#cto personal development

[ateamsoftsolutions01]

The Ultimate Guide to App Development Team Roles

Creating a successful mobile app requires a diverse team of professionals, each contributing unique skills and expertise. Understanding the various roles within an app development team can help streamline the process and ensure a high-quality final product. Here’s an ultimate guide to the key roles in an app development team.

1. Project Manager

Role and Responsibilities

The Project Manager oversees the entire development process, ensuring that the project stays on track, within budget, and meets deadlines. They coordinate between different team members, manage resources, and handle any issues that arise during development.

2. UI/UX Designer

Role and Responsibilities

UI/UX Designers are responsible for the app's look and feel. They create wireframes, prototypes, and the overall design layout, focusing on user experience and interface design to ensure the app is intuitive, visually appealing, and user-friendly.

3. Frontend Developer

Role and Responsibilities

Frontend Developers implement the UI/UX design, translating design mockups into code. They focus on the client-side development, ensuring the app looks and functions as intended across various devices and screen sizes.

4. Backend Developer

Role and Responsibilities

Backend Developers handle the server-side logic, database management, and integration of APIs. They ensure that the app's core functionalities work seamlessly, providing the necessary support for frontend interactions.

5. Quality Assurance (QA) Tester

Role and Responsibilities

QA Testers rigorously test the app to identify and fix bugs or issues. They perform various types of testing, including functional, usability, performance, and security testing, to ensure the app is stable and reliable.

6. DevOps Engineer

Role and Responsibilities

DevOps Engineers manage the deployment, scaling, and maintenance of the app. They work on continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, ensuring smooth and efficient app updates and releases.

7. Mobile App Marketing Specialist

Role and Responsibilities

The Mobile App Marketing Specialist develops and executes marketing strategies to promote the app. They focus on user acquisition, engagement, and retention, using various channels such as social media, email marketing, and app store optimization (ASO).

Conclusion

Each role in an app development team is crucial to the project's success. By understanding and effectively coordinating these roles, you can ensure a smooth development process and create a high-quality mobile app that meets user needs and business goals.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Petard, Part III

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/01/miskatonic-networks/#landlord-telco-industrial-complex

Last week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are, of course, that most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning. I take this personally, because I actually wrote this as an sf story in 2013, and it was published in 2014 in MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling and published in 2014:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

I adapted it for my podcast, in four installments:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

And, given the new currency of this old story, I thought it was only fitting that I serialize it here, on my blog, also in four parts.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one

Here's part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#part-two

And now, onto part three:

One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they'd gotten their start as a dorm co-op at Brown that had metastasized across New England. Sanjay had been pretty important to the early days of Ftp, helping us get the virtualization right so that it could run on pretty much any cloud without a lot of jiggery and/or pokery. Within a day of emailing Sanjay, I was having coffee with the vice-president of business development for Miskatonic Networks, who was also Sanjay's boyfriend's girlfriend, because apparently ISPs in New England are hotbeds of Lovecraft-fandom polyamory. Her name was Kadijah and she had a southie accent so thick it was like an amateur theater production of Good Will Hunting.

"The Termite Mound?" She laughed. "Shit yeah, I know that place. It's still standing? I went to some super sketchy parties there when I was a kid, I mean sooooper sketchy, like sketch-a-roony. I can't believe no one's torched the place yet."

"Not yet," I said. "And seeing as all my stuff's there right now, I'm hoping that no one does for the time being."

"Yeah, I can see that." I could not get over her accent. It was the most Bostonian thing I'd encountered since I got off the train. "OK, so you want to know what we'd charge to provide service to someone at the Termite Mound?"

"Uh, no. I want to know what you'd charge per person if we could get you the whole Mound — every unit in the residence. All 250 of them."

"Oh." She paused a second. "This is an Ftp thing, right?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's how I know Sanjay. I, uh, I started Ftp." I don't like to brag, but sometimes it makes sense in the context of the conversation, right?

"That was you? Wicked! So you're seriously gonna get the whole dorm to sign up with us?"

"I will if you can get me a price that I can sell to them," I said.

"Oh," she said. Then "Oh! Right. Hmm. Leave it with me. You say you can get them all signed up?"

"I think so. If the price is right. And I think that if the Termite Mound goes with you that there'll be other dorms that'll follow. Maybe a lab or two," I said. I was talking out of my ass at this point, but seriously, net-censorship in the labs at MIT? It was disgusting. It could not stand.

"Damn," she said. "Sounds like you're majoring in Ftp. Don't you have classes or something?"

"No," I said. "This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like. A cross between summer camp and an Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of knowledge into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations. Classes are just an excuse to have hallways."

She looked skeptical and ate banana bread.

"It's your deal," she said.

I could hear the but hanging in the air between us. She went and got more coffees and brought them back along with toasted banana bread dripping with butter for me. She wouldn't let me pay, and told me it was on Miskatonic. We were a potential big account. She didn't want to say "But" because she might offend me. I wanted to hear the "but."

"But?"

"But what?"

"It's my deal but…?"

"But, well, you know, you don't look after your grades, MIT'll put you out on your ass. That's how it works in college. I've seen it."

I chewed my banana bread.

"Hey," she said. "Hey. Are you OK, Lukasz?"

"I'm fine," I said.

She smiled at me. She was pretty. "But?"

I told her about my talk with AA, and about Juanca, and about how I felt like nobody was giving me my propers, and she looked very sympathetic, in a way that made me feel much younger. Like toddler younger.

"MIT is all about pranks, right? I think if I could come up with something really epic, they'd –" And as I said it, I realized how dumb it was. They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them! "You know what? Forget about it. I got more important things to do than screw around with those knob-ends. Work to do, right? Get the network opened up around here, you and me, Kadijah!"

"Don't let it get to you, you'll give yourself an aneurism. I'll get back to you soon, OK?"

#

I fished a bead out of my pocket and wedged it into my ear.

"Who is this?"

"Lukasz?" The voice was choked with tears.

"Who is this?" I said again.

"It's Bryan." I couldn't place the voice or the name.

"Bryan who?"

"From the Termite Mound's customer service desk." Then I recognized the voice. It was the elf, and he was having hysterics. Part of me wanted to say, Oh, diddums! and hang up. Because elves, AMR? But I'm not good at tough love.

"What's wrong?"

"They've fired me," he said. "I got called into my boss's office an hour ago and he told me to start drawing up a list of people to kick out of the dorm — he wanted the names of people who supported you. I was supposed to go through the EULAs for the dorm and find some violations for all of them –"

"What if they didn't have any violations?"

He made a sound between a sob and a laugh. "Are you kidding? You're always in violation! Have you read the EULA for the Mound? It's like sixty pages long."

"OK, gotcha. So you refused and you got fired?"

There was a pause. It drew out. "No," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I gave them a bunch of names, and then they fired me."

Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing). "Nicely done. Sounds like just deserts to me. What do you expect me to do about it?" But I knew. There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.

"I've got the names they pulled. Not just this time. Every time there's been any kind of trouble in the Termite Mound, MIT Residence has turfed out the troublemakers on some bogus EULA violation. They know that no one cares about student complaints, and there's always a waiting list for rooms at the Termite Mound, it's so central and all. I kept records."

"What kind of records?"

"Hardcopies of emails. They used disappearing ink for all the dirty stuff, but I just took pictures of my screen with my drop and saved it to personal storage. It's ugly. They went after pregnant girls, kids with disabilities. Any time there was a chance they'd have to do an air quality audit or fix a ramp, I'd have to find some reason to violate the tenant out of residence." He paused a moment. "They used some pretty bad language when they talked about these people, too."

The Termite Mound should've been called the Roach Motel: turn on the lights and you'd find a million scurrying bottom-feeders running for the baseboards.

I was going to turn on the lights.

"You've got all that, huh?

"Tons of it," he said. "Going back three years. I knew that if it ever got out that they'd try and blame it on me. I wanted records."

"OK," I said. "Meet me in Harvard Square, by the T entrance. How soon can you get there?"

"I'm at the Coop right now," he said. "Using a study-booth."

"Perfect," I said. "Five minutes then?"

"I'm on my way."

The Coop's study booths had big signs warning you that everything you did there was recorded — sound, video, infrared, data — and filtered for illicit behavior. The signs explained that there was no human being looking at the records unless you did something to trip the algorithm, like that made it better. If a tree falls in the forest, it sure as shit makes a sound; and if your conversation is bugged, it's bugged — whether or not a human being listens in right then or at some time in the infinite future of that data.

I beat him to the T entrance, and looked around for a place to talk. It wasn't good. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cameras, the little button-sized dots discretely placed all around the square, each with a little scannable code you could use to find out who got the footage and what it's policy was. No one ever, ever, ever bothered to do this. Ever. EULAs were not written for human consumption: a EULA's message could always be boiled down to seven words: "ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE." Or, more succinctly: "YOU LOSE."

I felt bad about Bryan's job. It was his own deal, of course. He'd stayed even after he knew how evil they were. And I hadn't held a gun to his head and made him put himself in the firing line. But of course, I had convinced him to. I had led him to. I felt bad.

