pbiggar

Microsoft's human rights stain will take decades to wear off (just like Meta, Google, and Amazon).

I'm sad to see Intercom/Fin's CEO, Eoghan McCabe, did not face repercussions after credible allegations about sexually harassing his employees came out in The Information in 2019 [1]. Some quotes:

When the woman said she, too, wanted to go home, Mr. McCabe told her that he wanted her to remain, the people said. After the other two employees had left, Mr. McCabe made a lewd remark to the saleswoman and said that he would like to sleep with her, the people said. She declined and eventually left his home, they said. Later, the saleswoman said Mr. McCabe’s actions had frightened her, according to one of the people who spoke to her about the incident, who declined to be named.

During the meeting, Schuur said she told Mr. McCabe that his behavior was inappropriate. The Intercom CEO cried during the meeting and said that he hadn’t realized there was a power imbalance between himself and the young woman, Schuur said. “I felt like I was just a guy at a party and she was just a girl,” Mr. McCabe said, according to Schuur. Two former Intercom employees present for the harassment training seminar said Mr. McCabe didn’t attend.

At an Intercom party around 2014, Schuur said she witnessed Mr. McCabe slap the saleswoman’s buttocks. At a different event around that time, another former employee said she saw the Intercom CEO place his hand on the same woman’s thigh. Four former Intercom employees, including Schuur, also said the woman told them of the advances, which she said were unwanted.

A key figure in the company’s culture was Mr. McCabe, described by employees as both brilliant and temperamental, with a tendency to cross boundaries with junior female employees.

Mr. McCabe, through an Intercom spokesperson, declined to be interviewed for this story, but said in a statement: "In the early years of the company I demonstrated some poor judgment. I apologized at the time [...]"

But early employees said he also showed flashes of temper and vindictiveness. He was known for occasionally writing scathing messages to employees in group messages, according to a former employee who saw them. On at least one occasion he told another person leaving Intercom that he intended to tarnish their reputation in the tech industry, that person said.

I previously tweeted about this and McCabe threatened to sue me.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/harassment-allegatio...

cached content: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zsAytvQRuEwc0ftY3OtlXwvj...

Thanks for catching that, should have done a better job vetting that. The rest of my post is still true.

[edit] Removed as my link was to a different Eric Ries.

Facebook is also paying far right israelis, whose content incites violence against Palestinians.

a new report titled “Monetizing Occupation: Meta’s Financial Enablement of Settlement Activity and Violent Rhetoric Against Palestinians.” The report reveals how Meta allows Israeli far-right pages, settler-affiliated accounts, and extremist media outlets to generate revenue through its platforms, despite publishing violent, racist, and inciting content against Palestinians, and despite many being directly linked to promoting illegal settlement expansion, as well as widespread violence and attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank.

https://7amleh.org/post/meta-monetizes-settlements-and-viole...

Every Big Tech company employs hundreds of "former" Israeli spies - Google just brought on another 900 via their acquisition of Wiz (to add to their existing 6000).

Defensive missions? Was the UK under attack?

We work on helping people move to Signal from WhatsApp. It'll be easier once they have a Communities feature, as WhatsApp is very far ahead there.

The main advice we got is that although you need to migrate individuals, the main focus should be on migrating channels. If you have a family group chat, that's the target. Tell people about how Meta spies on them, etc, and then support everyone in the channel to individually set up Signal if necessary.

Definitely. Not to mention that their major investor, Sequoia, has been war profiteering and Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire has been publicly islamophobic and a huge supporter of the genocide and occupation in Palestine.

Before eventually admitting to the theft of organs, the Israeli government initially denied the allegations and called them antisemitic.

This is basically the MO for anything. Call out a genocide - you're antisemitic! Call out the endless crimes against humanity committed by Israel? Antisemitic.

The best advice I saw on this was to think of the LLM as simply a tool, and if you get bad results, it's because you -- the user of the tool -- are using it wrong.

After that, I'm less angry at the AI, and turn more towards a constructive "ok, this machine is stuck, how can I unstick" it approach. Calms the frustration a lot too.

They mention Vibecoded compiler, here is one: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/full-optimizing-compiler-with-ai.... I continue to work on it in some limited spare time, but it continues well. I'm currently working on building an orchestrator to continue building it, as babysitting the AI still takes a lot of time. Need to figure out how to put the strategic direction into that though.

