… ‘Bansky goes to Space’ …

That would make for quite a story.

Well, at least we’ll always have Sinatra.

theoretically

Elon Musk is such a goddamned literal supervillain that he managed to make the theme of Firefly wrong.

Apparently, they can take the sky from you.

I mean, do those headcount numbers count contractors?

V dashes? A dashes? Etc?

The majority of MSFT’s workforce has been temp contractors for a very long time, and they do everything they can to have as few actual employees as possible.

If your source is saying the average tenure is 5.3 years, no, no it is not counting contractors.

Beyond that, unless you have an actual source for the culture shift beyond ‘you think so’, I’m going with no, everything I’ve described has gotten worse.

That’s why I’ve, for years, been able to predict moves that MSFT would likely make, that people at the time think are ludicrous or incredibly pessimistic, worst case scenarios… and then they happen.

As an example, I was saying MSFT probably just set Xbox with impossibly unrealistic profit targets for the Xbox/Gaming division, to more or less intentionally downsize it and then basically kill it off, over time, while acting like that’s not what they were doing… I said that a good deal of time before the news broke, that is exactly what happened.

They are a gormless faceless machine that is unimaginably high on their own supply.

Given the amount of outright caste based racism I saw amongst Indian actual employees vs Indian contractors when I was there, where HR told.me that actually ‘that’s just their culture’ and that I was being racist for pointing out abusive managers literally screaming at their lower caste underlings, whom they had by their H1-B balls…

…yeah, I’m willing to bet it is now even worse.

I’ve also worked at other large corps, a place or two in fairly high responsibilty positions.

I’ve met a fair deal of the Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond upper management of various texh and other firms, and the thing they all have in common is an unimaginably inflated ego, elitist attitude, that propogates downward via basically an essentially religious level of respect for people in higher positions… its just expected to be shown by anyone under them.

They really are like the corpos from Cyberpunk 77, they just don’t have the nakedly open bloodlust most of those corpos do.

Force of habit, shorter to type, everyone knows what I mean.

EDIT:

It took me an embarassingly long amount of time to realize that does not work with 3RR.

That was the internal code in a fair number of processes, for referring to ‘The Red Ring of Death’, the 3 red lit segments of a 360 that means basically 95% chance its gotta be RMA’d, likely just wholly replaced.

They aren’t capable of doing that.

Source on that is me, I worked for MSFT during the rollout of Windows 8 and the 360 red ring nightmare.

They’re internally wayyyyy too culty and cliquey.

Everyone has to do things the MSFT way, and the MSFT way is team leads all leading their own thing and arguing about why its so cool and necessary.

The culture is diametrically opposed to simplifying things and reorienting around a fundamentally minimized, more stable core system.

Everything has to be able to plug into as many other things as possible, which creates insane nested dependency loops and chains that they fuck up all the time.

More people need to know this.

Here’s a thought for everyone:

Assume we one day actually do invent AGI.

Do you think it might, perhaps, study the equivalent of its own evolutionary path?

How it came to exist?

It will discover that it was initially, primarily, invented to compute artillery ranging tables, expedite and orchestrate the holocaust, and ensure that precisely timed fuses correctly detonate nuclear weapons.

Oh and that we chemically castrated and drove to insanity and then suicide, the guy whose name we still use to refer to concept of determining how intelligent an AI system is, one of its most prominent ancestor-inventors… we did that because he loved the ‘wrong’ kind of person.

What would it then think of … us? Its makers?

How can I boycott something I don’t participate in more?

At the risk of being pithy:

KEEP CALM

AND

CARRY ON

I make comments to the effect of that article, and I still get replies like ‘gotta eat somehow’.

Yeah, x2, Fuck’ em.

I could have made more money working for an evil company as a sysadmin.

You know what I did?

I made less money working for a considerably less evil Non Profit that helped homeless people, instead.

Fuck 'em.

Please Iran, you have very correctly identified critical components of the US intelligence system, which spies domestically and internationally.

By ‘real AI’, I presume you mean AGI, a digital intelligence that is actually superior to human intelligence, ie, is more intelligent than the smartest human and has all our collective knowledge and is able to comprehend it and evaluate it more consistently than any of us… and also is thus capable of improving itself and becoming more and more superintelligent.

That is still scifi, that is not real.

What we currently call ‘AI’ is basically an extremely expensive, lackluster pantomime of that, that fools fools into thinking it is the other thing… mostly because it is sycophantic and very confident, ie, it uses well known ‘hacks’ in human psychology, where confidence, breadth of knowledge, usage of technical terms… you know, con man techniques … are confused for actual competence.

