u/geronimosan

Two days before July 4th, Brad Smith posted a video series on LinkedIn celebrating America’s 250th birthday. “As an American company, we believe we have a responsibility to understand where we have been, learn from it, and help make real for others the opportunities created for us.”

Here’s what Microsoft has made real for others lately: roughly 20,000 jobs cut last year. Nearly 9,000 US employees offered “voluntary” retirement this spring under a Rule of 70 formula – age plus tenure – that conveniently targets the company’s older American workers. And per this week’s reporting, thousands more layoffs landing next week across Xbox, sales, and consulting. All while pouring $100+ billion into international AI infrastructure.

Now the timing. Companies that are actually proud of being American – the flag makers, the ones staffed with veterans – have been celebrating this anniversary for months. Microsoft discovered its patriotism 48 hours before the fireworks. And not with a national campaign, not a single TV spot. One executive’s LinkedIn post. You don’t reach the American public through LinkedIn. You reach the press and the professional class – the same audience about to read next week’s layoff coverage.

Then watch the videos. They’re entirely about what other Americans did. Founders in Philadelphia. People who “faced uncertainty and made choices.” If Microsoft were proud of its own American story, it would celebrate its own workers – the people who actually built the place. That’s a hard video to make when you’ve spent 18 months walking tens of thousands of them out the door.

So my read: this is air cover. A feel-good history series rolling out “throughout July” – the exact month the layoffs land. Microsoft times its cuts to the fiscal year, which starts July 1. The flag imagery arriving the same week is not a coincidence. It’s a cushion.

The series says history is made by people, in moments, through choices. True. In America’s 250th year, Microsoft’s choice was thousands of pink slips, timed to the fiscal year, wrapped in red, white, and blue.

That’s not celebrating America. That’s borrowing it.

I came across a JD that was really intriguing attempted to apply, on the basic information required fields page, there was a required input field for pronouns. It's not legally required that we identify our gender, ethnicity, veteran status, or disability status, so is it legal for a company to require pronouns?

We hope the American People learn to stop voting for Democrats.

Bongos.

I just visited LinkedIn and it force-pushed the download of a "dtag" file to my computer. Anyone know anything about this, or why LinkedIn is sneaking unwanted files onto our computers?

I've been running extensive STT tests lately, taking numerous factors into consideration, and as a single provider solution, openai gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize is almost perfect and I would love to use it, except it lacks one very important feature: word level timestamp granularity.

This is something absolutely needed for the SaaS I am building, and without this feature, openai gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize cannot be used as a single provider solution, and this makes it difficult to use even in a hybrid multi-provider solution.

Because of this, I am forced to use the next best solution - ElevenLabs Scribe v2 (words) + Pyannotes (diarization) multi-provider solution. It requires more unwieldy and risky coding, but unfortunately is my only real path forward.

But, hey, let me know when openai gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize implements word level timestamp granularity, and I would gladly switch over to it.

After my complaint last week about all of the regressions, I experienced with GPT 5.5. I took time away and just worked with Claude for a while. I came back today to see if things had leveled out and it's just gotten absolutely worse. The first thing I noticed is the speed of the responses - there's very little thinking, it responds as quickly as 5.3 spark. Which is concerning in its own right. But then all of the responses or surface level, they were not deep, they lacked the usual proactive nature. I would give it my usual long, detailed granular prompts, and it would ignore the majority of it. Hallucinations are high, assumptions and inference are overused, fact based processing is out the window.

Continuing to reset usage limits on an LLM model that has been modified to be a complete idiot is pointless. After today, I don't want resets - I want $ credits to my account. I'm tired of paying $200 a month and then having to spend all my time dealing with a shitty AI, bugs, rabbit holes, and regressions.

It's also time for AI companies to be forced to create SLAs, and that consumer protections and rights cover AI product purchases.

But, here's a thought - maybe the cost of running all this AI processing per customer would be improved if AI companies kept the AI smart. The fewer mistakes it makes, the fewer times we are forced to run the same micro-iterative prompts over and over to hold its hand to solve a minor problem. The more AI companies dumb down the AI, the more we have to push your cheaper and dumbed down AI repeatedly to do the same task until it gets it right.

GPT-5.5 is absolutely horrible today. This morning my code was in great working shape after spending yesterday working through a bunch of bugs. Today GPT-5.5 was tasked to implement some easy and well-planned out implementation. Instead, it never got the implementation in, and we spent the entire day - 14 hours - going down rabbit holes introducing one regression after another. No matter how many times I told it to stop rabbit holing and go back and find the root cause, it just kept layering shit on top of shit on top of shit, patching forward and never fixing the root. I'm going to bed, codebase not fixed, a list of regressions to fix tomorrow, my usage having dropped from 95% to 65%, wasted on some idiot version of GPT-5.5. Utterly ridiculous.

Claude Design rolled out to consumer Pro plans a couple days ago. I jumped in the first night to move real, professional UX/UI work forward.

The tool kept erroring out and cancelling tasks mid-stream. Burned hours of tokens repeating the same operations before anything completed. Daily limit gone before I had real output. Forced to wait a day and a half for the "daily" reset.

Came back Thursday at 10 PM, worked four hours, slept. Woke up Friday morning, settled in for a full day of design. One task in, I hit the wall – weekly limits spent, six-day lockout. No warning, no visible usage meter, no countdown. Bam – just gone.

It gave me the option to upgrade my plan for more usage. So, I did. I upgraded to the full $200/month plan. And that's when I found out Claude Design has its own usage limits, separate from the rest of the plan. The Max upgrade did nothing. Design quota was still cooked for the week. Classic bait and switch – the tool's limits push you to upgrade, the upgrade doesn't apply to the tool.

Total productive time before the wall: maybe eight hours. Less than one full workday.

I'm building a complex SaaS and a multi-platform mobile app in parallel, both currently at the UX/UI stage. If I committed to Claude Design as my design tool, my entire pipeline would freeze for a week at a time. Being held hostage by an alpha tool and insane usage limits means this is not a serious tool for professional use.

The output has potential. The model is capable. It's not mind-blowing, but it's convenient. Until it's not. This is alpha, not even beta – the error rate, the retries, and the metering all behave like alpha software shipped to paying customers so the paying customers can be alpha testers.

If you're evaluating this for a project on a deadline: don't bother. You'll watch a week of your roadmap evaporate the same way I did.

Anthropic should be ashamed of themselves.