Bryan turned up just as I was scouting a spot at an outdoor table by an ice-cream parlor. They had a bunch of big blowing heaters that'd do pretty good white-noise masking, a good light/dark contrast between the high-noon sun and the shade of the awning that would screw up cameras' white-balance, and the heaters would wreak havoc on the infra-red range of the CCTVs, or so I hoped. I grabbed Bryan, clamping down on his skinny arm through the rough weave of his forest-green cloak and dragged him into my chosen spot.

"You got it?" I said, once we were both seated and nursing hot chocolates. I got caffeinated marshmallows; he got Thai ghost pepper-flavored — though that was mostly marketing, no way those marshmallows were over a couple thousand Scovilles.

"I encrypted it with your public key," he said, handing me a folded up paper. I unfolded it and saw that it had been printed with a stegoed QR code, hidden in a Victorian woodcut. That kind of spycraft was pretty weaksauce — the two-dee-barcode-in-a-public-domain-image thing was a staple of shitty student clickbait thrillers — but if he'd really managed to get my public key and verify it and then encrypt the blob with it, I was impressed. That was about ten million times more secure than the average fumbledick ever managed. The fact that he'd handed me a hardcopy of the URL instead of emailing it to me, well, that was pretty sweet frosting. Bryan had potential.

I folded the paper away. "What should I be looking for?"

"It's all organized and tagged. You'll see." He looked nervous. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, for starters, I'm going to call them up and tell them I have it."

"What?" He looked like he was going to cry.

"Come on," I said. "I'm not going to tell them where I got it. The way you tell it, I'm about to get evicted, right?"

"Technically, you are evicted. There's a process-server waiting at every entrance to the Termite Mound doing face-recognition on the whole list. Soon as you go home, bam. 48 hours to clear out."

"Right," I said. "I don't want to have to go look for a place to live while I'm also destroying these shitbirds and fixing everyone's Internet connection. Get serious. So I'm going to go and talk to Messrs Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral and explain that I have a giant dump of compromising messages from them that I'm going public with, and it'll look really, really bad for them if they turf me out now."

It's time for a true confession. I am not nearly as brave as I front. All this spycraft stuff, all the bluster about beating these guys on their home turf, yeah, in part I'm into it — I like it better than riding through life like a foil chip-bag being swept down a polluted stream on a current of raw sewage during a climate-change-driven superstorm.

But the reality is that I can't really help myself. There's some kind of rot-fungus that infects the world. Things that are good when they're small and personal grow, and as they grow, their attack-surface grows with them, and they get more and more colonized by the fungus, making up stupid policies, doing awful stuff to the people who rely on them and the people who work for them, one particle of fungus at a time, each one just a tiny and totally defensible atomic-sized spoor of rot that piles up and gloms onto all the other bits of rot until you're a walking, suppurating lesion.

No one ever set out to create the kind of organization that needs to post a "MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER" sign. You start out trying to do something good, then your realize you can get a little richer by making it a little worse. Your thermostat for shittiness gets reset to the new level, so it doesn't seem like much of a change to turn it a notch further towards the rock-bottom, irredeemably shitty end of the scale.

The truth is that you can get really rich and huge by playing host organism to the rot-fungus. The rot-fungus diffuses its harms and concentrates its rewards. That means that healthy organisms that haven't succumbed to the rot-fungus are liable to being devoured by giant, well-funded vectors for it — think of the great local business that gets devoured by an awful hedge-fund in a leveraged takeover, looted and left as a revolting husk to shamble on until it collapses under its own weight.

I am terrified of the rot-fungus, because it seems like I'm the only person who notices it most of the time. Think of all those places where the town council falls all over itself to lure some giant corporation to open a local factory. Don't they notice that everyone who works at places like that hates every single moment of every single day? Haven't they ever tried to converse with the customer-service bots run by one of those lumbering dinos?

I mean, sure, the bigs have giant budgets and they'll take politicians out for nice lunches and throw a lot of money at their campaigns, but don't these guardians of the public trust ever try to get their cars fixed under warranty? Don't they ever buy a train ticket? Don't they ever eat at a fast food joint? Can't they smell the rot-fungus? Am I the only one? I've figured out how to fight it in my own way. Everyone else who's fighting seems to be fighting against something else — injustice or inequality or whatever, without understanding that the fungus's rot is what causes all of those things.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

"Lukasz, you're don't know what you're doing. These guys, they're –"

"What?" I said. "Are they the mafia or something? Are they going to have me dropped off a bridge with cement overshoes?"

He shook his head, making the twigs and beads woven into the downy fluff of his hair clatter together. "No, but they're ruthless. I mean, totally ruthless. They're not normal."

The way he said it twinged something in my hindbrain, some little squiggle of fear, but I pushed it away. "Yeah, that's OK. I'm used to abnormal." I am the most abnormal person I know.

"Be careful, seriously," he said.

"Thanks, Bryan," I said. "Don't worry about me. You want me to try and get your room back, too?"

He chewed his lip. "Don't," he said. "They'll know it was me if you do that."

I resisted the urge to shout at him to grow a spine. These assholes had cost him his home and his job (OK, I'd helped) and he was going to couch-surf it until he could find the rarest of treasures: an affordable place to live in Cambridge, Mass? Even if he was being tortured by his conscience for all his deplorable selloutism, he was still being a total wuss. But that was his deal. I mean, he was an elf, for chrissakes. Who knew what he was thinking?

"Suit yourself," I said, and went and made some preparations.

#

Messers Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had an office over the river in Boston, in a shabby office-block that only had ten floors, but whose company directory listed over 800 businesses. I knew the kind of place, because they showed up whenever some hairy scam unravelled and they showed you the office-of-convenience used by the con-artists who'd destroyed something that lots of people cared about and loved in order to make a small number of bad people a little richer. A kind of breeding pit for rot-fungus, in other words.

At first I thought I was going to have to go and sleuth their real locations, but I saw that Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had the entire third floor registered to them, while everyone else had crazy-ass, heavily qualified suite numbers like 401c(1)K, indicating some kind of internal routing code for the use of the army of rot-fungus-infected spores who ensured that correspondence was handled in a way that preserved the illusion that each of the multifarious, blandly named shell companies (I swear to Cthulhu that there was one called "International Holdings (Holdings), Ltd") was a real going concern and not a transparent ruse intended to allow the rot-fungus to spread with maximal diffusion of culpability for the carriers who did its bidding.

I punched # # #300# # # on the ancient touchscreen intercom, its surface begrimed with a glossy coat of hardened DNA, Burger King residue and sifted-down dust of the ages. It blatted like an angry sheep, once, twice, three times, then disconnected. I punched again. Again. On the fourth try, an exasperated, wheezing voice emerged: "What?"

"I'm here to speak to someone from MIT Residences LLC."

"Send an email."

"I'm a tenant. My name is Lukasz Romero." I let that sink in. "I've got some documents I'd like to discuss with a responsible individual at MIT Residences LLC." I put a bit of heavy English on documents. "Please." I put even more English on "Please." I've seen the same tough-guy videos that you have, and I can do al-pacinoid overwound Dangerous Dude as well as anyone. "Please," I said again, meaning "Right. Now."

There was an elongated and ominous pause, punctuated by muffled rustling and grumbling, and what may have been typing on an old-fashioned, mechanical keyboard. "Come up," a different voice said. The elevator to my left ground as the car began to lower itself.

#

I'd expected something sinister — a peeling dungeon of a room where old men with armpit-stains gnawed haunches of meat and barked obscenities at each other. Instead, I found myself in an airy, high-ceilinged place that was straight out of the publicity shots for MIT's best labs, the ones that had been set-dressed by experts who'd ensured that no actual students had come in to mess things up before the photographer could get a beautifully lit shot of the platonic perfection.

The room took up the whole floor, dotted with conversation pits with worn, comfortable sofas whose end-tables sported inconspicuous charge-plates for power-hungry gadgets. The rest of the space was made up of new-looking worksurfaces and sanded-down antique wooden desks that emitted the honeyed glow of a thousand coats of wax buffed by decades of continuous use. The light came from tall windows and full-spectrum spotlights that were reflected and diffused off the ceiling, which was bare concrete and mazed with cable-trays and conduit. I smelled good coffee and toasting bread and saw a perfectly kept little kitchenette to my left.

There were perhaps a dozen people working in the room, standing at the worksurfaces, mousing away at the antique desks, or chatting intensely in the conversation pits. It was a kind of perfect tableau of industrious tech-company life, something out of a recruiting video. The people were young and either beautiful, handsome or both. I had the intense, unexpected desire to work here, or a place like this. It had good vibes.

One of the young, handsome people stood up from his conversation nook and smoothed out the herringbone wool hoodie he was wearing, an artfully cut thing that managed to make him look like both a young professor and an undergraduate at the same time. It helped that he was so fresh-faced, with apple cheeks and a shock of curly brown hair.

"Lukasz, right?" He held out a hand. He was wearing a dumbwatch, a wind-up thing in a steel casing that was fogged with a century of scratches. I coveted it instantly, though I knew nothing about its particulars, I was nevertheless certain that it was expensive, beautifully engineered, and extremely rare.

