It's certainly more plausible than some cuts we've seen; but it's hard not to still see it as the usual "described as fat-trimming; inevitably ends up reaching bone" exercise just because of how software usually ships. Not everything ships in full abject brokenness; but at least for commercial-grade software (specialty formally verified stuff and projects that have been laser focused on solving a specific problem that bothered an academic computer scientist in 1980 since 1980 can be a different story) you don't generally see software that makes you think "Nope, it's finished, any additional resources allocated would be wasted or actively spoil the product. There are no edge cases that could have used a little more love, nothing interesting but currently too rough or subject-to-change to use".

Even if you go with a fairly optimistic view of productivity effects, 10%-ish gain and no serious side effects, just axing 10% of the employees so you can status-quo the product with lower payroll costs absolutely seems like a chop-shopping move when the status quo for software is so mediocre. As PE cuts go they don't seem to be speedrunning the hollowing-out and immediately going to a skeleton crew of junior vibe coders and a 'support' chatbot; but precious little software ships in a state where "efficiency is up 10%" means that you've already maxed out possible product quality and just need to start cutting people since you no longer have anything for them to do. If the optimistic projections pan out they might be able to approximately maintain their existing level of polish with fewer people; but that level was always a compromise.

It's good to know that this is purely a matter of technological change; no need to look at the classic "get picked up be PE chop shop"/"gradually get stripped for parts" hypothesis. Seems very credible.

Allegedly the same known-vulnerable Danfoss controllers as in the prior french incident; just chilling out on the internet for easy access. I assume we'll have breathless reports crediting agentic hack swarms by midday along with security vendors assuring us that faith in their next generation machine-speed solutions will save us; but apparently the bar is in hell in terms of low-hanging targets.

It also serves a lot of very low budget/someone-involved-in-game-development-did-a-game-jam-thing type purposes. Unfortunately, that's exactly the sort of niche that makes anti-slop work particularly hard.

If it were just about pearl-clutching standards that'd be one thing(roughly the same slop problem for both; but not easier or harder); but if you want to serve the "I did this game jam thing, pay what you want if you think it's neat" you've got a lot of your desired and legitimate activity that would be immediately destroyed if you tried to throw some sort of flat economic floor under the slop guys; and you are...not exactly...dealing in the margins on units sold that pay for tons of human mod effort.

It's not like Steam doesn't have an asset flips and shovelware section as well; but they aren't, and don't pretend to be, in the business of caring all that much about things that fall below the threshold of potential commercial relevance. They do turn a blind eye to a certain number of steam keys going to kickstarter backers; and are significantly less hardass than someone like Apple about how many 'review' copies go out, so it's not like they are actively hostile to stuff that is not yet commercially viable but is trying to get there; but they basically don't touch some of the little test pieces and rough cuts and concept demos and things that itch actively seeks to.

For a guy who is legally barred from involvement in the company under the terms of a prior money laundering conviction our man CZ sure tweets like more than the mere humble shareholder he insists he is.

Closer to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tradition. All they need are the words "Don't Panic" on the front cover.

If it doesn't, it has no real value.

Almost nothing on Wikipedia is true, but all of it is "verifiable" in that there's at least one published source making the claim. Even if 99.9% of all other sources say the opposite.

(The Haka is not, for example, a war chant. Which is attested to, but because it's claimed to be online, it is "verifiable".)

The number of errors is huge, the number of "official editors" who know anything about the subject is extremely small, and this has always been the case. This is why nobody reputable cites Wikipedia. Wikipedia is where you go to find out what is potentially interesting, but you ALWAYS obtain the facts from elsewhere, if you've any sense.

No argument there. I'm just fed up with people pretending that the problem is with boring utilities and civilization; rather than with CEOs and their circles.

It's especially irksome when it comes from the areas of 'tech' that are frankly kind of lightweight in a technical sense. Somehow the hardware side manages to go from 800nm to 5nm without sounding off their meds about it; while dudes who manage to pay someone to pay AWS to serve some javascript to a webview on an iphone are babbling about how how disruptive their innovation is.

Realistically email hosting is probably a safe-ish business. The required software is already more or less commodified(and the sort of people who pay extra for Proton rather than just using gmail or whatever their ISP points them to are the ones who specifically Do Not want you churning the UI all the time), just not desperately entertaining to administer; and the major challenge(even if you just ignore the amount of admin required to stay on top of security risks when internet facing and hope to get lucky) is achieving the necessary scale and stubbornness to get decent odds of delivery on the various major recipients of email who, at least initially, shoot the spammer and ask questions later or never if novel senders start popping up.

You could already DIY-mailsever in a fairly short span of time well before it became viable to ask a bot to do it; people just prefer not to because babysitting postfix just so that you can get rejected by the various services people you are tryign to reach use is not terribly rewarding.

It's not necessarily a glamorous or high margin sort of business; adequately competent hosted email isn't a wildly differentiated product; but people tend to not enjoy changing email addresses/repointing DNS/migrating mailboxes; so it's not a super cutthroat commodified market where people switch every quarter for the absolute lowest price. If you don't do anything particularly obnoxious or try to push price hikes there's a decent amount of inertia.

However, and this is what makes this guy's ranting seem so unhinged, it's precisely not the sort of business where you'd expect some sort of "AI transformation"; or a bunch of panting about whether the stack has velocity. Proton's config is a bit more fiddly than average, because it is supposed to provide better than 'just trust me bro' privacy assurances; but they do operate the fax machine of the internet age. We call it "email". And their customers are paying them for mailserver stay up; not the agentic everything app.

I'm not sure if this guy is butthurt because he didn't manage to score a nobel during his science time; or because he's not looking at an altman IPO; but the fact that he is screaming like a lunatic about “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity" when he runs something that is, as a feature, supposed to be a deeply boring utility suggests profound temperamental unsuitability.

It seems ironic, and a little telling, for the CEO of a company whose whole purpose is "mailserver stay up; securely" to be screaming at people about " Don't be the professional fax machine operator in the internet age".

Dude, you aren't some kind of randroid superman hero of industry. You run a kind of boring utility company. Which is fine; civilization runs on boring utilities quietly handled by competent people. Problem is that you don't seem to be fine with it.

Normal industry: Your factory has an expensive milling machine and a cheap stamping machine. Thankfully, customers actually seem to prefer stamped parts for most cases and you can produce those quickly; so you keep stamping out parts and rolling in cash.

Tech industry: As above but your entire c-suite believes that the milling machine with turn into mecha-jesus and end history; so you are bulldozing everything you can to build more milling machines.

Your best engineers will be AuDHD, and AuDHD folk don't do well in these sorts of synthetic tests.

I can code in 20+ languages for over 12 different OS', write code that's good enough for CERN to run for particle accelerator data collection for a decade, have accelerated systems by an order of magnitude by understanding the poem space better than their previous engineers, but I am abysmal at exam style settings.

The software industry is riddled with SEs who write abysmal code but can pass a coding test easily. They're the folk that you have always needed to reject but didn't because they ticked a box.

It seems likely that the answer to this question is 'yes'; but it seems like a mistake to be distracted by it when we are talking about people who are, busily and intentionally, building 'AI' products against the public.

It's mildly comical when they attempt to emulate humanity; but the important bit isn't the cluelessness; it's the malice.