Some guy is giving out free water on a hot day. Microsoft owns and operates a tour bus, he stop at the side of the road because someone on the bus sees water guy and everyone go out and get some free water.

Half the bus gets water, the rest get nothing and don't know why. Half the bus is pissed, the guy providing the water is pissed, everyone else in the neighborhood who usually got a single water from the guy are all also pissed, and then Microsoft has the gall to say 'Don't blame me, that guy just didn't have enough water'

Microsoft enabled the situation that caused the water shortage, and instead of making a statement like 'we will provide our own water next time' or 'we will do our best to limit what we take in the future to respect the generosity of those providing what we vitally need' they just said 'sucks to be you, assholes' and now the whole bus is banned from getting any more water from free water guy, ever.

They're a rude, arrogant company by action and reputation. They have no social credit to burn, and should not expect any leniency when they enable bad behavior.

This takes advantage of a bug in the biological challenge reward system.

Acts of minor repetitive participation that result in a series of low level disappointments with occasionally highly exciting reward spikes tricks the reward system into thinking that you're training a valuable skill.

The reward system thinks that as you get 'better' at doing it the big rewards will come more often, since that's how most skills work.

Since gambling twists that relationship apart people can instead become addicted to the anticipation of the reward even more than the reward itself, so the real reward becomes that moment when the reels are spinning and it might land on a jackpot. It's selling little bite sized nuggets of hope.

ycombinator is pretty good, as is mastodon. The key to mastodon is that if it's boring you're not following the right people, but they're out there and it's possible to find them!

Possibly because it strongly incentivizes later owners of the vehicle jailbreaking the car and potentially loading dangerous unregulated software into it. This isn't a computer where some sweaty guy is going to blue-screen his overclocked machine and drop his sesh, people are going to die directly because of this choice and the choices that will result from it.

You make an excellent point for why it's important to seek out fully remote companies where management already has the skill necessary to be able to tell an ass kisser from an excellent worker.

However it does appear that some companies only exist to provide a field of ass kissers to make management feel good, and doing business with customers is just a chore they do to keep the ass kissing game going. This is anathema to productive people who are actually passionate about what they do, because we end up carrying around all the non-productive ass kissers!

The idea of wealthy business owners throwing themselves from the top of their worthless glass towers appeals to me. Cites are the physical manifestation of wealth disparity and a machine for destroying the political power of the intelligent and educated via gerrymandering.

When someone is doing something that doesn't make any sense, I've discovered that almost every single time it was because they were pursuing a goal that is different from the one they were supposed to be pursuing, or have publicly stated that they're pursuing.

So if someone starts doing things that don't make sense I just assume that they're lying to me, stop believing anything they say from that point further, and try to figure out what goal they might have that fits their actual actions.

The demand to go back to the office is one of these situations. It's silly manipulative lie until it starts making rational sense, and that means there's a shadowy liar's reason behind it.

The board enriching themselves is one option, but it could also simply be to maintain the entrenchment of gerrymandering that they've fought so hard to create, or maybe it's just because they like seeing a big bunch of people treat them like royalty in person. The bottom line is that the stated reasons for the change to work from office do not align with the reality of work from office so that makes it some form of lie or another.

Save the lies for your sales team, I am a man of action.

Once I got out from under the noise machine I was able to think clearly and re-wrote/expanded a lot of our critical infrastructure. I was given a very nice raise and a great title bump.

They finally demanded I go back under the noise machine, so I'm interviewing at another company that, I kid you not, is offering me double my current salary with the understanding that if work from home ever becomes mandatory I'll move on again.

Your boomer jedi mind tricks are useless against anyone with valuable marketable skills, we already have recruiters banging on our doors every day of the week and we're currently choosing to stay with you. All it takes us us changing our minds and pursuing a different goal with the same passion we previously used to maintain your company.

You say that you're hiring for various roles, and that you get a lot of applicants, but would you mind specifying how long those positions remain open, and how many of those applications you'd consider high quality?

I suspect that entry level positions are going to be experiencing a different level of mobility than more experienced personnel at the moment.

I did not say that the company owned the real estate, silly, I said the board receives a strong financial incentive for the real estate. The company doesn't save it for themselves to do secret company things, the board puts it in their pocket while I have to pay for parking in another one of their investment properties.

I disagree, the whole point of AI is to industrialize the addressing of edge cases by something that has the capacity to give every single case a bit more attention than the usual 'fill out a form and hope you get contacted' response a chat bot can usually provide.

The more scary idea to me is that as published models become thoroughly understood it could become possible to manipulate them into providing specific adverse outcomes; Future hacker AI Version V knows that SmallCo XYZ is running a local version of a specific LLM dataset and that dataset can be jailbroken with a specific sequence of prompts into providing enthusiastic passwordless access to company internal systems, which the AI then uses to expand the capacity of the rouge AI Version V.

The board owns the real estate that the business uses. They use that to shelter a large amount of the profits away from the visibility of the employees.

It took away horrible jobs. Very few people want to manual labor in a field, and those that do tend to be content with a yard sized garden. To call field work with hand tools a 'real job' demeans humanity.

The less one has to lose the lower the stakes are when the gamble is life or death. While the person who chooses may technically be the same person cold in a trench somewhere those people are separated by a lot of time, distance, and effective propaganda.

Someone could level most of the world by dropping of ATMs that spit out free cash until unavoidably exploding, just dress them up like gambling machines and make the risk of death part of the fun!

Appeasement of an aggressive invader is never the 'better way'. World war 2 happened because people like you just wanted the problem to go away, thus leading directly to the holocaust. Cowardice simply enables and encourages psychopathy.