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.

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's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP.

I thought Oracle Cloud was designed by AWS alum and was supposed to be solid?

AWS is a complexity maze, whereas GCP seems Google only does the minimum and one can only talk to bots.

In Sweden the only one I ever got support with was Google, so it’s not a universal experience (I didn’t pay for professional services).

I believe you and I have had this discussion before.

So I think when either of us talk about it as if it’s universal we are both wrong.

So every time you make a claim, I’ll be there.

Your experience with Google, it’s mine with AWS.

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.

Example, you cannot do graphical debugging of parallel code, use visualizers, or do profiling analysis in VSCode.

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?

Sure it was. Just as OP wrote:

> From a user's perspective, everything has gotten steadily worse under his reign.

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.

(strangely, perhaps my perception, this is roughly when the Mac M1 came out).

Embraced as in this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

That is a joke, right? Right??

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.

It's a sign of the times...

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.

They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD.

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(!)

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.

AI. Customers want AI, users want AI, peers want AI. If anyone says otherwise, they’re a Luddite and possibly a dangerous political radical.

Even .NET and C++ tooling getting spoiled with AI no matter what, see latest set of DevBlog announcements.

The problem isn't hiring people that only know macOS/Linux, we always argue about how bad HR hiring processes are in our field.

The problem is apparently the lack of management motivation to bring those peoples up to speed, and is confortable pushing for Web widgets instead.

I'm sure Microsoft would be perfectly fine ditching Windows as long as they could keep pushing Teams, Azure AD and Office 365 to companies.

It's crazy how no one actually competently working towards a shared goal is invested in the desktop OS game any more.

Linux people still have some fire left in them, but lack organization and shared vision to deliver a high quality product in a timely manner. macOS is the best contender, but other than pushing weird mobile-driven UX design and locking down the OS, the macOS of today hasn't changed that much from the OS X of 20 years ago.

So in other words, Linux on the desktop will be a Linux I will hate. The closest thing to Linux for the mainstream we have is ChromeOS and I'm sure we all hate it. I sure do because I want nothing to do with Google services.

In other words, be careful what you ask for.

That may be, but there is PLENTY of people with the expertise to develop WinUI apps -- IMO, the glaring problem would be that Microsoft can't get their head straight on which UI to support in the first place!

WinUI, only Microsoft employees on the Windows team, and fools that aren't aware of all the WinRT tooling reboots since Windows 8 was introduced, buying into WinUI marketing of how great it is.

As one of the fools that thought WinRT was a great idea, what .NET 1.0 should have been, I doubt there are many of those left.

WPF wasn't brought back into active status at BUILD 2024 by accident.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40843252

Then check the feedback on the latest community call,

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/discussions/1...

They can hire pretty much anyone. They choose to not hire people with Win32 experience. They choose to implement hiring process which results in hire other kind of people.

I thought most work is outsourced now.

Yeah, there's been complaints about some Apple's old polish and consistency being lost, but it's usually very nitpicky stuff, nothing compared to the complaints about Win11.

That was the lure.

But the real Notepad has been decommissioned and there is some bloated one now.

The two applications i miss on my linux boxes are notepad++ (though Kate is a good substitute) and GitExtensions

Looking at the features there does not seem to be anything special, but a lot of people seem to love it so there is clearly something special about it.

Having so much there in just a couple clicks is very nice!

A.k.a. donor.

Foobar2k, Paint.NET, Notepad++, IrfanView, WizTree, Ditto, TotalCommander, NAPS2 etc.

Linux has many options for any of those, but I always had a feeling that those options have less polish, or are less stable, or their UI is an afterthought etc. On Windows you have basically a single option for each application that most people go for, so documentation and online help is plentiful.

Without those, especially last one my productivity at my corporate work would be half at most. Editing a file in an archive within another archive directly, doing quick file comparisons of 2 files, syncing different dirs, fulltext recursive search... all with much better UI than Unix console counterparts (which I use too). And much more.

Simply the best tools on the whole market for me in given category, period.

There is something magical about those specialized, no nonsense tools using WINAPI, not chasing cross-platform, and maintained for decades, some of them since 90s. Snappiness, intuitiveness, stability, discoverability etc.