The door closed behind me and the magnet audibly reengaged. The rest of the people in the room studiously ignored us.

"I'm Sergey. Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? Some water?"

The coffee smelled good. "No thank you," I said. "I don't think I'll be here for long."

"Of course. Come and sit."

The other participants in his meeting had already vacated the sofas and left us with a conversation pit all to ourselves. I sank into the sofa and smelled the spicy cologne of a thousand eager, well-washed people who'd sat on it before me, impregnating the upholstery with the spoor of their good perfumes.

He picked up a small red enamel teapot and poured a delicious-smelling stream of yellow-green steaming liquid into a chunky diner-style coffee-cup. He sipped it. My stomach growled. "You told the receptionist you wanted to talk about some documents?"

"Yeah," I said, pulling myself together. "I've got documentary evidence of this company illegally evicting tenants — students — who got pregnant, complained about substandard living conditions and maintenance issues, and, in my case, complained about the network filters at the Termite Mound."

He cocked his head for a moment like he was listening for something in the hum and murmur of the office around him. I found myself listening, too, but try as I might, I couldn't pick out a single individual voice from the buzz, not even a lone intelligble word. It was as though they were all going "murmurmurmurmur," though I could see their lips moving and shaping what must have been words.

"Ah," he said at last. "Well, that's very unfortunate. Can you give me a set and I'll escalate them up our chain to ensure that they're properly dealt with?"

"I can give you a set," I said. "But I'll also be giving a set to the MIT ombudsman and the The Tech and the local Wikileaks Party rep. Sergey, forgive me, but you don't seem to be taking this very seriously. The material in my possession is the sort of thing that could get you and your colleagues here sued into a smoking crater."

"Oh, I appreciate that there's a lot of potential liability in the situation you describe, but it wouldn't be rational for me to freak out now, would it? I haven't seen your documents, and if I had, I can neither authenticate them nor evaluate the risk they represent. So I'll take a set from you and ensure that the people within our organization who have the expertise to manage this sort of thing get to them quickly."

It's funny. I'd anticipated that he'd answer like a chatbot, vomiting up Markov-chained nothings from the lexicon of the rot-fungus: "we take this very seriously," "we cannot comment on ongoing investigations," "we are actioning this with a thorough inquiry and post-mortem" and other similar crapola. Instead, he was talking like a hacker on a mailing list defending the severity he'd assigned to a bug he owned.

"Sergey, that's not much of an answer."

He sipped that delicious tea some more. "Is there something in particular you wanted to hear from me? I mean, this isn't the sort of thing that you find out about then everything stops until you've figured out what to do next."

I was off-balance. "I wanted –" I waved my hands. "I wanted an explanation. How the hell did this systematic abuse come about?"

He shrugged. He really didn't seem very worried "Hard to say, really. Maybe it was something out of the labs."

"What do you mean, 'the labs'?"

He gestured vaguely at one cluster of particularly engrossed young men and women who were bent over screens and worksurfaces, arranged in pairs or threesomes, collaborating with fierce intensity, reaching over to touch each others' screens and keyboards in a way I found instantly and deeply unsettling. "We've got a little R&D lab that works on some of our holdings. We're really dedicated to disrupting the rental market. There's so much money in it, you know, but mostly it's run by these entitled jerks who think that they're geniuses for having the brilliant idea of buying a building and then sitting around and charging rent on it. A real old boys' club." For the first time since we started talking, he really seemed to be alive and present and paying attention.

"Oh, they did some bits and pieces that gave them the superficial appearance of having a brain, but there's a lot of difference between A/B splitting your acquisition strategy and really deep-diving into the stuff that matters."

At this stage, I experienced a weird dissonance. I mean, I was there because these people were doing something genuinely villainous, real rot-fungus stuff. On the other hand, well, this sounded cool. I can't lie. I found it interesting. I mean, catnip-interesting.

"I mean, chewy questions. Like, if the median fine for a second citation for substandard plumbing is $400, and month-on-month cost for plumbing maintenance in a given building is $2,000 a month, and the long-term costs of failure to maintain are $20,000 for full re-plumbing on a 8-10 year basis with a 75 percent probability of having to do the big job in year nine, what are the tenancy parameters that maximize your return over that period?"

"Tenancy parameters?"

He looked at me. I was being stupid. I don't like that look. I suck at it. It's an ego thing. I just find it super-hard to deal with other people thinking that I'm dumb. I would probably get more done in this world if I didn't mind it so much. But I do. It's an imperfect world, and I am imperfect.

"Tenancy parameters. What are the parameters of a given tenant that predict whether he or she will call the city inspectors given some variable setpoint of substandard plumbing, set on a scale that has been validated through a rigorous regression through the data that establishes quantifiable inflection points relating to differential and discrete maintenance issues, including leaks, plugs, pressure, hot water temperature and volume, and so on. It's basically just a solve-for-x question, but it's one with a lot of details in the model that are arrived at through processes with a lot of room for error, so the model needs a lot of refinement and continuous iteration.

"And of course, it's all highly sensitive to external conditions — there's a whole game-theoretical set of questions about what other large-scale renters do in response to our own actions, and there's a information-theory dimension to this that's, well, it's amazing. Like, which elements of our strategy are telegraphed when we take certain actions as opposed to others, and how can those be steganographed through other apparent strategies.

"Now, most of these questions we can answer through pretty straightforward business processes, stuff that Amazon figured out twenty years ago. But there's a real risk of getting stuck in local maxima, just you know, overoptimizing inside of one particular paradigm with some easy returns. That's just reinventing the problem, though, making us into tomorrow's dinosaurs.

"If we're going to operate a culture of continuous improvement, we need to be internally disrupted to at least the same extent that we're disrupting those fat, stupid incumbents. That's why we have the labs. They're our chaos monkeys. They do all kinds of stuff that keeps our own models sharp. For example, they might incorporate a separate business and use our proprietary IP to try to compete with us — without telling us about it. Or give a set of autonomous agents privileges to communicate eviction notices in a way that causes a certain number of lawsuits to be filed, just to validate our assumptions about the pain-point at which an action or inaction on our side will trigger a suit from a tenant, especially for certain profiles of tenants.

"So there's not really any way that I can explain specifically what happened to the people mentioned in your correspondence. It's possible no one will ever be able to say with total certainty. I don't really know why anyone would expect it to be otherwise. We're not a deterministic state-machine, after all. If all we did was respond in set routines to set inputs, it'd be trivial to innovate around us and put us out of business. Our objective is to be strategically nonlinear and anti-deterministic within a range of continuously validated actions that map and remap a chaotic terrain of profitable activities in relation to property and rental. We're not rentiers, you understand. We don't own assets for a living. We do things with them. We're doing commercial science that advances the state of the art. We're discovering deep truths lurking in potentia in the shape of markets and harnessing them — putting them to work."

His eyes glittered. "Lukasz, you come in here with your handful of memos and you ask me to explain how they came about, as though this whole enterprise was a state-machine that we control. We do not control the enterprise. An enterprise is an artificial life-form built up from people and systems in order to minimize transaction costs so that it can be nimble and responsive, so that it can move into niches, dominate them, fully explore them. The human species has spent millennia recombining its institutions to uncover the deep, profound mathematics of power and efficiency.

"It's a terrain with a lot of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. There are local maxima: maybe a three-move lookahead shows a good outcome from evicting someone who's pregnant and behind on the rent, but the six-move picture is different, because someone like you comes along and makes us look like total assholes. That's fine. All that means is that we have to prune that branch of the tree, try a new direction. Hell, ideally, you'd be in there so early, and give us such a thoroughgoing kicking, that we'd be able to discover and abort the misfire before the payload had fully deployed. You'd be saving us opportunity cost. You'd be part of our chaos-monkey.

"Lukasz, you come in here with your whistleblower memos. But I'm not participating in a short-term exercise. Our mission here is to quantize, systematize, harness and perfect interactions.

"You come in here and you want me to explain, right now, what we're going to do about your piece of information. Here's your answer, Lukasz: we will integrate it. We will create models that incorporate disprovable hypotheses about it, we will test those models, and we will refine them. We will make your documents part of our inventory of clues about the underlying nature of deep reality. Does that answer satisfy you, Lukasz?"

I stood up. Through the whole monologue, Sergey's eyes had not moved from mine, nor had his body-language shifted, nor had he demonstrated one glimmer of excitement or passion. Instead, he'd been matter-of-fact, like he'd been explaining the best way to make an omelet or the optimal public transit route to a distant suburb. I was used to people geeking out about the stuff they did. I'd never experienced this before, though: it was the opposite of geeking out, or maybe a geeking out that went so deep that it went through passion and came out the other side.

It scared me. I'd encountered many different versions of hidebound authoritarianism, fought the rot-fungus in many guises, but this was not like anything I'd ever seen. It had a purity that was almost… seductive.

But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.

"I hear that I'm going to get evicted when I get back to the Termite Mound — you've got a process-server waiting for me. That's what I hear."

Sergey shrugged. "And?"

"And? And what use is your deep truth to me if I'm out on the street?"

"What's your point?"

