The first meaningful internet presence he had was the whole WP engine debacle, which seemed to be a pretty ill-advised thing to do from a legal standpoint and also upset the open source community, who are rightly concerned about that sort of thing. Some of the actions taken then broke a number of small sites, upsetting those users. Overall, you've got a baseline reasonable number of pissed off hobbyists with internet presences.
Microsoft has had its controversies, but the reason the interest became personal here is it seems this was his own initiative (he kicked everything off with a public blog post).
And once again in this case, it looks like a bunch of chaotic behaviour centred on the individual more-so than standard "unpopular corporate decision making". That sort of thing has a big PR blast radius and has exposed him to criticism more than necessary (or normal).
Given how avoidable the above is (by simply operating through his lawyers / the organisation), it's feeding speculation on his mental state.
I hooked up claude code to Jira and Figma.
This is more a condemnation of Jira than anything, but being able to interact with it in natural language in the terminal is a huge relief.
Sadly, it's still limited in some ways.
If it's available, it makes things a tiny bit easier than interfacing directly via api, so it's a nice to have.
I did this as well. I found that it was really inefficient because if I was doing anything with a significant amount of text, it has to shuttle all of that through the model to the MCP invocation. It was way better to work with temporary files and pipe them around CLI tools once you’re happy with the contents. E.g. developing a user story and creating the Jira issue.
> "it makes things a tiny bit easier than interfacing directly via api"
By what metric? I would expect that a thin API client (with readable code) is generally going to out-perform a tool-surface which you don't have the ability to manage/edit.
This is what I don't get often when people say "ai will be the ui". Like pressing a button to get an action done for me will always be quicker than asking an LLM to do an action and then waiting for it to understand and do that action. Why will I not prefer to just press the button?
I run a lot of services to track my life and work and theoritically I could hook up their apis or mcp if supported to a harness and pretend like "oh its a talking computer that can do whatever i ask" but in reality, I can go through the native ui of those services esp with things like hot-keys for a faster and more ergonomic experience than talking to a jarvis and having to recorrect it if its wrong
Rules are well and good, but norms are important too.
An immigration system governs people making major life choices, and companies making large investments.
Legally, there's very little the state can't do, there could be a bill passed tomorrow revoking all immigrant visas. But businesses, and by proxy the nation, benefit from work done by these workers.
Sudden unilateral moves like this are stupid on a social level (cause damage to businesses and communities), and on a moral level. "First do no harm" is a principle just as suited to government as medicine. Even if there is a broad consensus for reducing or eliminating H1B visas, why punish people who followed the system as it exists and contributed? It's perfectly possible to pass a bill, stop handing out new visas, and sunset renewals after some 1-2 year timeframe.
It's legal to invite a bunch of guests over and kick them all out after you open the wine, but you're going to lose friends. And ultimately it will be businesses and individuals paying the cost for these needlessly volatile course changes. Tourism and high skilled immigration rates will face lasting harm.
> Rules are well and good, but norms are important too
Not when the norm is open defiance of the rules for decades.
> An immigration system governs people making major life choices, and companies making large investments.
And it also governs the right of people to decide who they want to invite into their country and, ultimately, with whom they want to share democratic governance of their home. Those are important stakes, not to be minimized. But you neglected to mention them.
Defiance of the rules? What rules exactly? The law does make clear that H1-Bs are temporary workers. But it's also permitted to renew, and workers are allowed to pursue immigrant status. In fact, until 1990 there was specific language saying that H1-B's (like all visitor visas) are not supposed to want to stay, they must maintain a foreign residence "which he has no intention of abandoning". This language was struck and the visas became, and still are, the most common defacto "seeking green card" status for workers seeking to move the US.
To be clear, while a person who enters the US on an H1-B is a temporary worker, they are not prohibited from also seeking a permanent status. So it's fully within the rules, which is why it becomes a question of norms. In the present, the H1-B is (was?) the most popular route to permanent immigration to the US besides family sponsorship.
I specifically said that the government (and the citizenry by extension) can decide who it wants to enter and stay, how much immigration, whatever. But changing the rules suddenly, upending peoples lives who have not broken any rules, through a pathway the US state itself freely established, is immoral and short sighted.