Less stable? MPD supported damn state supported popular science radio streaming channels in Spain like nothing...

Also vidir, entr and jimtcl/awk scripts p0wn your setup any time... I can just remote-mount FS's anywhere and use any local tools as if they where there. I can just spawn builds on directory changes and spawn an editor with a REPL in miliseconds. GUI? Everything it's composable. I can use a mega-complete GUI for MPD that makes Foobar2k blush. I can output audio to an streaming socket (or to plain Icecast) from MPD and plug any audio FX' and whatnot with MPD plugins.

I can push the whole graphical environment down and I could keep playing my music and control the whole music daemon from my phone. Add songs, add radio stream, play/skip, volume up and down... from my damn bathroom.

And OFC I can still code under VTY's and even read PDF's/CBZ's/EPUB's and even watch videos play any game or emulator which uses SDL (a ton of source ports, emulators like mednafen, Doom/Quake ports, Scummvm, DOSBox, PCSXR, PPSPPP)...

That without touching a mouse or switching between GUI's. No RSI, no headaches, no remote GUI tools to mount any crap requiring thousands of click and hurting your wrists and forearms. Everything it's under a directory and managed as it if were part of my hard disk filesystem.

I can edit directory listings with my text editor with the vidir tool, they will show up as a text file. You delete a range of lines, these files are gone. I can search and rename files at crazy speeds and, well, I can spawn any tool with find and iomenu and have a quick search for a file. File managers? Forget it, you keep typing and the fuzzy-finding tool with match the file in milseconds and open the registered tool for that extensions. And this is done with tools that could probably run in the 80's and early 90's. Go figure, I'm computing as if it was in 2040 but with 'prehistoric' tools.

Ah, don't forget that most CLI and TUI tools are scriptable... so you can just forget of even using a computer, 90% of the tasks can complete themselves via cron, the time scheduler under Unix.

I say with confidence that you will never be able to do file operations as quickly in a terminal as you could in a good GUI, like the Explorer from Windows 2000.

It used to be instant, which is something you really notice the difference with when it changes.

It was a proper WYSIWYG editor working with rich text, effectively a poor man's Word.

Microsoft should have turned it into a markdown editor, instead of killing it.

Now if you want to complain about something then vscode takes 12 seconds to load

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.

All the computers with Windows 11 that are available to me are fairly similar so I don't know if it's just these particular software/hardware setups. But it seems absurd that a device capable of billions of operations per second even on a single core somehow takes hundreds of milliseconds to display a few menu items.

This is disgusting! Who even comes up with ideas like that?

CotEditor on Mac is the closest to Notepad I’ve felt in years. Gotta wonder what the end game at Microsoft is.

There are no licensing issues, no fees to pay, no support to pay. It really is free, even in a commercial environment.

With that said, I think I've also had NotePad++ made available by IT at all employers and clients that had me use Windows even when the desktop setup was otherwise quite restricted. It's a rather established tool after all and probably considered a safe and reputable bet even by somewhat conservative IT leadership.

Thanks Microsoft for making everything worse

I feel sorry for the younger generations, they’ll never know what it was like to use computers that weren’t actively trying to shaft you all the time

Aaaand... thats about it, even Total commander's built in text editor is more powerful.

It is like a carpet raid. Bomb everything with Copilot agent…

It is funny but it is not.

I expect MS will get there long before Meta does given they don't have the encryption issue to contend with.

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”

A popup is a larger object, often a full window, that covers large parts of other elements or sometimes the entire screen. They are sometimes modal.

A toast is a smaller element, appearing (often by sliding into view upwards, hence the cutesy name) in or above a specific notification area of the application or the overall OS. These are much smaller, seldom modal and often convey useful notifications or warnings, unlike popups (especially modal ones) that are often either useless or actively, deliberately, in the way.

While it is correct to call then both popups if you wish, "toasts" are generally considered a specific subset.

I pasted this into Google to see what you were referencing, and was met with this full-screen, front page, all-important "AI Overview" (that of course takes precedence over actual search results)

> You're very welcome! If you have any questions about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's products, their marketing strategies, or need assistance with anything else, feel free to ask.

Full circle.

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.

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

Get a VM of Windows 9x/2k/XP to experience what "good Microsoft" was like.

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.

