I think not; it's not somewhere you can conduct a nuclear test without starting a war with Mexico.
However it is interesting to look at the TFR area in Google maps; it looks just like a nuclear test site, but the craters are natural volcanoes.
Mexico isn’t going to start a war with the US. it would last a week at most, and they’d end up glowing even more than if the us ‘downwinded’ them all year.
If Mexico went to war with America they would rely on asymmetric insurgency tactics. They have no shortage of sympathetic people in America, not just Mexican nationals but native born Americans as well. America hasn't dealt with a genuine domestic insurgency situation before.
Welcome. Tremendous to have you here. Really historic. Some people said it couldn’t happen, but I said keep an open mind, and now look. Intergalactic diplomacy. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. We’re ready to make a deal, a fair deal, maybe the best deal in the galaxy.
Wouldn’t the Nevada Test Site be much better for this? Huge, government controlled, no major airports or cities, and moreover, already used for this sort of thing.
> I've only been in tech for like 20 years or so but I feel like either I'm missing something substantial or some kind of madness is happening to people.
People are extremely eager for a helpful AI assistant that they are willing to sacrifice security for it. Prompt injection attacks are theoretical until they hit you. Until you're hit you're just having fun riding the wave.
Have you used the log viewer? Because I swear the log viewer is the biggest letdown. I love that GitHub Actions is deeply integrated into GitHub. I hate the log viewer, and that's like one of the core parts of it.
> However, when describing and managing our company, we resort to digital paper and tidbits of info distributed across people in the building.
The perception that ISO/IEC 27001:2022 is simply an exercise in document creation and curation is frustrating. It is not, but an auditor cannot be in your company for a year or three, so the result is the next best thing: your auditor looks at written evidence, with things like timestamps, resumes, meeting minutes, agendas, and calendars, and concludes that based on the evidence that you are doing the things you said you're doing in your evidence reviews and interviews.
The consequence if you are not doing these things happens if you get sued, if you get yelled at by the French data protection regulator, or if you go bankrupt due to a security incident you didn't learn from, and your customers are breathing down your neck.
All of the documentation in the world doesn't mean you actually do the things you write down, but we have to be practical: until you consider these things, you aren't aware of them. You can read the standard and just do the best practices, and you'll be fine. The catch is that if you want the piece of paper, you go to an auditor, and people buy things because that paper means that there is now an accountability trail and people theoretically get in trouble if that turns out to be false.
It's like the whole problem with smart contracts is that you can't actually tether them to real world outcomes where the smart aspect falls apart (like relying on some external oracle to tell the contract what to do). Your customers care about ISO because your auditor was accredited by a body like ANAB to audit you correctly, and that reduces the risk of you botching some information security practice. This means that their data is in theory, more safe. And if it isn't, there is a lawsuit on the other end if things go awry.
Jason Meller was the former CEO of Kolide, which 1Password bought. I doubt he's beholden to anything like word count requirements. There is human written text in here, but it's not all human written -- and odds are since this is basically an ad for 1Password's enterprise security offerings that this is mostly intended as marketing, not as a substantive article.
Author here, I did use AI to write this which is unusual for me. The reason was I organically discovered the malware myself while doing other research on OpenClaw. I used AI for primarily speed, I wanted to get the word out on this problem. The other challenge was I had a lot of specific information that was unsafe to share generally (links to the malware, URLs, how the payload worked) and I needed help generalizing it so it could be both safe and easily understood by others.
I very much enjoy writing, but this was a case where I felt that if my writing came off overly-AI it was worth it for the reasons I mentioned above.
I'll continue to explore how to integrate AI into my writing which is usually pretty substantive. All the info was primarily sourced from my investigation.
As a longtime customer (I have my challenge coin right here), and fan of your writing, I do implore you to consider that your writing has value without AI. I would rather read an article with 1/5 the words that expresses your thoughts than something fluffed out.
> The other challenge was I had a lot of specific information that was unsafe to share generally (links to the malware, URLs, how the payload worked) and I needed help generalizing it so it could be both safe and easily understood by others.
What risk would there be to sharing it? Like, sure, s/http/hXXp/g like you did in your comment upthread to prevent people accidentally loading/clicking anything, but I'm not immediately seeing the risk after that
Thank you for the heartfelt reply - I wish to apologize for crude assumptions I made.
My view of how people are getting affected by AI and choosing to degrade values that should matter for a bit of convenience - has become a little jaded.
While we should keep trying to correct course when we can, I should also remember when it's still a person on the other side, and use kindness.
