I am the Senior Vice President of Workforce Architecture at Cloudflare and I need to tell you about the best decision this company has ever made. We posted $639.8 million in quarterly revenue. 34% year-over-year growth. Record net retention. The strongest quarter since IPO. And then we fired 1,100 people. Not because of the quarter. During the quarter. I need you to understand the sequence because the sequence is the whole point. My team built the model that made this possible. We call it CIRRUS: "Capacity-Indexed Reduction and Reallocation for Upside Scaling". CIRRUS took our revenue trajectory, our margin targets, and our board's stated appetite for what they called "structural boldness," and it determined that the optimal time to execute a 20% headcount reduction is at the exact moment of peak financial performance. Not during a downturn. Not during a miss. During a beat. The logic is simple. When revenue is surging, the market reads a cost reduction as discipline. When revenue is falling, the market reads the same reduction as panic. Same action. Same 1,100 people. Completely different stock reaction. CIRRUS identified a seven-day window where the earnings momentum and the layoff announcement would compound rather than cancel. I found the math beautiful. I still do. We deactivated 1,100 badges between 9:00 and 9:04 AM Pacific on a Monday. People Analytics determined this was the four-minute window of lowest Slack activity. We called it a "clean cutover." Someone in Infrastructure suggested "zero-downtime deprecation" but Legal thought it sounded too much like a product feature. I thought it sounded exactly like a product feature, which is why I liked it. But I deferred to Legal. I always defer to Legal. That is one of the things that makes me good at this job. The people we cut were not underperformers. I want to be very clear about that because clarity is a Cloudflare value. Sixty-two percent had received exceeds-expectations in their most recent review cycle. Fourteen had been promoted in Q3. One engineer in our Austin office — I'll call him Marcus, though that is not his name and the reason I'm not using his name is not that I've forgotten it — had shipped the caching optimization that directly contributed to $14 million in new enterprise contracts. His manager nominated him for the Raygun Award, which is our internal recognition for outsized impact, six days before I added him to the CIRRUS list. He won the award on Wednesday. His access was revoked the following Monday. The ceremony and the termination were planned by different teams in the same building and neither team knew about the other. I don't think this is ironic. I think this is how large organizations work. The left hand builds. The right hand optimizes. Both hands are attached to the same body and the body is performing well. We let Marcus keep the trophy. It's a small acrylic prism etched with a lightning bolt. It costs us about eleven dollars. His annual cost-to-company was $312,000. CIRRUS selected the 1,100 based on three variables. I'm going to share them because I believe in the methodology. First: salary band. Employees in bands 6 through 8 offered the highest savings-to-replacement-risk ratio. Second: visa dependency. Employees on sponsored visas have a 60-day window to find new employment or begin departure proceedings. This creates what CIRRUS categorizes as "low-friction separation" — the compliance timeline is externally enforced, which reduces our administrative burden. I presented this variable to HR and they requested I rename it from "visa dependency" to "mobility factor" in all future documentation. I agreed. The math didn't change. Third: managerial tenure. Employees whose direct manager had been at the company less than eighteen months were 73% less likely to generate a negative Glassdoor review, because the manager-employee bond hadn't fully formed. CIRRUS weighted this at 15% of the selection score. We call it the "attachment coefficient." We told the market the layoffs were an AI workforce pivot. We said artificial intelligence was making certain roles redundant. We said we were reallocating resources toward our AI gateway products. This was a communications strategy. Not a workforce strategy. The AI framing was my team's recommendation and I'm proud of it because it worked. Two analysts upgraded us the same week. The stock moved 8% in five sessions. The entire AI narrative was four paragraphs in a press release that took my comms partner and me an afternoon to write. Four paragraphs. 