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)

For servers, we just use containers.

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.

I get the same feelings whenever I am near an interface that looks anything like NT4.0.

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.

Windows NT what ? Microsoft was always the same.

And the stunts they pulled to kill other IMs.

Or how they crippled the web for a decade due to killing competing browsers, building Windows lock-ins into IE (eg ActiveX controls), fragmenting Java, and then leaving IE to die themselves.

Or how they lied about Windows 98 requiring IE4.

Or how they didn’t give a crap about OS security until halfway through the life of XP. Leaving literally millions of people vulnerable to a plethora of different forms of attacks from malware to direct hacking on open Telnet ports.

Or how they tried to land grab IRC with their comic book GUI. Which, in fairness, was a novel app. But unfortunately it was another embrace, extend, extinguish play.

Or how they tried to kill ODF with their own faux-open document format: OOXML

Or their constant stream of FUD messaging about Linux being “communism”.

Yeah, MS were really noble in their goals to create a good OS. /s

It’s a pity they couldn’t even manage to do that well given every iteration of Windows has been bloated, buggy, and years behind the competition in terms of performance and capabilities. Windows was never a good OS.

In fact I’d go further and say Microsoft have never release a good OS. Even their versions of BASIC sucked compared to the competition.

Microsoft have always been good at negotiating with businesses. It’s why Azure is used in governments, why Windows is the “business platform”, and why 9x beat the competition in the 90s despite being consistently the worst in class for basically every metric you could think of.

Windows didn’t succeed because it was good. Microsoft succeeded because Bill Gates was ruthless!

They won because they were first mover, not because they were the best because they weren't and they aren't. This is why they are so hell bent on copilot everywhere. They want to build an installed base again so they can milk it. But they're hardly the best. In fact what they are selling as copilot isn't even anything they made. It's just Chatgpt. Another interesting parallel with edge by the way which is of course just chrome.

Microsoft didn’t even have an OS when they made that deal with IBM.

Hence why I said they’re good at negotiating with businesses.

Being first to market is actually less important than people think it is. It’s just history tends to remember the victors so everyone assumes they were first to market.

It was full of vulnerabilities though. I used to take a laptop with some specialist software to clients and in the end I started running it in a VM so I didn't have to deal with my machine becoming infected from my clients dodgy networks.

Am I reading that right?

Thankfully they still let you reorder the buttons, so I moved archive back and hid that unwanted summary in the overflow menu.

Progress!

They "let" you do fewer and fewer things with the computer you "own" every year.

Windows under Satya Nadella: "Kindly provide your credit card and personal information sir"

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).

User count going up? Sure.

New browser that will deeply integrate chatGPT into users lives and give OAI access to their browsing/shopping data? Sure

Several new hardware products that are totally coming in the next several months? Sure

We're totally going to start delivering ads? Sure

We're making commitments to all these compute providers because our growth is totally going to warrant it? Sure

Oh, since we're investing in all of that compute, we're also going to become a compute vendor! Sure

None of it is particularly intentional, strategic, or sound. OAI is a money pit, they can always see the end of the runway, and must secure funding now. That is their perpetual state.

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

Do you feel the same about say alcohol and cigarettes? We allow those, heck we encourage those in some situations for adults yet they destroy whole societies (look at russia with alcohol, look at Indonesia for cigarettes if you haven't been there).

I see a lot of points to discuss and study but none to ban with parent's topic.

The issue is it becoming ubiquitous in an effort to make money.

I'm suggesting restraint and responsibility on the part of the organization pushing this. When do we learn that being reactive after the harm is done isn't actually a required method of doing business? That it's okay to slow down even if there's a short-term opportunity cost?

This applies just as much to the push for LLMs everywhere as it does OpenAI's specific intention to support sexbots.

But it's all the same pattern. Push for as much as we can, as fast as we can, at as broad a scale as we can -- and deal with the consequences only when we can't ignore them anymore. (And if we can keep that to a bare minimum, that would be best for the bottom line.)

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.

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...

And because there's something in the human mind that has a very strong reaction to being talked to, and because LLMs are specifically good at mimicking plausible human speech patterns, chatGPT really, really hooked a lot of people (including said VC/private money people).

