"overstating the degree to which genAI helped them"
You actually legitimately believe this, don't you?
What if someone has fifty windows open with fifty tabs each?
Asking for a friend.
Solid effort - good job.
It's a bummer if any of the employees got rug-pulled but many of the best employees will strike out on their own, form new companies with working conditions they value, and likely hasten Skydance's demise.
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.
I literally linked a map of where pistachios are grown in California. They are overwhelmingly in the Tulare Basin lowlands (not merely "the San Juaquin Valley" as a whole - specifically the Tulare Basin (the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley). Bakersfield to Merced, mostly Bakersfield to Fresno, is where almost all California pistachio cultivation is located. We're not talking e.g. Stockton.
The southern end of the San Joaquin valley - the Tulare Basin - gets 5-8 inches per year in the lowlands. Bakersfield gets 7 (same as Phoenix and Reno). That's desert (defined less than 10 inches per year). Fresno is borderline-desert (10-11 inches per year). Merced is 12. Stockton gets 14-18 inches per year, but that's not relevant because that's not where the concentration of pistachio cultivation is.
7 inches of rain per year is NOT Mediterranean. Even the northern end of the San Joaquin Valley (where only a very small % of California's pistachio cultivation is conducted) is at best marginally Mediterreanean. Compare Stockton's 14-18 inches to famously "Mediterranean" cities:
Athens: 15.7 in
Tunis: 18.7 in
Málaga: 19.7 in
Marseille: 20.7 in
Tel Aviv: 21.5 in
Barcelona: 24 in
Algiers: 23.6 in
Nice: 31.1 in
Beirut: 32.3 in
Naples: 39.6 in
Antalya: 41.3 in
Dubrovnik: 41.7 in
Stockton, the NORTHERN end, is up there with the absolute driest of famous Mediterranean cities. The San Joaquin Valley is not Mediterreanean. It ranges from desert in the south, borderline desert in the middle, and arid in the north. It is coastal California that is famously Mediterranean.
Specifically, Mediterrean climates are Köppen classification (Cs). Coastal California, from Los Angeles through San Francisco, is clasified as "Hot-summer Mediterranean" (Csa) to "Warm-summer Mediterreanean" (Csb). But southern San Joaquin Valley lowlands are a mix of BWh (Hot desert climate) and CWh (Cold desert climate). Most of the rest is BSk (Cold semi-arid). The northern end around Stockton just barely qualifies as Csb (Warm-summer Mediterranean). The coasts are solidly in Csa and Csb.
These are the facts, and you need to come to accept them. California's pistachio cultivation is overwhemingly in the SOUTHERN San Joaquin Valley, which is desert and borderline desert, NOT in the north, which is arid to borderline Mediterranean.
By the way, do you even know where pistachios are native to? They're native to Iran. Specifically, the high deserts and arid steppes of northeastern Iran (the Iranian Plateau, not the Caspian coast), extending into western Afghanistan. Typical rainfall in their native range is 6-16 inches per year. Their native summers are hot (~38C / 100F), highly dry and they cannot tolerate significant rainfall during the growing season. They develop a very long taproot to search for deep sources of water, so despite being adapted to dry climates, they thrive on access to water. They have high salt tolerance because they're commonly found around the edges of endorheic basins. Their native terrain looks like this. They are not a mediterranean tree.
California pistachios grown overwhelmingly in the Tulare Basin lowlands. The Tulare Basin lowlands get only 5-8 inches of precipitation per year (for comparison, Phoenix and Reno both get about 7 inches). As a desert is a region with less than 10 inches of rain per year, yes, pistachios are grown in the desert. Without irrigation projects the pistachio lands would be barren desert scrub. They get the water from deep wells (causing land subsidence, because they're not getting replenished), mountain rivers (which are overdrawn and under seasonal threat from diminishing winter snowpack accumulation), and water channeled all the way from the Oregon border. So much water has been channeled from rivers in the region that Tulare Lake, once the largest US lake west of the Mississippi, is usually largely dry.
Outside the San Joaquin valley, the other main ag centures are the Imperial Valley, Palo Verde Valley, Coachella Valley, and the Yuma Project, which are fed via Colorado River water which was overallocated by the Colorado River Compact. These are in the Colorado Desert, part off the Sonora Desert system.
nah, a RS code can correct a tiny bit of loss but two metadata copies can correct a bad sector or even track if you're lucky.
Different requirement spaces.
The idea this guy has might make embedded devices slightly more long-lasting.
They usually have quantity one of a cheap storage part and a bad block in the wrong place could brick the whole thing.
It would only be useful in the case where maybe the build is 12MB and the chip is 16.
Most vendors won't ever pay extra for this.
I suspect the people who hate it don't have problems it solves.
Maybe a very basic home laptop is fine with SysV today and they don't want to learn anything new.
Personally I've been able to retire thousands of lines of scripts I'd written to handle complex things with many edge cases and ugly devops modules that are no longer needed with more recent releases.
There's just no userland interface to many of the events it can respond to and it's not easy to write a new C++ daemon to handle each need that comes up.
At this point it's largely a functional API to kernel events in the way I use it. That's the DOTADIW perspective for me. I still have services call my scripts where it doesn't handle what I need. It would be crazy to ever expect it to handle everything.
But just because I need to handle complex things at scale sometimes doesn't mean everybody else does. If I want to run debian with X11 and emacs and you want to run Devuan with Wayland and vi, you'll get no argument from me.
Who has time for drama these days?
>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.
and using AI to create fake driver's licenses to get accomplices hired as delivery drivers.
And in-person voting is fraud proof? Ha ha.
We can't blame all this on the Clowntator, but he has had the FBI take a lot of focus off of real crimes to chase alleged illegal immigrants with "crimes" such a parking tickets, alleged voter fraud, and political opponents. Plus, a lot of experienced people left the FBI who didn't want to be part of the Gasstapo.
Thus, a cause, no, contributor yes.
but my violin for this is too small for even a tardigrade to hold.
Plus many countries are pushing to get off MS because Donald made them realize that US voters are f$cking idiots who put assholes in power. I doubt Donald's the first asshole. Remember Palin, and the string of war-mongers?* USA is an unreliable trade partner.
* Sounds like a 50's rock-group: "Palin and the Warmongers, with their new hit, 'Fox Jesus Told Us To Just Take It!'"
Gee, Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.
