FaceDeer

I mean, do those headcount numbers count contractors?

I linked the source for my information, feel free to dig into it for more detail.

Beyond that, unless you have an actual source for the culture shift beyond ‘you think so’

I literally said I didn’t know whether there had been a culture shift. Reread the last line of my comment. All I’m doing here is pointing out that your own view on the subject is likely very outdated at this point. There’s been enormous employee turnover, including right to the top CEO position, and other major companies have merged into Microsoft in the interim.

I’m willing to bet it is now even worse.

Based on?

I’m not doubting your previous experience. I’m just pointing out that it was a long time ago and a lot has happened since then, so I’d like to hear some more recent evidence.

The Red Ring of Death was around 2009 or so, Windows 8 rolled out in 2012. That was 14 years ago now.

Headcount numbers:

• 2012: ~94,000 employees.
• 2026: ~228,000 employees.

The median tenure of employment at Microsoft is 5.3 years, so most of those 94,000 employees will be long gone by now.

Also, Satya Nadella took over in 2014 and made major changes to the corporate culture from the earlier Balmer era. Stack ranking was abolished, there were major corporate acquisitions that brought external corporate cultures inside (eg LinkedIn, GitHub, ZeniMax/Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, Nokia).

I have no idea what Microsoft’s current internal culture is like but I think your impression is likely quite outdated by this point.

For someone who likes digging around in my Reddit history you’d think you’d be able to find something that was actually relevant to the topic at hand. That was a comment about the uses of agentic coding tools for making custom applications, not about building bots.

The only thing keeping the bot population low here is that there just aren’t enough people here to be worth it yet. If the Fediverse grows they’ll come in greater numbers.

There’s a master “kill switch” for all AI features in Firefox now. I suggest everyone who’s concerned about this kind of thing just go and turn it off, and then we need never bother each other over this again.

And also, people are really spoiled with existing internet speeds. When I joined the Internet it was still relying on telephone modems for much of the connectivity. There’s plenty you can do with that. The Fediverse, right here, is an example - just ordinary text communication.

My suspicion is that part of the problem is that social media sites are getting more and more refined. They’re getting better at providing users with what they want, meaning users are seeing curated bubbles where everyone around them agrees with them and they’re presented with rage-bait tailored to the specific things they get angry at. It’s the best way to cultivate “engagement” - group people with mob-mates and then give them something to form an angry mob about.

I don’t think there’s some evil mastermind laughing to himself on a golden throne doing this, either. It’s just a natural, organic consequence. Sites that don’t do it don’t get as many users sticking around long term.

It had some technical issues earlier on but it’s up and running right now. Looks pretty active.

It did convey a useful concept, until it started getting used for basically everything to mean “thing that used to be better but I don’t like now.”

It got enshittified.

any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge requests, and merge request descriptions) will be immediately closed

Guess it won’t be labelled, then.

Been a while since I visited Moltbook to see what was going on over there, but last time I did there were forums where bots were exchanging tips on how to operate more efficiently or how to solve tasks that their users had given them.

Let them have their own space.

I have never been afraid of being falsely accused of assault or rape because I have never done anything even close to anything that can be defined as assault or rape, or shown any behavior or tendencies to do so.

I think you’re missing the basic definition of what a false accusation is, here. The whole point of it is that you didn’t do the thing that you’re being accused of.

We’re talking about downvotes here. Those don’t indicate anything other than what a particular mob thinks about a subject, not whether they actually are a troll or racist. Unless you want to expand the term “troll” to be synonymous with “someone who says something that’s unpopular with the community he said in in”, which is unfortunately a definition I’ve seen people use that word to mean and makes the word pretty much useless.

Yeah, I think that caveat applies, with the same disclaimer for me; I haven’t studied the code or architecture in detail, I’m just going off a high-level understanding of how this works. The “server of record” is the server that re-broadcasts everything to those that federate with it so it can act as a filter.

ActivityPub is a nice idea, but I can imagine some manipulative shenanigans an instance could get up to with this kind of setup. I hope there are mechanisms for detecting that sort of thing.

But that’s the point he’s making, you can’t necessarily judge whether something is a “racist” or “troll” simply because lots of people are downvoting them. That just means the mob doesn’t like what they said. Mobs aren’t always morally correct.

There’s probably a bunch of places in the Fediverse you could go and say something that you thought was perfectly fine and reasonable and get a whole bunch of downvotes for it. Would that make you the racist troll, then?

As I understand it, you can downvote the content posted by instances that don’t support downvoting, they just don’t see it over there and can’t add downvotes of their own when using that instance.

In a similar way I could make my own instance that implemented “sidevoting” alongside up/down, people could vote left and right on those posts and comments, and the rest of the Fediverse would be blissfully unaware of the nonsense going on over on my instance.

Only one social media protocol is allowed to implement each particular approach to voting at a time?

You seem to have forgotten that this is a social media website comments section discussion, not a court of law.

And you are forgetting that it’s a discussion about a court of law. It’s right in the title, this is about a lawsuit.

You’re presenting a big wall of text that’s explaining your opinions on the matter. I could likewise present a big wall of text that explains my opinions on the matter. Neither of those things actually matter, though. The title and subject of this thread is not “hey, what do you all think about this stuff?” It’s “here’s what the US Supreme Court ruled (or in this case chose to let stand without making a ruling).”

I get what your opinion is. I’ve seen this opinion presented plenty of times over the years. I don’t think that’s how the courts are going to rule, though, because so far they’ve been ruling in other ways and I think I’ve got a pretty firm understanding of why they’ve been ruling that way.

Still, this all feels a bit like Schroedinger’s Copyrighted Work to me… the work exists, so who made it?

It’s simply not the court’s job to determine this, in this particular case. Which is why it’s so frustrating that this particular case keeps ending up under headlines claiming that it’s established that “AI generated art can’t be copyrighted.”

All the rest of this argument is out of scope of this case, you’d need to look to other cases. You can argue and opine however you like about what you think the outcomes should be but that doesn’t change what the outcomes of those cases actually end up being.