Comment by ChicagoDave
13 hours ago
Microsoft has gone full-blown evil corporation again. No customer validation on any of the AI cruft. No full OPT OUT. Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere.
I've been a Windows user from day one and I now see a future without it. Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft, but this blind lust for AI, especially in bed with Altman who is pure con artist, is unforgivable.
Some of the investment sells recently are starting to look like the beginning of the end for OpenAI. That will have a wide range impact on everything.
I use Claude for coding (and mostly in WSL). OpenAI enabled its users to have a sext conversation.
Seriously. And Satya just keeps on at full speed.
Microsoft was never not a full-blown evil corporation. What they had, at their peak, is some software that worked well. In the background, same evil corporation as ever.
I can't even write a top example why. Just take a glance at the documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
There was a time when it looked like they were less "evil". There was a period punctuated by less anticompetitive behavior, embracing open source, no significant user-hostile moves, etc. and naively it did look like they are focused on the product not on abusing competitors or users. Can't say if this was a step in a carefully crafted plan, or just made business sense to be like this at the time. But Microsoft did look less evil for a brief time.
That sounds consistent with their classic embrace-extend-extinguish process [1]. Embracing with no significant user-hostile moves is step 1, and then abusing competitors and users comes as step 3 of the process. They need to briefly look less evil in step 1 to maneuver into position for step 3.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Looks-wise, I agree, the "MS heart Linux" era was better than the current one.
They haven't discovered side loading.
> Office products are bastardized with copilot buttons everywhere.
They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD.
This is the funniest thing, considering it lacks 90% of the features included freeware text editors written in some student's spare time back in the 90s.
It's basically a fancy textbox.
Microsoft's own people can't use the toolkits they write, as evidenced by the React component in the start menu(!)
They can, the problem is that apparently they aren't able to hire people nowadays with Win32 development experience, so they get interns that have grown in US universities with macOS and Linux, which sundenly have a Win32 developer role.
That is how you end up with web garbage in what was supposed to be native code, or .NET.
I think this is also a reason why WinUI efforts went down the drain.
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> It's basically a fancy textbox.
That was the lure.
But the real Notepad has been decommissioned and there is some bloated one now.
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It's not even a competent textbox. Try to scan barcodes into it for example, or use it with Autohotkey. It has some sort of buffering issue and lags horribly whenever characters are input faster than a human.
And this W11 version of Notepad takes longer to open than Sublime Text and about equal to Firefox. On NVMe.
It used to be instant, which is something you really notice the difference with when it changes.
The fucking start menu used to be an actual windows component that opened instantaneously. It's a web app now, sometimes taking seconds to open.
I also noticed a lot of the time windows just ignores me double clicking on things in file explorer, leaving me to sit there wondering if I have to do it again.
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They made the damned system volume regulator open with a visible delay now. You can click on it and observe it at 0 level, and then after some seconds it jumps to the actual position. After they threw out Win10 taskbar and replaced it with this rejected tablet atrocity in Win11, everything got much slower on it.
The only reason I use Notepad is that it opens instantly. A fancy think with loads of features that's slow to open should be a new product.
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Opens instantly on my machine. It takes the same amount of time as neovim.
Now if you want to complain about something then vscode takes 12 seconds to load
Wait till you open the humble calculator.
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They put a copilot button in Outlook. Which, when ask, gladly confesses it doesn't have access to your mail or calendar, completely negating any value it could possibly have.
My personal headcannon is, that it's mostly for telemetrics and KPI scamming, so stakeholders can reap the bonus based on engagement metrics
Just Microsoft doing Microsoft things. Cue the James Franco First Time? meme...
The same with the AI thing Meta added to Whatsapp. After spending a while trying to search for a message whose exact wording I couldn't remember, but whose content was easily described, I thought I'd give the bot a try. Turns out it doesn't have access to my messages.
I expect MS will get there long before Meta does given they don't have the encryption issue to contend with.
> They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD.