To get a flavor of what Ahmed Eldin speaks about, here is one of the last episodes of his podcast before his arrest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9poJrS_VgI

Disagree on his characterization of Claude as being much better than OpenAI (a very low bar), esp from a sovereignty perspective. Here's what Anthropic's CEO had to say (from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-full...):

We are patriotic Americans. We have done everything we have done for the sake of this country, for the sake of supporting U.S. national security... We believe in defeating our autocratic adversaries. We believe in defending America.

and

So, you know, Anthropic actually has been the most lean forward of all the AI companies in working with the U.S. government and working with the U.S. military. We were the first company to, you know, put our models on the classified cloud.

We were the first company to make custom models for national security purposes. We're deployed across the intelligence community and military for applications like cyber, you know, combat support operations, various things like this. And, you know, the reason we've done this is, you know, I-- I believe that we have to defend our country.

and

And so we have said to the Department of War that we are okay with all use cases, basically 98% or 99% of the use cases they want to do, except for two that we're concerned about.

CircleCI seems to not have the same problem: https://status.circleci.com/

Would not recommend getting attached to an editor that's VC funded by Sequoia.

Can you add support for UpScrolled? https://upscrolled.com/en/

Inshallah!

This is absurd. Iran hasn't done hostile expansion during its entire history as a modern state. Meanwhile the Greater Israel project is being aggressively pursued, with Israel currently (as in today, Wednesday April 8th) ethnically cleansing South Lebanon for indefinite occupation, as well as annexing the West Bank.

The Anti-Zionist tag is interesting. It seems that it's actually an extension that would be used by Zionists, as it identifies anti-zionists, and the wording incorrectly claims that anti-Zionism is hate speech (whereas it is in fact Zionism that is hate-based ideology).

A lot of Zionists claim -- incorrectly -- that all Jews as Zionists. But certainly the major groups of Zionists are Christian zionists and Jewish Zionists. I would say there is a very very high chance that if you use the Anti-zionist Tag Chrome extension, that you are Jewish.

So it seems quite likely that Linkedin is actually tracking Jews with this.

As I recall, Andreesen's descent started with his being publicly criticized during the cancel culture movement of the mid 2010s. This seems to relate to that - perhaps the criticism came so hard he couldn't take it, and his solution was to refuse to think about it.

What happened? Kroah-Hartman shrugged: "We don't know. Nobody seems to know why. Either a lot more tools got a lot better, or people started going ..."

Odd sentiment. It's pretty clear the tools crossed a threshold last year (in April as I recall) where they became good enough to actually write entire applications, and just accelerated from there. Today they're amazing and no-one I know is writing artisanal code anymore (at least, not at work).

Tech for Palestine runs a (free) incubator for civic tech. Would encourage the OP to apply!

https://techforpalestine.org/incubator

The author mentions the French revolution, and that is a really important thing for the elites to understand. Class mobility -- as much as it existed because for a lot of people it didn't -- is what keeps the heads of the elites attached to their bodies.

When the system gets destroyed, and when the wealthy extract all the wealth from society, a lot of desperate people start looking for reform. And when the wealthy control and limit all means of reform (buying politicians, limiting free expression on social media, etc), reformists realize the only remaining path is revolution.

Exactly. and that's what development is becoming.

Let's take the metaphor of writing. Would we say this guy is just a writer who started from another trade? No. Writing is something that used to require experts (scribes) and that now anyone can do and is just a normal part of doing any work.

Developers are scribes - we have sacred knowledge that is now being democratized because everyone can do it due to good enough tools. As a result, we won't be needed much going forward.

Or we stop attacking sovereign countries simply because our allies (why are Israel our allies?) want to start wars.

The US shouldnt be starting wars with countries, and bombing civilians, at all.

Of course it is. There was no reason for the attack, except as Rubio admitted, Israel was going to attack so the US joined in. Why are we attacking anyone? Why are we dropping bombs on civilians in Tehran, destroying schools and hospitals, for no reason at all?

Same reason we did in Gaza - because Israel's goal is to destabilize the Middle East so that they can expand into Syria, and Jordan, and take over Palestine. Which is exactly what they're doing: https://theintercept.com/2026/03/10/israel-iran-war-west-ban...

It seems to be working for me.