It should go without saying that there are experts across many fields in industry that any country would benefit from attracting. The US is harming its capacity to attract and keep that talent with these ridiculous theatrics.
> This language was struck and the visas became, and still are, the most common defacto "seeking green card" status for workers seeking to move the US.
Incorrect. H1B still requires non-immigrant intent. The only thing that was struck was requiring the government to presume non-immigrant intent automatically upon some filing for permanent residency. That was not intended to change the system into a de facto permanent residency pipeline.
You are arguing semantics and peculiar archaic ones at that. It is not prohibited. It is permitted. In fact it is so common that Congress had to pass AC21 to mitigate the damage caused by indefinite backlogs in the H-1B->GC pipeline. A majority of employment based greencards are issued to people in the US through adjustment of status. The purpose of the system is what it does.
Yeah, law is about semantics. And semantics reflects underlying politics. Immigration proponents never had the political capital to enact a law that actually reflects current practice.
>Immigration proponents never had the political capital to enact a law that actually reflects current practice.
Reagan, in 1986, signed a bill that legalized any illegal immigrant who came here before 1982 and 3 million people applied, of which 2.7 million were granted.
This was a bipartisan bill. Democrats and Republicans worked together to do that. This was literally the bill that established the requirement that an employer cannot "knowingly" hire an illegal immigrant. There was zero enforcement from day one. Because the bill was pushed by agriculture groups.
Reagan said, "The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans."
Go ahead and tell me recent democrat immigration policy, under "Obama the deporter in Chief, was somehow more lax than that. Than literally legalizing 3 million people with the stroke of a pen and a smile and doing nothing at all to actually implement the disincentives that would prevent future immigration.
Reagan signed a law that made it illegal for hospitals to deny emergency care based on immigration status.
The nation did not have any immigration law at all until after the civil war. Then we banned all chinese laborers for 30 years.
What's funny, is that Reagan's amnesty happened after* Mexican immigration had gotten federal attention as a serious problem and we ran "Operation Wetback". That program is somewhat of an analogue to what Trump and ICE are doing right now, including the part about deporting legal citizens. Operation wetback was pushed for, again, by agricultural interests.
I think this is a fair take, but also the US does this because it can. I don't think other countries don't do imperialism because they are morally pure, but because to do so means getting into conflict with the US. The US just has the biggest stick and so can push around other nations with impunity.
The US domestically has a commendable historic commitment to free expression and press freedom, which are good things that China does badly. Those things deserve to be commended even while we condemn imperialism. China has its own record of imperialism in Nepal and its ambitions to attack Taiwan. It just doesn't (currently) have the position to act with impunity the US has long enjoyed.
>[China] has a better track record than the US; trivially, as every other country does.
This is a fair take? Really. That "every other country" has a better "human rights" track record than the US, so countries including Russia. Or the oft-accused-of-genocide Israel.
I don't think it's possible to coherently debate these policy moves when the starting point for the opposition is "I am choosing to be insane about my view of history and the position of the respective countries party to the dispute".
Setting aside for a moment whether or not whatever they are doing is or is not a genocide (I don't pay attention to that matter, it doesn't concern me and the outcome of that conflict has nothing to do with my country or people), is your statement meant to mean that the United States is a puppeteer of Israel or something?
I don't think it's a fair take when every evil is considered, because that list includes Pol Pot, whose regime would make the Pizzagate conspiracy theory seem like an day ending in y.
But the USA does not come across as a strong moral power by the standards that people like to pretend are a sign of civilization since WW2: the USA has had concentration camps in living memory, and the Kent State shootings even more recently than that (and the things done in the war the dead students were protesting against); further back it took Texas from Mexico in much the same way Israel is taking Palestine (not exact but it rhymes), and it definitely engaged in what is now considered genocide against the native American peoples.
(Sometimes people bring up nukes; on balance, I suspect this was not an example in this category, though the reasons are a long diversion).
>further back it took Texas from Mexico in much the same way Israel is taking Palestine
Genuinely laughed out loud at this. This single statement, monstrously ahistorical as it is, allowed me to dismiss everything else you're saying because this narrative emerged only recently, around 2014 or so. It's comically at odds with the written record.
