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Hot on her heels is talk of more Indian fraud:
https://x.com/givemebanhammer/status/2025525203762073950
This behavior from microsoft and sharma makes it incredibly difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt in any capacity.
The people bringing up "wokeness is the real enemy" is darkly ironic, as if whites are not watching a DEI hire be chosen over someone with plausible credentials.
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Ok, the fact that she shared an obviously staged Xbox account is a hilarious unforced error, like Elizabeth Warren getting the genetic ancestry test. They realize she has a perception problem, but instead of just... ignoring it, as one of the most powerful corporations in the world, they insisted on trying to appeal to it. They legitimately could go, "she's not from gaming, but she's a good leader, and we think she's the best for the role," but instead they have to try to make up word salad about gaming passion and fabricate a record of gaming. Gamers are going to hate Microsoft no matter what they do, it's just in the culture, why are they trying to appeal to them? Make some good games and it won't matter whether a trained seal is in charge of the gaming division.
Well, exactly, and (to put on my armchair psychologist hat) this makes Sharma seem so much worse. There’s been a bunch of talk on the less salubrious corners of the Internet about the concept of “izzat”, an Indian cultural practice whereby faking credentials is seen as just as good as having the credentials because the real merit, to the Indian psyche, is in Dedication To The Facade, not in the distinction between facade and the reality. For an izzat-brained Indian, setting up a fake account is the smart, meritorious move, because it proves your hustle, your dedication to fake it until you make it, your savvy use of shortcuts, which is better than putting in the leg work like a chump and actually having achievements.
Ignoring a bunch of basement-dwelling no-life babies until they go away is not possible to a person who got where they are due to izzat, because she knows that spiritually, she is also a basement-dwelling no-life baby. Which might explain why she got her little brother to fake her account, idk.
I agree with this and think it applies even more broadly to a global personality type beyond just the sub-continent.
This shares an interesting with the Elon Musk Diablo controversy. The TLDR is that Elon went on Joe Rogan and randomly mentioned how he was ranked in the Top 10 of all online Diablo players. The internet rightly immediately went "lol. whut? How does the CEO of like 5 different mega companies have time to grind Diablo?" The ONLY way to get that high of a ranking is to grind. There is no giga-brained shortcut. You have to put in the hours. The immediate conclusion was that he was paying someone to ghost-play his account to boost ratings.
Well, Elon wanted to shut up the haterz and so live-streamed himself playing. It went as well as you would expect. A bunch of actual Diablo mega-grinders immediately pointed out tactics that Elon used that were dead giveaways that he didn't know what he was doing. IIRC, Elon eventually admitted that he did pay someone to grind for him.
Why in the hell would a literal centi-billionaire care so much about online video game rankings? Isn't it just enough to be the (future) Prince of Mars, the face of American rocketry, and to have had 14 - maybe 100 kids?
Elon and this Sharma lady both suffer from a personality deficiency where they don't actually model social esteem systems well. When a value system is totally objective and external - profit and less, share value, rocket re-use cost - their Autism engines get a turbo boost. But when it's more interpersonally subjective and based on relative-social status within niches (video games or, perhaps, dancing being excellent examples) they lose all bearing. I think it literally flips the "flight or fight" level of anxiety and they reflexively react by trying to "do the thing" at the same level of all-or-nothing that the dedicate to their primary pursuits.
These people don't have a real interpersonal or social core. The "sense of self" in a very immediate flesh and blood way isn't there. This is part of the genesis of the "Musk is an alien" memes. When he was on SNL he opined he may have autism or asperger's (self-diagnosed). Perhaps, but color be doubtful. I don't think it has anything to do with "brain chemistry" (a term I loathe) or even real-deal mental health (i.e. BPD, MDD, Schizo-class disorders). Instead, it's a socially rooted character underdevelopment that never was addressed precisely because they were hyper-indexing on whatever optimization problem was in front of them.
Elon musk and Ms. Sharma know that the piles of money they make are valuable because money can be exchanged for goods and services but they fail to make the domain transition and realize that having lots and lots and lots of money also creates real social value (and, if deployed correctly, political value as well. Musk has tried to do this but keeps fucking up because he truly doesn't get politics or government. His DOGE failure should be more heavily highlighted, IMHO).
As @urquan says, gamers are never going to "vibe" with MSFT because MSFT is an evil corporation that kills all the good games. And also makes them too, or whatever. The point is that the point isn't getting gamers to "like" you but to buy your products. Musk doesn't understand that Chinese EV buyers don't actually care if you can dance so long as you can sell them fucking robot EVs. These people aren't real because they don't conceive of themselves as totally human.
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If she was not a public figure I would assume that save files from non-Xbox-account-registered copies of the games were imported. But the CEO of Xbox can't very well say she's been playing pirated games, can she?
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