Hello social medias, this is a heavy post so please keep scrolling if needed.

I experienced sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse from my biological siblings, mostly Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman.

I feel strongly that others have also been abused by these perpetrators. I'm seeking people to join me in pursuing legal justice, safety for others in the future, and group healing. Please message me with any information, you can remain however anonymous you feel safe.

Sam and Jack,

I know you remember my Torah portion was about Moses forgiving his brothers.

“Forgive them father for they know not what they've done”

Sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse. Never forgotten

Hurt people cause more hurt, and forms of abuse go together. I have endured physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, financial, and technological abuse at the hands of a human I once called my brother. I know he can hear our dad in his head reminding him that “love wins”

I'm not four years old with a 13 year old “brother” climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore.

(You're welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.)

I've finally accepted that you've always been and always will be more scared of me than I've been of you.

Must be strange to stalk your younger sibling's social media after she went no contact from your abuse.

Must be stranger to see her kitty and butthole that you touched non-consensually, now posted publicly.

Thank you for the love and for calling I spade a spade. I experienced every single form of abuse with him - sexual, physical, verbal, psychology, pharmacological (forced Zoloft, also later told I'd receive money only if I went back on it), and technological (shadowbanning)

Already flagged to death on Hacker News but getting some traction on Twitter:

This is Sam Altman's sister. Her tweets about sexual, physical, emotional, etc. abuse are incredibly hard to read. Seems that no one in the media is that interested in covering this story because they're afraid of losing access to OpenAI if they write something critical of Sam.👇

Thank you for reading and for sharing 🙏🏼❤️

Is this new?

This is how to turn off Eric Andre startup jumpscare

Go to Opera installation folder, by default it should be at %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Programs\Opera GX, then go to folder 104.0.4944.74 and find opera_gx_splash.exe

Delete the executable file.

I'll be honest. I don't know the purpose of a browser having a starting splash is. On all my M1 Apple products opening any browser is basically instant. Is this what life is like on Microsoft products? Needing fancy graphics to hide loading inefficient software?

A single day has destroyed the entire community work

Just one day brah. Lol.

r/operagx is in shambles

r/firefox is hoping people will trade one shitty browser for the furfricker equivalent

This is apparently apart of a marketing campaign that started around a month ago.

In short for why everyone is mad

Please use a real browser like Brave or Vivaldi. Arc if you like doing things in weirdly specific ways and have an Apple. Safari if you're a homosexual (good king). None of this "I play games so I need a gaming browser!" soy trough eating bullshit.

It was well understood that this is what was happening when Kiwis were continually banished off host after host, but didn't have any way he could prove it until now. He's pondered legal action against in the past so here's hoping for a court case sneed.

"Katherine L. and I invited Nitasha Tiku to see the work that our multi-disciplinary, all-volunteer team has been doing over the past year as Kiwi Farms was de-platformed from over 32 providers located in 22 countries that found it in violation of their Acceptable Use Policies. By our count, we set in motion more than 24 of those terminations with our abuse reports and our professional follow-ups to ensure that they were actioned. Because of needing to repeatedly find and change to new providers, the site achieved approximately 50-60% reliability as observed from US consumer ISPs over the past year, as opposed to the 99.5% or higher reliability a typical law-abiding website with competent administration will offer.

Thousands of hours of thankless work went into taking this single site offline; even then, hopping to a new "shithost" provider takes merely hours of work, and then following up to show the new provider is in cahoots with the abuse and unresponsive to complaints can take dozens or hundreds of hours and weeks to months of wall time. This is not repeatable, nor should it _have_ to ever be repeated. There is no slippery slope here, least of all because the vast majority of sites on the Internet comply with their upstream AUPs.

Even when there is blatant breaking of both private contracts and the law, if it takes hundreds to thousands of hours of volunteer to time to get it actioned, there is no real enforcement accessible to the average victim. And governments _already_ can skip all of this and raid or order sites offline if they so choose. While I hope that one day there will be criminal consequences for those who perpetuate harassment online, I'm not holding my breath waiting for the government. Not to mention, which government? Companies in 22 countries were involved in this international takedown effort.

I'm protecting myself, and future generations of transgender and neurodivergent people. Don't just be a bystander, take action if you see injustice (and clear breaches of contract!). A huge huge huge thank you to everyone on our volunteer team, and everyone in the tech community who listened to us.