>But the USA does not come across as a strong moral power by the standards that people like to pretend are a sign of civilization since WW2
Oh wow, news to me. Last I checked, we had pretty much the entire planet trying to come here. Are you going to tell them that this isn't a good "standard" of civilization? Or do you want me to do this.
> This single statement, monstrously ahistorical as it is, allowed me to dismiss everything else you're saying because this narrative emerged only recently, around 2014 or so.
Oh? Which part of this is wrong? All of it, or just parts here and there?
Mexican territory -> Anglo-American settlement (I can draw comparisons between this and Israeli settlements in occupied territories even if specifics are different) -> rebellion against Mexico -> independent Republic of Texas -> U.S. annexation -> US vs. Mexico war, where the USA got at least as far as Mexico city due to Mexico having negligible capacity for self-defence -> Mexican recognition of the new U.S.-Mexico border.
> Are you going to tell them that this isn't a good "standard" of civilization?
I'm in the set "them". I looked at you, the USA, from the outside more than once, and my decision every time was "you know what? I don't need any of that nonsense". Likewise for many of my peers, at least one of whom resigned from a big tech firm rather than be relocated to the USA.
Guess what: a lot of nations have the "we are the best, everyone wants to move here" narrative. That includes the UK, which I infer from your use of "here" to refer to the USA, is a place you do not live and are unlikely to want to live in.
The comparison between Texas and Israel-Palestine is laughable. In the former, American settlers moved to an empty territory at the invitation of the Mexican government on the condition that they obeyed Mexican law, converted to Catholicism, and on the additional condition that they would assist the Mexican government in fighting the Comanche who were raiding settlements across the Mexican interior, all of which the American settlers agreed to. The American settlers eventually outnumbered the Mexican administers of state security (the army and so on), and, again because this was empty territory before the Americans settled it, declared independence and the territory was annexed, Mexico then invaded Texas, and the United States declared war believing they had casus belli, and Mexico lost. The rest is history, though in this case the timeframe here is something like "30 years", I'd have to look up dates of the main events.
On what planet is this at all comparable to Israel-Palestine, a conflict that arguably goes back 1200 years? Just the "settlement" part? Be specific.
>I'm in the set "them". I looked at you, the USA, from the outside more than once, and my decision every time was "you know what? I don't need any of that nonsense". Likewise for many of my peers, at least one of whom resigned from a big tech firm rather than be relocated to the USA.
Then it sounds like you and your peers made a good decision, both for you and for my country. There are already too many people working in elite industries here who do not like the United States, have no loyalty to it, and are blood and soil nationalists for the country they actually care about. It's fine to be honest about that, and I genuinely applaud your self discipline in remaining outside the United States of America (alternatively known as The Aerospace Republic).
Also note that you didn't actually address the factual claim, you just went straight to an ad-hominem. That in turn reads like you don't actually have a response to the claim and are just trying to distract from that fact.
>Also note that you didn't actually address the factual claim, you just went straight to an ad-hominem. That in turn reads like you don't actually have a response to the claim and are just trying to distract from that fact.
The problem here is that you appear to believe there is a factual claim involved, when there isn't. It's like claiming the point of water is to drown people.
Edit, since I noticed you're the author upthread. It's worth pointing out, since you are new here, that your initial comment also violates the spirit of the guidelines.
>The very existence of the US is predicated on ethnically cleansing the continent of native americans and large-scale ecocide.
Forgetting for a moment if this is true or not, it's not a claim that's falsifiable. It's an ideological statement that is meant to convey that the speaker a) is likely a communist (congratulations), b) has extreme disdain for the United States, and c) attempts to redirect what are meant to be policy discussions into a blackhole of attempting to argue about whether or not the United States is evil. This is pointless, but is a common tactic used by online bullies.
It is a purely factual statement. The silbling commenter already provided some sourcing, but it should be obvious to anyone with any knowledge of history.
The only ideological move is your continued refusal to address the factual claims - instead writing a long-winded comment to distract from it.
Two wordy paragraphs. Not a single word about the fate of native Americans. Speaks for itself, huh.
Yes I already said I understand that you hate the United States. Is your actual point that you want to play some sort of "which country has the highest body count in their history" competition? I'm not distracting (or distracted) from anything, I am fully aware of the kinds of games you and those like you attempt to play.
