ratios. The electrolyte compounds all need to be bioavailable so there shouldn’t be major differences there. The biggest difference is likely purity and contamination tolerances. (Contamination would be things like insects, small rocks or sand, etc: Things that would still be non-toxic, but generally reduced for human consumption.)

Edit: Still don’t drink the stuff. The ingredients are scaled for an ~1100lb animal so it should be a no-brainer to get the Gatorade instead.

The opening comments are overshadowed by the Solow Productivity Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

I don’t think you know how nicotine/tobacco products are used for money laundering. Just Google it.

You seem hell bent on trying to prove these are pointless raids. Maybe they are, but your arguments are just bad.

The core of this is anti money laundering and that, in many cases, is not victimless. You also point out that they have limited resources, but try to roll into an argument about how trying to preserve those resources is pointless?

Also, law enforcement isn’t exactly a “massive resource” spend when the cost of that should already be baked into yearly country expenses. The only real expenditure is time for investigation. If this really is tied into luxury construction money laundering, we could he talking about hundreds of millions of dollars saved or recovered by only paying the salaries of a few law enforcement officers that will need to work anyway.

Again, I think you missed a few words in the article. It’s an article about black market nicotine and the issues most countries have with controlling substances that are regulated.

Careful online though! With your interpretation of this news article, it seems you might easily be swayed by heavily biased or misleading information sources. Here is a good explainer of how to spot such things: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20250227STO27081/spotting-disinformation-six-tactics-used-to-fool-us

No, they aren’t. OP even copied the summary for you.

Most of TNG painted a picture of a perfect utopian Starfleet and how humans had grown up, like you say . (Obviously, humanity is never perfect but the messaging is fairly clear: They try.)

I can chime in more about VOY and ENT though…

VOY is my favorite and also when you start to see a little more of humanity in Starfleet. We learned a few things like: The Prime Directive/Temporal Prime Directives were always just suggestions, murder could actually be justified, you will never get promoted past ensign if you play the clarinet and chemical addiction is still a key driver in human decisions and behavior.

ENT is just the human transition out of a military focused race to a race focused on exploration. (I am not sure why Archer always seems to have serious case of constipation, but it is what it is.)

Magnets, maybe.

What exact is the goal here? You kinda just rolled right into install instructions without context…

Moab, I think.

Yeah, its a hell of an experience many people should have. (Many people probably also shouldn’t.) At the core of it all, I believe that being able to view problems through a very different lense is a big part of how psychedelics work when used for deep therapy. In many cases, I could see and interact with my emotions and feelings like they were an independent thing. I could almost visualize and touch my own emotions. Being able to see through my problems and get closure for issues that were supposed to be long in my past was a very beautiful thing. Trippy stuff, quite literally.

Also, (and this is really for others that are reading this) I am not really joking with my personification of a mushroom. I used to think that was just some crazy burned-out hippy talk, but there is so much more to it than that. Yes. A mushroom talking is absolutely a hallucination. That isn’t what that literally is though…

It’s more of a very primal, internal dialogue. It’s like the voice that we choose not to listen to when we have a “gut feeling” about something and can’t vocalize the concern. It’s the voice in your head that always knows the right decisions to make even if we brush it off through a normal day. That is the mushroom talking and it’s got a really powerful voice if you ever choose to follow Alice down that rabbit hole far enough.

I attribute mushrooms to finally breaking my years long journey as a fairly committed alcoholic.

The decisions or realizations people can have during an intense trip tend to be really sticky for a very long time regardless if it’s a good trip or a bad one. It’s the nature of the beast.

But mushrooms be like you described sometimes. I won’t go near the dosages I was taking when I was kicking booze. 1-2 grams every once in a while is just fine for me.

After my last power trip (+5 grams) I saw what I needed to see and probably will never go in that range again. It was a life changing trip and thankfully not a bad one. However, when the mushrooms speak to you like that, you listen. They told me I was done and I was ready to heal on my own.

LPT, keep a stopwatch going for psychedelics. I’ll start a timer on my phone when I drop and it helps snap me out of any kind of time related disorientation as I peak. For your average time dilation stuff, it’s awesome. If I can’t see my phone, then time probably is the last thing on my mind.

Most of this is just marketing crap from Anthropic.

Finding vulnerabilities in code and generating complex, multistep exploits with publicly available models is possible now. This biggest hurdles now is setting correct context and actually knowing what to look for. Any “guardrails” for this behavior are easily bypassed by framing the detection and exploit generation as a valid dev style question in the most difficult of situations.

They likely just trained a model without guardrails in this case.

What they are doing here is over-hyping a problem and framing it like they are the only ones with a solution. LLM security issues are more in-focus now that companies have dumped a ton of resources into building AI systems they don’t really understand.

I want it to be a Lower Decks reference.