Katherine L. and I are going to be taking a break from this work for a while, as it's extremely burnout inducing. "Clay" is well positioned to continue this work, and further blackmail or intimidation against me is not going to deter Kat, me, Clay, or the rest of our teams from finishing the job."

https://archive.ph/xbhN5 ( LinkedIn Post)

He announced this his Telegram as well:

Comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36030969

https://archived.moe/g/thread/93632944/linux-graphics-stack-is-trans (EDIT: removed/jannied, archive: https://archived.moe/g/thread/93632944/)

HN users are noticing something:

« I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans »

From a purely statistical POV, this is absurdly bizarre.

Not really.

Statistically there will be weird coincidences completely naturally. It's also quite arbitrary which we see as meaningful. If say, Linux networking has unusually many people called "John" that probably will be unnoticed because nobody pays that much attention to common, unremarkable names. If they all randomly turn out to have green eyes, then that's more visible. It's completely subjective which of those is more remarkable.

There are also likely social effects -- people stick together, and some side interests align with some fields. Eg, I think it's reasonable to guess there's going to be more furries than average in VR development. Part because VR allow you to look like whatever you want a lot of the time, part because people will invite their friends in.

It is not just a random coincidence. It's a phenomenon more broadly across programming, especially very low-level/hardware stuff.

There does seem to be a correlation between autism spectrum and gender confusion, with the former often present in individuals who are into highly technical pursuits.

The logic seems to be not conforming to masculine stereotypes ==> must be a woman.

It's not "gender confusion". They know very well who they are. You are confused about the topic.

Meanwhile on /g/:

HRT destroys programmer communities the same way as crack was destroying black communities in the 1980s

Archive

E-H discussion

Tildes

Lemmytards

redditalternatives

/r/instantkarma /r/mademesmile

Edit: lw discussion

Edit 2: Initial announcement. They were hacked again after it

Edit 3: GitHub discussion of the XSS attack

Edit 4: Final announcement about the hack

Do we really live in a free country? pic.twitter.com/OeaD1FBGap

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) June 29, 2023

Remember this guy?

This is the guy who was photoed with Trump and mostly responsible for Brexit, much to the dismay of some europhiles:

Anyway, Nigel reeing here:

https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1674507257248116746

Some key quotes include

'This is serious political persecution at the very highest level of our system. If they can do it to me, they can do it to you too.'

Speaking of the importance of having a bank account, he added: 'You effectively become a non-person, you don't actually exist.

'It's like the worse regimes of the mid-20th century, be they in Russia or Germany, you literally become a non-person.

'I won't be able to have a debit card linked directly to my account. I won't really be able to exist or function in a modern 21st century Britain.'

Story here

He suspects he was cancelled as revenge for spearheading Brexit and has tried to open up 7 other bank accounts in the UK, but they all refuse. Being cancelled online is one thing. Not being able to open a bank account to exchange money is quite the next level. He's saying how stressful it's been and that he might have to move from the UK. He even claims his closest family members have had their bank accounts closed too.

Maybe commie China has come sooner than I anticipated.

There is a tiny ray of hope. No. 10 (the government) are looking into the matter and have given a warning to the banks over being too trigger happy when shutting accounts down.

Angry malds all over tech subs about GHC conference having a few men in attendance. She is _really_ mad - 6 posts in the last day across /r/GirlsGoneWired and /r/csmajors.

GHC, the "Grace Hopper Celebration" (maybe don't call it a celebration if you want to be taken seriously) is "is the world's largest gathering of women and non-binary technologists." Our heroine finds it ridiculous that evil men are allowed to attend.

Profile

First post

Second post

Third post

Fourth post

Fifth post

Sixth post

I'm seeing entire groups of just men, at a conference that's sole purpose is to give opportunities to WOMEN and non-binary individuals in a male dominated field. I attended last year and did not say any male identitying student attendees. This is genuinely infuriating.

Continues sperging out in the comments -

Men are minorities there aren't they? U gotta be more accepting

Are you stupid ??? The biggest appeal of grace hopper for the actual women / nb there is to be surrounded by other women. Last year, before men fricked that up for us, it was an extremely empowering and wholesome conference. It was the ONLY place we could celebrate women. It was a safe place for us. Men are the reason we needed it. And now you've come there too.

Lmao u have ten other ppl in here trolling why u comin after me? Is it because uk I'm a man and ur discriminating against me based on gender? Considering I work around women that have as much of an impact on me as I them, I'd consider ur scales before pooping all over men. This isn't a woman vs man thing, it's about working in cohesion

I'm mad at all of you. Seriously frick all of you. None of you guys that think this shit is funny know what it's like being the only woman in a class of 50 men. None of you know what it's like being talked down to because you are the only women on your engineering team. None of you understand why we have this conference and why this is upsetting.