1,100 people. 8%. I don't know what the per-paragraph return on that is but I think about it sometimes. The actual AI initiative employs thirty-seven people. We cut 1,100 to fund 37. The ratio is not in any of our public materials. There is a Slack channel called #bright-futures# that our Head of People Experience created for the remaining employees. It posts an automated message every morning at 8:45 AM: "You are the ones we chose to keep." The message includes a rotating motivational quote. Last Tuesday it was a Winston Churchill quote about perseverance. The channel has a custom emoji called :survivor: that the Culture team designed. It's a small cartoon phoenix. Nine hundred people have used it unironically. I find this genuinely moving. I think it shows resilience. My wife says it shows something else but she works in education and I think the frameworks are different. The severance was calculated using a model we licensed from the same consulting firm that built our customer pricing tiers. Median payout: eleven weeks. We benchmarked against industry and landed at the 50th percentile exactly, which our CHRO described as "fair by design." The 1,100 will burn through their severance while our stock price digests a 20% cost reduction applied to a revenue base that was already growing 34%. By the time the last check clears, the savings will have funded the first full quarter of the AI initiative. The one with thirty-seven people. My performance review is next month. I've been told informally that I'm on the COO track. The criteria include "demonstrated ability to execute at scale with minimal organizational disruption." The 1,100 people are the execution. The stock price is the scale. The four-minute badge window is the minimal disruption. I meet all three criteria. I designed all three criteria. Not the review criteria. The outcomes. I keep the CIRRUS model on my laptop in a folder called "Workforce Planning FY26." It sits next to a subfolder called "Offsite Photos — Maui" from the leadership retreat we took in January, where we set the annual targets that the 1,100 people spent four months hitting before we terminated them for hitting them. Marcus's desk in Austin has been reassigned. I don't know to whom. The acrylic prism is probably in a box somewhere. Or maybe whoever cleaned out the desk kept it. It catches the light nicely. I noticed that once, when I visited the Austin office to present the CIRRUS methodology to the regional leadership team. They gave me a standing ovation. The prism was on a desk near the back of the room, refracting a small rainbow onto the wall behind me. I didn't mention it. I stayed on my slides. I'm proud of the work we've done here. I think when people look back at this quarter, they'll see it as the moment Cloudflare became a different kind of company. I think they'll be right. I think the 1,100 people would agree, if you explained the math to them carefully enough.

# Elasticsearch Features and Practical Usage 🗣️ You want "laptop" and "notebook" to find the same products. Synonyms absorb those variations and rephrasings, and the Synonyms API lets you manage them with no reindexing. 🏷️ Title: Synonyms API / synonym token filter 🔗 URL: 📘 Overview Synonyms improve relevance by matching documents that express the same concept with different words, and they help with domain-specific vocabulary and common misspellings. Managing synonym sets as independent resources through the Synonyms API lets multiple analyzers reference them and removes the need to reindex on updates. ⚙️ How It Works There are two rule formats. ・Equivalent (bidirectional): comma-separated terms like `laptop, notebook, computer`. With `expand=true` all terms map to each other; with `expand=false` they collapse to the first term as the canonical form. ・Explicit (one-way): `i-pod, i pod => ipod` replaces the left-hand terms with the right-hand term via `=>`. Two token filters exist, `synonym` and `synonym_graph`; `synonym_graph` is recommended because it handles multi-word synonyms correctly. Applying synonyms at search time means updates require no reindexing. 