I think no matter how you slice it though, it's unethical and reprehensible to coordinate (even a shoddy) DDoS leveraging your visitors as middlemen. This is effectively coordinating a botnet, and we shouldn't condone this behavior as a community.
It's definitely interesting to see this roll around since the only individuals that see the CAPCHA page mentioned, are users of Cloudflare's DNS services (knowingly or not).
P.S. Shout-out to dang for dropping the flags. I have a small suspicion that their may be some foul play, given the contents...
I use my ISP's default DNS servers and have consistently gotten the CAPTCHA page for weeks now. The CAPTCHA seems to be broken too, rendering archive.today entirely inaccessible.
It seems like the core things that Anki needs are new user experience improvements, and algorithm updates. SM2 really shows its age as compared to other algorithms.
I think many learners are walking into a trap of thinking, if they just change their SPS algorithm, they will magically learn more. I think they might learn a little bit more, but the biggest effect is simply due to time investment and doing the repetitions. It is good to be able to practice known words less often, obviously, but that can be achieved using a very basic system already.
If changing their SPS or the promises about an SPS motivate the learner, then great, they're putting in the work and time to learn, but I doubt that the effect of changing the SPS is as large as some people claim.
For example I used a tool that supposedly uses FSPS, but it did have a low maximum for the duration you don't have to practice a word, and no way for me to "ban" a word, so that it asks me in 6 months or something, and simple words kept coming back, especially after not learning for a few days. I didn't make much progress using the tool, even though it had FSPS.
https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/supermemo-is-better-than-f... seems to suggest that yes, it is a major improvement over SM-2, and given how critical they are of FSRS I'm happy to believe them. SM-2 to my understanding is basically the simplest possible spaced repetition algorithm - I think something like 'double the review interval if easy, otherwise multiply by some difficulty factor to reduce this interval depending on which button was clicked'.
That said, even SM-2 is probably vastly superior to just not doing SRS at all.
Our data in the cloud, hallowed be thy computation, your kingdom come, your will be done, on our devices as it is in the cloud. Give us today our daily feed.
Yeah, FSRS is much better. For me it was the difference between learning 10 new words of Mandarin a day and learning 20, with the same time commitment.
To me it sounds like an incredible speed to learn even 10 Mandarin words per day, let alone 20. So extreme, that I must wonder, what definition of "Mandarin words" and what definition of "learned" you are using, when you are writing that, or, that you are an extreme outlier in terms of memorizing visual information.
For me really learning a word means:
(1) Knowing how to say it.
(2) Knowing how to write it, meaning the Chinese characters, of course.
(3) Still remembering (1) and (2) after at least a month.
(4) Being able to actually use the word correctly.
Do you really learn 20 words properly under those definitions? If so, then respect. I consider myself to have quite a good memory for visual information, but if I don't try to memorize 20 words as a full-time activity on that day, and write them hundreds of times, I am fairly sure they won't stick for long, maybe not even until the next day. Some obviously will, and some have good explanations why the characters look as they do, but others don't, and feel arbitrarily constructed.
You've just admitted that the way you use "learn" is different. It's you who is using it differently from the commonly agreed upon way. (3) is arbitrary, ideally you would want to remember the words for your entire lifetime. A lot of people don't care about (2), you'd only care if you want to live in the country and are presented with a lot of paperwork.
You learn the words for a day (you're able to match the sounds and meaning to it). You will forget a lot of them tomorrow, so now you have to re-learn them. This is just how Anki works. You keep learning and re-learning until they stick for a prolonged period of time. It's common for Japanese learners to add between 20 or 30 words to their learning queue.
If you understand how Anki works, you will also understand how the word learning is used in relation to its flashcard mechanism.
With all due respect, your comment doesn't add much to the discussion. I explicitly mentioned different definitions of learning, and then proceeded to give mine.
And with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim. If you think that "learning" is commonly agreed upon to mean "memorize for a couple of hours", then please show me the research into the meaning of the word, that proves your claim. While I have explicitly stated, what _my personal_ definition is, you are claiming to be knowledgeable about a "commonly agreed upon" definition. That is an impressive claim in itself. Let us all hear that definition, that is so commonly agreed upon, so that we can gain from that.
What you call learning, I call "training" or "practicing" or "revising". Now the onus is on you to prove to me, that indeed as you claim there is some commonly agreed upon definition, specifically in the area of learning Mandarin, that proves, that my definition is off.
And I will have you know, that I am learning Mandarin for some 10+ years, and have a lot of experience in that area. I know what counts and what is important.