The tables are turned as can identify valid enbys on sight

It says women and non-binary

The men I'm complaining about are not non-binary, they have “he/him” as their pronouns. I don't know a single non-binary person that goes by “he/him”. There are some that go by they/them and he/him but never just “he/him.” And for people who are actually part of the 🏳️‍🌈 community, its not very hard to tell. It's of course possible there are non-binary people that happen to look like cis males, however hundreds of people there being nb and coincidentally looking like cis men is statistically extremely unlikely… it's very clear that is not the case.

You just openly admitted you assume peoples sexually by just looking at them... wow

Lots of pooping on OP in this thread, she wants you to know she is very angry

OP is an absolute bigot for assuming that the people posting about it are not non-binary or identifying as women.

Go back to Alabama OP these days everyone can be a women.

Lol they put “he/him” as their only pronouns on their name tags and it's definitely possible that there are some non-binary attendees but not 1/3 of the attendees.

There are plenty of nb people that have he/him as their pronouns rather than making their life even harder than it already is maybe try to lift them up.

That is true but that is not what is happening here and it is very obvious

Educate yourself, sweaty

Follow up question, do you think that men who attend Grace Hopper are more or less likely to agree with the statement "Women are unfairly given extra employment opportunities in tech," when compared to all men in tech?

Kinda seems like voting with their feet to me.

I think they would think that, yes. Because they don't understand the history and personal experience of women in this industry. They don't understand the reason we have this conference / who create it / who it was created for.

You didn't start the conference, you don't run it. Who are you to say who it's for? Seems like they belong there more than you.

Try doing some research about the conference and educate yourself.

More bonus drama

I don't go to this, I don't even live on the same continent, but I do wonder how you are telling which people are non-binary and which are men? because I am a masc-presenting non-binary person and worry you might class me as a man if you saw me there.

edit: Really not sure why I am being downvoted. this sub "welcomes contributions from everyone".

Because it seems you're trying to muddy things for who knows why, possibly a distinctly masculine desire to make every conversation about yourself. Non-binary people are rare, rarer than either of the binary sexes. You see a conference "for women" which is populated distinctly by non-women, it does not make any sense to think "ah, non-binary representation!"

why invite non-binary people then?

That is not the issue here, is it? When there's a room full of people of whom 50% are masc presenting, 98% of those will be men not enbies. Whether any one of them specifically could be misgendered as either male or nonbinary is... well, personally unpleasant, statistically unimportant. It's just not likely to be successful enough to invite enough of the masc enbies but bad enough at inviting women to visibly get the ratio of male seeming people to be very high.

Plenty more drama in those threads, and I wouldn't put it past to continue madposting about it until the "celebration" is over.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327520

Google and Chinese AI companies watching this unfold like

UPDATES

I think this means something

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/17yrdsq/mira_murati_interim_ceo_of_openai_has_sided_with?sort=controversial

The Chief Strategy Officer told employees they are confident about bringing everyone back and will have an update tomorrow

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17yqyme/openais_chief_strategy_officer_jason_kwon_told?sort=controversial

Ilya about to be stebbed?

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17yt8sl/what_does_this_mean?sort=controversial

Nice to know that even rich tech dorks tweet like high schoolers

Lots of drama in this thread. With blackmailing over email and threats. Here is some highlights.

Ends with a jannie y'alling the thread

Edit: Since this post is doing so well, have some bonus peepeesword drama of some other AI ethicist also whining:

Back in the day I used to do Mechanical Turk like work assessing search engine quality. There were very detailed guidelines about what made a search engine good, compiled into a like 250 page document Google had been curating and updating over the course of years.

One of the key concepts was the idea of a "vital" result for a user request. If a user had a specific request, the search engine had to deliver that content first. For example, simpson.com at the time was a malicious website. With this in mind, if the user searched for "simpson.com", the first result had to be simpson.com, even if the search engine is returning a malicious page. It's specifically what the user requested. We aren't supposed to question what the user wants. The results that followed after could provide suggestions of what else the user may be looking for, like the official Simpsons website.

I would love to see whatever shreds of this document is left at this point, and I'd love to know at what point the entire thing was thrown into the trash and rewritten. I assume somewhere around the year 2016 or 2020. I know this is nothing shocking to a lot of people, but it really does amaze me just how bad things have gotten. I've stuck to the major search engines because despite peoples bitching, for a long time they consistently outperformed the smaller competitors, but they are genuinely without hyperbole almost unusable now.

Example: I wanted to find the recent Tucker Carlson - Vladimir Putin interview. It's a newsworthy interview with a world leader and a current event. There is a very specific video I'm looking for, the published, official video of sitting down and asking questions.

