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Cake day: May 17th, 2024

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  • There needs to be a way to have an inclusive corporate culture that celebrates cultures and backgrounds but also allows brutal honesty about products without people being afraid of accidentally offending others or being too indifferent to the corporation’s success to speak up.

    A lot of it probably relates to how often people are fired and how short tenures are with companies. If you have a short tenure with a company or are expecting to, does it matter if Company A does well instead of Company B or Company C? It probably doesn’t, and with social media capturing one wrong offensive faux paus for eternity (by which I mean until the planet becomes uninhabitable 300 years from now), workers have every incentive to let disasters like this go to market.

    I am judging Microsoft employees but likely would have said nothing if I were there too. With all the layoffs in tech, why risk it to say something controversial? Even my initial post on this got down-voted into the depths of an abyss just for mentioning that men and women see pornography in different ways sometimes, which should hardly be controversial. I don’t know whether the votes were from men or women, but actually I imagine more women than men down-voted it, and even this guess will probably lead to additional down-votes.

    I dislike people like Elon Musk for his cruelty towards transgender people (despite his admirable intelligence), and I dislike Donald Trump for his cruelty towards those who are different in any way, but I also feel like people should be able to have discussions about actual uncomfortable subjects without it being automatically offensive. The fact I was so heavily down-voted immediately tends to illustrate my point.


  • The point of the first two sentences is that because there is a large gender divide on whether porn is acceptable, a lot of times men and women don’t discuss porn because the subject will lead to conflict. This isn’t true of all members of both genders. Since corporations often have a mix of genders, bringing up the topic of porn and how a feature could alienate porn viewers would be an uncomfortable topic that would be easier to avoid because men and women find the topic uncomfortable often for different reasons. In Microsoft’s case, it seems like no one at Microsoft brought up how male porn watchers might not like AI watching their pornhub history and recording it to a file, despite it seeming like it would be an obvious concern to any male at Microsoft who watches porn, and likely many do. These means their corporate culture is so selfish on their own career protection and focused on not offending others that they let a really bad feature that many hate go to market instead of talking openly how this would be a disaster out of fear that it could cause workplace conflict.

    So instead of saving millions of dollars in costs and damage to the brand, everyone at Microsoft aware of this problem just said nothing. That’s a terrible corporate culture. If a product isn’t going to work, even uncomfortable discussions should be had if it saves millions.

    My point overall was that it’s shocking this made it into the product. It’s such a bad idea for a feature on multiple levels, that it seems like employees did not openly talk about this.

    My other point was that if Microsoft employees didn’t drop the ball, then this feature may have been forced into the project by a government order of some kind, which can and does happen in closed source software. Although hidden backdoors are often secret, the government could equally compel a large unlocked window at the front be added as well.







  • Most male computer uses watch porn and would not want an AI to log that. Many women find porn sickening and don’t understand it and will never understand male urges that result in watching it. The fact that this got into a finished product tells you a lot about Microsoft’s corporate culture.

    No one working there really cares about the company enough to bring up uncomfortable issues, they are all there just to get their paycheck and actual outcomes be damned. The culture their must be toxic for this product to have been put into a product enabled by default.

    If this was a top-down decision and there was no input by others into it, it leads to questions over whether this feature was forced to be included by the government, which can easily require corporations to do anything and then issue gag orders and whether it was some sort of test to see how much intrusive spying bullshit that regular consumers will tolerate now. If this was a feature that was forced into the product, the plan may have been to turn it off by default after negative feedback, but then just keep it in the program for when governments want to turn it on. Governments may have realized it in any capacity such a terrible feature would result in outrage and may have thought this was the path of least resistance, like saying “Would you like to eat a bowl of shit? No, okay, we’ll just give you these brussel sprouts”




  • Thanks for posting this.

    I read the article you posted also.

    I think the article is likely entirely true. One of the difficulties I have, as a regular reader not highly educated in Asian politics and history, is that I know Western governments do lie in order to protect their interests. Not only that, many of their rules allow them to lie. There are gag orders, and levels of secret classifications, and ps-ops and we all know that exists.

    I am pro free speech and pro protest rights. I think since China does not allow free speech it’s likely the entire post is completely true. I really wish I could believe it completely. One thing that many Western pro-free speech countries don’t understand is that lying frequently, even if it’s sanctioned by the government and justified somehow, means they lose moral credibility with the truth of anything they say. Is it the truth this time… or is this one of the lies?

    I still want to live in a world of free speech and women and LGBT people having rights and Western governments seem to be the best at doing this, but I just wish I could believe the article you linked without any doubt at all.

    If it’s really that bad on lemmy.ml, couldn’t all the communities be replicated? I use lemmy.world and don’t know if there’s an option for me to block lemmy.ml unless I change federations. The plight of the poor and concentration of wealth among the upper classes has become very bad, and environmental problems will likely kill us all within 300 years (capitalism and democracy have environmentally failed) but I don’t want to be a part of something in which mere discussion of different views results in banning and deletion of comments, even if I have very pro-poor people views.