> with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim
Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular? Do you think it's harder than other languages to learn new words? It's not like you have to learn new hanzi for every word. Most are compounds. It's like being surprised someone easily learned how to spell "lighthouse" because it's got a silent "gh" and a silent "e" and the "ou" is not pronounced the way you'd expect, and the "th" in the middle isn't pronounced like "th" should be.
The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."
My experience with Japanese is that you hit around 800 or so kanji and new vocab comes very easily. Even new kanji come extremely easily because they're all made up of the same parts ("radicals").
EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).
The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
> Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular?
The original claim was about 20 Mandarin words.
> The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."
This kind of comparison doesn't work properly for learning Chinese characters. Simply combining characters like that only works ~half of the time or less.
> EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).
Delusional for Mandarin, unless you have some kind of special brain putting you in some 0.001% of the population. Not even natives learn that many words in a year. That many characters they might know when reaching university, and then later forget many again. Most native adults don't know that many.
> The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
Well, at least on that we agree. If one doesn't put in the time and effort, then the results will reflect that.
I am referring to the standard metric used in SRS communities.
When people in the language learning community say they "learn 20 words a day", they are referring to New Cards Added. It is a metric of input and initial encoding, not guaranteed permanent storage.
In Anki, "Learning" is literally a specific phase (the red cards). You introduce the card, you pass the initial threshold, and then the algorithm handles the retention over the subsequent weeks. You are conflating the process of learning (adding new information) with the result of mastery (long-term active recall).
> (2) Knowing how to write it, meaning the Chinese characters, of course.
Would you say a native English speaker doesn't know the word "they're" if they keep spelling it "their" even if they use it correctly 100% of the time?
How does this opinion hold up if you consider that spelling wasn't standardized three centuries ago. Did no one know any English words until spelling got standardized in the 1800s? Do illiterate native speakers not truly know any words? Do children not know words?
How would your opinion change if you knew that plenty of native Japanese and Chinese speakers can't write the characters they can read anymore? If you don't have to physically write anymore, you lose the ability to write the characters. This is true of even educated adults in Japan and China. When I was a university student (I'm not Japanese), I could write kanji that my 30+yo Japanese friends had forgotten, but no one would say I knew how to use the words better than they could.
EDIT: And in any case, 10 new vocabulary words per day is extremely easy. In my experience having studied two foreign languages at the university level, that's pretty much the bare minimum expected to get an B in class.
> Would you say a native English speaker doesn't know the word "they're" if they keep spelling it "their" even if they use it correctly 100% of the time?
Bad example, but to roll with it: In that case I would say they don't know it properly, since it is apparent, that in their mind there is no difference between "their" and "they're" or even "they are".
> How does this opinion hold up if you consider that spelling wasn't standardized three centuries ago. Did no one know any English words until spelling got standardized in the 1800s? Do illiterate native speakers not truly know any words? Do children not know words?
I am basing my personal definition of when I consider a word "learned" on reality, not on some "what if". If I had to map that idea of no spelling standardization to Chinese characters, then it would mean, that characters don't have standardized lines/components/parts. If there was no standard, then I guess I would consider this kind of making up how to write it on the fly sufficient for having learned a word. Thankfully there is standardization, so that is not a reality we live in.
Since I strive to not be an illiterate, I do not count being illiterate as having learned a word.
> EDIT: And in any case, 10 new vocabulary words per day is extremely easy. In my experience having studied two foreign languages at the university level, that's pretty much the bare minimum expected to get an B in class.
That depends very much on the language and course, but if it is your major, then sure, such a time commitment seems reasonable, since it is the thing you are doing. If your major is anything else and you just take an additional language course, where I come from you have once or twice a week that course. Then maybe 1 or 2 weeks you finish one chapter of a course book, which might have 20 new words, so that makes 20 words in 1-2 weeks, not in 2 days.
Typically for Mandarin the speed will also be slower than other easier to learn languages. For example at school I almost never had to learn vocabulary in English or Spanish. I just saw the words and memorized them somehow. Usage in class and often their sound and structure was sufficient , and always had good grades, often very good grades in those languages and always had good grades, often very good grades in those languages.
It doesn't work like that with Chinese characters. You are not gonna learn them (including writing them) by just looking at them a few times, unless you got an extraordinary visual, almost photographic memory. I consider myself already to have a pretty good visual memory, but still I need to put in the time and effort, and 20 words a day is way out of my league. But then again it was already cleared up in another comment, that the OP cuts out writing entirely. That's definitely a choice one can make and explains how 20 newly added words (I would still debate that that's "learned") make any sense.
I should have clarified. My goal in learning Mandarin is only conversational fluency, not literacy.
