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.

Have a normal, balanced diet if you aren’t extremely active. So yeah, just eat a banana. :)

I run a lot and a sweat a lot, so my electrolyte loss is fairly high. (You can see the buildup of salts on my gear after it dries and before I wash it.) Electrolyte supplements are great for athletes that can’t practically make up the losses with regular food intake.

But… To say that Gatorade and other electrolyte drinks are overused by people who aren’t active is an understatement. Many people simply do not need the extra boost of sugar and salts and it’s just going to get pissed out anyway.

The reason I am a bit vocal about this is that 1. People should actually eat a decent diet just to get these basic salts and 2. Electrolyte supplements are awesome, extremely basic but extremely overused. They are extremely important, but not in the way marketing departments say they are.

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.

I just sit in the garage until the song is done, which is also a great way to annoy the kids if they are sleeping at weird hours as their rooms are above the garage. (I also like lound music.)

Please tell me this was actually in the script somewhere. I could hear his voice perfectly on this meme.

I use load balanced links to my NAS since it is primarily used for photos and other small files. I do get fairly close to full utilization if Windows needs to rebuild all the thumbnails or if my servers happen to read the NAS SMB share at the same time.

Still, it is kinda pointless except in the rare cases it’s not. 99% of the time it’s only one link that gets used. My NAS and my switch support it so there isn’t really a reason not to bond them.

Bonded ethernet ports are for redundancy and concurrency, which is not quite additional bandwidth. (Just calling that out to help squash any misconceptions of how bonding works. It is technically more bandwidth, but you won’t see total throughput of the two links unless you are transferring multiple files.)

The only emojis I usually see now are exclusively in slop posts.

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

Her wallet probably feels fine though.

Magnets, maybe.

Super shitty paywall.

Moab, I think.

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.

Specifically, the square chunks not blended in at the top of the S and the E. It was lazy work. ‘Hoop’ was done decently, but the rest, not so much.

But yes. The pixels.

Oh, it’s from 2019, so it pre-dates AI and the obvious pixelation effect on those kinds of generated images.

Bad Photoshop blending on other letters…