Here is what google returns in a private window:

The very first piece of content - the "vital result" - is clickbait youtube cute twinkry from Time What are the keeraZIEST moments from the interview?!?

The rest of the results are a cascade of editorialized garbage, opinionated news articles reporting on the requested content. God forbid a careless user actually be exposed to a primary source.

The closest result to what I'm looking for is about over 10 pieces of content deep - the transcript of the interview from Russia's state website. Likely this is an oversight.

Here is Bing:

There's been some meme going around that "no really guys, Bing is actually kinda good now believe it or not".

This is even more nonsense than Google. The most prominently featured content is, of course, more editorialized bullshit with the interview itself nowhere to be found. But also half of the content is just completely irrelevant crap I didn't ask for. Why is the entire right half of the page a massive infobox about Tucker and his books and quotes? Why am I seeing something about Game of Thrones?

Brave:

You get the point. More useless crap. It gets half a point for its AI accidentally revealing that tuckercarlson.com is where the interview is located, but this doesn't count. The actual search results are all garbage. Thanks Brave for showing me all the latest reddit discussions

Yandex:

Was that really so fricking hard? Result #1 - the interview from Tucker Carlson. Past the interview are news articles and images - things of waning utility that other users may be interested in. But the vital result is at the top of the page. That's fricking it. This would have been the required order for the page on Google ten years ago.

Selected comments:

They will enslave their population. You'll see. You can look in some of my recent comments to see a thread where people in Amsterdam were celebrating the installation of "noise cameras" along public roads because they bought into the claims that it was to fine "loud cars." They don't realize that they are frogs in a pot that is coming to a gradual boil. If the people of the Netherlands won't take back their freedom from tyrants, they will soon realize that the tyrants don't actually have their best interests at heart. But it will be too late for them to do anything about it because they won't be able to flee their city prisons anymore. This is effectively a ban on cash.

They will soon freeze assets for people who are ideologically opposed to them. And from there it's a descent directly into heck when the majority of people realize that they are not essential to what the regime, I mean The Cabinet, thinks and wants.

They can't control the black market in drugs, what makes them think controlling a black market in cash, which is a million times more desirable, will be any more successful? There's the small matter of millions of undocumented migrants entering Europe who will be trapped in this now-illegal-cash underclass, and these financial oppression laws just incentivise and create criminal networks to facilitate basic economy. This is financial oppression that totally demoralizes their society as a means to dissolve it.

It's not a lot of money, and given inflation, diminishingly so. This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash and farmers everywhere have a lot of tax relief precisely because they provide food security for nations - and it's to the benefit of criminal networks to top it off. The architects of this policy are disgusting.

Tell me you voted (twice) for Trump without telling me you voted (twice) for Trump.

What? Clearly this issue is too nuanced for your American mind.

What are some good reasons to allow cash payments above 3000 EUR?

Jesus Christ Europeans are absolutely insufferable. How will you ever survive without making rules about other people's money?

Xenia (a Xbox 360 emulator) throwing out a warning accusing you of piracy if it detects ISO files, a DISC IMAGE FORMAT, is the funniest thing i've seen all day pic.twitter.com/dT9qNRMZM4

— MeovvCAT (@osu_MeovvCAT) July 26, 2023

https://github.com/xenia-canary/xenia-canary/pull/180

*taps on mic* Introducing, our refreshed look.

Learn more: https://t.co/zpebTKjX3z pic.twitter.com/3WzyqeTCZa

— Reddit (@Reddit) November 29, 2023

https://www.redditinc.com/blog/evolving-the-reddit-brand-a-more-accessible-bespoke-typography-new-conversation-bubbles-and-colors-and-a-new-snoo-logo-now-with-opposable-thumbs

Orangecels and redditards alike just discovering how much they rely on the service.

Speculation is that this might be related to making ChatGPT voice available to all free users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38371213

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/180t5l4/andddddd_its_down?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/180to2m/so_it_begins?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/180tnnt/down_for_anyone_else?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/180w64p/is_chatgpt_down?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/180vs09/sam_please_openai_is_dead_chatgpt_and_the_api_is?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/180uykv/is_there_anything_to_be_interpreted_from_chatgpt?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/180utn9/chatgpt_and_openai_apis_are_down?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/180tswm/breaking_gpt_down_in_the_uk?sort=controversial

Blind thread: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Reddit-Layoffs-TiryTRSE

God I hate Reddit, but if we have any jannies on that powerjanny call tomorrow, maybe bring this up!

No severance lmao

They had layoffs in January. Wish I had known so I could gloat about that one too.