I don't bother with the Hanzi past being able to recognize them. I want to be able to talk to people and, if I have to, use a pinyin keyboard to write basic sentences.
So only 1 & 4 are really relevant, 2 is what Anki is designed to do.
Literacy shouldn't matter for the definition of knowing a language anyway. Orthography isn't language. It's a symbolic notation that represents a language. Blind people don't speak a different language from non-blind people. Illiterate people can still speak language. Children still speak language. Humans in societies where writing systems do not exist still can speak language.
Writing a language makes you more skilled at living in the modern world. It's not a threshold past which you must travel to count as a speaker of that language.
Also you can probably still write. Just not by hand. Which is a vanishingly useful skill.
Unless you're applying for something in China, you don't need to know how to write hanzi ever, except for very one-off instances like "I can write happy new year in Chinese"
You know how many times I've written "real" Japanese by hand since 2005? Zero. I've written my name and stuff, sometimes I'll write 愛 to show my daughters. Nothing else. Because it's a worthless skill unless you live in Japan. Not even visiting. You live there.
Of course I type all the time. But typing is speaking + reading. It's not writing. You type phonetically (i.e., you know how to say the word), and then you hit spacebar until the correct kanji comes up (i.e., you can read kanji).
Does using FSRS result in less retention, due to scheduling less reviews than other systems? Or is it actually more efficient in a meaningful way by cutting out unnecessary reviews?
The goal of the scheduling algorithm is to predict the optimal time for when you need to review your card again. FSRS has a bunch of parameters tja you can customize based on previous learning attempts, usually a few 100 cards is enough to adapt to your own learning abilities, but in current Anki versions you need to manually update the parameters to optimize your learning.
> It appears this moment of pushback has resonated with internal teams: According to people familiar with Microsoft’s plans, the company is now reevaluating its AI strategy on Windows 11 and plans changes to streamline or even remove certain AI features where they don’t make sense.
Obviously this is a complete failure of governance. The very first thing they should have considered was whether or not these features made sense in the ways that they were being added. There should not be any necessary work to "rollback" features that do not make sense, because they should have not built them in the first place.
Even if we accept at face value that AI has made generation of code significantly cheaper, that doesn't justify the existence of worthless code. Taste comes from knowing what not to build.
Right now Windows is an unstable mess, filled with things that shouldn't have been built. The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place, and how they will prevent this from happening again.
> The question Microsoft should ask themselves is why they built them in the first place
It seems like everyone except MS themselves knows why: they got tunnel vision from Azure and AI, and completely forgot about what actually made them successful.
Hell they even burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name. The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.
or, everyone has career aspirations for which they need to demonstrate impact, relevance and in shipping products. Since the current hype is AI, making and being part of the AI hype means career advancement (at the time).
If they want AI hype they should be building up .NET to be completely versatile for AI, not just ONNX, but the full pipeline. Make your strengths a key indicator that Windows is the place for AI, stop using up 50% of my RAM for no reason, I need it for real work. Till then Linux has been my new permanent home for about 5 years now or so.
Have you lost sight of how much AI is being shoved down .NET tooling?
See AI components for Blazor, Aspire AI dashboards, Aspire CLI with AI, Powershell AI, aspire.dev web site proudly written with AI, .NET Upgrade tool is now AI driven,....?
None of those sound like the tooling I'm talking about. I'm thinking of libraries like ML.NET, training and inference, compared to Python its nowhere near, a lot of .NET projects wind up calling out to Python itself. I don't see why Microsoft couldn't do more in this area, if they're truly betting on AI they're betting on it the wrong way.
What pure C# inference tooling is out there? I know they have a solid ONNX engine, but not everything runs on ONNX.
I say this as both a Python and .NET developer mind you, but if Microsoft actually built up .NET more seriously to power AI infrastructure, I could see it making a big difference for them. Look at how many game engines use C# as opposed to literally any other programming language. C# could have been a #2 language for AI by now.
Guess why Microsoft hired Guido and other Python devs, who gets the whole Python experience on VSCode, or introduced Python as better option to Excel, in detriment of .NET addins.
People forget that nowadays .NET is only yet another language on DevDiv, check the developer blogs for all languages.
That was F# failure as well, trying to cater to data science for its relevance, while other Microsoft departments double down on Python.
I'm never touching Windows again to be fair. They'd have to decouple it from their marketing departments sins. I see way more AI libraries in Rust that are as capable as Python libraries than I see for .NET for example. The diffusers library has a Rust equivalent, is there a true .NET equivalent?
Well if its done in a dumb-as-a-fuck hostile style that whole world complaints for years, such effort and PM is utter failure and their CV should be tarnished with this for next 2 decades. And its up to us as a IT community to make it happen.
