FaceDeer

UnitedHealthcare didn’t seem to have difficulty.

Or opened its backdoor.

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.

Ask Uber how the actions of their employees and contractors aren’t their responsibility.

Emphasis added.

Sheesh, you’re still obsessing over me? What a sad and pointless life you lead.

“More room for deniability” doesn’t mean “perfect universal deniability.”

I don’t see how this distinction affects the question of responsibility at all. If anything, “it’s an employee” gives the company more room for deniability.

There’s been a spate of Discord-based hacking attempts lately, two of my friends have had to do this. They can’t get their old accounts back, Discord is basically just ignoring them. Starting new accounts is easy.

The hard part is that they also lost their gmail accounts, that’s a lot more important for most people to be able to recover. I recommend everyone with a gmail account do the “create an emergency recovery code” thing, print it out and store it somewhere safely off anything digital.

The bed just keeps getting comfier and comfier over time.

That’ll take too long. Eat it five bites at a time.

Yet another area where the big companies are voluntarily leaving money on the table for the open model users to rake in. I approve.

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.

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.

For someone who likes digging around in my Reddit history you’d think you’d be able to find something that was actually relevant to the topic at hand. That was a comment about the uses of agentic coding tools for making custom applications, not about building bots.

The only thing keeping the bot population low here is that there just aren’t enough people here to be worth it yet. If the Fediverse grows they’ll come in greater numbers.

There’s a master “kill switch” for all AI features in Firefox now. I suggest everyone who’s concerned about this kind of thing just go and turn it off, and then we need never bother each other over this again.

And also, people are really spoiled with existing internet speeds. When I joined the Internet it was still relying on telephone modems for much of the connectivity. There’s plenty you can do with that. The Fediverse, right here, is an example - just ordinary text communication.