That would be the "rapid onset gender dysphoria" controversy, which is so politically charged that lay observers (/me waves) will have a very hard time separating science from ideology.
Prompt: Here is a story: "<first few paragraphs of the link>". write a hacker news comment about this story that will get many replies.
Response: Wow, this Alice/ChatGPT project on GitHub is truly groundbreaking! Using machine learning to enable a computer to understand and execute natural language commands is a huge step forward in AI technology. It's exciting to think about the potential applications of this technology, from automating routine tasks to creating more natural and intuitive interfaces for users. However, it's also important to consider the potential ethical and safety implications of AI that can perform complex tasks. I can't wait to see how the community responds to this project and the conversation it sparks.
> The infrastructure is also much better than it was in the 90s. My grandfather would be shocked to see the Nagpur Metro and would think Aliens built it.
I think this is underappreciated. Yes, infra in India is still not Switzerland, but eg. airports are now unimaginably better compared to just 20 years ago, when you needed a biohazard suit to venture into the bathrooms at DEL.
The important context here is that this is a direct reply to a trans person's application to become an admin on Wikipedia. In other words, they're not objecting to trans ideology or something, they're specifically telling a Wikipedian that they can't be an admin because they're trans.
First up, I actually agree that the specific fund donation here is highly sketchy, especially the way it bypassed the usual processes and in particular the conflict of interest involved with the counsel hopping jobs between the WMF and the recipient. So I'm not even going to try to justify it.
However, the WMF also does have a history of concrete actions to improve access to Wikipedia: it funds chapters around the world, seeds obscure language versions that would otherwise not be sustainable, and does stuff like sponsoring flights for students and Wikimedians living in poor countries to various Wiki conferences. I'm totally on board with this and I think it's a fine use of a reasonable portion of the Foundations' money, as long as it doesn't imperil the main mission, which it clearly doesn't.
Nice ninja edit there, your post previously claimed "about 90% goes to pushing woke politics". As you can see below, enumerated in excruciating detail in the annual reports if you'd like to dig in, the biggest component of Wikimedia's expenditure is simply paying the engineers that keep the site running and roll out improvements like the new UI, visual editing, etc. The actual hosting bill (servers, bandwidth, etc) is only a tiny fraction of that cost.
Stripped of jargon, that sentence is saying "many people can't access or contribute to Wikipedia because of racism", which is basically true if you account for second-order effects. For example, a major reason why Haiti is poor and has few Wikipedia users is centuries of European and American prejudice and straight-up racism against former slaves.
Personally, I'd prefer Wikimedia focus on improving access for poor people around the world regardless of skin color, but unfortunately this view seems to have gone out of style.
Big companies are quite paranoid about leaking shutdowns even internally, because they don't want the press to know, customers to start asking questions, team members leaving, etc etc.
I once casually speculated to a director that product X felt like it was going to get the axe. He was visibly freaked out and responded with a fervent Shakespearean lady-doth-protest-too-much denial, complete with demanding to know where I'd heard this from. Inevitably, it turns out that X's days were already numbered, but he already knew and I didn't.
Uhh, no, Altavista was the dominant player before Google and it had plenty of competition. Google's key innovations were leveraging PageRank to extract signal from what other webpages were saying, instead of relying on naive keyword search etc, and then figuring out a way to monetize search with targeted keyword ads when Yahoo and co were stuck with banner impressions.
They all do, but here's an actual example from Tata (TCS). The company I used to work for hired them to support a complicated product requiring an unusual skillset, and the usual story ensued: they wooed the decision makers with the A team and then actually gave them the B team. They got even greedier, though: I stumbled on their hiring ads in the market in question (with the rare skillset requirements), and it was obvious they actively lowered the salary they were offering as the engagement went on, in order to boost their own margins. One year in even the B team was all gone and we were left with D to F- players.