🛠️ Practical Usage Create a synonym set with the Synonyms API and reference it from an `updateable: true` analyzer. ``` PUT _synonyms/my-synonym-set { "synonyms_set": [ { "id": "1", "synonyms": "laptop, notebook, computer" }, { "id": "2", "synonyms": "pc => personal computer" } ] } ``` Point a `synonym_graph` filter's `synonyms_set` at this set and wire it into your search-time analyzer (`search_analyzer`). With `updateable: true`, updating the set via the API automatically reloads the associated analyzers, so changes take effect immediately. Validate the result beforehand with the `_analyze` API. 💡 Use Cases This is ideal for an e-commerce relevance-improvement loop. Analyze search logs to find rephrasings that returned zero hits, add them to the synonym set through the Synonyms API, and they take effect instantly with no reindexing. You can continuously eliminate "searched but not found" cases. ⚠️ Caveats Always use `synonym_graph` for multi-word synonyms; the legacy `synonym` filter breaks position information. Large synonym lists consume heap, and exceeding 95% trips the circuit breaker. With `lenient=false` the index can go red, so in production prefer API-managed sets over inline definitions. #Elasticsearch# #SearchRelevance#

👀 As soon as Trump left, the CCP started playing the "balancing" game again. Xinhua News Agency hurriedly pinned a top headline on its front page: “Xi Jinping and Russian President Putin Send Congratulatory Messages to the 10th China-Russia Expo Respectively.” When you click in, there’s only one sentence: “Xinhua Flash: On May 17, President Xi Jinping and Russian President Putin sent congratulatory messages to the 10th China-Russia Expo respectively.” When the spokesperson for the CCP’s Ministry of Commerce answered questions about the outcomes of the China-U.S. economic and trade consultations, he listed five results: 1. Both sides will continue to implement the outcomes of previous consultations and have reached a positive consensus on relevant tariff arrangements. *(My two cents: This is basically meaningless boilerplate.) 2. Both sides agreed to establish a Trade Council and an Investment Council to discuss each side’s respective concerns in the fields of trade and investment. Through the Trade Council, they will discuss issues such as tariff reductions on certain products and have in principle agreed to reduce tariffs on products of equivalent scale that each side is concerned about. (Comment: Too vague, too general, lacks details.) 3. Both sides will resolve or substantially promote the resolution of certain non-tariff barriers and market access issues for agricultural products. The U.S. side will actively promote the resolution of China’s long-standing concerns regarding automatic detention of dairy and aquatic products, medium-sized potted landscape plants exported to the U.S., and the recognition of Shandong as a poultry influenza-free zone, etc. The Chinese side will also actively promote the resolution of U.S. concerns such as beef facility registration and poultry meat exports from certain states to China. (Comment: Still lacks details. Basically, it means China is going to buy more U.S. beef and poultry?) 4. Both sides agreed to promote the expansion of two-way trade in areas including agricultural products through mutual tariff reductions on a certain range of products and other arrangements. (Too vague, too general, lacks details, and overlaps with the previous two points.) 5. Both sides have reached arrangements regarding China’s purchase of aircraft from the U.S. and the U.S. ensuring the supply of aircraft engines and parts to China, and agreed to continue advancing cooperation in related fields. (China will purchase aircraft from the U.S.) So overall, it boils down to this: China will buy some American planes, and that’s about it. Nothing else of substance. Also: When Xi Jinping accompanied President Trump in reviewing the CCP’s military honor guard, Trump solemnly returned the military salute, while Xi showed no reaction at all. Some people joked: “If you didn’t know better, you’d think Trump was the commander-in-chief of the PLA.” And honestly, it really did look that way. On one hand, it reflects Xi Jinping’s arrogance toward his own military. He simply does not show the kind of respect for service members that Trump does. On the other hand, perhaps after previously embarrassing himself by saluting troops with his left hand during an inspection, he no longer dares—or no longer wants—to give military salutes.