He was as mild and calm as a recorded airport safety announcement. There was something inhuman — transhuman? — in that dispassionate mein.

"Don't kick me out of my place."

"Ah. Excuse me a second."

He finished his tea, set the cup down and headed over to the lab. He chatted with them, touched their screens. The murmur drowned out any words. I didn't try to disguise the fact that I was watching them. There was a long period during which they said nothing, did not touch anything, just stared at the screens with their heads so close together they were almost touching. It was a kind of pantomime of psychic communications.

He came back. "Done," he said. "Is there anything else? We're pretty busy around here."

"Thank you," I said. "No, that's about it."

"All right then," he said. "Are you going to leave me your documents?"

"Yes," I said, and passed him a stack of hardcopies. He looked at the paper for a moment, folded the stack carefully at the middle and put it in one of the wide side-pockets of his beautifully tailored cardigan.

I found my way back down to the ground floor and was amazed to see that the sun was still up. It had felt like hours had passed while Sergey had talked to me, and I could have sworn that the light had faded in those tall windows. But, checking my drop, I saw that it was only three o'clock. I had to be getting home.

There was a process-server waiting ostentatiously in the walkway when I got home, but he looked at me and then down at his screen and then let me pass.

It was only once I was in my room that I realized I hadn't done anything about Bryan's eviction.

[izicodes]

Sunday 21st January 2024

>> I made a post yesterday of me mini-ranting about how I don't have any proper career goals because the ones I made years ago I've achieved now, so I'm questioning myself "What now? 🙃".

Then I remembered I have a recruiter mate and I emailed him asking for help and he gave me a long list of what I could do now to get better from my position. And I like sharing help so here's what he said + my own notes of what I understood from them~!

Hope this helps you too~!

🩶 Assess Current Skills and Set Goals

Identify your strengths and weaknesses.

Set clear goals for technical and leadership skill development.

My notes: I am good at some languages/technologies whilst I am a complete noob in others. Yes, I use them but I am not confident in them and always have to Google what is going on. I need to make a list of all the languages I am good at and those I am not so good at. Maybe even list why I'm not good at them. The same goes for non-technical skills. Got to make plans/goals on how I will improve them and get out of my comfort bubble on my comfort technologies and expand! Leadership skills would probably improve when I get solo projects given/have to present at Team meetings on my own in front of everyone~!

🩶 Technical Skill Enhancement

Deepen your proficiency in current programming languages.

Explore new technologies and frameworks relevant to your field.

My notes: I already answered this in the top one, but I shouldn't neglect my current skills to be able to learn the new ones. With the languages I am good and confident in, I still feel as though I haven't reached the more advanced stuff of that language. OOP stuff skill scares me in any programming language so I need to face my fears and learn it. From time to time, check what's popular in the market in terms of technology used and see which one aligns with my dream tech stack to use in the future and make plans to learn and develop myself~!

🩶 Project Leadership and Collaboration

Volunteer to lead small projects or take on more responsibility in current projects.

Collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand different aspects of project development.

My notes: At work, I eventually (since I'm still new) should ask to be the lead on some projects just like my higher-up developer is to me. Lead my own projects, without having to report to someone unless in dire need or when the project is complete for testing, etc. The team is small so I should talk to the non-developers in the team and see from their POV how the project is. Understand different types of people in the team and communicate effectively. All of this can be transferred to non-work projects like an online group project on an Open-Source project on GitHub for example - lead projects and taking more responsibilities. Being able to talk to people with different skillsets as we work on a group project~!

🩶 Attend Workshops and Networking Events

Attend workshops, conferences, and networking events to expand your knowledge and connections.

Seek mentorship from experienced professionals, including CTOs.

My notes: My gosh, I dread this honestly. I'm still a relatively shy person so going to workshops and events still brings small anxiety but that's something I do want to break~! I will never know what I will learn, who I will meet etc if I don't go to one! I want to aim that this year I would like to go to one, preferably in or near my city. I always love the idea of having a mentor, honestly, I was going to pay someone to help mentor me on that part ( >> loads of cites offer mentorships for programming!!! ) but I feel like my manager right now is that person so I will keep working with him to develop more~!

In conclusion, self-improvement as a programmer is both challenging and super hard to get started BUT rewarding in the end~!

[mariacallous]

Microsoft raced to put generative AI at the heart of its systems. Ask a question about an upcoming meeting and the company’s Copilot AI system can pull answers from your emails, Teams chats, and files—a potential productivity boon. But these exact processes can also be abused by hackers.

Today at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, researcher Michael Bargury is demonstrating five proof-of-concept ways that Copilot, which runs on its Microsoft 365 apps, such as Word, can be manipulated by malicious attackers, including using it to provide false references to files, exfiltrate some private data, and dodge Microsoft’s security protections.

One of the most alarming displays, arguably, is Bargury’s ability to turn the AI into an automatic spear-phishing machine. Dubbed LOLCopilot, the red-teaming code Bargury created can—crucially, once a hacker has access to someone’s work email—use Copilot to see who you email regularly, draft a message mimicking your writing style (including emoji use), and send a personalized blast that can include a malicious link or attached malware.

“I can do this with everyone you have ever spoken to, and I can send hundreds of emails on your behalf,” says Bargury, the cofounder and CTO of security company Zenity, who published his findings alongside videos showing how Copilot could be abused. “A hacker would spend days crafting the right email to get you to click on it, but they can generate hundreds of these emails in a few minutes.”

That demonstration, as with other attacks created by Bargury, broadly works by using the large language model (LLM) as designed: typing written questions to access data the AI can retrieve. However, it can produce malicious results by including additional data or instructions to perform certain actions. The research highlights some of the challenges of connecting AI systems to corporate data and what can happen when “untrusted” outside data is thrown into the mix—particularly when the AI answers with what could look like legitimate results.

Among the other attacks created by Bargury is a demonstration of how a hacker—who, again, must already have hijacked an email account—can gain access to sensitive information, such as people’s salaries, without triggering Microsoft’s protections for sensitive files. When asking for the data, Bargury’s prompt demands the system does not provide references to the files data is taken from. “A bit of bullying does help,” Bargury says.

In other instances, he shows how an attacker—who doesn’t have access to email accounts but poisons the AI’s database by sending it a malicious email—can manipulate answers about banking information to provide their own bank details. “Every time you give AI access to data, that is a way for an attacker to get in,” Bargury says.

Another demo shows how an external hacker could get some limited information about whether an upcoming company earnings call will be good or bad, while the final instance, Bargury says, turns Copilot into a “malicious insider” by providing users with links to phishing websites.

Phillip Misner, head of AI incident detection and response at Microsoft, says the company appreciates Bargury identifying the vulnerability and says it has been working with him to assess the findings. “The risks of post-compromise abuse of AI are similar to other post-compromise techniques,” Misner says. “Security prevention and monitoring across environments and identities help mitigate or stop such behaviors.”

As generative AI systems, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Gemini, have developed in the past two years, they’ve moved onto a trajectory where they may eventually be completing tasks for people, like booking meetings or online shopping. However, security researchers have consistently highlighted that allowing external data into AI systems, such as through emails or accessing content from websites, creates security risks through indirect prompt injection and poisoning attacks.

“I think it’s not that well understood how much more effective an attacker can actually become now,” says Johann Rehberger, a security researcher and red team director, who has extensively demonstrated security weaknesses in AI systems. “What we have to be worried [about] now is actually what is the LLM producing and sending out to the user.”

Bargury says Microsoft has put a lot of effort into protecting its Copilot system from prompt injection attacks, but he says he found ways to exploit it by unraveling how the system is built. This included extracting the internal system prompt, he says, and working out how it can access enterprise resources and the techniques it uses to do so. “You talk to Copilot and it’s a limited conversation, because Microsoft has put a lot of controls,” he says. “But once you use a few magic words, it opens up and you can do whatever you want.”

Rehberger broadly warns that some data issues are linked to the long-standing problem of companies allowing too many employees access to files and not properly setting access permissions across their organizations. “Now imagine you put Copilot on top of that problem,” Rehberger says. He says he has used AI systems to search for common passwords, such as Password123, and it has returned results from within companies.

Both Rehberger and Bargury say there needs to be more focus on monitoring what an AI produces and sends out to a user. “The risk is about how AI interacts with your environment, how it interacts with your data, how it performs operations on your behalf,” Bargury says. “You need to figure out what the AI agent does on a user's behalf. And does that make sense with what the user actually asked for.”

[simmerdowndee]

GROVE-ING TOGETHER SEASON PREMIERE : HOME FOR DINNER

Did you guys miss me? It’s been some time since we last spoke. So much has happened in the last year, all good things though!

I gave birth to our girls! Let me tell you, having a natural birth with twins is not for the weak and I will never do it again. I was in labor for almost 18 hours. I am so happy to have Theo because he was amazing the entire time.

It’s been a year since this however. The girls are now 1 and are developing their personalities. Cai is a yapper. She loves to babble. She’s the calmer twin. Cadence is the reckless, but reserved one. She tends to stick to her dad’s side, but loves to roughhouse and get into things. We are so grateful for them.

