> unless said workers have the same skills and experience.

At Microsoft, its usually the hypocritical scenario.

There were very few specialized dev roles at Microsoft. Either you're thought to be smart enough and adaptable enough to work on whatever you're told to do, or, you aren't hired.

Exceptions would be "face characters" - unique individuals with unique contributions; people slashdot might have heard of. But those are far less than 1% of the company.

When you are cutting staff by thousands and hiring staff by thousands, none of them are special, none of them are differentiated. Its just bodies.

The layoff policy at Microsoft when I was observing it was pretty brutal. Each round was slightly different, but the mechanisms were usually similar: Each layer of management hierarchy, starting at the top, would get an "NTE" number, "Not to Exceed". As in, "your headcount is NTE 514" or whatever the number was for that manager. And whatever number you got, you subdivided it amongst the mangers beneath you, they subdivided to their child managers, and on downards, so most people in certain org-trees had some quota of people they were responsible for cutting.

Often, the layoffs were not based on the skills the person had, or how good or bad they were at their job, or anything like that. Usually entire teams would be eliminated, even if they had great people the company should have wanted to keep.

Yes, you did sometimes have awful situations where you lost really outstanding people just because they were on the wrong team when it came time to conduct random firings/layoffs.

The company seemed to have the idea that if they were good, they would reapply and find their way back in at some point.

The mechanism had a certain sort of "trapped by corporate America stupidity" feel to it. "We need to cut xx people and we can't be very intelligent or selective about it.. we cant make it about the specific person [because that invites lawsuits], so we make it about 'reducing investment in product [xyz]"

I am aware of possibly 2-3 RIF ("reduction in force") actions where the performance of the affected individuals was a factor in them getting chosen. More often it was whole-team cuts.

I was a dev lead at Microsoft. I believe I was asked to support immigration fraud.

I had an employee on a VISA. He was in a junior level role.

The immigration attorney asked me to verify that the job requirements for his job were:

- masters degree
- expertise in python
- (a few other things)

He had a masters degree. He had the other things on the list.

Problem was, the job he actually had was an entry level dev job. It was the exact job I got hired in at at the beginning of my career. For the level/job he was at, a 4 year degree is normal. Python (or any other specific language) is not needed.

So i said "no, that's not right. You don't need this, or this, or that"

And the immigration attorney was like "OH! My mistake! It sounds like this is more of an entry level position! Well, I guess based on what you've told me, we cannot sponsor the Greencard process for this employee at this time"

I had no idea that's what was going on or what was at stake when I answered the question. My employee wasnt mad at me - he quit MS and transferred to Google - who promised to push through his Greencard process. He said once he got done at Google he looked forward to working for me again at Microsoft some day.

So you tell me what you think was going on.

I think I was supposed to rubberstamp Microsoft immigration fraud, and I accidentally didn't, because I tried to accurately answer the question I was actually asked.

But look at how the lawyer responded. "Oh, shoot, what a silly mistake - nevermind!".

So no matter how I responded, he has plausible deniability. And if I had said, "yes, these are the required skills", nobody would have known otherwise.

I was gutted that I had ruined things for my employee without realizing it. The fact that he wasn't furious with me surprised me. To him, it was all a transaction. He wanted a Greencard; so he was going to go where he could get it - no hard feelings.

It's all transactional.

>OK, you don't work in software. Good tech companies don't outsource core development. They hire in house.

I was a software engineer at Microsoft for 22 years.

For all 22 of those years, Microsoft had core developers on every product who were not Microsoft employees.

You may want to look up the "permatemps" lawsuit from the early 00s. Microsoft had so many permanant contractor "non employees" that they were succesfully sued for the practice.

Microsoft has all kinds of legal sub-structures and "at a distance" legal entities for various employment arbitrage reasons. The technical talent of the people is not a determining factor in whether someone is a contractor, vendor, or full time employee.... Or if they are employed at an overseas subsidiary or domestically here in the USA.

And Microsoft plays a LOT of games with hiring/employment laws.

For instance, Microsoft had (has?) a large Vancouver development shop because, as I understand it:
1) its faster to get Chinese/Indian nationals into Canada than it is to get them into the USA
2) Vancouver is just up the road from Redmond, so easy to come down to Redmond for in-person meetings once in a while
3) It's very fast, legally to get people from Canada to the USA

So It was an open secret that MS would hire foreigners into the Vancouver office and park them there for, IIRC, 1 year, before moving them into the US.

H1B abuse has been happening for decades. "Unicorn Job" listings are an indication that the company is just doing the motions and knows they won't hire an American. This change needed to happen even if for the Trump admin it's a Stopped Clock Moment.

Stopped Clock moments. They're doing the right thing but for intensely wrong reasons. (Gotta wonder about JD Vance though, with his mail order Beard-Bride to hide the fact that he's one of Peter Thiel's paid buttboys.)

