drillsteps5

Maybe making the business look more lean/efficient to prep for upcoming bond/debt/whatever mechanism they'll use to get those 100sB/y...

I was disagreening with your statement

> like many of these recent layoffs, this is essentially reversing 2020-2022 net headcount growth.

which I took as "this is just reversing Covid overhiring". Which I'm tired of hearing. MSFT might have grown faster in 2021/22, but have stopped hiring for pretty much 4 consecutive years since.

Well, the MSFT stock is up on the news today. Not the effect the hiring freeze is known for.

So I checked your claim and it is accurate, in 2020 Microsoft had 163,000 while in 2022 it had 221,000.

There is a big HOWEVER. At least 2 in fact.

1. The company had been growing in the previous years, 2019, 2018, 2017 (they shrank somewhat in 2015 or 2016). In 2014 they had 29% workforce increase. So the significant growth in 2021/22 is not an aberration but rather continuation of the growth in previous years.

2. What IS an aberration is the workforce count after 2022. No growth in 2023 or 2025 (as in ZERO YoY change), and measly +7,000/3% growth in 2024. And some YoY loss in 2026 (-5,000, or 2.2%). With 2027 YoY likely showing at least some (and possibly a lot) of these 60,000.

So no, "it's just overhiring due to pandemic" was supposed to die years ago.

Not to say that this is isn't huge, but it's _up_to_ 25%, given that some will accept and some won't.

And the internal memo currently circulating actually does not mention that number so I'd be curious where it came from.

There is a joke "When it comes to AI psychosis, Sam Altman was likely patient 0"

Given all insane bets made by previously (somewhat) reasonable and successful business owners, I wonder how much of a joke it really is...

That's true, however (phbb/mediawiki/wordpress/etc)'s exploits are very well documented and widely available for people to use simply due to popularity of these software. Which is not true for much more obscure software running on these controllers. So breaking into these was not not only low value but also high effort.

Well _obviously_ there were enough people willing to go into the trouble of doing that. Because someone(s) actually did.

I'm just saying it wasn't a high value target like a bank. Which is what they counted on.

I don't know about your grocery store but the ones I've been to have maybe 5 on the shopping floor and probably a few more in the back. They all have physical controls which (I'm assuming) override the controller if something goes wrong. So if big bad hacker says "I'm gon' turn y'all fridges off if you don't pay me" it's not a threat, it's a silly joke.

Unless of course they turn it off without telling the businesses so the products go bad because nobody's watching over the weekend or smth. But then again, why would someone want to do that. I wonder.

It's a fridge. In a grocery store. You just get an employee to adjust the thermostat dial. How would the hackers demand payment if all you need to do is turn the dial back to "frozen"???

Edit: Yes i know the commercial fridges do not have "dials" and it's more involved. Still, if you have physical access to the thing, there's nothing that can be done from the outside that you can't revert.

One might make an argument that the operators should have known of LLM agents' tendencies to perform completely illogical and even destructive actions and therefore should have been watching them more closely. A valid point with which I totally agree with. I'm just saying it would not be classified as theft as there was no intent to do so, but merely as malfunctioned software.

If I remember correctly OpenAI suspended the testing/training in September after discovering the incidents, so they might be in the clear for now.

The operators of the software (OpenAI "researchers") did not attempt to make purchases with someone else's crypto funds. They set (completely unrelated) goal for the LLM agents. While attempting to achieve the said goal the agents went on a series of increasingly bizarre side quests one of which required purchasing service (hosting? you can look up the details if you wish). Which required funds that LLM agents were able to obtain by hacking into crypto account(s).

So the operators did not have intent to steal the cryptocurrency.

Not that different from me requesting bank transfer through online interface and the software sending my funds to a random person somewhere. As long as the funds are refunded, everything's fine.

Now, if bank IT knew that their software kept making all kinds of bizarre mistakes and instead of fixing it continued to operate it - that would be a different story, and negligence might be at play.

To be fair, their entire threat model was likely "who TF would want to break in to change the settings on a thermostat on a fridge at a grocery store".

A valid question which has yet to be answered (at least not publicly).

On a second thought, this might not be classified as theft as there was no intent to steal. Software malfunctioned and as a result cryptocurrency was used to pay for whatever service they it was used to pay for. So as long as it's reimbursed they might be fine.

Although at some point it will start bordering on negligence, running software known to do all kind of weird and unexpected things. With each disclosure they're getting closer and closer to that point...