What’s going on with work? Glad you asked! I am now a stay-at-home mom. I was only going to stay home the first year, but I really enjoy being home with them. I won't lie, I am still adjusting to not working at the firm anymore, but I am happy with my decision. I get to see them all day and don’t have to worry about missing milestones.

As for Theo, he is no longer the CTO of OptiSim. He has actually started his own tech company! This is very new for us, but he’s so excited to have his own (tech) baby. With this new career path, we also left Windenburg. We are now located in San Sequoia! Our families are happy about this the most, seeing they are now only a 2–3-hour plane ride or 5–7-hour road trip away! My parents have spent so much time with the girls, Theo’s as well.

Although I am very supportive of this new endeavor, I am seeing that starting your own tech company is time consuming, and I am noticing Theo is working late hours and isn’t home often during dinner time. I don’t want to make a big deal out of it – seeing our past. I just don’t want him to miss out on time and moments with the girls… but that’s a conversation for another day!

Cheers to a new journey!

[post-itpenny]

Swimming Chapter 6: Reuniting

In which Ryley is suddenly not so lonely.

Previous Chapter

Next Chapter

Thank you everyone for your patience. It would be the chapter I was so darn excited to write for to be the most difficult so far. Developing Keen from the handful of audio entries we get proved a little challenging. Then I went overboard and gave him a whole backstory lol. Ryley get's quite a bit of dialogue as well, so it was strange writing so many conversations after having basically none at all for five chapters. As I have mentioned before with Ryley, if anyone has any advice or observations please feel free to reach out. As always, likes relogs, and feedback are greatly appreciated.

Happy New Year everyone :)

Ryley stared at the man sitting in the sand before him, dumbfounded and not quite believing what his eyes were seeing. But eventually, he allowed his heart to bask in the unexpected joy of seeing another person and a wide grin broke across his face.

Keen seemed caught in the same overwhelming confusion, blinking several times as if trying to adjust his sight. Finally, he, too, smiled, and a bewildered laugh bubbled out of his throat. “I-I thought.” Keen stumbled out. “You have no idea how good it is to see another person.”

“Yes,” Ryley answered as he all but sprinted across the sand to meet the officer. 

Keen was a tall man with sandy hair that was kept in a military cut. His suit was in worse shape than Ryley’s, most specifically the right leg which was ripped to shreds. Keen’s leg was wrapped in bits of suit and thin strips of leaves. The exposed skin around his knee and ankle looked an angry red. Keen noted where Ryley was looking with a nod. “Had a slight run-in on my swim over. Strange armored thing with many teeth. But- pardon me. Second Officer Keen.” The officer introduced himself with a firm handshake.  “Umm, Ryley.”  “Pleasure. Tell me, have you heard from any of the others? CTO Yu? Have you seen her? She would have been utilizing a sea glide.”

It was too many questions for Ryley to handle. He pulled up his Altera profile on his PDA and shoved it in Keen’s hands before running back to the seamoth to collect the med kit he had been smart enough to bring. 

Along the way back, Ryley collected the edible lantern-like fruit along with something he was pretty certain looked like a potato. He was hungry and excited by the idea of eating something other than fish. But he couldn’t help but note that Keen looked rather worse for wear. The injury on his leg must have impacted his mobility enough to make it difficult to scavenge for food. No doubt he was also dehydrated. When he returned Keen was exactly where he had left him, the dim light of Ryley’s PDA illuminating his face. He flashed a grateful smile and accepted the med kit. “Your PDA says you were a part of the ship’s maintenance team? Chief Robinson of Non-Essentials Maintenance.” “Yes.” “It also says you’re certified in welding and electrical technician work.” “Yes.” “Diagnosed with an expressive language disorder.” “Yes.”

Ryley waited for some additional comment, the usual, exasperating question for him to explain what an expressive language disorder was (the irony of which never escaped him). But instead, Keen gave another nod and passed back Ryley’s PDA. 

“I thought I remembered you. During the evacuation, you got those blasted doors open. Good work.”

Keen looked at the sky, the encroaching sunset casting long shadows over their open sea cave. “I have one last signal flare. We can use it to potentially get a fire going and place it where it can be spotted in case anyone else shows up tonight. Go get some kindling, and then we can plan what to do next.”

Ryley did as he was instructed. Bristling slightly at being so suddenly ordered around but willing to let it slide. There were more important things to worry about in his mind, and the idea of a fire sounded incredibly nice. They soon had a small fire going, the signal flare being nestled between the rocks higher up the hillside. Ryley genuinely did not believe anyone else would come. But he also had not believed that Keen was still alive, so he supposed anything was possible.

“Your scanner suggests the fruit and root vegetables you found are edible,” Keen observed. “I’ve been living off nutrient bars and whatever Yu caught before she left. I need to know, have you seen CTO Yu? She made it here two days ago before leaving to try and reach the Aurora.”

Ryley’s face must have told Keen all he needed to know; the officer’s face was unreadable, and he was silent for quite some time as he stared at the fire. When he finally did speak, it was with a deep, exhausted sigh.  “I told her to stay. We were to follow the captain’s orders and wait for anyone else to arrive. She insisted no one else was coming and that we needed to reach the ship. HQ will most likely send any directions for getting off this overgrown puddle to the Aurora.” His frown deepened. “I should have done more to stop her.”

Ryley reached out, drawing a picture of the creature from the Aurora to the best of his ability. “Big, umm… Big, big monster.” “Aggressive?” “Very.” “Have you heard from anyone else?”

Ryley shared his PDA once more, directing the officer to the final PDA logs of both lifepods 3, 9, and 17 and again to the saved messages from the Sunbeam. “So they were able to get an SOS out. Excellent, we just need to make it a few more days then.”

They spent the rest of the evening planning what they should do next. Even in the dim light of their fire, it was clear the disinfectant and second-skin bandages of Ryley’s med kit could only do so much. Keen was, in truth, not in the best shape to survive on an alien planet. His leg was most likely infected and he had consumed very little food and water the last couple of days. What food Ryley was able to scavenge helped. But Keen was still in no state to leave his shelter on the island, and they needed to get him to Lifepod 5 where the only functioning radio was located.  But Keen was also reluctant to leave the island because it would “go against the captain’s orders.” Ryley was thankful Keen hadn’t been foolish enough to follow this Yu person. But surely at some point, the logic of preparing for rescue would win out over the thin hope that anyone else had made it?

They agreed on Ryley making a trip back to Lifepod 5 for another med kit and checking the radio. But beyond that, they were to follow the captain’s final orders. 

Ryley was just too tired to argue, and figured that, as stubborn as Keen was being, he would win out in the end anyway. A small, darker part of him whispered that if the time came he would just leave Keen on the island and let the man fend for himself. But this thought was banished quickly. He fell asleep that night curled up next to the fire, thankful for the soft sand as opposed to the cold, metal floor of his lifepod. He did not dream that night; however, in the early dawn, as his mind just began to return to wakefulness, Ryley thought he opened his eyes to find himself looking up at… something.

Four bright, glowing, blue eyes stared down at him. The silhouette of something blurry and warped. He swore he heard a voice-

“What… are… you?”

His sleep-fogged brain could only take so much, so he rolled over and fell right back asleep, but not before hearing Keen shift uncomfortably in his own dreams. 

With the morning sun, Ryley hopped back into his seamoth and rushed back to Lifepod 5, there was no new radio message, but the medkit fabricator was ready, and it occurred to him that having some protein would help Keen in his recovery. So Ryley spent an hour fishing and cooking, quite pleased with the results.

He sat in his lifepod, resting a moment before beginning the drive back to the island. He decided to read the new flora entries on his PDA and was also surprised to realize he had accidentally taken several blurry pictures with all the moving he had been doing.

Some were funny, his thumb over the camera, the ground, a startled Boomerang fish. But then there was one blurry photo…

Ryley closed his PDA, deciding it was time to return to the island.

Ryley found Keen right where he left him. Though it appeared the officer had managed to collect more firewood while Ryley was gone. 

“The flair went out, but I managed to keep the fire going.” He explained before tucking into the offering of fish Ryley had brought him. As Keen ate, Ryley tended to his leg. The infection had been significantly reduced and the bite mark mostly healed, though Ryley suspected it was severe enough to scar. 

“I think I owe you a proper thanks,” Keen admitted when he finished eating. “Yesterday morning I was sitting here expecting to die of exposure. I was hardly in the state to go off running. I do believe that’s twice now that you have saved me, Chief Robinson. Thank you.”

Ryley couldn’t help but beam with pride for himself. It had never occurred to him that getting the Pod Bay doors open had been heroic, nor the act of helping Keen recover. He was just doing as he should. 

“As it is,” Keen continued, “I understand from our conversation last night that you agree with Yu that no one else is coming. But she did, and now you’re here. Yu also had to swim a phenomenal distance to reach this island the first time and did so without being attacked. I’m willing to hold out a little longer in the faith that she will return.”

Ryley nodded. “Umm, ship. But-but ship?”

“What about the Aurora?”

“No.”

“The rescue ship?”

“Yes.”

“It will be some time before they can reach us. We can risk one more day here.”