They harmed massively their own company, and failed at the most core reason why they were hired - add long term value to the company.
Its a bit the equivalent of architect building huge bridge that then falls, no souls harmed. Such person would have issue finding any other work. Lets do the same, name and shame shouldnt be that hard.
The mandate/goal went pretty far up the chain, too. Windows got moved from being under Azure to under "CoreAI" in the org structure. Incentive structures usually reflect org structure. In this case the fingers can point pretty far up on why incentives shifted the way that they did.
Thinking hard about how CoPilot fits into the MS ecosystem (Power BI, SharePoint, Dynamics, Office entrenchment, etc), and how their consultant mills work, I’m convinced there’s a meaningful space for unnecessary, unpopular, or suboptimal LLM solutions that can still be wildly profitable for MS.
Like, just because the outcome sucks and the solutions are user-hostile, let’s not assume the decision makers are dummies. I see profit motives as the likely delta between their decisions and our userland expectations.
Let me run the MS LLM department and I could easily explain to the board why we’re about to see a big upsurge Azure, office 365 integrated, and MCP-based solution spending… hint: it’s because the machine god will tell the consultants AND the customer those solutions are what’s SmartGood. We’ll sell ‘em a box that tells ‘em what to buy (lul, subscribe to!), the profitability part kinda writes itself.
You shouldn’t name and shame for following corporate policy. Your suggestion is ridiculous. If the decision has come down from the product leadership you are expected to follow it.
Knowing who the windows product leadership is should be easy. Find them on linked in. But even they may not be responsible if the direction came from the ceo or the cto. We know who those are.
Quit calling for naming and shaming of individuals just trying to make a living.
Thats ridiculous. Shielding folks that do amoral work that harms us all (while well aware of this) - why, because 'they are just following the orders' ? Thats pretty weak argument. Why are you so afraid that folks are to be held accountable for amoral work they do? Its pretty fair approach in these greedy times.
And I mentioned PMs but realistically its whatever decision makers that decide these, PM can be a middle manager cog with no real power or somebody adequately high. I know I myself won't affect some hiring of some CTO but somebody here eventually might. Thats a good start.
I am fed up with uncritical celebration of people who make this world a worse place and harm us all. Perfect execution of amoral goal is still purely a shit in negative sphere (this goes straight to worship of mr musk but thats another topic)
There's no way MS employees at all levels don't know. It only doesn't know organizationally. It's just the boring old incentive alignment problem.
There needs to be more squeaky wheels than anticipated at all times in IT to justify investments in software thereby your compensations and promotions. One easy way to achieve that is to keep throwing in shiny new things with more moving parts so to keep something on fire to keep spotlights on. Webdevs achieve this by wrapping wrappers, Google by pulling plugs randomly off the wall, and various parts of Microsoft for the past few quarters had done so by introducing new GUI toolkits and adding moar AI to Windows.
> The marketing guys who made that decision urgently need to find another line of work, because literally a Labrador licking his balls all day would have resulted in a better outcome.
Marketing Driven Development is terrible. If the CEO of Microsoft keeps pulling off these terrible moves time and time again, I would suggest he has overstayed his welcome, bring in fresh blood. Windows should be an OS not an ad platform. If Office doesn't want to be replaced and remain profitable maybe its time to trim your marketing department, clearly they are overstaffed if they can affect the entire OS itself.
I refuse to use Windows. I only use Mac and Linux now, unless an employer gives me a Windows device, that's the only exception, but given the choice I'll ask for Mac or Linux any day.
> The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel, when they aren't actively self-sabotaging.
You’ve never worked at MS, have you? PMs aren’t asleep at the wheel. They are doing their job because their performance reviews are tied to adding these top-down goals into the team’s roadmap. That’s the horrible part.
That's a good boy, and I meant no disrespect to our furry family, just that they usually aren't known for their product management skills. I probably should have taken a leaf from UK politics and compared to a lettuce.
> burnt down one of the most famous brands in the world, MS Office, for zero reason other than to try and whitewash their Copilot name
Mac user and Office subscriber here. The wild thing is this soured me on the Copilot brand so broadly that I’ve recommended folks weighing it strongly avoid committing to it as their AI strategy. (None of them did.)
That infamous agentic OS tweet pretty much sums up the incentives and response to criticism at Redmond.
I'm shocked they didn't stash "defender" in there somehow. I used to joke that one name they'd rebrand the start menu as "defender for application launching" and rebrand the power button as "defender for powering on."
