[l_theanine]

I find it unlikely that somebody randomly shanks someone a dozen times just because of stress, in a workplace environment.

Surely these two gentleman either knew each other and something had happened, OR the attacker knew the victim and there was some sort of issue, romantic or something like that to where he would've been angry enough to try and kill this other man.

Of course Microsoft is going to say "Oh, they didn't work with each other or know each other as far as we know, this is just a crazy thing that happened" because they want to be left out of this as much as possible. Which is probably fine. I doubt the MS Teams experience is bad enough to kill over, bad as it may be.

[BryantD]

If the web page linked in another comment is authentic, the attacker was in a very bad mental state. I don’t think we can completely rule out previous contact, and the attacker was unhappy with his team members, but random chance also seems possible.

I lean towards authentic because a) the journal document is much too long to have been produced quickly, b) the text isn’t lifted from other sources, and c) the website was captured by archive.org in 2019. That last is most important since it’d be relatively trivial to train an AI to produce the kind of disassociated text we see there. Yay, 2022.

And just to get out in front of it: while there are all kinds of conspiracy theories and some racism in that document, I don’t see any ideological consistency and I don’t see accelerationist tendencies. I’m not a professional extremism researcher, mind you.

[beebmam]

Making Holocaust video games isn't exactly non-extremist.

[BryantD]

This one is fairly tasteless but it’s not clear to me whether or not it’s extremist. If the description said you were chasing Anne Frank down, that would be one thing. As is, it’s explicitly framed as pushing the limits of free speech which strikes me as a dumb kid thought exercise.

And it wasn’t important enough for him to list on the standalone games pages.

Now, Prophet Shooter is unambiguously anti-religious, so maybe there’s something there? And he’s got a Trump parody game. I’m not 100% sure here, just leaning against it. It’s also certainly true that sometimes extremism is the result of mental illness looking for some kind of framework to cling to.

[zozbot234]

Making an Anne Frank game while also praising "Adolf Hitler's bolstering of Nazi Germany in the 1930's" is pretty unambiguous, I'd say. Nothing that a random 8chan user couldn't have come up with "for the lulz" of course, but that website has also been associated with violent acts.

[BryantD]

Huh. That honestly struck me as irony, given that it’s in conjunction with his grandmother’s departure from Germany. But I do see your point.

Note that the dates may not be accurate; according to a quick bit of genealogical research, his grandmother Paula married his grandfather in Bavaria in 1955 < https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/b/i/s/Robert-S-Bishop/BOOK-000...>. Could also be that she left Germany and then returned for the wedding, of course.

Paula’s mother’s surname appears to have been Ketzler, which doesn’t tell us a ton about ethnic background. Not that it would tell us much about the attacker in any case, even if that was why she left Germany.

Edit: he had at least a bit of 4chan activity, as per his journal.

[tptacek]

This one is fairly tasteless but it’s not clear to me whether or not it’s extremist

Recalibrate. It's overt.

This person is gravely mentally ill, though.

[cld8483]

> "just because of stress"

Where is that narrative coming from? It doesn't seem to be what the article is pushing.

The perp seems like a nutjob who had a violent melt down, no need for a grander narrative. This sort of thing happens thousands of times a year all across the country, the only reason this case is on HN is because of who they worked for. If this were about a Redmond retail worker stabbing another, in the same town, it wouldn't be here.

[ciabattabread]

Likely scenario:

Police: Do you know who attacked you?

Victim, trying to concentrate on his breathing, as the paramedics stop the bleeding, while being loaded onto an ambulance: Dunno.

[me_again]

If Microsoft has made any statement at all, it's not linked or quoted in the article.

Also this incident occurred next to a 4-lane public street, not exactly a workplace environment - Microsoft's campus is not a secluded enclave.

[prmph]

But it seems the victim has spoken about the attack, and if they had anything to do with each other he would have made that known?

[luxuryballs]

Funny point actually if the PR approach actually thought just working at Microsoft was this taxing rather than it being personal.

[trynewideas]

(withdrawn; apologies)

[l_theanine]

I guess you think I didn't already read the article?

I'm questioning the legitimacy of the claims. I'm plenty literate, so no copy-paste recap needed, thanks.

[trynewideas]

I pasted it because this is from a different, newer article than the link that described the attack in more detail and identified the victim. Sorry for the confusion.