This sounds like a real cross-cultural mismatch, but it’s doing too much work with nationality alone. In a lot of Indian (and broader South Asian) work contexts, questioning instructions can be read as challenging authority or admitting incompetence, so people default to executing without asking. That’s often reinforced by education systems and contractor dynamics where producing something quickly feels safer than pausing to clarify.
Add in time zones, language friction, and fear of losing work, and "just run with it" becomes a rational strategy. Meanwhile, many Western workplaces treat clarification and check-ins as professionalism, so the behavior reads as strange or careless.
The key point is that this usually isn’t lack of curiosity or reflection, but risk management under different norms. The pattern often disappears once expectations are explicit: ask questions, check back, iteration is expected.
Yeah, I agree, the time zones are killer, and this can't be ignored. I work at a company spread over most of the world, with SMEs coming and going as the globe spins.
Back-and-forth iteration and consultation is a genuinely hard problem. Certain kinds of feedback cycles have a minimum latency of "overnight". Which means we need to invest heavily in good communication.
But also, it means more people need to have the "big picture", and they need to be able to make good decisions (not just arbitrary ones). So the ideal goal is to prevent people from going off in random nonsensical directions based on miscommunication, and equip them to actually think strategically about the overall plan. Continent X might make different decisions than continent Y, but they're all talking, and enough people see the goal.
A lot of the international teams I've seen pull this off are ones where an Eastern European or Indian team is just another permanent part of the company, with broad-based professional expertise. Contractors on any continent are a whole different story.
So I think what a lot of people try to blame on Indian management culture (or whatever) really is just a case of "we hired contractors in a different time zone." I mean, there are always cultural issues—Linus Torvalds came from a famously direct management culture, and many US managers tend to present criticism as a not-so-subtle "hint" in between two compliments—but professionals of intelligence and goodwill will figure all that out eventually.
> But also, it means more people need to have the "big picture", and they need to be able to make good decisions (not just arbitrary ones). So the ideal goal is to prevent people from going off in random nonsensical directions based on miscommunication, and equip them to actually think strategically about the overall plan. Continent X might make different decisions than continent Y, but they're all talking, and enough people see the goal.
Very common pattern you see in literature about military strategy, actually. The answer is delegation, heavy use of NCOs, and in general explaining the plan all the way down to the individual soldier. Under the western school it all falls under "initiative".
Notably, a lot of non-western militaries are terrible at it, and a number of military failings in africa, the middle east, and the soviet union (*cough*russia*cough*) are viewed as failures in flexibility with very low initiative, as well as lacking/unskilled NCO corps.
Dunno how you apply that to an organization, but maybe sending skilled workers as a kind of non-comissioned officer could work. Who knows.
> Dunno how you apply that to an organization, but maybe sending skilled workers as a kind of non-comissioned officer could work. Who knows.
The most successful engagements I've had with contracting firms have been when we've shelled out for a team manager and a software architect (in addition to the number of straight developers we want).
The software architect builds a solid understanding of our solution space, and from then on helps translate requirements into terms their engineers are familiar with, and provides code reviews to ensure their contributions are in line with the project goals. The team manager knows how to handle the day-to-day reporting, making sure everyone is on task, escalates blockers over the fence to our engineers and managment, etc.
Without those two roles from the contracting firm's side, I find that timezones and cultural mismatches (engineering culture, that is) pretty much erase the impact of the additional engineering headcount when adding contractors.
Explaining the plan to the individual soldier also works better when the individual soldier is expected to care at all about the overall goal. (Such as believing in the mission of defending the home country.) When the soldier only has extrinsic motivation such as money, top-down command and control and treating soldiers solely as equipment to be spent makes more "sense", in a terrible way.
IT also only works if the soldier is well trained in the things he can do. I can teach you to shoot a machine gun in a couple hours - and half of that time will be figuring out how to shoot and clean it myself (I've used hunting rifles and have enough mechanical knowledge that I think I can figure out the rest - but someone who knows that gun can likely find something I would not figure out). That will be enough for "spray and pray" which is a large part of what a machine gun is used for.