Every time I see a new CoPilot button, or a toast nagging me because I've not clicked any of them and they think I really should want to, a phrase crosses my mind…
“Thank you the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation”
For reference: you can get the regular notepad back by just uninstalling Notepad from the control panel (the new one, with big buttons and less features). Since it's possible using the regular UI without particular shenanigans, I assume this is fully supported.
What is Copilot good for in Notepad? :)
It is like a carpet raid. Bomb everything with Copilot agent…
It is funny but it is not.
That's not Notepad. They may call it Notepad, but it isn't.
NotePilot 365...
They call Wordpad write.exe!
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Notepad++ is always a default install on any new Windows PC. Who on earth uses Notepad?
So its gonna sound weird, but some companies really have strict policies and notepad there is ok, but notepad++ isn't. Usually, there is some way to get exceptions, but those tend to require more effort than it is usually worth it. I guess what I am saying it: it is not always by choice:D
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If it's a windows-based server, there's probably little need to do much text editing, so installing Notepad++ wouldn't be needed or desired. Then, you suddenly need to copy/paste/amend some text, so you end up opening Notepad. My use of it is typically if I'm connecting remotely to the Windows desktop and am not sure if the keymap is correct when typing in a password, so I type it into Notepad to make sure I'm putting in what I think I'm typing.
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I do, when I have tons of tabs in Nodepad++ and then need some other notes of different priority/context in explicitly another window that looks visually different to Notepad++ :)
Aaaand... thats about it, even Total commander's built in text editor is more powerful.
Maybe it can finally get the new lines correct for a given application? ;-)
A choice of line endings was one of the few good things they did to Notepad, but that was in the Windows 10 era.
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I found that the other day, in a co-worker computer ...
WTF!! JFC
CotEditor on Mac is the closest to Notepad I’ve felt in years. Gotta wonder what the end game at Microsoft is.
This is endgame. They are at the stage when everything in game is already done and they are lazingly trying to do some sidequests, like stacking the most cheese you can in a room.
The endgame is getting corporate customers hooked on cloud-hosted subscription-model everything, then jacking the prices up.
I bet it was the MVP. LOL
Meanwhile have you used the latest Excel for Mac?
1. Open a sheet. Type anything.
2. Hide Excel (Cmd+H).
3. Bring Excel forth.
4. Stare at a blank screen where your grid should be for anywhere from 0.5 to 3 seconds.
> 4. Stare at a blank screen where your grid should be for anywhere from 0.5 to 3 seconds.
It is because is drawing the 3D surface with your Excel cells. It's not Microsoft's fault that you didn't buy a decent graphics card. /s
> OpenAI enabled its users to have a sext conversation.
Considering that this is only with verified adults, how is this "evil"? I find it more evil to treat full grown adult users as kids and heavily censor their use of LLMs.
(Not to detract from the rest of your post, with which I agree).
Ok so for that matter let's pose this hypothetical... How would you feel if Disney or Nintendo produced adult content for verified adults?
Why should anyone feel anything offensive about that? Or why would anyone get offended over this? I really do not understand what the issue would be.
My point is not about morality. It’s about ROI focus and that OpenAI can’t and won’t ever return anything remotely close to what’s been invested. Adult content is not getting them closer to profitability.
And if anyone believes the AGI hyperbole, oh boy I have a bridge and a mountain to sell.
LLM tech will never lead to AGI. You need a tech that mimics synapses. It doesn’t exist.
I have also a hard time understanding how AGI will magically appear.
LLMs have their name for a reason: they model human language (output given an input) from human text (and other artifacts).
And now the idea seems to be that when we do more of it, or make it even larger, it will stop to be a model of human language generation? Or that human language generation is all there is to AGI?
I wish someone could explain the claim to me...
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<< LLM tech will never lead to AGI.
I suspect this may be one of those predictions that may not quite pan out. I am not saying it is a given, but never is about as unlikely.
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>LLM tech will never lead to AGI. You need a tech that mimics synapses. It doesn’t exist.
