●● IRC: #techbytes @ Techrights IRC Network: Saturday, October 31, 2026 ●●
● Oct 31
[05:29]		*pi__ is now known as techrights-sec6
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1m67dj2g9
[05:44]		-TechBytesBot/#techbytes- ( status 403 @ https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1m67dj2g9 )
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	":
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	my 2c
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	folks, the news about the early retirement should be a wake-up call for everyone in tech. that's roughly a third of the workforce, and whether it's voluntary exits or layoffs, the message is clear. msft and other companies are looking for ways to cut costs while pouring billions into AI & data centers (and automation). I think this trend is only going to accelerate.
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	my 2 c... first know your severance package and exactly how long you can survive without a paycheck. second keep at least 6 mo of living expenses saved. 3rd update your resume and linkedin NOW, not after you get laid off. finally start building your prof network outside your co. talk to people and contribute to open source, share your projects on github (very iportant), and build some credibility before you actually need it.
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	stop collecting useless certs and start building real AI projects. build something - a RAG app, an agent, or some automation thatsolves a problem. employers want to see what you can do not just what courses you've completed. Having a solid portfolio and knowing the right people can make a huge differnce when you're suddenly looking for work.
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	if you're on H1B, you need to take this even more seriously, you don't just risk losing your paycheck, you risk uprooting your entire family or whoever depends on u: your kids, your home, your immigration status, everything can be affected. i'd say put 10x the effort into networking, saving money, and preparing backup options. don't assume your co will protect you. the biggest mistake is thinking you'll deal with all this when it h
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	appens. by then you're already behind. the job market is changing FAST, and being loyal to one company isn't a career startegy anymore. Build your options now!!! even if your job feels completely secure. not trying to scare anyone, just sharing some practial advice.
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	the uncertaintity in tech isn't going away anytime soon and being prepared is a lot better than scrambling after getting that unexpected meeting invite.
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	'https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1m67ckvnz
[05:44]		-TechBytesBot/#techbytes- ( status 403 @ https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1m67ckvnz )
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	"
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	Starting at Microsoft in 2 Wks. Should I Be Worried About Layoffs?
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	I'm scheduled to start a new role at Microsoft in Ireland in two weeks, working on an AI-related project. Ive already signed my offer letter + contract.
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	With the recent voluntary buyout announcement and ongoing concerns about layoffs, I'm starting to wonder how secure my position really is. Is there a realistic chance of being laid off shortly after joining, or am I overthinking this?
[05:44]	schestowitz[TR2]	Anyone at Microsoft have insight into how new hires are typically affected during layoffs?
● Oct 31
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[07:53]	schestowitz[TR2]	"
[07:53]	schestowitz[TR2]	checking
[07:53]	schestowitz[TR2]	a lotof the traffic is from bots but I am not sure how much
[07:53]	schestowitz[TR2]	the names are always changing and not all identify themselves though
[07:53]	schestowitz[TR2]	so details are elusive
[07:53]	schestowitz[TR2]	returning to an old question: do you have reasonable (i.e. non-PayPal) options
[07:53]	schestowitz[TR2]	to receive donations?
[07:53]	schestowitz[TR2]	"
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● Oct 31
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1m67ckvnz#replies
[15:38]		-TechBytesBot/#techbytes- ( status 403 @ https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1m67ckvnz#replies )
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	"
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	Are you under 35?
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	if yes than worry less
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	40 minutes ago by Anonymous
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	| no reactions | Reply
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	Post ID: @d7+1m67ckvnz
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	 0 
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	yes
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	3 hours ago by Anonymous
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	| no reactions | Reply
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	Post ID: @cs+1m67ckvnz
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	 0 
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	Don't panic, but be careful:
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	    I would suggest to keep your resume out there until your start date. Should you get an interview with another company, at least take that interview. If they ask you if you have any open offers, be forthright with them. They ought to understand your plight - all techies are concerned about this these days.
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	    Your boss at Microsoft may possibly be getting laid off. This could make your employment chaotic. You could end up working for someone who's department has no use for you, or would've to trim his/her department's budget, or already has someone with your skill set (not saying they'd get rid of you immediately, but it may be on their roadmap), or who may not have hired you in the first place.
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	    Is your job a newly-created position or a backfill (replacing someone who quit/retired/fired?)? Maybe too late to find this out now, but generally an ok question to ask during an interview - but keep that topic to just one question... they don't want to discuss why someone quit or was fired.
[15:38]	schestowitz[TR2]	"
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1m5xmawk0#replies
[15:39]		-TechBytesBot/#techbytes- ( status 403 @ https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1m5xmawk0#replies )
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	"
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	Microsoft achieved record annual revenue and net income in fiscal year 2026.
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	Fiscal Year 2026 Financial Results
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	 Total Revenue: $331.84 billion (up from $281.72 billion in FY 2025)
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	 Net Income (Profit): $133.75 billion (up from $101.83 billion in FY 2025)
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	All that money is for the CEO and his pals (that include corrupt politicians & their friends) not you American workers who invented and created the tech industry.
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	1 hour ago by you-are-being-played
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	| no reactions | Reply
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	Post ID: @y4+1m5xmawk0
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	 +7 
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	The buyouts are the "friendly" first pass. If they don't reach the 60K the second pass will be the forceful process and people will get laid off. Either way they will reach the target.
