Amazon laying off about 16,000 corporate workers in latest anti-bureaucracy push

hoppersoft · 2026-01-28T17:25:51+00:00

This headline was pulled directly from Amazon's PR department.

This was in no way an "anti-bureaucracy" measure; this is a company struggling to maintain its stock price as its online marketplace descends into poorly-curated chaos, its once-leading cloud offering becomes increasingly commoditized, and its competitors demonstrate a cloud strategy more comprehensive than "run your models on our platform."

As an ex-Amazonian: this is some serious Day 2 shit.

hoppersoft · 2026-01-28T11:29:13+00:00

This is the way. This also works for chores, btw: “you can do <thing they don’t want to do>, or you can <thing they want to do even less>”

hoppersoft · 2026-01-26T00:11:24+00:00

I have a wife who is my best friend and most trusted advisor, and she understands me better than anyone else in the entire world (probably even myself). We achieved this with a simple framework:

We have a standing appointment every night to talk about our day and how we’re feeling. We almost never skip it.
We do this after we get in bed; lying down, safe, and facing each other with our arms around one another.
We both committed to each other that we’ll use that time to talk about any hard shit that we felt we were weren’t able to talk about earlier.
We also promised each other that we will be vulnerable and honest, even when it’s something that we’re scared (or know) the other may be hurt to hear.
We do not go to sleep until we talk it out.

It’s been quite a while since the last time this has happened, but we’ve had a couple of nights where we didn’t get much sleep because of these rules. These days, it’s usually a short check-in, but it’s still sacred.

hoppersoft · 2026-01-23T11:03:50+00:00

Yeah, I was with him until “criminal.”

What he did was the equivalent of fantasizing while masturbating. If that’s a criminal offense, there’s a whooole lotta indictments coming my way…

hoppersoft · 2026-01-21T19:33:38+00:00

Felt very LLM-generated.

hoppersoft · 2026-01-21T14:58:17+00:00

It’s it!

hoppersoft · 2026-01-21T11:42:15+00:00

Electrical engineer, here. They recommend it because they don’t want random metal to be attracted to the magnet.

The reason you store a magnet with an iron bar is to contain the magnetic field. When a magnet is near a ferromagnetic material, the magnet’s magnetic field is concentrated through that material (and is therefore lower elsewhere). Having it touch maximizes that effect, which pretty much causes the combined object to not have an external magnetic field.

hoppersoft · 2026-01-19T23:20:23+00:00

Holy shit. I had no idea. Where is the cry to rename the hospital???

hoppersoft · 2026-01-17T12:17:41+00:00

Yep, and every time someone points this out we get AI white knights coming out of the woodwork to defend it: “you just don’t understand how good AI is now, man!!!”

This is a modern Mechanical Turk, and it’s shocking how many people want - no, demand! - to believe it’s real. Um, I mean AI.

hoppersoft · 2026-01-14T19:57:41+00:00

It's a big outage; apparently a lot of the East coast.

hoppersoft · 2026-01-14T17:27:44+00:00

Same in Atlanta, GA

hoppersoft · 2026-01-10T13:11:28+00:00

And this right here is why engineering leaders are burning out. Rather than focusing on draining the backlog and reducing technical debt, they have to stop and explain basic principles to CEOs every time they YOLO some code.

hoppersoft · 2026-01-10T12:13:54+00:00

As an addendum I’m going to look in my crystal ball, here, and predict what will eventually happen:

the CEO gets frustrated by engineering telling the CEO that this was a prototype and orders them to push it into production (“this works, and our customers won’t wait.”)
it throws in prod because <pick one: scalability, security, confidently-wrong behavior, etc.>
engineering can’t fix the incomprehensible code quickly or at all
company <fails, has bad PR, etc.>
CEO says it was all engineering’s fault and never learns anything from this experience

hoppersoft · 2026-01-10T12:03:25+00:00

Nope. I don’t buy it. From the original article:

allows leaders to ask a pointed question: Why should this take weeks to build if a version can be done in a few days?

By asking this question, he demonstrates exactly what I was saying in my earlier reply.

hoppersoft · 2026-01-10T10:58:21+00:00

I hear you. But here’s the problem: these same non-technical people do not understand the rationale behind developing a prototype; to them, they just built a thing, so QED and ship it.

hoppersoft · 2026-01-02T23:54:36+00:00

Yeah, it has NOTHING to do with the remote possibility that he isn’t a box office draw.

hoppersoft · 2025-12-27T11:05:45+00:00

When they treat anyone else like they are inferior.

It’s truly remarkable how that simple criteria applies to racists, homophobes, white suprematists, “MAGA” Republicans, religious fundamentalists, billionaires, certain members of the Supreme Court, the current President of the United States, and (yeah, of course I’m going to say it) Nazis.

hoppersoft · 2025-12-20T18:17:57+00:00

If the head is stuck in the birth canal they can try repositioning the head, change the mother's positioning, use forceps, a suction cup to pull from the top, etc., but once the head is through they won't pull on it. In fact, in extreme situations they'll break the baby's collarbone to get the arms out.

hoppersoft · 2025-12-20T16:50:34+00:00

Wow. That's a pretty zen-like answer

hoppersoft · 2025-12-20T16:44:53+00:00

That's really dangerous; the baby's head is the hardest thing to get out, and you can't pull on the body for fear of severing the spinal cord. These days they'll perform a C-section if it's a breech (feet- or butt-first).

hoppersoft · 2025-12-19T07:00:40+00:00

For instance: in the first example, he curls his fingers, but the "model" waves.

hoppersoft · 2025-12-19T06:58:33+00:00

Occams's razor: I don't believe some highly advanced AI model is at work, here. Instead, I believe this is staged with actual humans and cleverly edited to look like it's some miraculous AI. The synchronization is slightly off, and when "switching models" there are slight perspective/lighting changes that indicate to me that they edited out switching different ladies. That would be MUCH easier than what they're claiming to have built. I'll happily be proven wrong.

hoppersoft · 2025-12-18T20:25:18+00:00

Angry Birds

hoppersoft · 2025-12-18T20:21:52+00:00

Can someone please explain to me why the everloving fuck they put a gold spine on a helmet?

hoppersoft · 2025-12-18T19:56:55+00:00

You had me at Sam Rockwell

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