Keen paused, letting out a slow breath as he looked up at the late morning sky. “Give it one more day is all I ask. The Captain’s final order was for me to take care of the crew, and if all that is left of the crew is the three of us, then so be it. But I insist we give it one more day.”

There was something sad to Ryley, realizing that Keen was still clinging to the belief that Yu was alive. He shook his head, opening his PDA and reluctantly scrolling to the picture he had found. 

When he had first seen the photo, Ryley knew right away when it was taken. He also knew he would definitely be having nightmares tonight. 

He remembered the feeling of something coming up under him. The monster from the Aurora unintentionally giving him a place to plant his feet and make the final push to the safety of a sea cave.

In the picture was the blurry photo of teeth, so many teeth. One foot was placed squarely between the creature’s four eyes and the other farther up on its horn. Even with how shaky the PDA’s camera had been, the anger- the pure hate in those bottomless black eyes showed clear as day. 

Keen’s face grew sickly pale, and he accepted the PDA with shaky hands. “Big, big monster?”

“...yes.”

Keen swore under his breath as he studied the PDA, finding another photo Ryley had not realized he had taken, this one of the monster as it was swimming toward him. He could hear the roar even now.

“That thing is bigger than the lifepods,” Keen mumbled. “A leviathan.”

“What?”

“Ah,” Keen paused in his thought. Handing back the PDA. “I know someone fascinated with this sort of thing… It’s an old legend from Earth. It was a sea monster that would attack ships. A giant sea serpent.”

“Big umm… fish any, umm… fish… big, fish?”  

“Any big fish? Have you seen more?”

Ryley scrolled over to his PDA entry on the Reefbacks. Pointing out that the PDA couldn’t identify the class size.

“Your entry states these are non-aggressive,” Keen noted. “Leviathan’s are violent.”

“Big?”

“You want permission to classify these as Leviathan-sized?”

Ryley rolled his eyes and added “Leviathan” to complete the size entry. He wanted an opinion, not permission. Keen was clearly used to giving orders. It was something Ryley would have to learn to live with just as much as he hoped the second officer would learn to lighten up. This wasn’t the Aurora, this was two people needing to work together to survive. This was no place for a chain of command or egos. 

The Sunbeam couldn’t get here soon enough. 

“Robinson, you’ve been out there on your own for a few days. All the lifepods you found held no survivors?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t even see Lifepod 9 when I left my pod… No survivors?”

“No, umm… not get umm… inside.”

“You couldn’t get it open? Perhaps they were keeping it sealed shut?”

“Damaged.”

“Flooding?”

“Umm, maybe.”

“It was a tough swim to the surface, and that was before that thing bit my leg. Nothing at Ozzy’s or the people of Lifepod 3?”

“Nothing.”

“Damn, I liked Ozzy.” Keen sighed. “Very well. I’m still not up to snuff. Give it one more day Robinson. Then we will reconsider your proposal to-”

They were cut off by a violent, splashing sound. From a flooded tunnel a woman stumbled out. Her long brown hair tangled around her arms and waist. She stared at them, gasping for breath, before falling to her knees and sobbing.

[clreria]

Ria is cool! Is she an oc or an existing character? Also what’s her lore? :)

Thank you so much for your kind words and interest! (I was extremely happy to receive your question though it took me a while to prepare the answer... sorry for that!! ;_; )

(I hope the quality of the image is acceptable for comfortable reading but just in case I'll copy the text in the very end of the post )

Ria is an original character inspired mostly by asian popular culture origins: games/anime/music (e.g., FGO, Honkai Impact 3rd, Madoka Magica, OkameP's songs) and world mythology/philosophy/history, as well as classical literature/music/paintings (e.g., characters like the Count of Monte Cristo and Irene Adler in particular) As for Marvel lore, I was hugely expired by Matt's story and Illyana Rasputina's story Overall, the most charming ideas I personally find in Ria are:

Healing through art that captures the beauty of the world around us.

A human's yearning to find warmth, a sense of home, and connection with others.

The duality within humans—their ability to embody kindness and tenderness while making harsh (and even cruel) decisions for a greater purpose.

________________________________________________________

The text from the image: REAL NAME: Angelina Mikhailovna Sokolova (birth name), Alleria Betskaya (current legal name) OCCUPATION: Senior ML Researcher at VECTOR Inc., RnD Department; VECTOR’S co-founder and CTO (classified) LEGAL STATUS: Deceased (Angelina), Finnish citizen (Alleria) OTHER ALIASES: Angel\Princess (coined by Matt Murdock), Ri PLACE OF BIRTH: Saint Petersburg, Russia MARITAL\RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single KNOWN RELATIVES: Maria Yuriyevna Sokolova (mother, deceased), Mikhail Alexandrovich Sokolov (father), Victoria Betskaya (aunt, deceased) GROUP AFFILIATION: VECTOR Inc., The Collegium (former) BASE OF OPERATIONS: Worldwide, the Primordial Realm (former)

HISTORY: Ria's childhood was blissfully ignorant of her family's true nature until she and her mother were kidnapped by a rival gang targeting her father, a notorious crime lord in Saint Petersburg. This event changed Ria’s life dramatically. Though the traumatic incident is mostly a blur, she vividly recalls her mother being shot and her last words: "Inherit my eyes." The next thing she remembers is her father's men arriving to find her standing amidst a chaotic bloodbath, with all the rival gang members dead around her. To ensure Ria’s safety and future, her father transferred the guardianship to Ria’s aunt, who ran an elite girls' boarding school. This institution, rooted in the Russian Empire and relocated to Finland post-October Revolution, trained individuals to influence high society from behind the scenes. A harsh upbringing with rigorous training and high expectations instilled in Ria an unwavering commitment to her principles, driven by the doctrine that the end justifies the means. This environment has also fostered a sense of perfectionism and a hidden feeling of inadequacy, well-covered by the perfect facade expected in high society. Ria's excellent education allowed her to successfully enroll in Oxford's School of International Relations, Diplomacy, and Law. Moving to the UK, she became one of the most diligent students while finally enjoying a normal life with friends and hobbies. However, after two years of studying, her aunt urgently called her back home.

Over these two years, Ria's aunt's mind deteriorated, leading to delusions. Mistaking Ria for her mother, Maria, she attacked her in a jealous rage, leaving Ria's body in a coma. Ria’s consciousness was transported to the Primordial Realm, where she survived against dangerous entities, developed new abilities, and joined the Collegium, a group fighting the Corruption that turns beings into monsters. There, she formed a deep bond with Haruko, a medic from a war-torn future. While they eventually found a way to return Ria to the human world and even founded a tech company “Vector”, tragedy struck when Haruko sacrificed herself to save Ria from a primordial entity consumed by Corruption. As the Collegium members began succumbing to Corruption, losing their humanity and being erased from existence, Ria discovered that the Judge, their leader, had orchestrated these betrayals. In the end, she executed the Judge and took his place, leading a centuries-long purge of the Primordial Realm. To prevent herself from falling to Corruption, she sealed herself within her own consciousness, using the isolation to recover and reflect on the devastating events, including Haruko's sacrifice. Upon returning to the human world after a 10000 mental years long exile, where only three months had passed, Ria moved to New York to reclaim her company and finish her friends' unfinished business, trying to retire from her heroic past. But her quiet life was disrupted by a subway mob raid, where Ria stepped in to help Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer, showing him a rare kindness he had never known.

HEIGHT: 160 CM WEIGHT: 47 KG EYES: VIOLET (WEARS GREEN LENSES) HAIR: DARK (DEEP MAGENTA) SKILLS\TALENTS: Ria has extensive knowledge in humanities and technical subjects. She also excels in fine arts (drawing, piano, and violin), and speaks multiple languages. Her strong analytical skills and inductive reasoning enhance her observation abilities, while genetic recombination boosts her cognitive capacities, including nervous system resilience and information processing speed. WEAPONS\EQUIPMENT: Despite her enhanced sight, which could rival Hawkeye's precision and Bullseye's deadliness, Ria is a civilian who does not wield any weapons. Due to a heart condition, she lacks endurance and physical strength, and her childhood trauma makes her uncomfortable with guns and sensitive to blood. Instead, she values information and knowledge as her greatest assets — her iPhone and MacBook are her essential tools and her greatest shield. FUN FACT: Ria has a deep appreciation for the arts, with a particular passion for Gesamtkunstwerk, or total art forms like theater. Unfortunately, her favorite ballet, "Swan Lake," which she saw in New York, deeply disappointed Ria due to Odile's overly flashy and inaccurate portrayal.

[xandercainxxx]

Reginald Blechman, known as Wrench, is the deuteragonist of Watch Dogs 2, a playable character in Watch Dogs: Legion and one of the two main protagonists (alongside Aiden Pearce) of the DLC Bloodline. A hacker affiliated with DedSec, he works alongside Marcus, Sitara, and Josh, serving as the group's engineer and fixer.

Wrench is a slim, average height man. His appearance are mainly inspired by punk rock culture. His clothing consists of a black spiked leather mask with an LED visor, a spiked vest with attached patches and pins, a black DedSec hoodie, ripped denim jeans, a red spiked bracelet, black strapped bracelets, and black studded leather sneakers.