Left Twitter bcuz of mean ol' Musk just to get the wingcuck layoff with no severance.

Booohooo muh third-party app devs have to pay now booohooo

My feelings exactly.

Apparently this lawsuit was the breaking point.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64618791

Foid decided 10 years later to sue the site that allowed her and her abuser to meet. Not sure how omegle is responsible for the actions of the abuser. However, it doesn't matter because it seems omegle doesn't have the means to fight the battle and decided to close shop. RIP.

Here's an excerpt from the founder's final thoughts. This hit me pretty hard and kinda sums up the noticeable decline of the internet.

I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection.

omegle.com

EU just ruins things because they can't build anything.

AI often isn't available because of obscure laws. chatGPT had been blocked for a month. Gemini is not available right now. A disaster.

Bureaucrats want to show that they exist.

To my knowledge they've never been "blocked". Google simply didn't release them in the EU for a while.

By delaying something introducing stupid regulations, they block it.

Personally I don't want to be drinking polluted water, eat unsanitary food, live in a place where all housing is owned by a handful of entities that engage in price-fixing, work 80 hours a week in an environment when response to mass worker suicides is to install suicide nets, have my privacy violated by private corporations (foreign or domestic) or have my insurance rates tripled by some opaque discriminatory AI, but you do you in whatever dystopian future you dream of.

You're just a low life europoor communist.

EU just wants to kill tech, because its ever changing nature means that they can't control it.

Quite the opposite, in EU there is no innovation because only big tech can comply with regulation.

EU is just hurting its own startups.

USA, India, China. They all have multibillion AI companies. EU doesn't because nobody wants to deal with unpredictable lawmakers

Edit: @dang came and mopped up, RIP _giorgio_

Edit 2: actually _giorgio_ didn't get banned

OH FOR CHRIST'S SAKE https://t.co/y9jLN61VOf pic.twitter.com/vx8yDcz1B3

— Silent (@__silent_) September 3, 2023

https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/16afo4x/rockstar_selling_you_cracked_copies_on_steam?sort=controversial

We're all going to die.

Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's four days in exile, several staff researchers sent the board of directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

[...]

The maker of ChatGPT had made progress on Q* (pronounced Q-Star), which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans.

Edit: The linked /pol/ thread is kinda insane

Edit 2:

They're now trying to cover it up

a person familiar with the matter told The Verge that the board never received a letter about such a breakthrough and that the company's research progress didn't play a role in Altman's sudden firing

Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model.

Sora can create videos of up to 60 seconds featuring highly detailed scenes, complex camera motion, and multiple characters with vibrant emotions. https://t.co/7j2JN27M3W

Prompt: “Beautiful, snowy… pic.twitter.com/ruTEWn87vf

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) February 15, 2024

Lots of seethe on Twitter. Discuss the societal implications, and what degenerate thing you're going to make when stable diffusion released their copy in a year!

Also, what will it take for Yann LeCum to admit he is wrong? We'll have AIs that simulate the future and he will still be arguing they aren't intelligent and his model (which is essentially the same thing) is better

Imagine a tech conference having no CFP, as they reach out to speakers directly. They successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter men speakers in tech, and 3 women speakers.

Now imagine my surprise that 2 of those women are FAKE profiles.

They do not exist.

Nada.

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) November 24, 2023

It's not often (read: ever) that I get to post about drama from my country, but this one is hot off the press and I think you guys might find interesting.

Full info is in the nitter thread, but here's a quick rundown:

QRD

Eduards Sizovs is some bloke that organizes and runs several international tech conferences, of those the two that are important to this are DevTernity and JDkon, though there are others

Apparently the organizers of these events do not accept applications from potential speakers, but instead reach out to people they are interested in, thus creating this more of a closed group of speakers.

Well, now as it turns out, there are fake speakers that are signed and advertised at these conferences (and have been in the past). In reality, they are merely fake online personas created by Eduards, and have never actually appeared at any of his events. Currently 4 such personas have been identified, all of them being women.

Here's Alina Prokhoda, a speaker at the upcoming DevTernity conference with prior experience at WhatsApp and Microsoft MVP who has been identified as a non-existent person who has never worked for those companies:

And here's Anna Boyko, with the same issues

Besides these there's also Julia Kirsina who worked as Uber's software Architect in Estonia, despite Uber not even having such division in that country, and there's also Natalie Standler who (didn't) work at coinbase.

Eduards has pushed back against the notion of him creating fake speakers by saying that a single fake was added by accident, but was quickly proven wrong when it was shown that these 4 fine ladies have been signed up to his conferences on 5 different occasions in total, and yet have given 0 speeches, without anyone ever seeing them in person.