However in a real war you need to figure out what direction to point the gun, and need to know when to fire and when to not. I don't know how the army handles "we are advancing now so don't shoot", or "we are crawling along the ground so make sure you shoot high": someone else needs to give anyone I train those orders. The army trains their machine gun operators better so they can figure a lot of that out without being told.
> the time zones are killer, and this can't be ignored
100% agree, especially when there is minimal overlap during normal office hours. I was managing a dev team in India from the US and it was a real challenge. The company ended up moving team to the US, relocating most of my team. Despite all the people being the same, management became much easier.
Since then I've done US and EU, and EU and IN, and those have all worked fine because we had sufficient overlap during business hours.
He didn't need 8 hours, but zero didn't work. The us and india are about 12 hours apart (there are 4 times zones in the us, day light savings time, and india is offset half an hour, but it rounds out to 12 hours for discussion)
> If you needed 8 hour overlap you were micromanaging?
...ok. I didn't need 8 hours of overlap.
As I mentioned in my first comment, I've also now done US/EU and EU/IN. Both of which have only partial overlap and things have gone well.
With US West Coast and India, I was often doing meetings at 7AM and my devs were doing meetings at 9 or 10PM. That was challenging, irrespective of any cultural differences.
> Contractors on any continent are a whole different story.
Having spent the last ~7 years working for different startups before pivoting, my advice to any founder is this: do not hire overseas consultants. They're good, competent people, but you and your company do not have the tools or the culture to actualize them.
To add to that, it is culturally acceptable and even lauded in India to achieve something by "gaming the system", something usually considered unethical in the west (okay maybe less so in the US).
I would be ashamed to submit an AI slop PR or vulnerability report.
An indian might just say "I have 25 merged PRs in open source projects"
In my experience trying to outsource to India, there is a strong systemic bias towards lying and cheating to get ahead (and that was even before AI), and a focus on milking as much money as possible rather than building great technology.
While there is real talent there, there is also a lot of overhead to find people you can trust.
This is probably just a reflection of the competitive nature of the market and the social ladder tech salaries enable there.
Yes, this is apparently the moment international law finally collapsed. After decades of regime change, covert action, targeted killings, proxy wars, and executive unilateralism carried out by every administration of both parties. What makes this case uniquely intolerable is not the conduct itself, but the failure to dress it up in the usual layers of euphemism and multilateral paperwork. The real violation, it seems, is skipping the rituals.
Right, because this time humans will heroically reject cheaper, faster, better substitutes out of pure reverence for "the human condition." Any day now. We’ve famously done that with factory goods, photography, recorded music, CGI, calculators, spellcheck, and literally every other technology that "could never replace" human craft.
The claim boils down to: AI won’t replace humans because humans like feeling special. A rigorous argument. History definitely supports the idea that sentiment reliably beats convenience, especially once the imitation is indistinguishable and half the price. But yes, this disruption will surely pause out of respect.
2011: Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion, rebrands Lync to Skype for Business, an incredible branding manoeuvre.
2012: Skype peer-to-peer nature and end-to-end encryption removed.
2017: Microsoft launches Teams, competes with own product after driving Skype into the ground for 6 years with encroaching advertising, removing features, and abandonment.
2025: Skype shut-down.
What was the point? When MS bought Skype, they already held a majority market share in the IM market with MSN, which they also shut-down. Between 2011 and 2025 they lost almost all market share for domestic users to WhatsApp and Discord.
This series of events baffles me to no end.
If I remember correctly, they had to buy Skype twice because they didn't get everything g in the first transaction. Also, the purchase was backed by the cia through one of their companies (I don't remember if it was palantir though) to remove the end-to-end encryption.
I think that was ebay. They bought skype but not the p2p tech backing it; fucked the founders on earnouts; the founders refused to reup the contract; ebay was incapable of replacing the tech; and the founders got a bunch of the business back. Presided over by Meg Whitman, who appears to be profoundly incompetent, understanding neither tech nor business.
Not quite--this predates .net. They acquired Hotmail in 1997, while it was running on Solaris mail servers and Apache on FreeBSD for the web frontend. In a highly publicized move, Microsoft ventured to port it to Exchange and IIS on Windows NT. This went on for years on end, with MS claiming to have finished the transition several times, while getting egg on their face. Eventually, they got it running on Windows 2000 and a combination of their flagship products and Windows Services for Unix (the WSL of those times).