Why would you think synapses (or their dynamics) are required for AGI rather than being incidental owing to the constraints of biology?
(This discussion never goes anywhere productive but I can't help myself from asking)
I don't see what is so complicated about modelling a synapse. Doesn't AlmostAnyNonLinearFunc(sum of weighted inputs) work well enough?
Yeah the disapproval/disgust I'm seeing everywhere, from pretty much every side that I keep my eye on, about OpenAI enabling erotica generation with ChatGPT is so frustrating, because it seems like just Puritanism and censorship, and desiring to treat adults like children as you say.
The issues that these pseudo-relationships can cause have barely begun to be discussed, nevermind studied and understood.
We know that they exist, and not only for people with known mental health issues. And that's all we know. But the industry will happily brush that aside in order to drive up those sweet MAU and MRR numbers. One of those, "I'm willing to sacrifice [a percentage of the population] for market share and profit" situations.
Edits: grammar
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Looks like OpenAI can do anything it desires, but if an indie artist tries to take money for NSFW content, or even just make it for free publicly - they get barred from using payment processors and such.
It is not bad per se but in my opinion it shows that OpenAI is desperately trying to stop bleeding money.
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> Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft,
Not in what concerns Windows development, I miss "Developers, Developers, Developers" dance.
UWP transition after Sinofsky was super bad managed, trying to rescue what was left of it as WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK, killing C++/CX, C++/WinRT, .NET Native in the process is a bad joke on anyone that believed in the technology.
Don't believe the WinUI marketing, the only reason left to use it, it being a Microsoft employee, or someone that just can't let go of UWP remains.
It reminds me of the Xbox One release. They basically had the market with the earlier release compared to Sony's PS4, but then pushed the thing as a media/entertainment glorified roku box not gaming console. They didn't care what you want only what they wanted to sell you, and they were pushing NFL deals not gaming.
Nobody wants this Copilot everywhere, but they sure are pushing it anyway. It's like they completely forgot how to make a product and only know how to push their agenda using whatever monopoly is left.
> They basically had the market with the earlier release compared to Sony's PS4
The Xbox One and PS4 were both released in November 2013.
If anything, it was the PS4 that was released a week earlier than the Xbox One.
I opened my outlook android app today to find they'd replaced the archive button in the bottom toolbar with a "Summary by Copilot" one. It wasn't enough that the only colourful button is the Copilot one on the right.
Thankfully they still let you reorder the buttons, so I moved archive back and hid that unwanted summary in the overflow menu.
Once your coworkers start using copilot to turn what should be a single sentence email into six paragraphs, you'll need that to summarise it into a sentence.
Progress!
Yeah, but it will be very polite and full of corpospeak, which means that it is very insightful.
>Thankfully they still let you
They "let" you do fewer and fewer things with the computer you "own" every year.
"again"? What they did in the past seems absolutely neighbourly compared to what they're doing now.
Get a VM of Windows 9x/2k/XP to experience what "good Microsoft" was like.
The other day I installed Windows 7 on a VM for fun.. it was not fun at all. I got weird wave of nostalgic sadness, like being teleported back in time, I felt/remembered how things were back in ~2010, the culture, my university life, how things were with an ex gf, ALL of it. The OS is engrained in my mind and it was gorgeous seeing those aero effects and hearing the startup sounds again. It is so simple and easy. It felt good so see & use it again.
With Windows 11, although I mostly like the UI (rounded corners on a high dpi tablet also with rounded screen is amazing), it feels absolutely gross, in the corporate soulless sense. It feels mentally heavy top operate. I constantly had to battle it to get it to work the way I want it.
These days all my devices are running Fedora with KDE, which is just the best. You basically set it up once the way you like it, and it won't change by itself for months. It is a buttery smooth experience and have had zero need to go back to Windows yet.
If anyone want the same level one-ness with your computer like back in Windows XP & Windows 7 days, give KDE a try. Fedora is pretty simple distro to get used to if you want a good starting point.