You brought up the track record of countries and the United States, then spent several comments complaining people don't want to engage on the substance, while consistently ignoring the track record of the United States, something directly relevant to the substance of the topic you yourself brought up.
You still haven't addressed the topic you introduced, you are still derailing by attempting personal attacks.
>The very existence of the US is predicated on ethnically cleansing the continent of native americans and large-scale ecocide.
This is your original comment. "Predicated" means "to establish". So, your claim is the United States was founded "to ethnically cleanse the continent of native americans and large-scale ecocide". Can you find some primary sources, from George Washington perhaps, where he says "we are founding this country to kill the natives". Please be specific. Is English not your first language?
Again, this is such a common thing. You are the one that introduced this absurd claim, not me. I have not derailed anything, and there is nothing you could possibly say to convince me that I'm wrong. Because, as implied, I am an American. I don't have to put up with this bullshit from people like you anymore.
Predicated means something is a precondition for something existing, not something was created to do something.
Funnily enough though, there actually are letters from Washington declaring said intent (think the May 31, 1779 letter to Sullivan), but that wasn't even the claim I made.
> Is English not your first language?
It's my fourth, actually. But I'd like to think I do pretty well in it and understand its nuances :-)
Anyways, I will note, that you are still distracting from the claim. You are still doing anything but addressing the substance of what happened to the Native Americans. You still refuse to discuss the track record you yourself introduced.
> there is nothing you could possibly say to convince me that I'm wrong. Because, as implied, I am an American. I don't have to put up with this bullshit from people like you anymore.
May I suggest refamiliarizing yourself with the rules, particularly the bit about ideology trampling curiosity?
Amazing. I do not owe a foreigner a debate or explanation on how their contrived and ridiculous claim about the origin of my country is wrong. You start off by violating the very same rule that you now claim that I am violating, and then get upset that I respond in kind. 10/10, no notes.
First of all, may I again gently point at the rules? You may find this one relevant:
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
Anyways, so many replies deep and still all distraction, anything but actually engaging with the substance - the very thing you claimed to be against! - on the topic you brought up.
It's devolved from - and I quote - "I don't think it's possible to coherently debate these policy moves when the starting point for the opposition is "I am choosing to be insane about my view of history and the position of the respective countries party to the dispute"" to claiming "there is nothing you could possibly say to convince me that I'm wrong. Because, as implied, I am an American"
What a turn, huh? What could possibly explain this dramatic shift in position? Why are you still avoiding the fate of the Native Americans, so many comments in? Why are you debasing your entire position just to run from this line of argument? Why are you, to use your own terms, creating an ideological black hole to redirect the debate?
There's a Slovenian philosopher named Slavoj Zizek, who's famous for his analysis of ideology. Let me leave you with a few quotes of his I think you'll find enlightening:
"Ideology is not a lie which misrepresents the truth; it is a lie which enables you to endure the truth."
"Everyday reality is an escape from the traumatic encounter with the Real."
"To step out of ideology, it hurts. It's a painful experience. You must force yourself to do it".
Aren't they interesting? It's been a joy exploring them together.
Except I haven't devolved from anything. It's entirely consistent, and the whole chain confirms that it isn't possible to coherently debate this with people whose starting position is insane, like yours. At it is insane to assert that "trivially every other country has a better rack record" than the US does, and it is insane to claim that the US was founded with the express intention of killing off the indigenous inhabitants of North America. These are insane positions to hold, and yet ... here you are.
Note how you're still doing it, by clinging on to an already-invalidated definition of purpose instead of precondition and still refusing to actually face the track record you introduced.
It's been lovely, but I think this exploration of ideology has run its course, there's not really more to see from here.
We've already gone from claiming to want debate all the way down to expressing pure nationalist xenophobia and expressly stating to be closed to any argument.
We now even had confession that that was the consistent position all along, revealing the call for rational debate was never the true position - it had been an ideological device all along.
We've already witnessed so many levels of fetishistic disavowal. There's nothing new left to look at, we've fully looped around to just restating the original thesis.
To paraphrase "The Princess Bride"- you keep using the word "communist". I don't think it means what you think it means.
One can acknowledge the very real harms done by the United States over its history, without also believing that private property is evil and workers should seize the means of production. Can you see how those two things are orthogonal?
