FaceDeer

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 All I’m doing here is pointing out that your own view on the subject is likely very outdated at this point.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I have no idea what Microsoft’s current internal culture is like but I think your impression is likely quite outdated by this point.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.

It had some technical issues earlier on but it’s up and running right now. Looks pretty active.

It did convey a useful concept, until it started getting used for basically everything to mean “thing that used to be better but I don’t like now.”

It got enshittified.

any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge requests, and merge request descriptions) will be immediately closed

Guess it won’t be labelled, then.

Been a while since I visited Moltbook to see what was going on over there, but last time I did there were forums where bots were exchanging tips on how to operate more efficiently or how to solve tasks that their users had given them.

Let them have their own space.

I have never been afraid of being falsely accused of assault or rape because I have never done anything even close to anything that can be defined as assault or rape, or shown any behavior or tendencies to do so.

I think you’re missing the basic definition of what a false accusation is, here. The whole point of it is that you didn’t do the thing that you’re being accused of.

You’ll note that I was asked.

This is going to be one of those “Torment Nexus” things, I take it?

Quite true.

Well, I guess the most games-oriented thing is that at the moment I’m generating some cover art for some music I generated earlier to use as part of a tabletop roleplaying campaign I’m in. Custom art, custom music, stuff that a few years ago would have cost me thousands of dollars to commission (and therefore that I would never have dreamed of commissioning - it’s just for me and a couple of friends). That’s pretty awesome, IMO.

As long as it isn’t in AI

Afraid I can’t help you, then.

It’s really quite ironic, this is the sort of tech that science fiction has been dreaming of for decades. And now it can’t even be mentioned in tech-oriented forums, can’t even be hinted at, without mobs of negative-nellies dumping on it.

Ah well. I continue to have fun with it, downvotes can’t stop that.

Ironically, there are a couple of things in the tech world right now that I’m extremely interested in. But you would likely downvote me if I mentioned them.

You seem to have forgotten that this is a social media website comments section discussion, not a court of law.

And you are forgetting that it’s a discussion about a court of law. It’s right in the title, this is about a lawsuit.

You’re presenting a big wall of text that’s explaining your opinions on the matter. I could likewise present a big wall of text that explains my opinions on the matter. Neither of those things actually matter, though. The title and subject of this thread is not “hey, what do you all think about this stuff?” It’s “here’s what the US Supreme Court ruled (or in this case chose to let stand without making a ruling).”

I get what your opinion is. I’ve seen this opinion presented plenty of times over the years. I don’t think that’s how the courts are going to rule, though, because so far they’ve been ruling in other ways and I think I’ve got a pretty firm understanding of why they’ve been ruling that way.