WesternInfidels

You don’t understand where I’m coming from because you’ve completely taken it for granted that of course Mayer’s every move should be publicly dissected under a microscope, not just for business soundness, but also to check if she’s setting a luminous enough example for all other women everywhere.

Which is a thing I’m refusing to do.

And that’s why I say [Mayer] ran it into the ground- because when Google demonstrated a MUCH MUCH MUCH better Search, Yahoo didn’t do anything differently.

Look, this sentence literally blames Mayer for things that happened before her tenure. You acknowledge that this doesn’t make any sense, but you can’t really deny that it’s what you’ve said. Somehow the media that’s covered Mayer has made a lot of people react this way.

Flickr is one that comes to mind. Google had Picasa…

As a response to its community’s concerns, Flickr saw a substantial engineering investment from 2014-2015 or so, under Mayer’s tenure. I’m afraid the best summary I’ve found is pretty obvious AI slop, but it’s relating some real events.

Flickr lives, Picasa was killed, Google Photos is now an extremely annoying nagware for backup services. Things could be so much worse for Flickr.

Yahoo Answers was another one…

God I hated Yahoo Answers.

Mayer’s attempts to make Yahoo relevant again may not have worked but it’s not responsible or accurate to conclude that she was necessarily inept.

It is my suspicion that if, say, Jack Dorsey had overseen the dismantling of Yahoo, the business press would have told us that he made a great effort but Yahoo’s problems went too deep. Rather than leading us to believe that he was just inept. Or that he failed because he took the wrong amount of paternity leave.

She is the woman who ran Yahoo into the ground, taking it from one of the giants of the dot com era into a largely worthless and useless has-been

Yahoo was once a big recognizable brand, but there was pretty much no moment in history when anyone would have said “Oh no, Yahoo is down, now how will I get important things done?” It was never focused, it was never indispensable.

Yahoo was valued at over $100B briefly in 1999-2000, after Google had demonstrated a much, much better internet search. Yahoo cratered to as little as 5% of its all-time high, recovered for a while, then began fading away. Its market cap was just under $20B when Mayer was hired in 2012. After which the market cap trended up.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/yahoo/marketcap/

I don’t see how you get this attitude, those conclusions, from anything I wrote.

Yahoo offers a generous 16 week maternity leave

Which is just a little bit shy of two years

Do you honestly believe her offering to take only 2 weeks “leave” while working was a feminist or woman empowering decision?

No. But I think that decision was up to her and that the press should have treated it as not-newsworthy. Any amount of maternity leave that she chose was doomed to be criticized by somebody as the wrong amount. And so, it was.

You and her are the ones perpetuating “CEO mom is impossible”

No. CompactFlax posited that “A real ‘girl boss’ in a position of power and wealth and public visibility needs to use that platform to take a year or two of maternity leave,” and I’m just observing there was no realistic possibility of that happening. If this is what you demand from a CEO mom, well, you’re not getting that.

You believe she has to act like…

I don’t understand how you think you know any such thing. I comprehensively don’t think like this. I don’t think there’s any “has to,” I think those arrangements should have been her own decision and it would be better to have minimal commentary on it.

The fact that everyone feels entitled to weigh in on her work/life balance and parenting decisions is the problem. Criticize her for her business decisions, criticize her for being an AI pusher, that’s fine, that’s appropriate.

When criticism focuses on “CEO mommy” topics, that is a mode and angle of criticism that no man ever seems to face in the tech/biz news. That is sexism. Obviously. What else would that be?

“They” who?

A naive person (like me) might think that an insurance company would be setting itself up for a fall by doing this, one day finding that it had to pay claims it had not collected enough fees to cover.

But that’s because I’m not thinking like a capitalist. Who bears the risk that results from this kind of fraud? Not the insurers who commit the fraud and profit from the insurance, but the insured, the ones who paid for insurance:

…clients could suddenly see their coverage withdrawn because risks that had been building over years were suddenly deemed too high.

“The industry knows these policies are going to become quite vulnerable and might not keep us profitable and we will have to cut chunks off the policies, making streets or whole areas uninsurable,” said one senior risk professional from the reinsurance industry, who said she faced “pressure to fudge the numbers”.

An optimist is an optometrist who’s figured out how to see a better future

She got press that pointed out she was a CEO who had dared to get pregnant. It seemed to me they were pointing out that 1) a CEO who took time off to give birth was bad, and 2) a woman who wouldn’t take more maternity leave was also bad.

Way too much press about her was about her personal-life decisions rather than business prospects.

A real “girl boss” …

I read “girlboss” as strictly perjorative.

needs to use that platform to take a year or two of maternity leave

This is tantamount to saying: a CEO mom is impossible.

I’ve been on Fastmail’s cheapest plan for years and I’m very happy with it.

I think this sucks but I also think the headlines have never given Mayer a fair shake at anything and that also sucks. “Marissa Mayer dared to speak and we’re here to get snarky about it” could apply to almost every headline I’ve seen that was about her. And this story charges straight to “girlboss.” Ugh. Isn’t there enough to criticize here without jumping straight to the kind of casual sexism we all laughed at in the 1980s? It’s unprofessional.

I don’t like it, but that would just make them cheaper to hire back as AI babysitters.

Every phone maker seems convinced that if they can be the one to make this work, they’ll be the champion of world forever, or something.

I can’t understand why a user would even want this. How many users do want this?

I’ve never seen “Community” and I’ve never lived in Great Britain but even I know what “streets ahead” means.

Online, at least, I’ve probably heard more hetero people than gay people use “partner.” In some cases they were in fact perfectly conventionally full-blown married, they just weren’t interested in sharing any more details than they had to to tell whatever story they were telling, because that detail wasn’t important for the story.

the photo of them standing next to the dementia riddled rapist felon

…was probably the entire point of the exercise, from the regime’s perspective, and I can’t understand how anyone headed to the White House wouldn’t understand this.

A very clear statement that he values petty party politics more than leadership of the nation.

The un-patriot president. Anti-citizen one.

“That’s not enough, though, as I assume many comedians and dancers haven’t gone through the trouble to copyright their material,” he added. “We need a way to help those creatives without letting bad actors make more fake claims (happens all the time unfortunately).”

Creative works are copyright by default. I guess Mosseri means to say “many [performers] haven’t gone through the trouble of registering copyrights with the government or with copyright policing services,” which is, like so many other things, a hoop that big, prosperous organizations can jump through more easily than individuals can.

Suppose you’re a RAM maker. You’re raking in fat profits from this maybe-a-bubble situation. Your market forecasts show there’s a risk the bubble might pop. Or that new Chinese sources of your commodity are about to become widely available in the West, cratering your beautiful margin. What do you do?

One thing you might do is: encourage the public to buy now, while prices are still high.

If you’re spending $1K per month on LLMs – putting aside whether this is productive or ethical for a moment – wouldn’t it make more sense to just pony up the $5K-$10K or so that it would cost to provision a private, local model? Might that not actually be superior in terms of corporate security?