This caused the organizer to go into full damage control mode as other, actually real speakers started pulling out of the conference after being informed of the controversy

But how could this happen? Surely someone would've noticed that these people don't exist?

Well, as it turns out, while the people themselves are fake, they have a very real online presence- we're talking several different social media accounts with over 100k followers, actively posting motivational quotes about girls who code, all while hiding behind what are likely AI-generated pictures of women. In short, Eduards has been quite successfully running several catfish accounts pretending to be women

Even Kiwifarms' LFJ gave her opinion on the matter, which is a complete moment which just shows that fricking everything and everyone is connected

So now for the big question: why would he do it?

Well, the guy who broke this story speculates that the reason behind why every fake persona is a woman is that Eduards, the organizer, has been trying to up his DEI compliance to attract bigger fish to his conferences by making them seem more inclusive than they really are, and probably to get some gibs/shoutouts from the organizations that promote such nonsense in the first place. Oh, and of course to milk attendees who pay... up to 800$ to attend? WTF people?

Well, now he's been caught and his entire life's work will likely go down the drain. Sucks to suck

So what's your opinion? Is the dude based for duping r-slurs, or is he an r-slur himself for thinking no one would find out?

Based - 253 votes

R-slur - 51 votes

I would like to apologize if this is a bit clumsily written because I'm a bit out of my comfort zone here trying to write about shit I have no understanding of off twitter, but I wanted to do it quickly so none of you strags manage to snitch it first

Microsoft wants to move Windows fully to the cloud

Microsoft has been increasingly moving Windows to the cloud on the commercial side with Windows 365, but the software giant also wants to do the same for consumers. In an internal “state of the business” Microsoft presentation from June 2022, Microsoft discuses building on “Windows 365 to enable a full Windows operating system streamed from the cloud to any device.”

The presentation has been revealed as part of the ongoing FTC v. Microsoft hearing, as it includes Microsoft’s overall gaming strategy and how that relates to other parts of the company’s businesses. Moving “Windows 11 increasingly to the cloud” is identified as a long-term opportunity in Microsoft’s “Modern Life” consumer space, including using “the power of the cloud and client to enable improved AI-powered services and full roaming of people’s digital experience.”

No drama (yet), reposting for posterity.

Very little on orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39596491

Archive: https://archive.is/HfRvZ

Google's Culture of Fear

inside the DEI hivemind that led to Gemini's disaster

Mike Solana, Mar 4, 2024

• Following interviews with concerned employees throughout the company, a portrait of a leaderless Google in total disarray, making it “impossible to ship good products at Google”

• Revealing the complicated diversity architecture underpinning Gemini's tool for generating art, which led to its disastrous results

• Google knew their Gemini model's DEI worldview compromised its performance ahead of launch

• Pervasive and clownish DEI culture, from micro-management of benign language (“ninja”) and bizarre pronoun expectations to forcing the Greyglers, an affinity group for Googlers over 40, to change their name on account of not all people over 40 have grey hair

• No apparent sense of the existential challenge facing the company for the first time in its history, let alone a path to victory

Last week, following Google's Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problems than its hotly anticipated generative AI tool erasing white people from human history. Separate from the mortifying clownishness of this specific and egregious breach of public trust, Gemini was obviously — at its absolute best — still grossly inferior to its largest competitors. This failure signaled, for the first time in Google's life, real vulnerability to its core business, and terrified investors fled, shaving over $70 billion off the kraken's market cap. Now, the industry is left with a startling question: how is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?

This is Google, an invincible search monopoly printing $80 billion a year in net income, sitting on something like $120 billion in cash, employing over 150,000 people, with close to 30,000 engineers. Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true. But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company's far greater problems. First, Google is now facing the classic Innovator's Dilemma, in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model. Second, and probably more importantly, nobody's in charge.

Over the last week, in communication with a flood of Googlers eager to speak on the issues facing their company — from management on almost every major product, to engineering, sales, trust and safety, publicity, and marketing — employees painted a far bleaker portrait of the company than is often reported: Google is a runaway, cash-printing search monopoly with no vision, no leadership, and, due to its incredibly siloed culture, no real sense of what is going on from team to team. The only thing connecting employees is a powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma. But the company's zealots are only capable of thriving because no other fount of power asserts, or even attempts to assert, any kind of meaningful influence. The phrase “culture of fear” was used by almost everyone I spoke with, and not only to explain the dearth of resistance to the company's craziest DEI excesses, but to explain the dearth of innovation from what might be the highest concentration of talented technologists in the world. Employees, at every level, and for almost every reason, are afraid to challenge the many processes which have crippled the company — and outside of promotion season, most are afraid to be noticed. In the words of one senior engineer, “I think it's impossible to ship good products at Google.” Now, with the company's core product threatened by a new technology release they just botched on a global stage, that failure to innovate places the company's existence at risk.

