This is pretty standard when someone leaves Microsoft.
The management above the person leaving sends a nice message about them and their work and NEVER tells the truth about _why_ they are leaving.
At the upper levels I don't think there's really any sincerity about anything said, one way or another. This is just how corporate America operates.
Nextcloud has done great work in terms of EU-Soverignty and offering credible replacements for all the pieces of the the Microsoft stack.
Nextcloud Talk works well for video conference meetings.
MS Teams is a pretty terrible piece of software. The design of it is bad, and the implementation is bad.
Any software that tries to copy it will also be bad.
If you haven't spun up a nextcloud AIO instance yet for your organization(s), you should try it out.
Its reply to me:
"Yes, in large part."
But that is mostly caused by NVidia's lackluster driver support in Linux.
Uh, sure.
These were people who worked in defence so anywhere behind the Iron Curtain was right out and I imagine Cuba would have been too. Even Austria was considered a risk, probably because so many spies would hang out there from both sides.
Or so they told me. I can't be entirely sure they weren't exagerrating.
Yes, certain destinations were off-limits to people who chose to work in defense, however that falls far shy of this "Exit Ban".
The US saying "If you travel to Cuba, you may face charges when you return" or even "You have been charged with a specific crime, so you cannot leave until the charges are resolved is significantly different from China saying "You are important to our plans, so you cannot leave the country at all, and neither can your immediate family", or forbidden a US citizen from leaving because of visa inconsistencies, much less the common situation where Chinese employers require staff to surrender their passports.
Yes, a judge can require the defendant to surrender their passport as a condition of bail, but the USA lacks effective exit controls, so that isn't actually a high barrier to exiting (but makes it tough to come back).
If, as the article suggests, this is an "Exit Ban" on certain individuals and extending to their family members, that's significantly more restrictive than anything the US has imposed on defense workers and top scientists other than during wartime.
Yes, people with sensitive jobs and a security clearance are strongly discouraged from visiting hostile nations, with a subset even being required to submit their travel plans before any foreign travel, but this is explained clearly when you accept employment directly with the US government, or start working under a government contract, and you're always free to not accept the job offer. And yes, all US citizens were for many years prohibited to travel to embargoed nations (Cuba). But this was nowhere near an "exit ban" on key personnel, much less on their family members!
When I held a clearance, I was never forbidden to leave the USA. I might not have a job when I get back, but that's not the same thing at all.
Governments are people.
"These fuckers are why you are seeing less physical switch games as an example"
Buwhaha
Yeah, I know what you mean. I just did it the easy way - dropped out of university, eventually move to Montreal where it was almost *difficult* to be a programmer and not end up at a game studio. Thankfully the industry grew in Toronto as well and I was able to move back after some lovely years there.
I hope you've all read the Aschenbrenner paper from 2024.
https://situational-awareness....
Never mind Trump's rambling speaking style. He's aware of it and he likes it.
We know that people in the Trump admin have, at minimum, been briefed on the Aschenbrenner paper. I assume some of them have read the whole thing.
The point he's making - that we're on the cusp of ASI, and the USA MUST not get there wildly behind, for example, China, is correct. And that the USA should not be shackled by an international framework that rival nations are going to ignore anyway.
He's directionally correct, even if you think he's too stupid to know what he's agreeing with.
I'm an oldhead programmer (still) in the games industry. You're thinking of DigiPen. (I didn't go there.)
it's just a pipeline for techno-oligarchs
"a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling not warming"
How is this not an indictment on America's ability not to raise incredibly dumb voters? I mean
"We need to call it Super Intelligence!" Trump demanded, waggling a finger at an iPod.
Lol, this is the president some people are willing to tolerate for a party that promises you'll have lower taxes (while only giving them to the upper class) and less thinking about trans people or something. Communism! Boo! It's quite astounding.
It's actually very funny. There's a reason word of mouth has been doing the heavy lifting for this.
To do nothing is to be nothing.