It's not that language generation is all there is to AGI, but that to sufficiently model text that is about the wide range of human experiences, we need to model those experiences. LLMs model the world to varying degrees, and perhaps in the limit of unbounded training data, they can model the human's perspective in it as well.

[1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1582807367988654081

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)

LLM are really good at pretending to be intelligent but I don't think they'll ever overcome the "pretend" part.

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.

'Machine will always know where to go from here on now'.

I think _maybe_ quantum computing might be the tech that moves AGI closer. But I'm 99.9999% certain it won't be LLM tech. (Even I can't seriously say 100% for most things, though I am 100% certain a monkey will not fly out of my butt today)

It’s not the hardware, it’s the algorithms.

Like at the moment I think during training new data changes all the model weights which is very compute intensive and makes it hard to learn new things after training. The human brain seems to do it in a more compartmentalised way - learning about a new animal say does not rewrite the neurons for playing chess or speaking French for example. You could maybe modify the LLM algo along those lines without throwing it away entirely.

So you might improve algorithms (by doing matrix multiplications in a different order.... it's always matrix multiplications) but you'll be feeding them junk.

So they need ever increasing amounts of data but they are also the cause of the ever increasing shortage of good data. They have dug their own grave.

I also don't subscribe to that. I'm polyamorous and sex-positive. And very LGBTIQ friendly. But I've seen that attitude a lot even in Europe :( especially from the emerging extreme right parties.

I don't really understand it either. Why is it any of their business what I do? I don't tell them they can't have a big traditional family. Why are they so preoccupied with me.

But don't think conservative ideology/politics is about making their rules your rules. Or at least being bound by their rules. I mean: If Musk doesn't like what someone says, they get blocked from Twitter (or in case of German political parties, downranked, so that the far right is ranking higher/being recommended more often on X). But they (like Musk) claim "free speech" for themselves. Meaning, they want to say what they feel like without consequences.

I found this interesting "law" by Frank Wilhoit:

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

The thing is if you're not protected you don't really have free speech.

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.

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.

I can't even write a top example why. Just take a glance at the documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

The same way with other big American tech. Netflix operated for a decade at a loss and now that they saturated the market they are constantly asking more money for less content.

They needed to grab as much free code as they could to train their AI, so what better way could there be than setting up the GitHub honeypot for this sole purpose, evangelize The Greater Good Of The Open Source, and play along a bit as in "we do open source too, don't be shy to show your code to our gradient descent, erm, we mean world!"

DotNet were shook, and shook bad. They went all out to make their runtime "cross-platform" because they faced an existential thread from lamdba+node.

The rise of the MBP also saw their dotnet ecosystem under thread from the other end of the stick - the developer end. Visual Studio cannot run on macos, so competitor IDEs that can were rising in their numbers. Hence the push for VSCode to try and claw back some IDE market.

Well even if they have an "opt out" option, it's closed source software, so you cannot audit anything.

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.

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.

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 :(

If so?’, then what the heck users are cool with these things?

However I would want it running fully locally (on my servers, absolutely not on Azure or any other cloud) and to have full control of where everything is stored and how it works. And have full control whether I use it or not. Absolutely no popups and marketing nudges to use it. That stuff tends to drive me away, it deeply annoys me and I only start hating the product.

But this will not happen with windows. Microsoft is purely a cloud company now and windows is just a sales vehicle for it.

I think that's the core problem more so than just the latest thing they're trying to push. But I'm not on this hype train. I don't need to have it today or have FOMO. Rven at work there's this push to use AI "or else we will become irrelevant soon". Which is partly driven by Microsoft as they are very close to our top dogs. Their "adoption" teams are constantly hounding us with their bullshit and I hate them so much. Also the colleagues who are evangelising AI (constantly shilling on Yammer and LinkedIn) are just working to make themselves irrelevant in the long term because AI is cheaper than colleagues.

I'll try it when it comes to Linux in a workable form and fully under my control. Just like I didn't use chatbots until they had workable performance on my own ollama server. And even then I don't use it that much. It's still early days. I don't get this pressure "keep up our fall out". I've been doing computing for 40 years and all the big things have taken at least a decade to actually "change the game". Like the dotcom crash. Eventually we fulfilled it's promises but it required other things to make it happen. Like the smartphone and the app.