As we take a closer look at Google's brokenness, from its anodyne, impotent leadership to the deeply unserious culture that facilitated an encroachment on the company's core product development from its lunatic DEI architecture, it's helpful to begin with Gemini's specific failure, which I can report here in some detail to the public for the first time.

First, according to people close to the project, the team responsible for Gemini was not only warned about its “overdiversification” problem before launch (the technical term for erasing white people from human history), but understood the nebulous DEI architecture — separate from causing offense — dramatically eroded the quality of even its most benign search results.

Roughly, the “safety” architecture designed around image generation (slightly different than text) looks like this: a user makes a request for an image in the chat interface, which Gemini — once it realizes it's being asked for a picture — sends on to a smaller LLM that exists specifically for rewriting prompts in keeping with the company's thorough “diversity” mandates. This smaller LLM is trained with LoRa on synthetic data generated by another (third) LLM that uses Google's full, pages-long diversity “preamble.” The second LLM then rephrases the question (say, “show me an auto mechanic” becomes “show me an Asian auto mechanic in overalls laughing, an African American female auto mechanic holding a wrench, a Native American auto mechanic with a hard hat” etc.), and sends it on to the diffusion model. The diffusion model checks to make sure the prompts don't violate standard safety policy (things like self-harm, anything with children, images of real people), generates the images, checks the images again for violations of safety policy, and returns them to the user.

“Three entire models all kind of designed for adding diversity,” I asked one person close to the safety architecture. “It seems like that — diversity — is a huge, maybe even central part of the product. Like, in a way it is the product?”

“Yes,” he said, “we spend probably half of our engineering hours on this.”

The inordinately cumbersome architecture is embraced throughout product, but really championed by the Responsible AI team (RAI), and to a far greater extent than Trust and Safety, which was described by the people I spoke with closest to the project as pragmatic. That said, the Trust and Safety team working on generation is distinct from the rest of the company, and didn't anchor on policy long-established by the Search team — which is presently as frustrated with Gemini's highly-public failure as the rest of the company.

In sum, thousands of people working on various pieces of a larger puzzle, at various times, and rarely with each other. In the moments cross-team collaborators did attempt to assist Gemini, such attempts were either lost or ignored. Resources wasted, accountability impossible.

Why is Google like this?

The ungodly sums of money generated by one of history's greatest monopoly products has naturally resulted in Google's famously unique culture. Even now, priorities at the company skew towards the absurd rather than the practical, and it's worth noting a majority of employees do seem happy. On Blind, Google ranks above most tech companies in terms of satisfaction, but reasons cited mostly include things like work-life balance and great free food. “People will apologize for meetings at 9:30 in the morning,” one product manager explained, laughing. But among more driven technologists and professionals looking to make an impact — in other words, the only kind of employee Google now needs — the soft culture evokes a mix of reactions from laughter to contempt. Then, in terms of the kind of leadership capable of focusing a giant so sclerotic, the company is confused from the very top.

A strange kind of dance between Google's Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's Board, and CEO Sundar Pichai leaves most employees with no real sense of who is actually in charge. Uncertainty is a familiar theme throughout the company, surrounding everything from product direction to requirements for promotion (sales, where comp decisions are a bit clearer, appears to be an outlier). In this culture of uncertainty, timidity has naturally taken root, and with it a practice of saying nothing — at length. This was plainly evident in Sundar's response to Gemini's catastrophe (which Pirate Wires revealed in full last week), a startling display of cowardice in which the man could not even describe, in any kind of detail, what specifically violated the public's trust before guaranteeing he would once again secure it in the future.

“Just look at the OKRs from 2024,” one engineer said, visibly upset. Indeed, with nothing sentiments like “improve knowledge” and “build a Google that's extraordinary,” with no product initiative, let alone any coherent sense of strategy, Sundar's public non-response was perfectly ordinary. The man hasn't messaged anything of value in years.

“Sundar is the Ballmer of Google,” one engineer explained. “All these products that aren't working, sprawl, overhiring. It all happened on his watch.”