🚨Report: John Thune is outraged and livid after President Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over John Cornyn in the 2026 Texas Senate Race Thune threw up his left hand saying: “It’s his decision.” Via: Andrew Desiderio

EBench is here. An indoor VLA manipulation benchmark from InternRobotics for long-horizon, dexterous, and mobile manipulation in Isaac Sim. 🚀 🤖 🎯 Tasks: 26 evaluation tasks across long-horizon manipulation, simple pick-and-place, and teleop-style dexterous tasks 🏢 Dataset: LeRobot-format trajectories with multi-view videos from head, left hand, and right hand cameras 🛠️ Setup: client-server architecture keeps Isaac Sim on the server side while models connect through a lightweight client 📋 Assets: benchmark assets and dataset are released for reproducible embodied evaluation 💻 License: MIT

今天有点热是怎么个事儿呢😵‍💫 GPT- image 2 prompt 👇 A soft, bright indoor photograph of a beautiful young East Asian woman in her early 20s sitting in front of a white electric fan on a hot summer day, cooling herself off. She has dark brown hair loosely gathered up in a messy bun with soft wispy bangs and a few damp strands falling around her face and neck. Fair skin with a light natural flush on her cheeks, a faint sheen of summer heat. She looks directly at the camera with her eyes open, a warm gentle smile, glossy lips. A thin gold necklace with a small round pendant at her collarbone. She holds a small white towel up near her neck and shoulder with one hand, dabbing away the heat. She has an attractive figure — she wears a fitted pale-yellow ribbed spaghetti-strap tank top that hugs her upper body. She sits facing the camera, her full upper body visible in frame from the waist up. The white oscillating fan sits in the foreground on the left, slightly out of focus, blowing air toward her and lifting a few strands of her hair. Behind her, a bright airy room — a large green potted palm plant, a woven wicker basket, a window with sheer white curtains letting in soft bright daylight, pale walls. Bright, soft, diffused natural lighting, clean and airy with warm skin tones. Shot at eye level, upper-body framing from the waist up, 50mm lens, shallow depth of field, natural skin texture, the fresh intimate feel of a cool-down moment on a summer afternoon.

绝对俯视镜头📷 GPT- image 2 prompt 👇 Create a photorealistic live-action full-body fashion portrait in a 9:16 vertical aspect ratio. An exceptionally beautiful adult East Asian woman in her mid-20s stands outdoors beneath a vivid blue summer sky filled with large soft white clouds. Preserve the reference image’s dramatic extreme low-angle composition: the camera is positioned close to ground level and points steeply upward, making her thighs and hips appear closest to the lens while her torso and face rise toward the center of the sky. Frame her from the upper thighs to slightly above the head, with both hands included near the sides of the composition. She has a naturally curvy, voluptuous hourglass figure with a full bust, clearly defined waist, broad rounded hips, and especially thick, shapely thighs. Keep the proportions realistic and anatomically coherent while retaining the strong perspective enlargement created by the close low-angle lens. She wears a fitted light-heather-gray long-sleeved stretch top with a simple round neckline, fully opaque fabric, subtle wrinkles gathering naturally around the waist, and tight high-waisted matte-black athletic shorts with a clean seamless design. The shorts closely follow the waist, hips, and upper thighs without logos or visible underwear. Her left hand hangs loosely in front of one hip while her right arm rests naturally at her side. Give her long almond-shaped manicured nails in a pale nude-pink color with delicate crystal decorations. She is not wearing any hat or head covering. Her entire face is clearly visible and evenly illuminated, with no hair or shadows covering her eyes. She has refined East Asian features, a softly tapered oval face, clear almond-shaped dark-brown eyes looking down toward the camera, long natural eyelashes, subtle eyeliner, a delicate straight nose, softly defined cheeks, and full glossy rose-pink lips slightly parted. Her expression is calm, confident, and subtly alluring. She has very long, thick, softly wavy dark chocolate-brown hair flowing past her waist, parted slightly off-center and spreading naturally over both shoulders, with a few strands gently lifted by the breeze. Bright natural daylight, soft frontal fill light on the face, clean luminous skin with realistic pores and fine texture, crisp clothing details, gentle highlights along the hair, vivid blue-and-white cloud background, polished Korean outdoor fashion photography, high-resolution professional camera image, 24mm wide-angle lens positioned at ground level, strong but controlled perspective, sharp focus across the woman’s face and body, natural colors. Avoid: hat, cap, visor, sunglasses, hair covering the eyes, face hidden in shadow, cropped head, cropped hands, cropped thighs, pale featureless face, anime, illustration, CGI, plastic skin, doll-like facial features, childish appearance, transparent clothing, lingerie, exposed underwear, excessively exaggerated anatomy, tiny waist, distorted legs, uneven thighs, warped torso, malformed hands, extra fingers, fused fingers, duplicated limbs, fisheye distortion, text, logo, watermark, rounded image corners or decorative borders.