> It feels mentally heavy
I mentioned to a friend recently that W11 is so difficult to use compared to Linux like Mint nowadays. He didn't understand it, though he tried Mint a decade ago but kept using Windows 10, upgraded to 11, continues to have driver problems with his laptop, some weeks network card stops working some weeks his sound card drops out completely. He uses usb dongles intermittently, it reminds me how I used on laptop Linux 20 something years ago and even then it wasn't that bad. I feel preaching Linux is almost counter-effective, but I'm tired of being asked to solve his hw problems caused by bad W11 drivers.
nostalgia is pretty powerful.
I get the same feelings whenever I am near an interface that looks anything like NT4.0.
> and it won't change by itself for months
That’s… not a good sell at all
Promise me a decade and I’ll bite. (Joke’s on me, I’ll need to get out of this windows shithole asap)
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> "again"? What they did in the past seems absolutely neighbourly compared to what they're doing now.
As someone who lived through Microsoft’s actions in the 90s, I really don’t agree with your sentiment there.
There’s a reason many of us old greybeards still refuse to use anything MS even 30 years later.
The abomination that was IE6 - it poisoned the internet at the time with developers designing specifically for it and its random bullshit bugs. The number of admin tools (e.g. SAN interface) that specifically required IE6 to run ActiveX or some monstrosity.
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Windows NT
> Windows NT
Windows NT what ? Microsoft was always the same.
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> Microsoft has gone full-blown evil corporation again
You lost me here. They ALWAYS have been evil and disrespectful of their customers. It's not just paid products, even their so called "open source" products like VSCODE and Github Desktop randomly add helpers to run in the background constantly (even on Mac) under the label Telemetry. They paid good money for OpenAI, they want to make full use of it. RIP to all their customers who have to use their Office 360 suite. They will probably pull off an Adobe at some point :(
It’s do or die. Any ounce of doubt will cause the entire house of cards to collapse.
Never thought I'd miss Steve Ballmer
Windows under Steve Balmer: "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"
Windows under Satya Nadella: "Kindly provide your credit card and personal information sir"
It’s only a matter of time before MS starts asking us to send Wal*Mart gift cards.
Windows more often looks like an ad supported OS pointed AT ME rather than something for me to use to do anything.
> OpenAI enabled its users to have a sext conversation.
Am I reading that right?
You sure are: https://www.theverge.com/news/799312/openai-chatgpt-erotica-...
It's probably a ploy to get people to verify their identity.
Pure . This is clearly a opt-in feature and they make that abundantly clear in the article. Stop the dramatics.
"No full OPT OUT"
Well even if they have an "opt out" option, it's closed source software, so you cannot audit anything.
I don't know if it's evil. It's more like desperate and stupid. They are rapidly losing their gaming dominance thanks to Valve. They've been losing the console wars. There doesn't seem to be a single person using Windows 11 that isn't being forced to in one way or another. Now they are forcing online accounts and injecting AI where it doesn't belong. How they still have willing customers is beyond me.
Many people are using Win 11 out of free will, until they alienate them. The main problem is that they are alienating developers, and that they don't focus on anything they do everything half-heartedly (even AI).
They abandoned the mobile phone market, where they couldn't decide to target businesess or consumers, so they let them both down.
Same happens on the desktop, they are quickly eroding the platform advantage they had and leaving both hobbyists and home users and enterprises without a reason to choose them.
They are pushing for the AI now, but in a way that is too controversial and is not acceptable nor for many individuals, nor for businesses, also doing so with forced hardware updates and high monthly costs.
XBOX is being abandoned. They did venture into the streamed gaming topic, but abandoning, guess because all those powerful GPUs are needed for AI.
Many core services are being abandoned, without alternatives, eg. Maps in windows was abandoned, without any successor. At least they could have created like a PWA wrapper for google/apple/osm, and put in a chooser facede on first start. It would have taken about 1 month for a single developer experienced in the windows relevant subsystems.