Because the article is about censorship?

Slashdot doesn't have table support, so it's hard to do side-by-side well, but:

JPEG XL advantages:

Licensing:

JPEG XL: Fully royalty-free (Open source / Apache 2.0)
HEIC: Proprietary patent minefield (MPEG LA, Advance, Velos; royalties apply)

Legacy JPEG Migration:

JPEG XL: Lossless, reversible bitstream transcoding (~20% smaller); fast enough for real-time web servers
HEIC: Lossy re-encode only (generational quality loss; cannot reconstruct original JPEG)

Fine Detail & Textures

JPEG XL: Retains sharp text, fine lines, subtle textures, and film grain
HEIC: Video-derived coding (HEVC / X.265). Tends to smooth out high frequences and smudge grain.

Software Encoding Speed

JPEG XL: Extremely fast; highly parallelized SIMD architecture
HEIC: Exceptionally slow and computationally expensive in software

Software Decoding Speed

JPEG XL: Fast, lightweight multi-threaded CPU decoding
HEIC: Heavy CPU overhead (without using hardware acceleration)

Progressive Rendering:

JPEG XL: True progressive decode; smart saliency algorithm to focus bandwidth on critical details first.
HEIC: None; full file must be received and decoded before display

Lossless Compression
JPEG XL: Dedicated modular mode; vastly outperforms PNG and WebP
HEIC: Ill-suited; you basically have to try to do lossless compression with an inherently-lossy format

Bit Depth & HDR

JPEG XL: Native HDR; up to 32-bit floating point per channel
HEIC: Typically capped at 10-bit or 12-bit integer

Max Dimensions & Scaling

JPEG XL: Up to 1B x 1B; efficient viewport/crop loading without full decoding
HEIC: v5.2, 4096x2160; v6.2: 8192x4320; a tiling hack allows up to 16384 x 16384

Channels & Color Spaces:

JPEG XL: Arbitrary color spaces (hyperspectral); unlimited extra channels (alpha, depth, thermal, masks, CMYK, etc)
HEIC: Rigid container; limited auxiliary channels and standard video color spaces

HEIC advantages:

Rollout / acceleration:

JPEG XL: no dedicated hardware acceleration (thankfully, it's not as important because it's so much more efficient). Software adoption still rolling out.
HEIC: Hardware silicon (ASICs). Default capture format on modern iOS/Android; native capture in Sony, Canon, and Nikon cameras

Video:

JPEG XL: Supports animations (GIF/APNG replacement), with some optimizations** (it's not just a series of stills), but lacks the full set of optimizations that a proper video codec has.
HEIC: Container naively pairs full HEVC video tracks and audio with video.

** - JPEG XL can store up to 4 reference frames in a buffer, with multiple blending modes from the references (add, replace, multiply, etc); has subframe bounding boxes ("dirty rectangles") for when only part of a frame changes; invisible frames; modular deltas (differences between frames); etc. However, it lacks motion vectors (e.g. detecting a feature drifting across a scene and simply having to encode "move it" (followed by any needed deltas). So it's great for "GIFs", but if you wanted to encode a full movie, it'd be significantly larger than e.g. HEVC.

Why haven't you stopped watching _all_ corporate content - broadcast TV, cable TV, whatever the DSS dish companies are doing, Amazon, Netflix, blah blah blah

I hope you're not _paying_ for any of it...
And I hope you're not consuming very much of it...

It's bad for you. The people who make it are idiots, but they are crafty idiots. They know how to hurt you even if they don't know much else.

The idea that we have to watch their content is just baked into the cake, and nobody can escape it.

I was talking to a mechanic once. We were complaining about the news, and how it was all fake, they were all liars, etc.

I asked, "why not stop watching it?"

He responded: "but then I wouldn't know what's going on"

I replied, "you just said they are lying to you. So how does watching them tell you whats going on?"

(then everyone clapped)

He didn't answer. But I don't think he changed his habits.

Next, lets talk about Americas insane addiction to a Sportsball industry that regularly abuses us...

>not [seeking] an argument

Oh! Oh! I'm sorry! This is slashdot, in Room 12. This is Abuse!
For arguments, you want 12A, next door!

>people don't hire on merit
>Which candidate would you feel most comfortable working with for 40+ hours a week?

Why do you think "merit" and "works well with the employees I already have" are unrelated?

>Of course the candidate with a similar socioeconomic profile as your own would be preferred:

I suspect that's often true, but certainly not universal.

For example, allegedly, some people want slaves and want to lord themselves over their slaves. So they would never hire people like themselves, SES wise; they would only hire people where it was clear (in their own minds) that there was SES or other status daylight between themselves and their "underlings" So I'm not sure there's a universal law of hiring. I agree that "hiring someone like me" is a common -- but not universal -- pattern.

