FaceDeer

UnitedHealthcare didn’t seem to have difficulty.

CEOs are easily replaceable.

I think the online rhetoric around AI has been way more apocalyptic than the more vague and abstract political stuff. So Trump raped some kids, that’s really bad but that’s not something people feel the need to go out and risk their lives over.

But data centers are going to steal all your water and there will be killbots patrolling the streets? All jobs will be taken away and everyone will be reduced to serfs or killed as surplus population? Drum that into a sufficiently mentally fragile subset of the population long and hard enough and you’ll get them worked up enough to feel like they need to strike first.

Who is wasting resources on this? Seems a bit pointless.

There are people who spend their lives tracking bigfoot, or trying to figure out who D. B. Cooper was, or any number of other mysteries. It can be a hobby.

Hey now, they called it a “Quarantine”, not a “Blockade.” Completely different things. One’s an act of war and the other’s not. And… well, that’s basically the only difference.

The last time Congress officially declared war was in 1942 so obviously it can’t be an act of war.

The Anatoly Kolodkin, a Russian-flagged tanker that is itself under U.S. sanctions, departed from the Baltic Sea on March 9. It continues to be tracked and is expected to reach the Cuban port of Matanzas around April 4 . If it successfully delivers its cargo it would be the first oil shipment to reach Cuba since early January.

Guess we’ll see what happens.

Indeed. Pledging to keep the Strait of Hormuz open would likely be most easily accomplished by applying pressure on the US and Israel to de-escalate, and negotiating with Iran to get its cooperation. European military force isn’t going to add anything that the US isn’t already capable of.

Heartbeaking.

A classic case of making a ridiculously restrictive change, then “walking it back” to a merely semi-ridiculous change and having everyone sigh in relief.

Fill it with white powder and the reaction will cause more damage than a bomb would have caused.

How many layers of “nobody would be stupid enough to…” deep are we into this situation at this point?

I could imagine someone thinking a small fire might be safer than the ship carrying on to Hormuz.

Because the US is full of shit and can’t be reasoned with.

Iran really seems to have been behaving reasonably here.

Okay? I’m really not sure what your point is here, everyone knows the US is full of shit and can’t be reasoned with. The article is about the fact that Iran could be reasoned with, they were actually willing to negotiate.

No, you’re still not getting it.

if only we completely reconfigure the topic, the stakes and the parties involved.

Emphasis added to that plural. Iran was not the problem here. Iran was open to a reasonable deal. It was the Americans who were unreasonable, irrational warmongers that wouldn’t accept anything other than total surrender and the destruction of Iran. Only one of the parties involved was the problem.

I think you’re missing the point. He’s saying that a deal should have been in reach if the US had been actually interested in making a deal.

I mean, do those headcount numbers count contractors?

I linked the source for my information, feel free to dig into it for more detail.

Beyond that, unless you have an actual source for the culture shift beyond ‘you think so’

I literally said I didn’t know whether there had been a culture shift. Reread the last line of my comment. All I’m doing here is pointing out that your own view on the subject is likely very outdated at this point. There’s been enormous employee turnover, including right to the top CEO position, and other major companies have merged into Microsoft in the interim.

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

Based on?

I’m not doubting your previous experience. I’m just pointing out that it was a long time ago and a lot has happened since then, so I’d like to hear some more recent evidence.

The Red Ring of Death was around 2009 or so, Windows 8 rolled out in 2012. That was 14 years ago now.

Headcount numbers:

• 2012: ~94,000 employees.
• 2026: ~228,000 employees.

The median tenure of employment at Microsoft is 5.3 years, so most of those 94,000 employees will be long gone by now.

Also, Satya Nadella took over in 2014 and made major changes to the corporate culture from the earlier Balmer era. Stack ranking was abolished, there were major corporate acquisitions that brought external corporate cultures inside (eg LinkedIn, GitHub, ZeniMax/Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, Nokia).

I have no idea what Microsoft’s current internal culture is like but I think your impression is likely quite outdated by this point.

Are we moving from the “AI can never match the quality of human artistic output” phase to the “oh, it’s no big deal, art like that could always be faked” phase?

Only because that had nothing to do with what I was talking about? I don’t see why you think that’s the point here.