Among higher performers I spoke with, a desire to fire more people was both surprising after a year of massive layoffs, and universal. “You could cut the headcount by 50%,” one engineer said, “and nothing would change.” At Google, it's exceedingly difficult to get rid of underperformers, taking something like a year, and that's only if, at the final moment, a low performer doesn't take advantage of the company's famously liberal (and chronically abused) medical leave policy with a bullshit claim. This, along with an onslaught of work from HR that has nothing to do with actual work, layers tremendous friction into the daily task of producing anything of value. But then, speaking of the “People” people —

One of the more fascinating things I learned about Google was the unique degree to which it's siloed off, which has dramatically increased the influence of HR, one of the only teams connecting the entire company. And that team? Baseline far crazier than any other team.

Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I've obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir,” “ey/em,” “xe/xem,” and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group). There's no shortage of DEI groups, of course, or affinity groups, including any number of working groups populated by radical political zealots with whom product managers are meant to consult on new tools and products. But then we come to more important issues.

Among everyone I spoke with, there was broad agreement race and gender greatly factor into hiring and promotion at Google in a manner considered both problematic (“is this legal?”) and disorienting. “We're going to focus on people of color,” a manager told one employee with whom I spoke, who was up for a promotion. “Sounds great,” he said, for fear of retaliation. Later, that same manager told him he should have gotten it. Three different people shared their own version of a story like this, all echoing the charge just shared publicly by former Google Venture investor Shaun Maguire:

https://twitter.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1760872265892458792

Every manager I spoke with shared stories of pushback on promotions or hires when their preferred candidates were male and white, even when clearly far more qualified. Every person I spoke with had a story about a promotion that happened for reasons other than merit, and every person I spoke with shared stories of inappropriate admonitions of one race over some other by a manager. Politics are, of course, a total no go — for people right of center only. “I'm right leaning myself,” one product manager explained, “but I've got a career.” Yet politics more generally considered left wing have been embraced to the point they permeate the whole environment, and shape the culture in a manner that would be considered unfathomable in most workplaces. One employee I spoke with, a veteran, was casually told over drinks by a flirty leader of a team he tried to join that he was great, and would have been permitted to switch, but she “just couldn't do the ‘military thing.'”

The overt discrimination here is not only totally repugnant, but illuminating. Google scaled to global dominance in just a few years, ushering in a period of unprecedented corporate abundance. What is Google but a company that has only ever known peace? These are people who have never needed to fight, and thus have no conception of its value in either the literal sense, or the metaphorical. Of course, this has also been a major aspect of the company for years.

Let's be honest, Google hasn't won a new product category since Gmail. They lost Cloud infrastructure to AWS and Azure, which was the biggest internet-scale TAM since the 90s, and close to 14 years after launching X, Google's Moonshot Factory, the “secret crazy technology development” strategy appears to pretty much be fake. It lost social (R.I.P. Google+). It lost augmented reality (R.I.P. Glass). But who cares? Google didn't need to win social or AR. It does, however, need to win AI. Here, Google acquired DeepMind, an absolutely brilliant team, thereby securing an enormous head start in the machine god arms race, which it promptly threw away to not only one, but several upstarts, and that was all before last week's Gemini fiasco.

In terms of Gemini, nobody I spoke with was able to finger a specific person responsible for the mortifying failure. But it does seem people on the team have fallen into agreement on precisely the wrong thing: Gemini's problem was not its embarrassingly poor answer quality or disorienting omission of white people from human history, but the introduction of black and asian Nazis (again, because white people were erased from human history), which was considered offensive to people of color. According to multiple people I spoke with on the matter, the team adopted this perspective from the tech-loathing press they all read, which has been determined to obscure the overt anti-white racism all week. With no accurate sense of why their product launch was actually disastrous, we can only expect further clownery and failure to come. All of this, again, reveals the nature of the company: poor incentive alignment, poor internal collaboration, poor sense of direction, misguided priorities, and a complete lack of accountability from leadership. Therefore, we're left with the position of Sundar, increasingly unpopular at the company, where posts mocking his leadership routinely top Memegen, the internal forum where folks share dank (but generally neutered) memes.

Google's only hope is vision now, in the form of a talented and ferocious manager. Typically, we would expect salvation for a troubled company in the heroic return of a founder, and my sense is Sergey will likely soon step up. This would evoke tremendous excitement, and for good reason. Sergey is a man of vision. But can he win a war?

Google is sitting on an enormous amount of cash, but if the company does lose AI, and AI in turn eats search, it will lose its core function, and become obsolete. Talent will leave, and Google will be reduced to a giant, slowly shrinking pile of cash. A new kind of bank, maybe, run by a dogmatic class of extremist HR priestesses? That's interesting, I guess. But it's not a technology company.

-SOLANA