Thanks for the insight - that rings true to me and sounds like a major piece of the puzzle. It has me wondering if maintainers of the open-source software critical to so many companies could find a way to be more public about what they do. If more people in high places understood how important the maintainers' work is - and how little money it would take to keep the software they provide solid and secure - maybe the projects would be better funded.

It strikes me that they could do this with the help of LLMs. They have LOTS of documents as references; the AI could possibly use them to help with replicating Microsoft's house-of-cards magic tricks, even going so far as reverse-engineering the executables.

They could create a two-way translation suite which could both import and export all Microsoft formats faithfully. Thanks to LibreOffice they'd have at least a leg up on that process. Replicating the collaborative part might be harder - but I suspect that kludgy workarounds would get the job done, though less efficiently, for long enough to put a proper home-grown solution in place.

I think the problem here might have been not having an IT guru with programming experience heading up the project. Maybe they should have poached from the IT sector instead of from the tobacco sector. Maybe they thought that Big Tobacco, being more evil than even Big Data, could help them win the fight. But (something something) dogs, (something something) fleas...

The only way that will happen is for a really BIG chunk of users to just cancel their subscriptions and move on. Otherwise, inertia rules. Money also rules, and Microsoft has obscene amounts of it. That's the real problem here. Allowing corporations to become too big to fail and too rich to govern was a big mistake, though admittedly a hard one not to make.

Change that to slow release methylphenidate and I'm in!

If you ask a bare LLM to do stuff you'll get a mess. I run Claude code with a multipart harness that compels the model to treat the code as the mathematical thing it is, not human prose. LSP Enforcement Kit keeps low capability tools like grep out of the mix, Abstract Syntax Tree things handle the code as its meant to be understood, so that's CodeSight, OptiVault, Serena. About a year ago I gave Antigravity the boot after their awful 2.0 release and went back to JetBrains IDEs, which now offer code structure wise MCP services. Code review with the Ponytail skill chases away LLM excesses, and there's a smattering of other stuff like that in the mix. And then you hunt for whatever additional guardrails you can get the LLM to apply systemically.

I've evolved my own higher level project methods and they're comparable in a lot of ways to what Matt Pocock offers, but his stuff is more structured, more carefully considered, and I have to work with others now, after a long time solo. I'm taking his stuff, implementing a Kanban/wiki system, Gitlab CE, and NanoClaw for anyone who wants agents. I expect quite the slog between now and New Years, but in 2027 we're gonna stop trudging and start gliding over the landscape.

I'm reminded of a mid-90's Charlie Sheen SF movie called The Arrival. Aliens disguised as humans - some of them occupying positions of power - go about building giant atmosphere heaters to make Earth more habitable by their kind while making it unlivable for humans.

When I think about people like Musk, Karp, and Thiel, it's easy to believe that they are evil ETs looking to overheat the planet with data centres and deforestation, while simultaneously ruining the economy so REAL humans no longer have the strength and health to fight back.

To be fair, the aliens in the movie were more convincing as human beings than most of today's broligarchs are.

Damn! I have a quote from TFA in my clipboard in preparation for a writing a wordier version of what you just said.

Maybe the Finns should just establish a bounty on all wolves, including the human variety.

What if humans started training to become experts at writing like AI? We could end up with a whole industry of poorly paid, not-very-knowledgeable scammers in Indian call centres, cranking out utter fabrications that look like AI output but require a small fraction of the computing power.

Hooray for humanity, I guess?

Followed by:

So let's postulate a better budget. I'm just guessing, but let's say that $150K yearly per programmer, and $200k per year for the lead guy, would keep them happy and productive. Then, throw in a few junior programmers to do scut work, and a couple of admins to hold it together - add $500K per year to the budget. By my math that's $2.8 million. Round up to $3 million, just because.

Even that somewhat inflated sum is pocket change for just one of the many major corporations which rely on PHP. Hell, it's a rounding error on the annual budgets of the biggest users. So if a half-dozen or so chipped in, they could do it with money pulled out of the couch cushions in the C-suite. And they'd get better maintenance, faster. Plus, they'd spend less money putting out fires, because the extra support would catch more problems before roll-outs. Their reputations would be better, and advertising their "largesse" would be a PR goldmine. So why aren't they ponying up?

IANAP, so I could be missing something here - please tell me if that's the case. But I've worked in tech all my life, I've done a little bit of coding, and I've seen my share of corporate stupidity up close. So I'm guessing that I'm not too far off the mark. And I'm still scratching my head.

Those of you in America who have Ukrainian heritage had best avoid this service. I think Elmo might well throttle your data on a mere whim.

After all, he's already done that in Ukraine on more than one occasion. If he's willing to fuck Ukrainians over half a world away, why wouldn't he do it to the ones in his own back yard?

First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then...? Then you serve machines.

Arguably, we started wearing machines with the advent of the smartphone, so I think a case could be made that we're already serving machines to some extent. But with the advent of LLMs - and now a wearable GUI - our servitude may grow by leaps and bounds. Yay!

To ensure that, Ukraine needs more help from - hmm, let me see... - oh yeah, The United States!. Elon Muskler could start by not doing shit like his recent throttling of Ukraine's Starlink access at a crucial time. And Trump could also provide Ukraine with more armaments - if he wasn't a narcissistic shithead and hadn't blown his country's load in his stupid attack on Iran. He could also not buy diesel from Russia.

Ukraine doesn't need exhortations to do better - they've already pulled more miracles out of their collective hat than anyone could ever have dreamed. They need more weapons - not more advice.

My thoughts exactly. Bose knows how to do "ear-catching", but I find listening to their stuff for any length of time gets really old really fast. Recently we had to rent a car, and it had a Bose sound system. The sound was impressive - in the same way that a freight train whizzing past with its horn blowing is impressive. I guess that's why I tend to dub the company "Blose" ...

I could not get that radio to not make my ears hurt, even after extensive fiddling with the controls. I finally settled on settings that were reminiscent of a cheap 70's transistor radio - that was the least objectionable sound I could wrest from the thing. So the Skullcandy acquisition fits - it's "showy" sound for people who let trends and advertising, rather than their ears, dictate how their music systems sound.

You ask that question as though driving Facebook to extinction and putting fear in the hearts of the rest of the parasite class would be a bad thing.

As for myself, I'd love for that sustainability question to be answered empirically.

Clearly they wanted to say "redirecting liabilities", but the PR people freaked out about that and made them change the wording.

Isn't it wonderful how, in our current system, an employee can be transformed from a resource to a liability overnight and at the mere stroke of a pen?

In my experience, sucking up to that degree isn't a facet of diplomacy, it's a sign of mental and/or emotional dysfunction.