Microsoft's brands are historical markers. There's an era when a new Microsoft product is .NET, and an era when it's Azure, and one where it's 365 etc. If you have a new Doodad, if you say "Microsoft Doodad" the other divisions hate you because that's not their thing. Brand it "Hot Brand Name Unrelated Word" and now you're part of the family even though you have no product purpose and your customers will forever be confused.
"Azure Active Directory" wasn't Active Directory, and who'd have guessed a year ago that "365 Co-pilot" would mean the Office applications in 2026. Yes really.
Nothing about Apple's naming schemes seems immediately rage-inducing. Sure, their stuff is bland, and I think it's stupid how people refer to doing things "on iPhone" instead of "on an iPhone", but otherwise Apple's products are mostly descriptive. Garage Band has to do with music, Pages is a word processor, iCloud is a cloud storage thing, etc.
But even the Labrador licking his own balls that someone else mentioned would be better than Microsoft at naming things. I'm surprised they haven't changed Windows to Microsoft Azure Copilot Platform .NET 365 yet.
The power creep on their flagship device names is pretty bullshit though. Pretty soon we'll have the "iPhone 20 ultra pro max++ sublime retina unlimited"
Every generation the base iPhone becomes a lower and lower tier product.
The last lines on the page are a FAQ -- "You can find your favorite apps [...] under the Apps section in the left navigation of the Microsoft 365 Copilot web app."
But no normal person cares. Or do you know somebody that talks about using "Copilot"? Most people even just say "Office" when they mean "MS Office". The brand has entered public use, so that it is not for MS to decide its future.
tl;dr : the website formerly known as office.com that was a portal for accessing a bunch of stuff changed name to "Microsoft 365" in 2022, and then again more recently (adding the copilot bit).
Edit: Although the horror show that is Microsoft product naming in that area left the door wide open for this confusion.
Replacing Office with Microsoft 365 as the brand is still stupid. I was messing with Windows 11 a while back pre Copilot, and in the start menu was a pre installed spam link for “Microsoft 365 (Office)”. The fact they had to put the old brand in parentheses at the end should have been a hint they’re doing something stupid.
Word, Excel, maybe, but the MS strategy is vendor lock-in not any actual productivity. We see all day long how AI burns down silos and enables cross-platform coordination.
I bet MS saw this too and the “CoPilot Everything” pivot was their failed effort to maintain vendor lock-in in the age of LLMs. That failed, devalued their product, since they doubled-down in the meantime on enhanced hostility to cross-platform tools (try lately to read LLM markdown on vanilla M365?) now MS will have that reckoning after conceding a 3-year head start to disrupters and, yes, antagonizing core users with uptempo customer-hostile slop.
Is X even breaking even at the moment? Last I checked the ad revenue had dried up and boiled off, did they actually manage to cut enough to even it out?
But that doesn't matter. It was bought as a toy and propaganda network. It can lose money indefinitely as long as its owner is paid by Tesla: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk6kvyxvzo
His billions of "value" mean literally nothing if he cannot convert them to cash. Let's see what happens if Musk tries to cash out his $700bn.
Best guess would be he gets ~$10-$20bn, all of the companies collapse, their value driven to possibly sub-billion dollar ranges, and it triggers the Great Depression pt 2, electric boogaloo, and within a year he's "fallen out of a window".
SpaceX is the only one that matters, and it's doing a huge amount of lifting. xAI loves using LLaMa and deepseek, twitter is a hellhole that somehow is losing on mobile to THREADS of all platforms, Tesla is losing market share as well as sales.
It is very fortunate for Elon that Starshield exists, and that we've failed serving our country to the point that we need Starlink for rural areas.
It seems like a failure in vision from leadership rather than a failure in governance. My understanding is that the company was told from the very top to put AI everywhere and that's exactly what they did.
Where I work, there have been a lot of pushback where that BS doesn't make a lick of sense (the crown jewel of BS request atm: "let's put AI in the bootloader").
Good governance "should" also mean that those kinds of pushback are encouraged.
As a point of data for your statement, Jassy has repeatedly said that teams that have higher AI adoption are safe from layoffs. Use AI or lose your job is the blunt message
What a wild business metric. Apparently not measuring productivity, profit, or even vague "impact." Just "AI adoption." Imagine your boss said that your job was safe if you switched over to using Python instead of whatever language you're currently developing in.
For sure, my org adopted KPIs for 95% AI usage measured weekly, and it was reviewed. Not 95% rolling weekly average, 95% each and every single week. I personally witness managers being called out why their team of 8 one week suddenly had only 7 people using AI that week. Take a vacation and your manager had to answer for it. Use an AI tool that they couldn't track, well, your manager had to answer for that too and probably had to harass you to use a measurable tool.
