Sure, fair points. We should distinguish good and bad managers here before we get too specific. The bad managers will do whatever they're told to do by upper management. Upper management just says "cut down to this number" and they do it because they only care about their own incentives and don't care about the consequences. The good managers will probably realize the downsides of these decisions and will try their best to blunt the impact of these decisions. But in the end, they still have to report to higher levels of management, so there's little that they can ultimately do. So they're probably going to end up doing the same thing anyway.

This is why management is such a hard position, especially in the lower levels. You're basically at the end of the chain and usually have little power to get what you want. At the same time, you still have to make lots of different groups happy - upper management, your workers and whoever you're delivering your product for. All the things that you listed are things that I'm sure they would like to have, but probably end up having to get sacrificed anyway. If there's only one group of people that you're going to please, chances are that it's going to be the people you report to.

Nothing matters more than the quarterly earnings report. If that's what it takes, so be it!

Everyone in this thread is saying that this comes as no surprise, and that is certainly true. But the thing is, a lot of management types do know this already but they simply don't care for two reasons:

1. They care more about leverage/control over employees than they do about actual good work being done. You cannot understate at all how important employee control can be for managers and how seriously they're willing to destroy their own business to keep this kind of power.

2. RTO is basically a layoff program. As much as I love working remotely, it's very important to keep in mind that remote workers are the first ones that will get laid off when the business wants to cut back - purely because of how easy it is to do. They can just mandate RTO without actually calling it a layoff and know many workers will outright quit, and the business won't have to comply with whatever local regulations are in place around layoffs. Still, this shouldn't sound like comfort for employees that do work in the office - there's a good chance that once RTO is in place, another round of layoffs will strike when the company doesn't meet its cut targets. So any time a business announces return to office, it means that there's a good chance that layoffs will follow too.

tl;dr: Managers knew this would happen all along too - it was just a trade they were very willing to make.

Xournal - a great way to draw on pdfs

There is no way to make a network request faster than a function call.

Apologies in advance if this it too pedantic, but this isn't necessarily true. If you're talking about an operation call that takes ~seconds to run, then the network overhead is negligible. And if you need specialized hardware for it, then it definitely could be delegate it out to a separate machine over the network. Examples could include requiring a GPU, more RAM, or even a faster CPU if your main application is running on more power-efficient CPUs.

I'm not saying that this is true in every case - they are definitely niche cases. But I definitely wouldn't say that network requests are never faster than local function calls.

Agreed. It's really hard to understate how ineffective "voting with your wallet" can be. The fact is simply that nobody honestly cares. Even if you get 100 people to boycott a company, would 100 out of millions of consumers really make a difference? Of course not.

And of course, you always have cases like this where everybody does it. Same thing goes for TVs - if everyone spies on you, the only real solution is to not have a TV. Yes, I know there are exceptions here and there, but bad practices like these force buyers into making compromises that they shouldn't have to. Capitalism should be predicated on companies offering the best product to earn their income. It should not be about companies having the least bad product and trying every terrible thing that they can get away with.

(Of course, we all know that capitalism is a farce.)

Honest question here: what would stop me from starting a video, then pausing it and walking away from my computer for several hours so youtube plays ads to no one?

Now repeat but with several tabs.

And bonus points if the videos simply happen to be mine and I were to enable monetization on them.

Hmmm....

Agreed on all points. I think some of the issues that you're facing are things that would be resolved if Ocaml were more popular. But some others would be harder to fix without making breaking changes to the language as I mentioned earlier. If I had to put it as succinctly as possible, I'd say that the language just needs a lot more polish which would probably happen if it were more mainstream. But not all languages have to be mainstream, and maybe Ocaml's purpose in the world is, as you put it, to inspire other languages. It is definitely extremely good at that!

Sounds to me like these tech workers could really use a good union to protect them.....

No one has said Ocaml yet, so I will. It's not a perfect language, but it has a lot of cool ideas and concepts. It's a functional language, but allows you to write imperative code when you want to. Algebraic data types and type matching are built natively into the language and work very nicely. It's type inference capabilities are very powerful (though that can backfire at times), and the |> operator is really, really fun to use. It also has very powerful module/functor capabilities, though they go a bit over my head since I haven't had a chance to play with them. Also, Opam is a very powerful package manager and it's pretty easy to wrap/bind external libraries with it.

I'd love to see some improvements to the language - the syntax is a bit confusing and ugly at times (but this unfortunately can't be fixed without breaking the language of course) - but overall I think I'd have a lot more fun programming in Ocaml than what I do in my day job.

Agreed. Objects are nice and a great way to program. Composition is great. Traits/interfaces are great. Namespaces are great. Objects are a really nice way to reap the benefits of principles like these.

But then there are aspects of OOP that absolutely suck, like inheritance. I hate inheritance. The rules get very confusing very quickly. For example, try understanding overriding of methods. Do I need to call the superclass method or not? If not, does it get called automatically? If so, in what order? How do these rules change for the constructor? Now repeat this exercise for every OOP language you use and try not to mix them up... Java, C++, Python, etc.

Fortunately, it feels like we rely on inheritance less and less these days. As an example, I really like how Java allows you to implement Runnable these days. Before, if you wanted to run a thread, you needed a separate object that inherited Thread. And what if that object needs to inherit from another one too? Things would get out of hand quickly. (This is a very old example, but with lambdas and other new features, things are getting even better now.)

Anyway, long story short, I think OOP is a complicated way to achieve good principles, and there are simpler ways to achieve those principles than a full OOP implementation.

Those documentaries are great findings (and really really interesting). I would highly suggest posting them to the channel (or I would be happy to if you don't mind)

And ofc, Microsoft is well aware and is not interested in letting that happen.

This is true, but there are only so many times that they can pull off what they did in Munich. If enough cities keep trying at this, there's no way they're going to be able to hold the floodgates back forever.

I'm usually a pessimist, but stories like this actually do get my hopes up

I'm really curious to know which version of KDE Microsoft was copying that gave them the idea to insert ads in the first place....

Win98 had themes, and they were absolutely fantastic!!

Opt in??! Before you know it, you're going to suggest that we start to respect our users!!

Just updated on void and saw the same thing

Not only that, what about the downtowns where people actually live? This is basically just picking winners here, saying those downtowns don't matter, but the ones in major cities do. Pretty shameless exhibition of picking winners and losers here...

Hmm... I'm starting to get the impression this Doug Ford guy is a bit of a hypocrite....

Honey, check it out you got me mesmerized

With your black hair and fat-ass thighs

I only wish I could find someone someday who will think of such romantic things to say to me...