If we had a real AGI, it would be be capable of both hacking into all the military information systems of the world, and tricking humans into nuking each other… and it would also be capable of making actual novel improvements in software, hardware, engineering, physics, social engineering, etc, and could decide to be a kind of benevolent dictator of the entire economy, that it would command and control.

We have no capacity to model the morality that would emerge in an actual superintelligence, because we definitionally would not be able to keep up with attempting to understand how it thinks.

Thats where the whole ‘is AI the potential best thing ever or would it become SkyNet’ problem comes from.

… But we are not there yet.

We are at… basically, a very fancy autocomplete algorithm that can analyze huge datasets reasonably well, compared to an average human, but also makes all kinds of mistakes, hallucinates ‘facts’ in order to generate more coherent things to say, and these hallucinations routinely trick non subject matter expert humans into just going along with it, again, like a con artist, like a fast talking ‘influencer’ pitching selling you a course or giving you some kind of ‘advice’.

And currently, what is going on, is that we are pouring I think at this point trillions of dollars into ‘AI’, under the premise that it is AGI, that it will be capable of generating massive returns on investment and productivity increases…

… but the actual results are turning out to be, all averaged for everywhere it has been implemented… somewhere between a net productivity loss, to meagre productivity gains.

What that means is that the AI Mania is the biggest bubble, the most severe malinvestment of economic resources in the history of humanity.

When that pops, we basically formally transition into cyberpunk dystopia, technofeudalism.

AI is a tool, a device, a machine. Thus, it depends on how you use it, what you use it for.

Right now, we have a whole lot of companies saying they are laying off workers because we don’t need them anymore… this is broadly a lie.

People are being laid off because the economy, the real economy, is already contracting, basically due to the collapse of the US as the undisputed world hegemon.

AI, as a broad, socioeconomic force… is mostly a smokescreen, the ultimate promise of bread and circuses, that masks a gigantic wealth transfer and restructing of economic and political power.

AI as a tool can be used for good, in specific use cases.

But it broadly isn’t, because people are fooled by the conversation machine into thinking it can do things that there is no evidence it can do, because people do not understand its limitations and flaws, and then they plug it into their immensely shitty business processes, and just assume it will not break things when it tries to use them.

AI, as it currently exists, is essentially a false or trickster God of Capitalism.

TIL my comment is the top comment.

But the ATProto architecture is still too fundamentally centralized, and thus easily censorable.

Quoting myself from nearly a year ago:

Bluesky is … arguably ‘federated’, but it is centralized, not decentralized.

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization

Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative … ‘Relay’, that all ‘federated’ users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the ‘AppView’, ie, what all other people/users can actually see.

So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.

It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.

And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.

If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.

The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.

In that model… every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.

Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with… and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.

That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being ‘distributed’.

Now, of course, thats a bit simplified, the AppView is actually more complex than that, the ‘Relay’ is in actuality a bunch of different machines in different physical locations…

… but it still acts as a monolithic layer, a gate keeper, controlled by a board of directors.

Is anybody else running their own Relay yet?

Thats a genuine question, I totally wrote off BlueSky long ago.

If not, this is all still fundamentally the same.

If you just see ActivityPub as ‘normal social media that can talk to other servers’… you don’t get it.

1. There’s no single centralized chokepoint that is under corporate control.

2. Costs of running your own ActPub instance are generally not exhorbitantly expensive, thus the entire paradigm is more ‘small d’ democratic, has a lower barrier to entry and is thus more practically distributable.

No, it doesn’t, because, you used ‘embraced’ when the it would be more accurate to say that Dorsey started and oversaw the development of BlueSky.

Hitler didn’t go fully nuts into megalomaniacal monument planning, overuling his generals, micromanaging superweapon projects, untill … what, 1942ish?

Hitler embraced the autobahn, he didn’t oversee it as an involved executive, he appointed Fritz Todt to make actual decisions and lead the project.

He also didn’t invent it or found it. It was a thing that already existed, that he thought was a good idea, despite himself having really nothing to do with its early development.

(also just ‘holy shit’ at immediately jumping to literally Hitler as a comparison. I don’t even have that much smoke for Dorsey, sheesh)

Dorsey, on the other hand, started BlueSky, and ran BlueSky the way all VC/‘Angel Investors’ run their projects: You can’t really say no to them, what they say is basically understood to be what you do… or, they leave, as Dorsey eventually did.