It has since been rebranded as MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Hotmail, and Outlook, likely with some 365 thrown in.
Meanwhile, they have mismanaged their once great mail user agent Outlook Express, as well as their quite useful personal information manager Microsoft Outlook, to the point where their newest offering is absolutely unusable.
What's the point? Did someone in marketing just decide that "Active Directory" is too 90s and must be tossed out based on vibes? Entra ID sounds like something completely unrelated.
IIRC one reason was that Azure Active Directory bore little technical relation to Active Directory and it was endlessly confusing to customers. Especially as AAD evolved into an identity system and away from a directory.
Trivial example is that AAD doesnt do LDAP, unlike regular AD which was built on it. It's not surprising that some PM would keep "AD" in the name of AADto make the transition to cloud seem less scary, but after a few years its actively unhelpful as the majority of customers have made the switch to cloud based auth and identity.
Actually "Azure Active Directory" was confusing in the first place, since Active Directory already existed for decades, and Azure Active Directory was not-really it's cloud-equivalent
Though some of the rest of Clippy's "friends" (Lynx the cat and Rover) came from Bob and were Bob's "friends" first. Windows 2000 added Microsoft Agent which shared some characters in 2D with Office 2000 and invented a few new 3D characters (which Office never used). Windows XP added "Search Assistant" using some of the Office characters (Rover being the default search character and Lynx still hanging around as an alternative).
The legacy of Bob lived on for a while. Also Microsoft Agent was a lot of fun to play with as a kid in High School. I built some wild PowerPoint Presentations scripting Agents from the Notes field.
[edit] Maduro remained under US federal indictment on narco‑terrorism and related cocaine trafficking conspiracy charges throughout the Biden administration.
Venezuela has always been a minor player in the drug trade compared to other countries. The whole narco-terrorism thing has always been code for "he took back the oil and we don't like him"
Reuters calling the switch a "font" change instead of a typeface change is troubling, though consistent with a society that now casually refers to all pasta as "spaghetti". A typeface is the design; a font is its specific instance. This is basic knowledge, taught to children, houseplants, and most domesticated goats.
A simple correction would stop this spiral, but Reuters appears committed to forging a bold new era in which terminology is chosen at random, like drawing Scrabble tiles from a bag and declaring them journalism.
I’m a professional graphic designer, people in the industry use font, type and typeface interchangeably. No one goes “Umm Actually…”
you should also tell that to who wrote css, because font-weight doesn’t make sense if a font is already a specific weight. Words mean something specific until they don’t and the meaning changes over time and that’s okay
Originally, a font (also spelled fount, at least formerly) was a physical thing: a collection of metal slugs, each bearing the reversed shape of a letter or other symbol (a glyph, in typographical parlance). You would arrange these slugs in a wooden frame, apply a layer of ink to them, and press them against a sheet of paper.
The typeface dictated the shapes of those glyphs. So you could own a font of Caslon's English Roman typeface, for example. If you wanted to print text in different sizes, you would need multiple fonts. If you wanted to print in italic as well as roman (upright), you would need another font for that, too.
As there was a finite number of slugs available, what text you could print on a single sheet was also constrained to an extent by your font(s). Modern Welsh, for example, has no letter "k": yet mediaeval Welsh used it liberally. The change came when the Bible was first printed in Welsh: the only fonts available were made for English, and didn't have enough k's. So the publisher made the decision to use c for k, and an orthographical rule was born.
Digital typography, of course, has none of those constraints: digital text can be made larger or smaller, or heavier or lighter, or slanted or not, by directly manipulating the glyph shapes; and you're not going to run out of a particular letter.
So that raises the question: what is a font in digital terms?
There appear to be two schools of thought:
1. A font is a typeface at a particular size and in a particular weight etc. So Times New Roman is a typeface, but 12pt bold italic Times New Roman is a font. This attempts to draw parallels with the physical constraints of a moveable-type font.