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	4 days ago by Anonymous
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	| 7 reactions (+7/-0) | Reply
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	Post ID: @c8+1m5xmawk0
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	 +3 
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	No worries. The products will take care of themselves because AI Super Intelligence is here and the Singularity is near!
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	(Copilot has been performing admirably in this role so far, if you haven't noticed!)
[15:39]	schestowitz[TR2]	"
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49991215
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	"
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	spottedmarley 24 days ago | next []
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	'Plagiarism' is an overreach. An LLM works a lot like the human brain does in terms of how it gathers its ideas for what to output, just like people do. When you write or create art, your ideas are a synthesis of everything you've experienced externally, directed and focused by the context of what it is you are looking to create/output. Nothing in your head is more original than what an LLM might produce. If you hadn't listened to 
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	music composed by other composers for most of your life you wouldn't be able to generate a new composition and neither would an LLM. Are you plagiarizing when you write a new composition because you listened to famous composers and practically memorized their music over your training run (your life)? I'd say no. Plagiarism is more like the intentional act of copying work instead of doing your own synthesis.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	Is a painter who was trained on Van Gogh or Salvador Dali plagiarising those artists when their own work shows influences of their work? Meh, I dont think so
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	Is Greta Van Fleet plagiarising Led Zepplin? Some would say so out of distaste but it's not an actual fact.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	vincent-uden 24 days ago | parent | next []
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	You actually have no idea if an LLM works "a lot like the human brain". No one does. It is still not clear if neural networks are capable of generalization to data outside of the training set in any capacity. Not just LLMs.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	If they could, why would we need these monstrous models, even for simple problems?
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	spottedmarley 23 days ago | root | parent | next []
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	I didn't say that it works like a human brain mechanistically, I said that in terms of how it can only output variations of the underlying training data, it does, indeed resemble (or 'works like', in common parlance) how a brain works. Your confusion stems from your literal take on the term works like.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	The theory is sound.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	can3p 24 days ago | prev | next []
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	A lot of artists are doing mix and match and they're fine because it's framed as artistic interpretation. Can the author point to examples of LLMs reproducing some original work without being explicitly asked to do so? If not, what's the argument?
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	I read the source code and like some patterns that I reuse in my later works. Is that plagiarism? If not, what's the difference with LLMs in this sense?
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	vincent-uden 24 days ago | prev []
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	I for one am still baffled at just how OpenAI/Anthropic and the likes have gotten away with the biggest copyright infringements (or perhaps IP-theft, I'm not sure what the correct term is) in history (the data collection for training) without any legal ramifications.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	Even if it turns out to be perfectly legal I think a "retreat" to this position of LLM generation being Plagiarism (and therefore being uninteresting and morally bad) is quite a reasonable action.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	It also separates LLMs for searching through documents quite nicely from content generation which since I would be hard pressed to consider a "fuzzy search" as a form of plagiarism.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	verdverm 24 days ago | parent []
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	If they buy the books, is it still theft?
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	vincent-uden 24 days ago | root | parent []
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	For training purposes? I'd say no.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	The legal or ethical status of generated output is still up for discussion. I myself do not think neural networks can generalize and thus I would have to say that it still would be copyright infringement since its just regurgitation of input data. Just because I bought a book doesn't mean I get to re-publish it.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	verdverm 24 days ago | root | parent []
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	they are not outputting or "regurgitating" like that, especially as the models get smaller, they just cannot encode that much information for reproduction, not so dissimilar from humans
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	maybe a couple of years back in the early experiments, but not today, if it were easy to get them to do it still, the activists would have by now
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	vincent-uden 23 days ago | root | parent []
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	Yes they are. Just because the models have been overfit on the entirety of the internet doesn't mean they aren't in principle re-generating parts of their input data for the overwhelming majority of their output. Sure, stochasticity pushes the output into weird states sometimes, these are the states where the output is plain useless nonsense. Hallucinations, if you will.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	Our brains are entirely too small to recognize the patterns encoded from the gigantic training data set. But they are there nonetheless.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	This is easily seen if you try get *any* neural network to generalize to *any* non-trivial task (in this case, XOR for example I consider to be trivial). There are no non-flickering, stable vision models that can recognize a human/dog/cat/whatever in all the lighting settings we can without false positives. The models are only getting better because they are getting bigger and are provided with more data. This is *not* generalizati
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	on.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	verdverm 22 days ago | root | parent []
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	> Yes they are.
[15:58]	schestowitz[TR2]	If you change the definition to be more flexible, sure, you can claim such things. But I will disagree because under this definition humans are largely just regurgitating too. Consider how evolution has been a similar training regime for organic systems."
[15:58]		-TechBytesBot/#techbytes-news.ycombinator.com | Slop Is Plagiarism | Hacker News
● Oct 31
[16:48]	schestowitz[TR2]	https://www.goominet.com/unspeakable-vault/vault/527/https://www.goominet.com/unspeakable-vault/vault/527/
[16:48]		-TechBytesBot/#techbytes- ( status 404 @ https://www.goominet.com/unspeakable-vault/vault/527/https://www.goominet.com/unspeakable-vault/vault/527/ )
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