Folks who have institutional knowledge that is really critical to the company are likely treated quite well in prestigious roles and paid handsomely. If they take a modest buyout offer, it's probably because they were close to retirement anyway. Any truly critical role will have a succession plan. And if someone the company really doesn't want to lose signals they intend to take the offer without a credible succession plan, the company could just make them an even better personal offer to stay.

At the same time, I'm sure there are many folks who over-estimate how important their role and knowledge are to the company, especially to its future, which may look increasingly different from its past. Some of these people can become active blockers or political problems that are difficult, visible, and painful to deal with. Getting them to exit on their own is a win for the company, and it avoids the morale problem of visibly performance managing them or firing them.

Hardware pricing and availabilty pre-COVID was pretty predictable and stable, which meant the consumer could extract a meaningful cost advantage if they were willing to do the relatively modest amount of work of sourcing components individually and personally assembling the build. Right now, though, some places like Microcenter appear to have a cost advantage that fundamentally relies on market and pricing instability and can only be achieved through deeper integration with the supply chain and bulk purchasing in advance -- something a retailer like Microcenter can do, but I personally cannot.

Then, mostly by chance, I saw that my local Microcenter had some pre-builts for sale, and I ended up picking one up for <$5k that had "best in slot" components across the board, including a 5090 and even a high-end power supply.

The last time I built a gaming PC was upwards of a decade ago, and at that time the prevailing wisdom was to never buy a pre-built unless you had a massive amount of disposable income and couldn't spare even just one weekend to dedicate to a hobby project that could benefit you for years. Now, it was absolutely a no-brainer.

I think this is a really important point that is getting overlooked in most conversations about GitHub's reliability lately.

GitHub was not designed or architected for a world where millions of AI coding agents can trivially generate huge volumes of commits and PRs. This alone is such a huge spike and change in user behavior that it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect even a very well-architected site to struggle with reliability. For GitHub, N 9s of availability pre-AI simply does not mean the same thing as N 9s of availability post-AI. Those are two completely different levels of difficulty, even when N is the same.

Time will heal some of this naturally. But the #1 recommendation I would always make to anyone in this situation is to pursue exercise. Weightlifting, hiking, etc., generate rapidly compounding results across multiple dimensions of your life and also often generate some of the most authentic social experiences you can find as a 30+ year old adult.

That's about Google, though. The picture about Sundar specifically is harder to evaluate. The pessimistic take is that Google had that position already and Sundar failed to proactively lead through a fundamental product shift, forcing the company onto the defensive for some time. The optimistic take is that Sundar, having occupied the top spot since 2015, prioritized investments in the company's overall technology development, then successfully executed a rapid product pivot when the market changed, securing a dominant position in both research and product that nobody else can compete with long-term.

Giving precedence to words over actions is how you get taken advantage, abused, deceived, etc.

Obviously the military wants to use it for that purpose since they couldn't accept Anthropic's extremely limited terms.

One can easily and immediately infer the answers to both your questions are yes.

I take that to mean they don't want the military using Claude to decide who to kill. As a hyperbolic yet frankly realistic example, they don't want Claude to make a mistake and direct the military to kill innocent children accidentally identified as narco-terrorists.

At least, that's the most charitable interpretation of everything going on. I suspect they are also worried that the sitting administration wants to use AI to help them execute a full autocratic takeover of the United States, so they're attempting to kill one of the world's most innovative companies to set an example and pressure other AI labs into letting their technology be used for such purposes.

3 years is really not a long time. So I'd say it comes down to emotional fortitude and probability of staying employed. If your time horizon is longer than 3 years, the calculation of whether to sell should essentially come down to calculating your odds of keeping your job. I bet it's possible to build a robust mathematical model that recommends a decision given your best personal estimate of your layoff probability during a severe market crash.