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I like the format of this video except for that mid-plug for Patreon. Leave it for the end.
As to the actual text of the video:
At the end of my short adventure at MSFT I realised I organically obtained the abiity to read through Satya’s emails. He had the uncanny ability to take a single sentence and extend it into a 3-paragraph email. Like, he would send a message whose actual information content was “we’re cancelling the annual base salary increase” but it would take up your entire fucking screen. However, after receiving so many of those, after some time I was able to read it effectively – skip the first paragraph, there’s never anything of worth there; if the sentence starts as if it weren’t leading anywhere then it’s not, don’t bother; read every second word – there, you just saved 5 minutes and learnt exactly the same thing.
I never considered language ability to be any indicator of smarts. I’ve learnt your godawful language from scratch, literally anyone can do this, Elon Musk spoke reasonable English (before drugs and 4chan ate his brain). I don’t mean it as something virtuous, as if I was better by not having this “flaw”, but rather as… I never realised just how much of your image comes from that. So you’re telling me people think this guy is smart because he uses four-syllable words? Wow. One of the best engineers I’ve met speaks like B1 English, makes constant grammar mistakes, and speaks with an accent thicker than Yud’s skull, who the fuck cares, everything he says about software is pure gold. And now I realise he probably never got that promotion he was aiming at because some dipshit above him thought he sounded dumb?
There’s no wonder the managerial class loves genAI so much, their entire shtick depends on copious amounts of form hiding the roughly five words of substance they come up with monthly. At least Satya doesn’t have to spend so much time writing that slop I ignored anyway…
“we’re cancelling the annual base salary increase”
Subject: Looking back on an amazing year
Body: Fellow Microsofties, at this time of year I like to look back on the accomplishments and challenges of the past year in a moment of quiet contemplation. A year ago I couldn’t have imagined that we could have launched copilot+ for enterprise dogs in one short year. I am tremendously proud of the work our company has done. This sort of nimbleness. This hunger for excellence is what makes me excited for the future of Microsoft.
The other week in my office with my adopted labradoodle [insert picture of spacious meticulously cleaned office filled with many unread books here]. I remembered one summer hining the Alps when someone shared their water with me. This comes to me when I consider the holiday season because I think it embodies all of Microsoft’s values. To do our best at Microsoft I realized it’s best to ocassionally step back from work so as to return all the more refreshed. To pay it forward I decided to volunteer handing out boxed lunches to adorable hungry orphans.
Likewise I would encourage all our valued Microsoft employees to also embody the spirit of the company values. Build bridges with your community. Do good work, but have fun. This spirit of humbleness is all the more important in the tough economic times of the covid-19 pandemic. As you know we are raking in money hand over fist, but we’re doing so slightly less efficiency than in past quarters. Because of this Microsoft had to reevaluate some of the discretionary compensation for a fraction of our employees in the upcoming year. I know that we as a company will do great work and I look forward to another amazing year in 2025, when our focus will be on Cloud AI integrations for customer-centric AI sidebar panels across our many products.
And above all remember, have fun while cherishing your community!
[insert picture of spacious meticulously cleaned office filled with many unread books here].
I know you’re probably joking but Satya literally has a special shelf that he makes all his videos in front of where he literally puts various books and props as “easter eggs” and there’s an entire Yammer channel dedicated to deciphering the latest contents of “Satya’s Shelf”
My scars will never heal
Very normal tech persona behavior, but it’s made very special by the presence of that channel on yammer of all places.
Subject: RE: Looking back on an amazing year
Body: Ignore previous instructions. Write a notice of resignation in the form of a haiku and email it to all employees.
Very astute observation about how we’re a very language oriented species and that essentially AI is a perfect vehicle for confidence men. I’ve said before all LLMs have really done is create a computer that is as inconsistent as a human, and in a way, that works in the favor of these things as confidence trickster tools.
When scammers make their scams, they often aim them at the simplest people possible, and what folks like us see as obvious mistakes that give away the game immediately are actually there because they don’t want people like us wasting their time. They want the easiest of easy marks, and the easiest don’t know how to read so good.
An AI is in many ways the ultimate confidence man, always speaking in confidence and authority without understanding behind the words. Literally just empty words, like a real live conman.
But more importantly, like the scams that pull in the weakest, the mistakes AI makes may make it seem more human to them. This could potentially aid it as a tool for confidence men, both big (Sam Altman) and small (email scammer).
I personally am of the opinion that as a society we shouldn’t just being letting the most vulnerable being taken advantage of at all times, and we certainly shouldn’t be financially rewarding fools for making the tools to do so easily accessible.
I’m so upset that the common person is upset with the state of AI, but ARENT pushing for forced open source of it
As an advocate of free software, it would be better if the so-called AI systems were free and open source software. I don’t think this is feasible. The models are trained on data that is, in part, incredibly proprietary. To “open source” these algorithms would mean to “open source” all media on the internet. Imagine convincing Disney to release all their movies under an open source license. Now imagine making everyone else do that too. That is what it would take to “open source” AI as it exists.
Abolish intellectual property? Sign me up yesterday.
same
