I don't think "we" would have been impacted since this specifically targets the updates, but recently Microsoft pulled Notepad++ from the list of apps we can use on our production management laptops. Some people were annoyed and whining about this. That predated this announcement by a few weeks. Probably the right move by the security folks.
Sure, but at some point in the past, "Amazon India" was not a thing. Nor was "Microsoft India" and so forth. Surely you can understand what it feels like to be an American tech worker in a super high cost of living area, looking at reduction in headcount and continual offshoring of jobs as time goes by. I live in Seattle area, work at one of these big companies, I work with people in India almost every day and have been to India three times on business. When parts of my department's work was allocated to a new team in India, of course I was nervous about that.
I get the fear, but look at it from the investor's perspective. The US market is tapped out, Amazon is already everywhere it can be.
Amazon isn't expanding in India out of love for the country or a desire to see it grow. They are doing it because Wall Street demands infinite growth every single year. Amazon India went from zero to a market leader in a decade not because of charity, but because that is where the new money is.
To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets. If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.
They can capture the market without moving the workforce there. Meta/Instagram/WA have dominated Indian market for a decade now.
It seems like this is pure labor arbitrage. Growth is gone so the only way to increase profits is by cutting costs, with labor force being the top line item.
> They can capture the market without moving the workforce there. Meta/Instagram/WA have dominated Indian market for a decade now.
The former is a logistics company. They need an on-the-ground workforce in places they operate. The latter are social media products, no local workforce of significance needed.
That said, we are in a world where Amazon is able to do labor arbitrage of software-adjacent jobs by moving them to India. That's been happening for more than 2 decades. Nothing short of new laws levying penalties, or a massive consumer boycott will stop that or slow it down.
You are describing a colonial model, extract all the wealth while investing nothing in the local economy. That era is over.
If anything, Meta is the anomaly, not the role model. They should be required to invest more given their dominance, rather than being praised for extracting maximum value with minimum local footprint. Regulators will likely close that gap eventually.
If a foreign entity came into Florida and bought up 35% of the entire retail infrastructure, you bet the US government would regulate it and demand local value capture.
Case in point - US actively forced TSMC and Samsung to build $65B+ of factories in Arizona and Texas to secure domestic interests.
And Chinese/Korean workers being fired while American workers are being hired by their companies would absolutely be correct to see their jobs being offshored
>I get the fear, but look at it from the investor's perspective. The US market is tapped out, Amazon is already everywhere it can be.
Heaven forbid we forget about the investors, and don't forget about the executive compensation!
I mean, seriously, is there no such thing as balance? I'm not saying investors should be arbitrarily shorted, but on the same token it doesn't mean workers need to always take the brunt of the change, which is how it goes down 90% of the time.
If layoffs were seen as executive leadership failures first and foremost it would be a small step toward the right direction of accountability.
>To keep the valuation climbing (which sustains everyone's RSUs), they have to capture these emerging markets.
Fallacy that the stock must continue to rise to the detriment of the workforce that supposedly would benefit. Never minding that RSUs shouldn't be seen as a primary form of compensation to begin with, there is a myriad of things companies can do to maintain the valuation of employee RSUs, like bigger grants.
Secondly, you're assuming to capture these emerging markets, a layoff is a must. In reality, it likely is not. If you have a surplus of resources, deploying them effectively would be a net win, as you re-allocate these folks to higher priority projects and workstreams. The incentive structure that C-Suites have built up since the 1980s however don't align with that, because executive compensation is entirely based around juicing the numbers on a spreadsheet, as opposed to being rewarded for building sustainable businesses.
>If they don't, the stock stagnates, and the compensation model for US tech workers falls apart.
It doesn't, compensation is more broad than RSUs, and could be adjusted in kind. This is a solved problem.
True. This is Globalism at work. If these companies were not selling goods and services globally then they wouldn't have to deal with setting up offices, staff, pressure from local politicians to hire locals around the world.
Companies hiring more in cheap labor countries is quite obvious for long time. In case of Amazon I feel most of the stuff that was cutting edge 2 decades back is now low value work where cost is the only edge.
I've always wanted to do music recording on Linux (literally since the 90s). The fact that my preferred DAW (Reaper) has long been native to Linux has tempted me. But I have Universal Audio "Apollo" interface and have bought into their whole ecosystem which is very good and runs really great on my mac.
If I made the plunge I would get an RME USB audio interface and use Reaper, maybe play around with Bitwig which is also native on Linux. I don't think I would mess with WINE, regardless of other's success stories with it.
I'm glad to see where things have gone in recent years though
There is also Ardour which is FOSS and would be enough for recording as well as Traktion Waveform which has a free and a Pro version, if my memory is correct the difference is what kinds of instruments/effects plugins come bundled with it.
Ardour is the OG for sure! I'm a huge Reaper guy though been using it since 2009. One of the few pieces of software that I truly enjoy using, and the community is great
I have a RME _PCIe_ Raydat card that is supported by Linux. It has 4+4 ADAT ports, meaning 32in+32out channels. You can connect basically every interface that has ADAT to it. I've connected two Ferrofish Pulse8 AE, a Focusrite Scarlett and a Motu Traveler. :-)
If your UA Apollo has ADAT, you still can use it this way!
Of course it hasn't to be a RME Raydat, any other Linux supported interface with ADAT does it too, f.ex. a Scarlett. You could get a cheap Scarlett and connect your Apollo to it. Hahaha. Seriously, this would work.
That's awesome. I have ADAT converters as well, but the Apollo itself does not operate as standalone, and unfortunately has very proprietary Thunderbolt drivers. I'm pretty sure we will never see Linux support for Apollo thunderbolt interfaces. I would definitely go RME for Linux.
I feel like the only solution to the problem is democratized RLHF, where whenever we get a bad answer from an LLM, we can immediately tell it what was wrong and it can learn from that.
Not sure if that's too much of a crutch for you, but it's quite easy to create an "Ask Gemini" shortcut that calls a Cloud Function and returns a spoken response. I use this on my HomePods all the time, and it's working great.
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