Windows is still reliable, stable, decently fast and secure, but that is useless when you abandon it as a platform, you don't attract developer talent, you don't have a unified UI/UX language that differentiates you (if not with anything els then with its consistency), does not provide a more streamlined deployment and update flow than competitors, etc. Windows had these advantages, and is repidly loosing these.
Don’t they conduct research and tests with small groups of people before launching features?
If so?’, then what the heck users are cool with these things?
> Satya had been a bright spot in Microsoft
What? How?
From a user's perspective, everything has gotten steadily worse under his reign. Solitaire is now a subscription service. I long for the halcyon days of Windows 8.
Everything before CoPilot was pretty standard CEO stuff. The real change was internally. Satya is well-known for eradicating the "Art of War" environment and bringing workers together. He also fully embraced open-source (Balmer hated OSS) and R&D has continued to innovate. (Still boggles the mind that F# exists and is awesome)
Prior to CoPilot, my only beef was that Azure needs a ground up re-architecture. They bolted products onto Active Directory which is ancient LDAP tech. It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP.
It should be noted that while Satya opened the floodgates, it was already making inroads by then, just with a lot more paperwork. Some early examples of F/OSS predating Satya were ASP.NET MVC and PTVS.
At the same time, the insistence from up top that all divisions have to be profitable on their own means that in practice there has been a steady ongoing scale-back from F/OSS for several years now. Just look at the situation in VSCode: sure, the base platform is still open, but increasingly many first-party extensions have their pieces replaced by closed source functionality - Python language server, C# debugger etc. Related to this are the attempts to block VSCode forks by using prohibitive licensing terms and even inserting runtime checks for the same.
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> They bolted products onto Active Directory which is ancient LDAP tech. It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP.
I really don't see the problem with LDAP. If they make an overlay for it and it's needlessly complicated, that's just par for the course. Have you experienced SharePoint?
> He also fully embraced open-source
Embraced as in this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Given the option, I always favour Azure over AWS or GCP.
AWS is a complexity maze, whereas GCP seems Google only does the minimum and one can only talk to bots.
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Satya was definitely an improvement, a breath of fresh air. But the last few years, they've started dropping the ball. Everything is half-assed (new outlook), or releases too soon burning goodwill (new teams), or a miss being pushed on people (copilot integration).
(strangely, perhaps my perception, this is roughly when the Mac M1 came out).
Ancient LDAP is probably the best they still offer. A far superior way for internal auth and vastly superior for companies that need on premise infrastructure. Nobody wants internal apps that auth through AWS or GCP.
I hate registering a shitty app and use their modern auth flow. No security gain for additional maintenance.
For that matter, this is a main reason why Windows is so established. The logistic problem of distributing user accounts on several machines.
And no, a virtual and slow cloud Windows is not an alternative for anyone that wants to be productive.
I wish we still had ancient LDAP tech at work...
> Everything before CoPilot was pretty standard CEO stuff.
Sure it was. Just as OP wrote:
> From a user's perspective, everything has gotten steadily worse under his reign.
Wait until you try OCI.
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> Solitaire is now a subscription service
That is a joke, right? Right??
Nope. Minesweeper, too.
Well, the games are still free, the subscription is to remove the ads.
But you have to subscribe for each game separately, and it's a per-device subscription.
Yes, Microsoft really is that petty when it comes to nickel-and-diming users these days.
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Well, you can have a subscription for switching a relay in your car, so that current flows from the battery to some wire, so that your seat heats up.
It's a sign of the times...
They said Microsoft not windows. Modern dotnet is a good example of something Microsoft has been doing right. Windows on the other hand...
> I long for the halcyon days of Windows 8.
That's a phrase I would never have thought I'd see. I remember Windows 8 as being generally despised when it first came out.
On the UI side of things the trouble with 8 was the push towards touch as the latest shiny object to chase, coming a few years into the boom of smartphones/tablets. The start menu was full screen with no option and many OS applications were either full screen only or by default until you clicked a new title bar button. The 8.1 release pulled back from a lot of that.
There's no bottom. It can always get worse.
Solitaire is no longer free?
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