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.

Reddit was like that once. But I've noticed lately the "front page" (be it r/popular or r/all) is dominated by "Let's show someone doing something cool and add a saccharine stock soundtrack to it" type videos.

I think it lost its soul when they did the API thing that lead to so many leaving. Moderation has seriously deteriorated as people interested in the subs they mod no longer mod them, real communities have mostly died out, and what's left is auto-moderated generic subs that bots post to dominating the site to the expense of everything else.

The recent news about forcing everyone to log in will probably not end the way u/spez thinks it will.

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.

"Meanwhile even questioning if the earth is flat will have you downmodded to (-1) Troll."

What you might as well have said.

This appears to be an FPM exploit: https://github.com/KillaBoi/St...

But notice it has to make a huge amount of assumptions about the configuration of the server in order to work. So this kinda sorta underlines the thing you say, assuming the hacker cannot obtain the output of php_info() - it's not unheard of for PHP devs to include that somewhere so they can check what's going on. It makes script kiddie stuff a little less likely, though a hacker specifically targetting a specific installation will likely be able to break in.

I've read various comments about viable this exploit is, and even submitted a link to someone's commentary to Slashdot about how it maybe overblown (https://eliastaylor.com/noexploit/) - The infosec community seems genuinely split on it, and I'm not sure this proof of concept is really going to convince anyone right yet.

The reality is we should probably not have acted as if a nuke went off last week, while at the same time we should patch it on a "just in case" basis. The 4 thing was more serious, and remains more serious given the number of IoT devices that'll accept 4 forever. This, on the other hand, is a good reason to stay up to date.

My suspicion is that all of those comments relate to importing Word documents and templates into LibreOffice. Without LibreOffice full-on ditching their internal DOM and using Microsoft's, formatting changes are inevitable.

The question to me is why they see that as a reason to not replace Word. The obvious solution is import the fucking templates and fix them, a one off task.

Standards, maybe, but features? I'm unaware of any features missing from LibreOffice of note, and LibreOffice has a better UI and discoverability as it supports CUA standards, something Microsoft's Office suites haven't done since the mid-2000s.

Collabra is a full office collaboration suite based on several open source projects including LibreOffice. LibreOffice and Collabra have had an... interesting relationship, despite the latter making probably the largest amount of contributions to it in recent decades.

It's not obscure, it's just you probably don't know the primary output of Collabra's work when you use it.

...and? Are you seriously saying we shouldn't address serious threats to health because there's other serious threats to health?

...says the person who defamed Fauci in the thing being replied to, something that only people who intentionally consume only media that agrees with them knowing full well it lies about 90% of the time would do.

Let me guess: you think children are getting sex change surgeries. You also think that schools are providing sex change surgery for free. You think that there are litterboxes in school classrooms for furry students. You won't fly any more because there's a risk the airplane pilot might be a furry, and that somehow makes them unable to fly. You think cats and dogs are being eaten by legal Haitian immigrants. You think that undocumented immigrants are flooding the polls or even make up a meaningful percentage of voter registrations. Global warming? Ridiculous liberal myth, clearly. Same for the damage CFCs did to the ozone layer. Oh, and that pizzeria Hilary Clinton got her pizzas from has a child rape basement. Sure.

Sound about right?

One of the more subtle dangers of vibe coding is that the genAI system will generally drown you in praise and at no point tell you that it's already been done or that there are already ways to achieve what you're doing.

That's why this project got to the coding stage.

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.

> you cannot just separate out any pieces you want and use them independently,

Except when you can, which is most of the time. Grow up.

>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.

An article says:

>Employees at internal levels 64 and below received one week of base pay per six months of service, for example, and employees at levels 65 to 67 will receive two weeks of base pay per six months of service, according to offers reviewed by Business Insider.

Within MSFT, here's what those "levels" mean for software dev positions:

68-70: Partner & Above [entirely different comp structure; limited quota]
65-67: Principal
63-64: Senior
61-62: Engineer 2
59-60: Engineer

When I left in 2022, you unofficially had a limited amount of time to make it to the senior band. The "up or out" philosophy very much applied to junior engineers; if you didn't have the potential to make senior engineer (because you hadn't made it yet after x years), you were managed out.

People who made it to Principal could park their careers at the principal level and stay there indefinitely, so long as they were providing good results (but were still subject to random layoffs not based on their own performance)

The VEOs and other "voluntary" downsizing plans have been targeting older, higher-level folks. Yes, those folks are more expensive. They are also more male, more American, and more white.