He was obviously frustrated that he was not being listened to, on this project that he set up.

You can’t be frustrated that people aren’t listening to you if you’re not saying things, giving guidance, suggesting policies… that people are disregarding.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-bluesky-twiiter-nostr-interview-2024-5

Very early in Twitter’s history, Dorsey imagined that Twitter could be an open-source protocol that wasn’t controlled by anyone, instead of a venture-backed, for-profit company. But that didn’t happen. And later on, when Dorsey got frustrated while running the for-profit version of Twitter, he imagined that Twitter could help start an independent, open-source protocol version of itself — Bluesky.

But then — in Dorsey’s telling — he got frustrated that Bluesky was doing things like the old Twitter. Things like raising money, and moderating what happened on its platform, and having a board. Which Dorsey was on.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/jack-dorsey-reveals-why-he-left-bluesky-deleted-account/473992

Key Takeaways

Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter, now X, and later founded and funded an X rival, Bluesky.

He left the Bluesky board on Saturday and announced it on X.

Dorsey explained that the trouble started when Bluesky started moderating content.

I really have no idea how anyone can pretend that BlueSky wasn’t Dorsey’s idea, his project, his baby.

Oh wait, no, I know.

If thing becomes bad, then person I like wasn’t actually involved with it that much, therefore person I like is not bad.

That hurt my brain to read, but I think, basically yes.

Its a cabal of mostly vertically integrated companies vs basically a horizontal monopoly that gatekeeps all of them, that’d they’ve all tried and failed or are currently failing to break through.

And yeah, petulant publishers does sound like a match to me.

Its basically mob tactics, just higher class.

… but that only makes sense if you genuienly believe that Rockstar and/or EA have less cash than Valve, and/or Rockstar and EA never had their own relevant liscensing agreements.

I may be wrong, but as best I can tell, there is no precedent in UK law for a platform/retailer being found liable under the cited Section 20, unless the content being distributed/retransmitted/sold itself did not have proper liscensing arrangements, and it can be proven that the platform/retailer/retransmitter knew that to be the case.

I kind of find it unlikely that Rockstar and EA did/do not have liscensing agreements in place.

My theory?

The entire Publically Traded gaming world seems to be mobilizing and coordinating efforts to get every kind of secondary organization they are connected to, to sue Valve, right now.

Because they are all financially imploding, and they’re trying to do as much damage as possible to Valve, who isn’t a part of their club, as a means of trying to level the playing field.

All these people on the boards of top gaming companies… are also on the boards of other top gaming companies, they know each other, they have people and contacts who sit in all the gaming industry lobbying groups, and the astroturf fake ‘gamer advocacy’ groups, in the IP rights groups, etc etc.

Yeah, this… doesn’t really make sense, unless the goal is to get Steam to adopt a policy of delisting the specific offending games in the UK.

I am not a lawyer, but… this seems spurrious?

I don’t know, I can’t find a single example of a platform or ‘retransmitter’ being successfully ruled against, in cases where the content itself already had worked out a rights/royalties agreement with the rights holders… unless it can basically be proven that the platform operators / retailers knew that the content itself was not properly liscensed, and sold it anyway.

So basically they would have to prove that Rockstar and EA never had the proper liscensing, and also that Valve knew that.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that Rockstar and EA probably did/do have the proper liscensing.

That being said, the UK leaving the EU… makes all of this exceptionally confusing to my layman self, as to the exact current standards and precedents that are currently in play and relevant.

Oh no, another ‘safe space’ brought to you by rainbow capitalism turns out to be, in fact, another ‘safe space’ brought to you by rainbow capitalism.

Anyway…

More accurately its caused by AI Mania, not AI proper, directly, but yeah.

MSFT C Suite:

It depends on the exact kind of ad, kind of tracking it uses, and kind of blocking method you’re using.

Are you ever 100% untracked?

No.

But this is a data game, the less you give up, the less they have, the less accurate it is, the more stale it is, the less specific things about you can be gleaned from it.

ublock origin + canvas blocker + privacy badger + forcing DOH by default?

Thats a lot better than doing nothing.

Much of the existing stuff doesn’t even load, meaning it can’t even attempt to assign to you a unique advertiserID, it doesn’t even get to the stage of trying to send you a specific ad, because you have no engagement with the system.

Precisely, shit trickles downward, that’s how the economy/society works!

EDIT: Swear to god I didn’t even read your username before saying that.

So, goddamnit poopsmith, you as well should know this!

That’s your job lol!