swalkergibson

Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Professional boards of directors are supposed to be attentive to the risks to the organization as a whole, regardless of whatever weird ass governance structure exists.

Blowing out your CEO on a Friday afternoon and then accusing him of lying is not the way to do this, and they are likely to find out why come Monday morning at about 9:30AM Eastern.

I would venture to say that it is a near certainty that those researchers who left Google originally to work for OpenAI are going to be wanting to head right back there.

Their relationship with MSFT is now effectively over.

They will remain aboard for as long as it takes to find a suitable replacement.

Microsoft has spent the past 12 months absolutely PUMPING their share price talking about AI on every single earnings call.

Now that is over, and Google has taken the lead now that Microsoft crashed into the wall.

OpenAI is not far ahead of Google. In fact, they are within reasonable distance.

Although now Google is the undisputed leader, given that Microsoft does not have the internal resources to maintain this thing.

You make such announcements outside of trading hours, and you damn sure don't imply that he was lying about something.

And now I expect that we see this "board" dissolved.

Frankly, as it should. If you are going to take $10B from another organization and you nuke the CEO during market hours and then later it turns out that it was just an ordinary disagreement, then you should answer for that action.

On a Friday, no less. This is actually the kind of thing that can sink MSFT's apparent "first mover" advantage in the eyes of big money. OpenAI is now fractured, and whatever work they were going to be doing on tech is now going to be devoted to figuring out WTF to do with this mess the board just created all by themselves for no apparent reason.

MSFT dropped over 1% in two minutes, and Monday is almost certainly going to feature more selling.

If I am Vanguard, I am on the phone right now with Satya telling him to get control of this shitshow of a BOD before it nukes my positions.

This was my reaction as well. If a competent doctor had prescribed her medication and she took herself off of it without medical supervision, I think it is pretty reasonable to condition money on going back on medication (or at least going back to medical supervision). Many people who have family members struggling with mental health concerns take this approach.

Without question this extends to the other iBuyers in the market.

Zillow exiting because they could not make it work should be a massive alarm bell. Not only are they no longer buying new properties, they are liquidating their existing assets. You would not do that if you thought the market would come back to you.

SEEKING FREELANCER - Phoenix, AZ - Remote

I have a project related to an M&A of two mid-sized web hosting companies. I need a bunch of resources. Specific roles and tasks are listed below!

- C# .NET developer (some classic ASP) (x2)

The acquired company has some user-facing hosting management tools, as well as some internal tools that are used to manage the business. They need to maintain and extend these tools.

The acquiring company has a large client who needs a custom cloud server provisioning application completed.

- Microsoft Dynamics expert (x1, maybe more depending on complexity)

The two companies have separate Dynamics deployments that need to be merged and extended.

- Zimbra expert (x1, maybe more depending on complexity)

The acquired company has 55,000 email accounts currently hosted on an old version of Zimbra. They need to upgrade Zimbra to the latest version and limit breakage.

- Ceph expert (x1, maybe more depending on complexity)

The acquiring company needs someone to manage their Ceph environment. I don't have too much detail on this one, other than Ceph is a thing they need to deal with.

- Flexiant expert (x1)

As a hosting company trying to go after AWS, they need someone to handle scripting their virtual machines, or so I gather. Like the Ceph expert above, there is not a lot that I know about this particular task right now.

This is likely going to be a 3-6 month full-time contract for all of the above resources. If you are local to the Phoenix area, a full-time position as a C# dev is quite possible as well.

I need to fill these positions immediately, so if you or someone you know is interested, please email me at my HN uname (AT) Google's famous email service.

Pay is negotiable depending on experience! Make me an offer!

You answered the question yourself. If someone is a wizard in PHP, then they should use PHP. People that get caught up in the decision of what language to use don't ship code. Shipped code > language decision circle jerks.

I agree with you to an extent. However, the flyer says the session starts at 6:00PM, not 5:50 or 5:55PM. Generally speaking, when someone says to arrive at a particular event 5-10 minutes early, it is simply so that everyone can be seated and things can get going at the prescribed time, 6:00PM, not that the participants should disregard the stated start time of the event. Plus, if the story that the company representative was rude is true, then that is not cool for the exact reason that the participant specified. The company theoretically lives and dies by its couriers, so frustrating them (perhaps it is a little harsh to say they treat their couriers like trash) right out of the gate is not exactly a good growth strategy.

I would posit that nothing can be done about this in engineering.

PE, big banks, all of that money is based on information gathered from the companies before the rest of us peons get wind of any of it. John Q. Public is playing what he thinks is a fair lottery, while the wizards are pulling the levers behind the curtains. If we as engineers could figure out a legal way to "earn commissions" (read: steal from tens of thousands of people every year based on information asymmetry), then $500k is no problem. Until then, however, we are confined to, you know, actually trying to create value for people rather than extract it from the system.

Pardon the cynicism, I am pretty unnerved by our whole economic incentive structure.