In 2014, Robin Williams was 63 and living in Marin County, California, when a strange medical mystery began tightening around him. Parkinson’s had a name, but his fear, confusion, sleepless nights, and mental fog still did not. At home, Susan Schneider Williams was watching the man the world knew for laughter slowly become trapped inside symptoms nobody could fully explain. The comic genius was still there, but something hidden kept changing the rules. The clues did not arrive like one clear warning. They came scattered. Stomach pain. Insomnia. A poor sense of smell. Anxiety that felt too sharp. Then came moments that scared Susan because they did not match the Robin she knew. He could be present one minute, then caught in fear the next. Susan later wrote, “By wintertime, problems with paranoia, delusions and looping, insomnia, memory, and high cortisol levels, just to name a few, were settling in hard.” That sentence became one of the most painful pieces of the puzzle. Robin Williams had spent decades turning speed, memory, emotion, and chaos into art. His mind was part of his magic. On stage, he could jump between voices like flipping channels inside his own brain. In “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993), he made families laugh through pain. In “Good Will Hunting” (1997), he made silence feel heavy. But inside his own body, something was now stealing the very tools that made him Robin. The fear was not normal stress. Susan had lived beside him. She knew the difference between worry and something deeper. Later, she said, “But Robin would remain in a heightened state of fear and anxiety that led to irrational paranoia. It was painful to watch.” That was the nightmare. He was not simply sad. He was frightened by changes he could feel but could not name. By May 2014, doctors gave him a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis. It explained some things. His left hand had a tremor. His body had slowed. His face sometimes looked less expressive. His movement was changing. A diagnosis should have brought comfort, but for Robin it felt incomplete. He asked whether he had Alzheimer’s. He asked about dementia. He asked about schizophrenia. The answer was no, but the questions themselves were clues. That is where the mystery becomes darker. The diagnosis was not fake, but it was not the full picture. Parkinson’s explained the movement symptoms. It did not fully explain the paranoia, confusion, insomnia, panic, and strange mental changes. Robin was being treated for what doctors could see clearly. The real enemy was still hiding behind overlapping symptoms. Susan watched him struggle with things that once came naturally. Lines became harder. Confidence cracked. Sleep disappeared. Some days carried flashes of the old Robin, then the fog would return. He knew something was wrong, and that knowledge hurt him. It was like a brilliant machine was short-circuiting from the inside while everyone outside kept searching for the right switch. On August 11, 2014, Robin Williams died by suicide at his home in Tiburon, California. He was 63. The public story quickly became simple. People said depression. People remembered his past battles. But Susan kept trying to explain that the truth was not that simple. Later, the autopsy revealed diffuse Lewy body disease. The hidden disease had spread through his brain and brain stem. That discovery changed the whole file. Lewy body dementia can affect thinking, movement, sleep, mood, behavior, and perception. It can look like Parkinson’s. It can look like psychiatric illness. It can make a person seem anxious, paranoid, forgetful, or unlike himself. In Robin’s case, it had been quietly attacking the center of who he was. Susan later said, “Depression is a symptom of LBD and it’s not about psychology, it’s rooted in neurology. His brain was falling apart.” Those words did not erase the grief, but they gave the mystery its missing name. Robin had not simply lost a private emotional battle. He had been fighting a brain disease that was almost impossible to fully identify while he was alive. Later, Susan described him with heartbreaking clarity. “Robin is and will always be a larger-than-life spirit who was inside the body of a normal man with a human brain.” That human brain was under attack before anyone could see the whole map. The mystery was what no one could name in time.