(Oddly enough, in the USA in 2026, I think you'll find that white males are the _least likely_ to use the "someone like me" hiring strategy - if for no other reason than decades of targeted enforcement against that that group for appearing to employ that strategy. Eg the Indian preference for hiring Indians, or the female preference for hiring females, is stronger than the white-male preference for hiring white-males. Maybe not in terms of hidden preferences, but in terms of actual hiring outcomes, yes, that's what the data will show)

Back to the non-universality of hiring strategies: A friend of mine with a tech business intentionally tries to hire mid-field performers. He doesn't want a rapid climber, because he cannot afford to keep them on staff once they understand what they are worth. He wants mid-field performers who are going to do solid, reliable work, and be content to work for him for a long time. So he doesn't hire on "merit" - he hires for "good enough, low turnover"

Other businesses have other strategies.

> but "not understanding cost" is a dangerous assumption to make.

One of the best, most succinct phrases in this discussion. Thank you.

We don't have to wait for AGIs to develop their own agency and build terminator robots. Industrial robots with no agency and with auditable and deterministic programming already kill humans. The industrial robot doesn't understand there's a human in the safety cage with it. It doesn't understand that moving through space occupied by a human has a cost. It doesn't know there's a human there and it doesn't know what a human is.

Designing automation that can never kill a person is already an unsolved problem with standard, non-intelligent technology.

I don't know if AI makes it harder or easier. On one hand, AI behaves, in effect, non-deterministically (even though at some level it is deterministic, it's not observably so).

OTOH, in organic intelligences, adding sensors, adding alignment, giving feedback - tend to produce humans who accidentally kill less frequently. So maybe something like the 3 laws will conceptually be part of the System Prompt of future AIs, and they'll figure out how to avoid HAL 9000 problems.

Look, I use HEIC, but JPEG-XL is just better.

* Royalty-free
* Lossless transcoding of legacy JPEGs to immediately reduce their sizes by ~20% (fast enough that you can have webservers do it in realtime)
* Better fine detail / high frequency data representation for the same bitrate. HEIC was designed for video and simply is not as good at stills.
* Faster decoding
* MUCH faster compression
* True progressive decoding - and not old-school blocky progressive decoding, but using a smart algorithm that restores coarse detail (particularly focusing on parts of the image that the eyes immediately focus on) first, then progressively adding in finer detail that the eyes take more time to notice later.
* Vastly better lossless compression
* Better colour depth and native HDR (up to 32 bit per channel)
* Up to 1B x 1B pixel images (again, useful for scientific and engineering applications), with efficient loading (don't have to load and decode the whole 1B x 1B image at full resolution to view it)
* Arbitrary colour spaces - you can even use it for scientific hyperspectral imaging. You can include e.g. alpha, depth maps, thermal data, selection masks, etc etc.

It's just a better format for stills. It's annoying that it's taken this long to get support to take off (because it takes ages for most people to update their browsers), but I'm really glad that it's starting to.

Thanks for the interesting response.

The strongest man today; the hardest workers today... are not 10x or even 2x as strong or as physically productive as the best in human history. Depending on what you think about ancient man, we are possibly weaker and dumber than some of our ancestors.

The transmission of new ideas across memory, time, and place is the extra term in the equation of human achievement, civilization, and prosperity. It's not that labor doesn't matter. It's that ideas are like compound interest. Labor adds principal to our civilizational account balance. But Ideas compound it.

In the long term, ideas are all that matter.

I have the same reservations you do - powerful people will continue to want to corner and concentrate their power.

It's unclear how well they will be able to do that, however. The capability lag time between a paid frontier model and a self-hostable open-weights model is months.

The ability to train a good-enough model will also be commoditized. In my youth, we had distributed crypto challenges.... to get super-computing work done on mass democratized hardware of like-minded individuals. So in the future, we can fall back on analagous distributed model training efforts if some better alternative doesn't exist.

I am skeptical about a post-scarcity society and I am skeptical about man's "labor" ever going to zero. Of the infamous twelve possible AI outcomes, I am somewhere in middle. For biblical reasons, I believe the extinction of man is not going to happen, and I believe the utopia of man is also not going to happen.

Control of other people's speech is always about asserting power.

It's never actually about "reducing harm"; it's about asserting power.

Talking about it in "harm" terms is a clever hack: ... because most humans are sensitive to harm/harm reduction along their moral reasoning (see: Jonathan Haidt)

But "Never hurt my feelings" is an impossible bar, and it doesn't scale across a civilization. It cannot be a basis for law.

The attempt to abuse the "harm receptors" of political enemies is contributing to the mutual dehumanization across faction lines.

Daemon Spawn at that.