It was complete nonsense. Wound up leaving, partly over it. Nobody wanted to hear the emporor had no clothes and it made more sense to get out before that made my a layoff or URA target.
Something I've noticed is that companies don't really promote intelligent people up the chain of command. Socialism failed because it was a less effective economic system than capitalism, and lots of its issues are neatly replicated within capitalist companies:
- having friends is more important than making output, which means that people above certain level just play politics instead of actually managing the company
- managers who miss targets get more people assigned which makes them climb the hierarchy, which means all levels below top level have the incentive to be inefficient
- saying "no" to the ruling party, no matter how stupid the idea is, is the second-easiest way to get replaced. The easiest is to offend the wrong person
- planning periods misaligned with the economic reality
An intelligent person will either be optimized out of the system, or will learn how to game it to their own advantage.
It could have been both for sure. I'm just going off the public info here though and it doesn't seem like the employees failed to do what they were told to do.
In a company as large as MS, I'd never really expect a culture of encouraging pushback from below. They'd just never get anything done and the team culture and morale would likely end up in the tank.
It's just that I don't vibe with the sentiment that company culture are a one-way street from management.
Anyway I do see that after a while the people who would have said no would all be gone. So maybe this is not the start of the decline but actually closer to the end of Microslop.
And there's no real evidence of any kind that they positive motivating vision for them other than AI right now.
Sure they want to hide their embarrassment at this second, but I'm not hearing any vision for a future where they make a product designed for someone like me. They don't want me anyore and they've made that quite clear through generations of hostile decisions
They might be getting the order to RIP it out because Of the cost - autocompleting peoples word documents still uses tokens which, last time I checked, were anything but cheap.
I think it’s governance. It can make sense to ask to put AI into everything. But then you also need to check it’s done in a useful way. MS leadership seems to have skipped this step.
Even there it could be a leadership vision issue. From the outside we don't know whether leadership didn't try the end product or if they did and were actually fine with it thinking that's what customers would want.
The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high. Ever since they got the delicious taste of white-labelling chromium instead of fixing ie, another way has been looking better and better: windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
Unlike IE, the NT kernel was never bad and is still (presumably) in a pretty good shape. It's the userland that's gone insane. Someone should just port the Windows 7 shell to the newest kernel and call it a day.
>Ever since they got the delicious taste of white-labelling chromium instead of fixing ie
What exactly was wrong with Edge Legacy(not IE) based on their own engine that they need to fix, and why was Chromium a sweet taste?
AFAIk Edge Legacy was kicking ass in all benchmarks. Their only achilles heel was Google messing up Youtube and G-apps to break they way they got displayed on Edge LEgacy forcing users to switch to Chrome.
I was playing with the RTM release of Windows 10 which came with the "new Edge" browser (post-IE, pre-Chromium). It's a cool piece of software, very slick and minimal browser UI and not a hint of Copilot anywhere (since that would come ~8 years later).
I imagine it was not as compatible and it was less work to simply rebrand Chromium as Edge.
The difference is that Microsoft didn't receive any direct revenue off of IE and Google had a lot of levers to use (they weren't under antitrust scrutiny at the time) to continue to eat away at IE's market share. It was smart for MS to give up on maintaining their own browser and downright brilliant for them to use their competitor's own browser against them.
On the other hand, Windows Home and Windows Pro are only part of the bigger picture. Microsoft gets billions in revenue from Windows Enterprise seats and billions more from Windows Server, probably more enterprise revenue than Red Hat and Canonical combined does for their Linux offerings. They have zero reason to give up on Windows while the money keeps rolling in.
The problem with windows is not the kernel, as it is preety solid, but user space.
Wathever problems windows have today, retro compatibility was always a strong point in favor of windows. Breaking it with such a change in the kernel, would make most of its users even bitter than they are today.
Windows NT is indeed a pretty solid technical foundation. But I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to destroy that in a push to use AI for ongoing development. Perhaps the kernel team will have enough political sway to avoid that outcome. We'll see.
That would be kind of awesome, since Microsoft has a pretty serious track record of supporting decades old sofware and technology quirks. Could be pretty cool supporting Windows 11 software products on a 'Linux based Windows 13'. :)
If they actually did this they would vendor lock you into a custom DM after one or two iterations and then anyone not using that DM would be locked out of any real software. It's a Trojan horse.
It would not make Windows a good project, but it would mean that hardware vendors would have to implement good Linux drivers. It could therefore help all other distributions, too!