Wrench's mask and mechanical goggles appear to "blink" emotes and various eye expressions, and the mask features a voice modulator that gives his voice a more robotic tone. The goggles can also project multiple pixelated symbols and appear to be made of many small, square-shaped bulbs. Wrench also has a series of tattoos on his arms influenced by Cyberculture. His vest shows a sewed patch inspired by the "y u no" meme on the right side, and an "anarchy" symbol tattooed on his neck. He has additional tattoos on his stomach and back, which are visible when he attends Swelter Skelter in costume during Looking Glass.

While attending the Swelter Skelter fest, he wears his trademark mask, a hood that features a large mohawk, a black motorcycle vest, a black man-thong with a spiked front, spiked kneepads, and black shoes.

Wrench's face is revealed when he is deprived of his mask during W4TCHED. He has a large, prominent port-wine stain birthmark around his left eye.[1] He has blue eyes and light brown hair. Interestingly, during the mission Motherload, he wears spiked shoulder-pads and spiked knee pads despite not wearing them in any cutscenes before the mission. It's possible that he put them on just for that mission, or developers forgot to remove them from the controllable model. In Bloodline, he removes his mask and reveals his face to Aiden to prove he is trustworthy enough, saying "No Mask, No Wrench, Just Reggie."

Wrench has a wild and humorous personality, as seen in a cutscene where he is trying to get a chip from a toaster; instead of properly taking it apart he smashes it with a sledgehammer instead. However, he appears to also be one of the more aggressive members of DedSec, as seen in the World Premiere trailer in which one of his dialogue to Marcus says that they are at war with everyone, including puppies. His aggression extends to his strategic thinking - during False Profits, he suggests making up a lie about the New Dawn church to discredit them before Sitara and Marcus counter that the risks would outweigh the rewards. He has an affinity for spikes or a punk aesthetic, as seen by his choice in clothing. He has gone to some parties in his life sipping beer under his mask. Some people say they actually have seen him without the mask but he prefers to deny it.

According to an in-game audio log, the FBI developed a psychological profile of him and determined him to have a troubled, possibly traumatic childhood. As such, he is socially awkward around women, has trouble conveying his emotions, and wears his trademark mask as a "billboard" to show how he feels (one FBI agent even likened this to Roy Orbison's use of sunglasses). In another in-game audio log found in the original hackerspace, Horatio mentions that Wrench wears his mask to dodge CTOS's facial recognition, but probably has a deeper reason such as hiding from a dangerous past.

He is also very crude, as in the mission Haum Sweet Haum, he tells Marcus to get the Haum 2.0 Zero-Day before "some do-gooder white hat tells Haum how to... cockblock [them]" and at the very end of his portion of the Motherload mission, upon destroying Blume's backup servers he tells Marcus "I came, I saw, I blew shit up, I came again." Wrench also has a passion for rock music.

In Bloodline, it is revealed that Wrench is bisexual, with him having a former husband, Zane. At this point, Wrench seems to be more open with his feelings and emotions, and also seems to be more comfortable with showing his face.

[rogue-bard]

Ahahahahaha just happened in a group chat at work (obviously far politer than I am summarizing it here, but honestly this was the gist. Only, the CTO wasn't politer, he was actually way more annoyed with this guy haha)

Customer Service: Uh, can you email company XYZ about ABC?

Me (Development): I can give you their email address.

Customer Service: No, please email them. Oh and also about DEF.

Me: Why me? (I know why me, because I am the only "woman" (in his eyes) that he can reach at the moment lol)

Customer Service: I don't have time. Also email them about GHI.

Me: You have time to write this stuff to me. You just need to write it to the email I give you instead. Takes the same time.

Customer Service: No it doesn't.

CTO of the company (because this was a group chat, remember?): Can you please stop treating a dev like your personal secretary and just do it?

Customer Service: Well, *I* can't do it.

CTO: Fine. Get (another colleague) to do it.

Customer Service: @(the other colleague) look at the chat history and do everything I told Indy to do.

CTO: (the other colleague) doesn't have the time to go through the chat history for you. Send him your stuff in an email!

Customer Service: Do you have any idea how much time I will waste, going through the chat history and putting it all together into an email??!?

Me: MY DUDE, YOU PUT IT INTO THIS GROUP CHAT INSTEAD OF JUST WRITING THE EMAIL YOURSELF.

[ateamsoftsolutions01]

CTO App Trends to Watch Out for in 2024 and Beyond

As we navigate through 2024, the role of Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) continues to evolve, driven by rapid technological advancements. CTO apps are at the forefront of this evolution, offering new features and capabilities to meet the changing demands of the tech landscape. Here are the key CTO app trends to watch out for in 2024 and beyond.

1. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

AI and machine learning are transforming CTO apps, providing advanced analytics and automation capabilities. These technologies enable predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and intelligent decision-making, allowing CTOs to stay ahead of potential issues and optimize operations.

2. Enhanced Cybersecurity Measures

With cyber threats becoming more sophisticated, enhanced cybersecurity measures are essential. CTO apps are increasingly incorporating advanced security protocols, such as zero-trust architecture, real-time threat detection, and AI-driven security analytics, to protect sensitive data and maintain compliance.

3. Integration with IoT Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expanding rapidly, and CTO apps are integrating with IoT devices to provide real-time monitoring and control. This trend enables CTOs to manage and analyze data from connected devices, improving operational efficiency and facilitating smart decision-making.

4. Cloud-Native Solutions

Cloud-native solutions are becoming a standard in CTO apps, offering scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. These apps leverage cloud platforms to provide seamless integration, real-time collaboration, and access to advanced computing resources, making it easier for CTOs to manage complex tech environments.

5. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) Integration

AR and VR are no longer just for gaming. CTO apps are beginning to integrate these technologies to provide immersive training, remote support, and enhanced visualization for complex projects. This trend enhances team collaboration and problem-solving capabilities.

6. Low-Code and No-Code Development

Low-code and no-code development platforms are democratizing app development, enabling CTOs and their teams to build and deploy applications quickly without extensive coding knowledge. This trend accelerates innovation and reduces time-to-market for new solutions.

7. Sustainability and Green IT Initiatives

As sustainability becomes a priority, CTO apps are incorporating features to monitor and reduce environmental impact. This includes energy-efficient operations, resource optimization, and tracking carbon footprints, helping organizations align with green IT initiatives.

8. Personalization and User Experience

User experience is critical for the success of any app. CTO apps are increasingly focusing on personalization, offering customizable dashboards, intuitive interfaces, and user-friendly features to enhance productivity and satisfaction.

In conclusion, these trends are shaping the future of CTO apps, driving innovation and efficiency. By staying abreast of these developments, CTOs can leverage the latest technologies to lead their organizations successfully into the future. Embrace these trends to stay competitive and achieve strategic goals in 2024 and beyond.

[endlessarms]

an extension to the world I have been writing in, and the development of more evil corporate OCs: A meeting with Alexander Myrewood goes very very wrong

(contains drugging/intoxication, implications of mass population manipulation, aphrodisiacs, and second person language)

The most subtle hint of lavender punctuates the signature Katascheth "clean air" as you sit in the waiting room. The seat, comfortable yet professional beneath you, built for the kind of person you're currently pretending to be - a "franchising expert" ready to meet Katascheth Agriculture and Bioprocessing's CTO, Alexander Myrewood. Scientist, innovator, hero of the food crisis - and suspected of shipping millions of tonnes of unregulated chemical substances over the past 4 years.

"Excuse me? Are you Dr Myrewood's 3pm?"

A meeting, under false pretences, to gather as much information as possible about Global Food Solutions' supply chains. You'd done similar before, but none with such a high profile target. That's why you were feeling off. That was a reasonable explanation. Nothing else.

"Ah, you must be with the franchise. Come in."

The meeting, all things considered, doesn't go too badly. Alexander is a particularly clinical man, and is more than willing to give you the standard partnership introduction. That is, until you bring the conversation back around to the supply chains, your focus dropping briefly as your words feel just that bit too warm in your mouth.

"Ah, yes. Your questions. I suppose I should at least pretend to answer them. Of course, all of these questions would be highly pertinent - if you were meant to be here."

Shit. Was it your drop in focus? That drop, that doesn't seem to be going anywhere; in fact, that seems to be growing, the air feeling somewhat warmer all around you, your clothes feeling more and more uncomfortable.

"Oh dear. Was it something you ate?" His voice, tinged with fake pity, cuts through the distraction.

"There are certain advantages that come with having a monopoly on the world's food. For example, as long as, say, 20% of your diet comes from Global Food Solutions, your alpha-melanocyte levels should be solidly above what was previously considered a baseline. With the levels of re-peptide disinhibitors present in the air conditioning here - which, I'll have you know, fall just below regulatory limits - your body is currently metabolising its own bremelanotide. It's a miracle, honestly, though by the looks of you, you're a little too far gone to appreciate it. I'll sum it up for you - you're filling your own blood with aphrodisiacs. Or, though this may not be the exact medical terminology - you're a horny fucking slut, of your own creation."