Here's the falsifiable version:
- the Indian Removal Act of 1830
- the Trail of Tears
- the several hundred ratified treaties that were broken
- the Dawes Act, and
- the intentional decimation of bison herds from tens of millions to a few hundred by the late 1880s, which some Army and Interior officials at the time openly described as a way to force Plains tribes onto reservations. [1]
Which of those do you think "communists" are fabricating?
"When European settlers arrived in the Americas, historians estimate there were over 10 million Native Americans living there. By 1900, their estimated population was under 300,000.
...In the late 1800s, blankets from smallpox patients were distributed to Native Americans in order to spread disease.
...European settlers were paid for each Penobscot person they killed.
In the 19th century, 4,000 Cherokee people died on the Trail of Tears, a forced march from the southern U.S. to Oklahoma." [1]
America is built on the genocide of indigenous peoples. That fact is well-documented, whether you want to admit it or not.
Extraction is a weird way to put it. Usually, immigrants, especially skilled workers, are overwhelmingly net contributors. That's part of why modern economies want them so badly.
It's actually the perfect opposite, a skilled worker who plans to leave is a burden on their home country as they presumably will use services there they never paid for. Hopefully, in developed nations this balances out more or less. In undeveloped nations there's not much of a system to take advantage of.
I live in a country I was not born in, I pay taxes as much as anyone else and pay into social security programs I'll likely never get to use. The state did not have to spend a penny to educate me. If I return to my home country without having worked there another day in my life, I'm probably quite the net loss to them.
The extraction phase of your life is overwhelmingly being a child or elderly.
All of the net benefits you're talking about require some form of assimilation and we're in a discussion about rejecting/refusing assimilation.
There is plenty of evidence that immigrant enclaves depress wages because these immigrants are trapped in their local community instead of being part of the broader national economy.
Everything you're talking about just proves the point of the person you're responding to.
Now you’re being some “immigrant enclaves” into the mix to support your point. I think you show vast arrogance about how modern (high-skilled) immigration looks like and how it integrates into western society.
On a similar note, Firefox doesn't support <input type="month">, which I was surprised to see (chrome landed it in 2012). I checked their issue tracker and... as you describe. Browsers are complex, of course, but they do stand out as a really glacial corner of the software world.
While I agree a lot of information is conferred, most of it is not useful.
I'm quite a fan of not attending meetings where I don't get specifically invited (as in, directly, not as part of a group). This may or may not fly at a given organisation. Anyhow, my main learning has been that:
1. All truly important information will be repeated (in the form of tickets, slack messages, further meetings). Usually several times.
2. Most useful subordinate information (the kind that doesn't get repeated) only needs to be related to 1 person 80%+ of the time. It's vanishingly rare 3 or more people need some information that isn't ever repeated elsewhere.
The only really useful work in meetings is making decisions. This is an essential feature, but a big problem is often many "spectators" are invited (attendees without decision power or context). Being a pure spectator in a meeting is almost always completely pointless. Also, people like to make decisions/input so meetings are rife with bike shedding (most people have decision power + context for low importance items usually).
You can go to any number of sites (here's a nice one https://webencrypt.org/openpgpjs/), and encrypt a message. You can exchange public keys over any text channel. You can then send encrypted messages over that text channel. Anyone who really needs to send encrypted messages, trivially can. Of course, many criminals won't, but should we all sacrifice our privacy for such a pathetic measure of security?
That's true, but over a relatively short timeframe, those archives have proven to be extremely ephemeral. I can recall multiple instances of feature rich, good quality searchable archive sites existing, improving, then one day vanishing with a huge amount of data, sometimes permanently. There's usually low redundancy and a reliance on an individual or two, who can cease keeping the data at a whim. Such archives don't monetise well, if at all. So it's a hobby project for someone. Over the last fifteen years a screenshot has proven incredibly more reliable than an archive link.
Microsoft has had its controversies, but the reason the interest became personal here is it seems this was his own initiative (he kicked everything off with a public blog post).
And once again in this case, it looks like a bunch of chaotic behaviour centred on the individual more-so than standard "unpopular corporate decision making". That sort of thing has a big PR blast radius and has exposed him to criticism more than necessary (or normal).
Given how avoidable the above is (by simply operating through his lawyers / the organisation), it's feeding speculation on his mental state.
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