It's funny to see political ads by people running against data centers in this election cycle.

still news worthy, even without flock, police basically store a car, wrecked it, all under the guise that its part of a crime when not and are not rectifying it.

They should be held 110% liable for the car and forcing the person to forgo and go through all the painful hoops to get it back to the point where the price of a new car seams cheap.

Impounding should not happen with such a low amount of evidence, and IMO should come after some kind of court thing that prevents mistakes and they should assume all liability to any damage even if it was used in a crime.

The fact that it was AI that said it was the same car and the cops raised a question but didn't really question it is also noteworthy.

Man I loved Trade Wars 2002. I played the heck out of that, with {COMMO} macros and a series of BBSes I'd call into every day to manage my empires. It now amuses me that it was set 24 years ago.

I loved that book but it was a thick one and a long time ago, so I don't remember that specifically. But I believe you.

I am reminded of Ted K's writings - specifically on the enablement-virtuous-cycle between tech level, state control, authortarianism, etc.

The replacement of uniform broadcast media with "decentralized" culture and media has thrown a wrench in things. The tech we had in the 50s-80s enabed one form of mass control. The changing tech broke those specific mechanisms, but the System responded.

The fight over control of twitter was actually like trying to re-litigate WW1 The dying princes of the dying imperial system were all trying to install their preferred ruler; not realizing that decentralization had already won.

People will occupy twitter if they can, but holding that territory was already non-essential by the time it changed hands.

The system response has certainly not let go of trying to reclaim overt control over all top-100 information warfare tiles on the board, but has invested in subterfuge and compartmentalization as well.

If the system cannot control a single monoculture, it is also happy to have significant influence over 100 microcultures that are functionally disjoint with non-porous boundaries.

Ted K would say that America has become functionally ungovernable. I agree. We have much evidence of being a failed state. Now, if you shut off the internet and the news, and just went about your life, you might not see any evidence of it. But we are sort of like an observer on the ground, watching a plane fly overhead at FL350. The plane's engines are out because it is out of gas. From the ground, to us, it looks fine. It looks like every other plane. It will stay up there, really high, for a good long while. It will have passed out of our view by the time it has lost enough altitude to notice.

But the plane is doomed. The people onboard know. The people with the right sensors know.

America is like that plane. It is going to fall out of the sky. But most observers don't know that yet.

Internet censorship won't restart the engines. That doesn't mean they won't keep trying anyway.

Tivo broke Civilization.

The olds will remember.

In the early 80s, every American watched the same TV programs at the same time. LIve, broadcast TV. It was the national American culture. Everyone at work and at school the next morning talked about their shared experience and varying reactions to the BroadCast that The Party had shown them the prior night.

Cable TV - by offering a few more channels - had _some_ impact on the "breakup" of America.

But it was Tivo - mass-scale consumer time shifting. Americans no longer watched all the same propaganda at the same time.

The monoculture started to crack.

The rest of it is downstream from there. The bigs tried to retain their control of culture and opinion, but it became too fragmented and too decentralized. They couldn't.

Nobody is mad about the internet. They are mad they don't control the internet.

Google models are quite effective at plumbing and managing GCP. At this point I really don't hand write much terraform or search around in the panel for things. You just use their ai chatbot and it find what you need, or copilot in VSCode or simialr to create or modify terraform. I don't think this is enough of a beneit/positive use case to even put a dent in the bill for making these slop bots, but it's something that actually makes my day easier so I can worry about architecture and design rather than the mechanics of some cloud service.

I missed the part that said it involved leftists, fats, or lesbians.

Yeah, let's ressurect a 30-year-old flame war!

So far as I know, the problem has not yet been detected on other planets or spaceships.

I'm guessing that Martians don't run Windows on their computing machines.

Many of your victims won't be able to say anything even if the files aren't decrypted -- this case is a good example, since the company in question couldn't admit publicly that they were paying ransoms.

A little searching shows that scams (beyond the base "pay to decrypt") are very common. You're dealing with criminals. If you pay a ransom, they now know that you have money that you're willing to pay, and they're going to do whatever they can to get more of it.

They'll probably postpone is US share prices start dropping.

Firefox was never there for the "Good Ole Days"

Firefox was a reaction to Mozilla becoming too ambitious and too unfocused.

The Netscape/Moz split was already after things had gotten bad. Moz completely jumping the shark was already bad.

The Good Ole Days were NCSA Mosaic and Navigator 1.1. Before the AOL invasion. Before people on the internet expected you to care about their feelings, and before politicians and mega corps knew how to screw it up.

Once upon a time, having friends on irc or usenet was like the nerd equivalent of _living on a pirate ship_

(except the avg pirate was at least +1SD on the IQ scale.)

It was the last vestige of freedom.

There is no "good internet" with Tay Zonday on it. Or girls.

No browser is going to bring back the good old days.

How about letting people post photos on the web without ratio restrictions? Maybe start there first.

>I find this very stupid.

I agree with you.

>Some people are good, reliable, and experienced "worker bees" who either don't want to be in management or are not qualified for it. I see no logical reason to get rid of such people, do you?

Agree completely.

>I'm not sure if "Sr. Engineer" means quasi-management at MS

It doesn't.

The people manager track and individual track are separate tracks, and both go all the way to the top. There were hundreds of Partner Software Engineers who didn't have any people management responsibilities. These engineers, because they were Partner level, had a minimum of $1m total comp some years. (The higher your level at MS, the more of your pay at MS is contingent: bonuses, stock, etc. MS has a "low" guaranteed salary and a wild bonus/stock award range, all based on your performance and overall company performance)

There are level 70 people who are not people managers; the job title changes to "Distinguished Engineer" somewhere up there, and somewhere past that becomes "Technical Fellow".

There is a level floor for being a manager; but (effectively) there is no level ceiling for being an individual software engineer.

IIRC, When I left, they wanted people to be Senior level before being people managers. But there were more senior level engineers than senior engineering managers...

Here's some quick lingo: an "M1" is a manager who only has engineers reporting to him. An M2 is a "manager of managers", e.g. an M2 has M1s that report to him - and may have 1 or 2 engineers engineers or support staff. There are also M3s, but M1 vs M2 is the main useful cutline.

MS generally wants an M1 to have at least 5 people reporting to him, but not more than 15. So the "span" is pretty narrow; MS R&D is pretty management heavy, with an M1 typically having around 8 people or so.

(I was an M1 for a few years, then went back to being a normal engineer with no people management responsibilities.)

Being an M1 at Microsoft is kind of a dual mandate: you are given a staff of engineers to go work on a problem that is (was?) too big for one person. The M1 has engineering & product responsibilities (e.g. make sure the right thing gets built on time and works correctly). The M1 also has people management responsibilities (coaching people in their careers, rewards and promo justifications, delivering bad news, etc)

Good M1s wrote code and reviewed code, but also burnt a lot of time in meetings ("what are the other parts of the company that are near me doing?") and individual meetings ("i have 8 people who report to me and I need to have a dedicated meeting with each of them every week to see how they are doing, give them career feedback, etc)

M2s rarely wrote code. They would occasionally write code for some demo or prototype, and then show it to people. If the idea had legs it would get spun off to underlings to flesh it out.

I say all this in past tense because I don't think how it was in 2022 necessary holds in Oct 2026. I know that I am not developing software or managing software engineers the same way now as I was even at the beginning of 2026. AI has changed all of it.