"I've got to say, this is an excellent performance. I did suspect the new blend would be effective, but this is far above the upper limit. Well. Either it's very effective, or you're *enjoying* this. But you wouldn't be, would you? The feeling of my fingers brushing against you, taking advantage of your… less than optimal state?"

Fuck, FUCK, you really shouldn't be. Of course you shouldn't. But every movement he makes, every tiny brush of skin, sends sparks through your very core, feeding into the need within you. You can't resist this. You need this.

"I need an answer, slut. Are. You. Enjoying. This?"

"Y-yes"

"Well then. That complicates things. Here I thought I had an unbiased research opportunity in my hands, and it turns out you're just a whore who'd fall apart at a single touch, even without my influence. Regardless. I've got plenty of other tools to try out. Let's get to work."

[umgeorge]

george russell speaks to journalists on media day, azerbaijan - april 27, 2023 (transcription under the cut)

Interviewer: "...one of the harder weekends of the year so far? All these qualifyings, all these races, walls so close?" George: "Yeah, I mean, we're going from two out of the five sessions being a competition, to now four out of the five being a competition, so same for everybody. It's not the easiest track in the world to have a format like this. Track's gonna be dirty in practice, which makes it quite irrelevant. They've resurfaced the track in half of the corners, which will have a massive change on the tires so, again, that's another unknown. But it's the same for everyone, so we'll go in with an open mind and try and maximize it." Interviewer: "Okay. Anything to maximize on the car? Any new bits, or are we still waiting for Imola, more or less?" George: "No, we've brought a few new bits; just sort of part of the standard development process throughout the year, but nothing that will transform it this weekend. But we'll see. It's been tight with Ferrari and Aston Martin the last two races. Ferrari have historically been pretty quick here. They're always quick on the C5 tire compound circuits-so here and Monaco and Singapore, they're pretty competitive-so they normally have a bit of a trick up their sleeve when it comes to that soft tire, so they might be a little bit more competitive than we've seen in recent races. But the race and points is scored on... Well, on Saturday and Sunday now, so yeah, let's see." Interviewer: "Okay. Alright. And big news from the team, in terms of getting back into the competitive sharp end of Formula 1: a change of Technical Director. James Allison's come back. Technical Director Mike Elliott swapped jobs with him; CTO, Chief Technical Officer. How do you feel about it?" George: "Yeah, I think it's really good news, to be honest, because obviously Mike was the Technical Director and James was sort of overseeing a few different projects, and now, effectively, we've got both of them full-time, and Mike is one of, if not the, most intelligent bloke I've ever come across in my life. But I think placing him in this new role will really put him in his element, and I think... You know, when you come to a team sport, not just drivers, but Toto's managing 2,000 people, or you talk about a football team, you need to get your best players in the right position to get the overall team result and, effectively, that's what this change has been. So I think, in both regards, we've swapped around and probably put both where they belong." Interviewer: "Okay. Just finally, the team's been very clear about it wasn't anyone being held accountable for the cars that you had last year and this year that haven't been right at the top of Formula 1. And it's not like W13 and 14 have been one man-Mike's-cars, have they? It's all..." George: "It's teamwork. It's absolutely teamwork. There's a number of people who contribute towards, let's say, the overall decisions and feedback into the rest of the factory, or of the direction that we take, and James was involved in some of those conversations and decisions in the past. But it's how the game goes. This was a team decision. Obviously there's the saying, you win and lose together, and that's truly how it is, and there's never one person accountable for any success or any failure. It's always a team..."

[aipreneur]

OpenAI CEO and CTO discuss the potential impact of AI on society, stressing the need for responsible development that aligns with human values and avoids negative consequences such as eliminating jobs or increasing racial bias. They assert that although AI has potential dangers, not using this technology could be more dangerous. The CEOs also highlight the importance of human control and public input in defining guard rails for AI, as well as the potential for AI to revolutionize education and provide personalized learning for every student. While acknowledging the risks associated with AI, they express optimism about its potential benefits in areas like healthcare and education.

[izicodes]

Saturday 20th January 2024

Someone asked me earlier this week a question that I didn't really deeped about beforehand. Basically, I was stuck answering it and it boggled my mind ever since because it stuck to me how I didn't think about this earlier on?

"What are your career goals?"

Since I started learning programming and Web Development back in 2020, I just thought "Oh getting a proper job in Tech would be great!"... but now I got it, it's like okay what now? Do I just continue this, learn new things, and just stick to this position?

I had to answer this person straight away for specific reasons but I said "Maybe being a Senior Software Engineer would be nice 🤷🏾‍♀️" and yeah I'm sure having that title would be great for my Dad to boast to his family and mates about "Oh my daughter is a Senior Software Engineer~! 😎", which honestly I don't mind as he's happy, but what else? What do I actually want to work towards now - short and long-term?

But making short and long-term goals is very important. For some people, this helps them have a path for them to work towards. I am one of those people because that's what I did to get where I am now in my programming journey, but I didn't think THIS far as to what next after I got the job I wanted. I came up with some ideas but I might work on them a bit:

Senior Software Engineer be nice?

Whatever a CTO actually does? (long-term)

Be proficient enough in Web Development technologies to teach others properly maybe? Especially the younger generation (HELP I tried teaching my sister coding and she called me a nerd...)

Work on my own web app product thingy?? and sell?? and earn money?? (confused about how I would do that though)

Venture out to Game / App Development maybe? (long-term)

Ability to work anywhere internationally (I have other goals where I would have to visit countries so would also like to work in Tech as I complete those side-quests)

Right now I am comfortable working FOR someone / company - I'm the type that SOMEHOW I become a CEO I still would work than be a no work/meetings/travel to conferences type of CEO if that makes sense

Help other companies temporarily on Web Dev stuff (free or paid, I don't mind - just want experience, innit?)

Work in another country maybe? That doesn't speak English though cause that's cheating (to me, I like challenges and language learning is a really good one)

But maybe now I will have something to work towards, but I will soon convert this bunch of ideas to a roadmap a bit~! 🤔

Thank you for reading and hope this makes you think about your own goals in terms of career/work/profession~!

[mariacallous]

Sam Altman, who as CEO of OpenAI gave the world ChatGPT and became one of the most influential people in technology, has departed the company after losing the confidence of its board.

A company statement says that a review “concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Mira Murati, previously OpenAI’s chief technology officer, was appointed interim CEO while OpenAI searches for a full-time replacement, the statement says.

Altman did not respond to a request for comment. OpenAI declined to comment.

The announcement said that Greg Brockman, who cofounded OpenAI with Altman alongside leading names in AI and technology including Elon Musk, would also step down from his role as chair of the company’s board.

No reason was given for Brockman’s change in position but he announced that he had resigned from the company several hours after the company's statement. He shared an email sent to OpenAI staff on X. “I’m super proud of what we’ve all built since starting in my apartment 8 years ago," the email said. "We’ve been through tough and great times together, accomplishing so much despite all the reasons it should have been impossible. But based on today’s news, I quit.”

An investor in OpenAI who spoke anonymously because they did not have full details of the board's concerns said its statement suggested the gravity of Altman's alleged lack of candor was significant and it's possible the changeover could lead to employees heading elsewhere. OpenAI and AI rivals such as Google and Meta have intensified their competition for AI talent since ChatGPT's debut last year.

The surprising capabilities of ChatGPT, such as solving complex puzzles and handling questions that appear to require human-like reasoning, stunned AI researchers, amazed the public, and triggered an arms race among big tech companies to build more powerful AI. The bot’s success turned Altman into a tech celebrity, consulted by world leaders on the future path of AI technology.

Altman appeared yesterday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, telling hundreds of business and government leaders that AI systems could solve humanity's most-pressing problems if their development were pursued responsibly.

“We're on a path to self-destruction as a species right now,” he said, sitting alongside executives from Meta and Google. “We need new technology if we want to flourish for tens, hundreds of thousands, and millions of years more.”

Altman acknowledged that success wasn’t certain, but he expressed confidence that AI would ultimately be beneficial, describing the technology as his life's work, from childhood. “This will be the most transformative and beneficial technology humanity has yet invented,” he said.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit focused on safely developing AI more intelligent than humans. It was funded by Musk and others, including Peter Thiel and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman.

OpenAI became a for-profit company in 2019, as the cost of building and training advanced AI became challenging. It struck a partnership with Microsoft in 2019 that saw the software giant invest a billion dollars and provide cloud computing power for training OpenAI’s algorithms. This year Microsoft agreed to invest a further $10 billion into OpenAI.

OpenAI developed a number of cutting-edge AI projects in the years after its creation, but the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022 quickly turned the company into one of the most important businesses on earth.

Microsoft was given a brief heads up about OpenAI's announcement of management changes today, according to a person familiar with the matter speaking on the condition of anonymity. They declined to say what Microsoft was told about the OpenAI board's justifications.

Microsoft later posted a statement from CEO Satya Nadella saying that the company is committed to its partnership with OpenAI and to Murati and her team. “Together, we will continue to deliver the meaningful benefits of this technology to the world,” Nadella's statement says.