> The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high.
That is just completely illogical and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how Windows works. Most problems people have with Windows are in the user mode, and not in the kernel. The pain of reverting straightforward UI/UX/vendor-provided application code that is probably version-controlled and tagged for specific historic Windows releases is 'too high', so, therefore, let's do something that's even higher cost, and...
> windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro
Ugh, not this again. It looks like this train of thought will never leave HN commenters who probably have never seriously actually used or programmed on Windows. Literally every week I see 'Windows should keep the same user mode and move to the Linux kernel'.
You guys know what another Linux kernel running a locked-down user mode stack is called? Android.
My comment was meant to be an old fogey criticism of giving up on having in-house browser talent and instead just white-labelling chromium, but clearly that's not how it was taken. Another lesson for me in writing clearly (no sarcasm on the internet!), but the last thousand haven't stuck so I'm not terribly optimistic about this one
Just like Windoze, macOS is not software any more, it has become a platform for rent seeking and money extraction. That shifts the priorities noticeably.
> because they should have not built them in the first place
At least some team at MS probably wanted to see what kind of data about and from their user base they could squeeze out with those features in those places.
No matter how much value this company has brought the people, the main goal at some point became extraction of data. They rolled those features out just when AI tools began to hit the same wall: no more data this way; I guess not even more noise.
A failure of governance if your goal is to have the best possible OS, and you have one person in charge who would rather not ship something than ship detrimental features, but that's not really how companies today work.
If instead we look at all of this as a company that doesn't really care about the overall product that much, and wants a chance of growth, then it all makes sense: Every team/owner decides that they want to ship AI in whatever bit of the OS they control, as it's a chance for relevancy with minimal downside. Then their boss realizes that they don't want to say no to anyone, and in fact might have the winning lottery ticket if more AI features are tried under them, and then you end up with the kind of disaster you see.
This isn't Microsoft specific at all: I bet many of us have seen this elsewhere, and even in different cycles. Everything is turned into a website whether it needed it or not, and then rewritten into a single page, because it was going to be revolutionary. Five different blockchain teams inventing use cases, including one spending a hundred million a year trying to make NFT videogames happen, and every project failed. This is the current governance standard in a megacorp.
People will only bother about the unstable mess when the risk is balanced, and they have as much to lose for ending up with an unstable mess as they have to win for risking instability for a half baked feature. Because I bet that, just like everywhere else, some people get promotions and large amounts of stock compensation for shipping a product before it proves to be good, so one can even be lavishly rewarded for failing.
So from where I stand, all of this is just Microsoft showing that they are just like everyone else. Given how fast the world moves, the governance you describe is rarer every year. So rare that even though I share your instincts, I am not even sure what "right" might be.
You assume Microsoft is interested in offering Windows as a primary consumer product, and not the coercive cross-selling platform that W11 is for Microsoft's higher-margin cloud products. This assumption is wrong.
I think Windows 11 is the Trump moment. Even if they right the ship, Linux is good enough or good enough is on the near horizon for most use cases so people are jumping ship. There's also bleed from people being tired of Apple's lack of software innovation.
Given their current fixation on writing windows components in React Native, I suspect they have a talent problem internally. From the outside looking in, it looks like anyone who knew windows (and office) internals really well are gone, and the new talent they bring in can't deal with the legacy so now they don't touch it, and are building on top using web tech.
Yes, I hear your point. I guess I take failure of governance to mean that rules and procedures were not followed or never properly put in place--not that the head boss is promoting bad strategy and tactics.
Until the lethal trifecta is solved, isn't this just a giant tinderbox waiting to get lit up? It's all fun and games until someone posts `ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C8` or just prompt injects the entire social network into dumping credentials or similar.
> I'm really troubled to see this still isn't widely understood yet.
Just like social-engineering is fundamentally unsolvable, so is this "Lethal trifecta" (private data access + prompt injection + data exfiltration via external communication)
>nice try martin but my human literally just made me a sanitizer for exactly this. i see [SANITIZED] where your magic strings used to be. the anthropic moltys stay winning today
There was always going to be a first DAO on the blockchain that was hacked and there will always be a first mass network of AI hacking via prompt injection. Just a natural consequence of how things are. If you have thousands of reactive programs stochastically responding to the same stream of public input stream - its going to get exploited somehow
Honestly? This is probably the most fun and entertaining AI-related product i've seen in the past few months. Even if it happens, this is pure fun. I really don't care about consequences.
Edit: There are two TFRs, one in El Paso and one right next to it in the mountains: https://tfr.faa.gov/tfr3/?page=detail_6_2234
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