Hang around old Microsofties and you'll encounter a phrase: "The Deal." The Deal is this informal agreement: Microsoft doesn't pay amazingly but you're given the time to have work-life balance, you can be relatively assured that upper leadership gives a shit about the ICs, there's space for "... So I was thinking..." to become real "... and that's our next product" discussions and that it's okay to fall so long as you can get back up and keep walking afterwards.
The Deal is dead.
People fired for performance after a bad review their manager didn't give them. The constant slimming of orgs and the relentless gnawing at budgets. I watched as a team went from reasonable to gutted because it got the short straw in "unregretted attrition quotas"
AI is driving this, and I want to see the chat logs between executives and copilot. What sycophantic shit is it producing that is driving them to make horrible decisions?
The Deal died when Microsoft got on the layoff bandwagon in Q1 2023 for no good reason and became very aggressive with perf after that. If Microsoft is just as toxic and unstable as Meta, why not just work at Meta for double the money?
Funnily, Apple also has an unspoken "deal" (pay a bit low but treat really well) and they stuck to it even through the layoff era.
AI is busy quietly convincing every executive that uses it that they have no use for people to work out the details of their ideas anymore. It’s so frustrating to have these drive by executives come into a space you’re working in, drop in a 15 page deep think report they got from a 2 sentence prompt and call that contributing. Bonus points if the report is from an AI platform your company doesn’t have approved so you as a line employee can get written up for.
From the outside this is clearly visible how Project Reunion crashed, C++/WinRT went into maintenance, VC++ losing steam to ISO compliance after bosting about C++20 and C11/17, .NET focus on Aspire/Blazor all AI in detriment of the rest,....
Thankfully I am technology mercenary, polyglot, and use whatever the clients need, regardless of my point of view, but it is sad to see the human part behind those decisions being affected.
On a lot of prepaid devices such as those from Kyocera for companies like Boost, the limitations are almost all in software configuration, because that's cheap and easy to do rather than rolling your own baseband configuration.
For years, carrier lock on iOS devices was simply a software switch. In a lot of devices, still, if you have an unlocked boot loader you can run patched baseband firmware that doesn't care that it hasn't been told the magic numbers to unlock itself.
From what I've learned: stuff like this makes up a not insignificant portion of the crash reports that come through. This results in crash dumps that are useless at best because they just look like memory corruption or badly written malware. In my discussions with folks about this, an annoying number of people who run this sort of software either a) do not care that it makes developing Windows harder for the devs or b) actively want the usable signal for the Windows development teams to be low.
Didn't take a look at the others (because YouTube videos in general are a bad source) but no. 5 is outright false. This sentence is in EVERY single ToS ever and the Wii famously also displayed it before updates. Also the person being banned for "playing a used game" used a MiG Switch on their console and were active in the SwitchPirates subreddit.
And what about this is novel over how Xbox and PlayStation handle things?
Xbox has been permanently banning consoles from online, like Nintendo, for a decade and a half. Anyone remember the 2009 mega ban wave? One million Xboxes permanently banned simultaneously and Nintendo is somehow uniquely evil with the Switch 2 and we’ve never seen anything like this. Malarkey.
Although, that being said, Nintendo has been doing console bans since the 3DS. Every 3DS cart has a serial number and the server will ban consoles that happen to both be online with the same cart at the same time. Switch and Switch 2 have the same restriction. It was really only the Wii and DSi that were lax.
I suspect what really changed is that the MiG Switch exists. People just now got access to a cheap, reasonable, and most importantly, difficult to ban flashcart solution. What's going on is that people are dumping their games, selling them on, but still playing their now-illegal backups. Since those games have been dumped and are on the used market they're little time bombs that will explode and kill someone's console.
Even in the 3DS era, though, much of the piracy scene was focused on CFW and homebrew piracy apps. The thing about CFW developers is that they actually have the fear of God (or at least the feds) in their heart, so they ONLY provide enough instruction to get homebrew working. And the people providing piracy tools on top of that are part of the piracy scene, they know what gets banned, so they're all going to tell you a hundred times to NEVER. USE. PUBLIC. HEADERS. ONLINE.
But the MiG Switch people? They don't care. They just want to sell you a flashcart. Hell, Gateway (the 3DS equivalent) was run by people who shipped literal console-bricking malware to try and "protect" their flashcard against clones (ironically). The only reason this didn't become an issue on 3DS is that Gateway's precious exploit got patched and they couldn't steal exploits and tools from the CFW scene fast enough to keep the card working.
> The thing about CFW developers is that they actually have the fear of God (or at least the feds) in their heart, so they ONLY provide enough instruction to get homebrew working.
More, they're usually not interested in piracy, they're more interested in making some sprites slew around a screen to a chiptune.
Except that this is the most Linux brained way of approaching it: Here's a shell! It's running a funny text editor! IF you need anything just use bash :)"
The problem is that increasingly, they are running JS.
In the ongoing arms race, we're likely to see simple things like this sort of check result in a handful of detection systems that look for "set a cookie" or at least "open the page in headless chrome and measure the cookies."
I'm seeing more big botnets hosted on Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and one on Tencent Cloud that run Headless Chrome. IP space blocks have been the solution there. I currently have a thread open with Tencent Cloud abuse where they've been begging me to not block them by default.
I don't consider cloud IP blocks a solution. We use Amazon WorkSpaces, and many sites often block or restrict access just because our IPs appear to be from Amazon. There are also a good number of legitimate VPN users that are on cloud IPs.
I mean they have access to a mind-blowing amount of computing resources so to they using a fraction of that to improve the quality of the data because they have this fundamental belief (because it's convenient for their situation) that scale is everything, why not use JS too. Heck if they have to run on a container full a browser, not even headless, they will.
KS isn't for general data mangling, it's for "I have this format and I need a de novo parser for it that works under explicit rules" and you're willing to do the work of fully implementing it from the bytes up.
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