2. A font is, as it always was, the instantiation of a typeface. In digital terms, this means a font file: a .ttf or .otf or whatever. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but consider: you can get different qualities of font files for the same typeface. A professional, paid-for font will (or should, at least) offer better kerning and spacing rules, better glyph coverage, etc. And if you want your text italic or bold, or particularly small or particularly large (display text), your software can almost certainly just digitally transform the shapes in your free/cheap, all-purpose font, But you will get better results with a font that has been specifically designed to be small or italic or whatever: text used for small captions, for example, is more legible with a larger x-height and less variation in stroke width than that used for body text. Adobe offers 65 separate fonts for its Minion typeface, in different combinations of italic/roman, weight (regular/medium/semibold/bold), width (regular/condensed) and size (caption/body/subhead/display).
In my experience, "font" is the colloquial term referring to either. Programmers get to demand precision, for journalists it's a bit tougher. The de facto meaning of terms does, unfortunately, evolve in sometimes arbitrary ways. And it's tough to fight.
If all DoS documents are prepared with the same software or software suite (e.g. MS Office), isn't that a distinction without much of a difference? They've gone back to using TNR.ttf instead of Calibri.ttf (or whatever the files are actually called).
Yanis, wasn’t an aristocrat. However, these were all from upper-class or elite backgrounds too:
Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Josip Broz Tito.
There are tonnes of people like that in Marxism. The irony is that they claim to want to liberate the working class when they were never part of it. Guevara especially came from a wealthy background.
YV was born into a monied family and married into one. He also went to private school as a child. As far as I know he has spent most of his life in an ivory tower.
irony: the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite
> they claim to want to liberate the working class when they were never part of it
that is not irony.
Do you believe only working class people can improve the situation for working class people? That seems counter-intuitive to me, as people outside the working class usually have more time and education to think about changes and advocate for them.
Oh it's irony alright. I've encountered many such folk. They claim to mean well but barely know what to deal with a real live proletarian when they encounter one.
What was it the Who once sang, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"? I don't think he has ever been much out of privileged circles.
The way ordinary people's lives can improve is self-advocacy and self-determination. You're not going to find that from Cambridge University where he teaches (one of the snobbiest and class ridden institutions in the UK which often resembles Hogwarts more than a modern university), the World Economic Forum (which prefers closed meetings to public ones and is furtive about its aims), or anything like that.
In this article he is right to voice concern about Big Tech oligarchy. But his analysis is off and he is not aware of what it really means to millions of people.
He is a World Economic Forum stooge, mate. There are only two ways into that. You either pay hundreds of thousands to attend each day, or you get invited from the inside as he did.
The WEF includes the top 100 companies in the world, along with the leaders and opposition leaders of every country. He's part of it.
I'm with saubeidl—while I, too, am deeply suspicious of anyone who comes from that level of privilege, and I've heard some shady stuff about Varoufakis in the past, you are refusing to present a) any meaningful criticism of his actual arguments, or b) any specific causal link between aspects of his background and reasons to doubt his work.
You just keep pounding on the fact that he is from privilege, but that alone is not enough to be suspicious.
At the very best, you are arguing guilt by association.
Guilt by association? Yes, he's associated with the WEF, a group of elite politicians and wealthy tycoons who meet away from the prying eyes of the public to discuss policies, and then tells us he's on our side.
They say you can know someone by the company they keep. The company he keeps are the Cambridge University students (who come disproportionately from private schools), mainstream media pundits and the billionaires of the WEF.
He doesn't just come from privilege... He never really left it.
But one can come from privilege, and choose to use that privilege to, effectively, infiltrate the ranks of the moneyed elite, seeking to make things better for the average person.
Some people have claimed that this is what he is doing. You have provided zero evidence that it is not. You merely keep repeating the same statements about his origins and his affiliation with the WEF.
I am not saying you are wrong. I am saying you have not supported your position in any meaningful way.
We have heard plenty from this particular messenger. He is/was never off the BBC at some stage. I always ask why someone is pushed on the public so hard, whether it is him or even someone like Jordan Peterson. I have the same basic issue with him as I do with the Guardian... He is completely out of touch with what is happening at ground level because of his current life and his origins.
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