Skype Fell Off a Cliff (Microsoft Killed It), All Microsoft Has Left Now is Slop and Spaghetti Code
Skype is dead and sooner or later the site will go offline, leaving nothing but an ashtray with dust in it (and a bad legacy). Skype was just losing loads of money, probably no better than GitHub, LinkedIn and other nonsensical "platforms" which conflate "activity" or "users" with business success (that never worked for Twitter, which was losing a ton of money while going deeper and deeper into debt).
Just before the latest (among many) wave of mass layoffs Microsoft's CEO told a bunch of nonsense about "AI" code [1, 2], trying to sell this lie that "expensive" engineers being laid off due to financial difficulties was in fact some sort of "innovation".
People in the IBM and Microsoft thelayoff.com forums (occupied mostly by engineers who lost their job or fear losing their job) challenge this lie. "If that is the case (30% of the code written by AI), then it is probably time to stop using Microsoft software... the quality is going to go down pretty quick," one of them wrote. Then followed by: "Agreed! Generative AI can only generate simple code patterns that it knows about. Knows about us key here!"
Someone there said: "This isn’t about AI. This is a puppet show to drive stock prices up and down." From what I've heard, many GAFAM workers are refused a pay increase, many are paid in shares they cannot sell for a long time (usually 12 months) and, unlike pensions, those shares are held by the same company that "grants" (prints) them as value "out of thin air"; when you want to "cash in" the company (employer) 1) makes it hard (artificial obstructions); 2) keeps track of who sells as if it keeps "loyalty score" on staff (that alone is deterrence against selling). Many people are signing all sorts of contracts that leave them playing with fire, holding onto stocks they cannot sell because that inflates "company value" without actually adding anything real and without compensating staff with real money.
Does this sound like a scam? Good. Because it is. But this one is perpetrated by people in suits, who frequent Wall Street and control the major media. So it's "OK".
"Truer words have never been spoken," said a later comment. "Every CEO out there is taking the approach of fire all the workers first, replace them with cheap Indians, tell the CNBC crowd it's all AI and you're an AI company now, juice the stock price. Everyone knows this is going to end badly but you can't get off the treadmill while it's spinning."
The same topic in another place challenged the lie that "AI" replaces programmers. "That's because they're not," it said. "AI is not working. It is "hallucinating", which is a euphemism for generating random output. Jobs are moved to India. Total number of ms employees worldwide is the same."
Take another look at "The Drunken Plagiarists" by George V. Neville-Neil over at ACM.
Smart people know that all this BS about "AI" is hype and a bubble waiting to explode, leaving nothing of substance behind it except an "LLM Ouroboros of shit". █