Atlassian is one of those companies that I equally laugh at, love, and hate.

They’re in so many markets in software and project management, and have so many large clients that pay for Confluence, Jira, BitBucket, etc. Despite this, people almost universally despise their products, with bugs being left open for years, features blissfully ignored, etc.

I often imagine what it would be like to work for Atlassian, and what “that” code based must look like. Working there must be fun as hell given the impact and breadth of opportunities, equally frustrating if you dogfood your own products, and infuriating given just how much stuff must be utter shit under the hood.

Because Reddit gets an insane amount of use, whereas Lemmy doesn’t?

I like it here, but let’s not pretend that people aren’t still using Reddit. Most people don’t care about regressive policies, they just want to look at stupid memes and chat shit online.

Lol have you ever tried to report abuse on Facebook or Instagram?

They won’t do shit about obvious racist abuse or hate speech. Let them define what they want, they will do what they always do - nothing.

No idea why this is downvoted, America does love a condiment. Thankfully, sausage rolls are extremely dippable, and some people do decide to dunk them in all sorts. It’s not something I’d do, but I’d tolerate it.

But the American monstrosity is a rip-off of sausage rolls, which originated centuries ago. They gave a name to something that they should have known to already exist. Frankly, I’m all for revoking America’s independence and returning them to secondary colony status over this…

The states are wrong. That’s a sausage roll, and it’s been a sausage roll for decades. The whole “pig in a blanket” thing is a new thing from people that basically reinvented the sausage roll and didn’t have the sense to check if it already existed.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that wars were started over less, and Australia and the UK would probably happily have their finger on the nuclear button if America doesn’t come to its senses and just embrace the correct food names…

Anger aside, I’m absolutely shocked that Greggs hasn’t tried to make its way stateside. Extremely cheap, fast food that’s greasy as fuck, has barely any nutritional value, and so convenient that you can just eat it out of the bag - sounds like an American dream.

Pigs in Blankets are this (pork sausage wrapped in bacon):

What you’re describing is a sausage roll (pork sausage wrapped in pastry):

I’m all for American versions of things, but please get these staples of British cuisine right.

I mean, I feel absolutely horrible after hearing some of the stories from the aftermath of that show, but fucking hell they knew how to get that look…

Respectfully, I worked for Alexa AI on compositional ML, and we were largely able to do exactly this with customer utterances, so to say it is impossible is simply not true. Many companies have to have some degree of ability to remove troublesome data, and while tracing data inside a model is rather difficult (historically it would be done during the building of datasets or measured at evaluation time) it’s definitely something that most big tech companies will do.

I’m fine with that, but let’s put some rules against this.

• Any AI models should be able to determine the source of their data to a defined level of accuracy.
• There should be a well-defined way to block data from being used by AI. If one of these ways (e.g. robots.txt) has been breached, the model has to be rebuilt without the data, and reparations made to the content owners.

A lot of people are giving Tesla shit here, but surely there should be regulations in place to ensure something like this isn’t allowed to be released for public use?

All of big tech is really worried about this.

• Apple is worried about its own science output, with many of their office heavily employing data scientists. A lot of people slate Siri, but Apple’s scientists put out a lot of solid research.
• Amazon is plugging GenAI into practically everything to appease their execs, because it’s the only way to get funding. Moonshot ideas are dead, and all that remains is layoffs, PIP, and pumping AI into shit where it doesn’t belong to make shareholders happy. The innovation died, and AI replaced it.
• Google has let AI divisions take over both search and big parts of ads. Both are reporting worse experiences for users, but don’t worry, any engineer worth anything was laid off and there are no opportunities in other divisions for you either. If there are, they probably got offshored…
• Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go, but they’re still plugging AI shite in places no one asked for it, with many divisions now severely down in headcount.

If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there’s a real concern that they’ll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn’t sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.

From a company perspective, it’s a common sentiment. Google and Amazon have mantras around trying to stay agile and relevant despite being behemoths, and both have arguably kept into boomer tech territory the second they made a poor CEO hire. Microsoft had their Ballmer era, and while Nadella did a lot of good at Microsoft they’ve had a lot of failures in established divisions to be soaked up by AI and sales.

I think that all of big tech has struggled over the last 3 years. Sacrificing employee skill for shareholder value has ultimately moved them all into IBM territory, whereas the cool tech is happening at startups again. If AI is a bust, and another company comes along and eats their lunch in their established markets like consumer devices, web tooling, or cloud computing, they’re in real danger of another huge set of layoffs and resetting their businesses to only core profit-making ventures. What I think we’ve seen companies shift towards death, Day 2, rotting from the inside, or whatever your business calls stagnation.

I work in AI as a software engineer. Many of my peers have PhD’s, and have sunk a lot of research into their field. I know probably more than the average techie, but in the grand scheme of things I know fuck all. Hell, if you were to ask the scientists I work with if they “know AI” they’ll probably just say “yeah, a little”.

Working in AI has exposed me to so much bullshit, whether it’s job offers for obvious scams that’ll never work, or for “visionaries” that work for consultancies that know as little about AI as the next person, but market themselves as AI experts. One guy had the fucking cheek to send me a message on LinkedIn to say “I see you work in AI, I’m hosting a webinar, maybe you’ll learn something”.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and some companies are doing some legitimately cool stuff, but the actual use-cases for these tools where they won’t just be productivity enhancers/tools is low at best. I fully support this guy’s efforts to piledrive people, and will gladly lend him my sword.

Yep!

I’m in the UK, and First basically hold the monopoly in my city. There are so few buses that they often skip stops at rush hour because they’re already full, or because they’ve decided in the moment that your stop doesn’t matter.

Nothing wakes you up during your commute like listening to a woman get fired over the phone because she’s going to be late for work, despite still being 60 mins early for what should be a 20 min journey.

That was two CEO’s in. Google under Sundar is very different to Google under Page.

The direct transfer of power in tech is often to someone that will carry the torch. It’s quite rare that a successor is picked that has been at the company for years, but wants to change practically everything about it. For that reason, I can see Gabe passing to a like-minded person that already knows that they are a succession candidate.

But ultimately none of us know Gabe, or what he plans to do. He may have a 100 step plan to secede power, or he might get to 65, say “that’ll do” and just sell up and retire to a remote island somewhere. The plans might have been in place for years, or he might not want to consider Valve without him. Hell, he might not even think that Valve should exist without him. It’s impossible to guess, so it’s not worth worrying about…

Like most big tech companies, they’re actually several divisions all competing with each other. Lately, the AI divisions have latched on to the hype and they’re pushing their wares to other divisions, often with enough clout to keep those in security/privacy quiet. Integrating LLM’s is also a great way for a middle manager type to curry favour with the bosses, and to build little empires for themselves.

Sadly, I don’t see Gimp ever competing with Photoshop. It’s not necessarily a feature parity thing, nor is it a mind share thing. It’s as you’ve said - it’s not built by creatives to be the best possible tool for many types of design.

It’s truly a shame, because for years Adobe slept on different aspects of digital design, and there was a true opportunity to build a Linux-first tool that made things like Web Design so much simpler. It’s an unpopular opinion, but Linux window managers have always lacked creative input. There has always either been a design-by-commitee, or a design-by-engineer feel - and this is reflected in how poor Gimp and design tools are in the Linux space.

In reality, Linux could have the best photo editing and design-specific tooling, but sadly the tooling either lacks a creative touch, or lacks features that are truly needed to be competitive.