I’m going to call it like I saw it, a very long time ago.

<rant>

You have a product that is basically purpose built to make data hoarding and piracy practical, yet it requires a login with a central service. I don’t care what justification anyone thinks makes that worthwhile or even a good compromise. Signaling to any corporate entity that you’re in possession of such a thing is a bad idea to begin with. They shouldn’t even know you exist. That information, along with anything else you do with the product is compromising to you and can be sold for money if aggregated with everyone else’s data.

If you find this rant out of place in our modern world, I’d like to point to the concept of shifting baselines. This didn’t used to be normal and nothing short of greed continues the behavior. The technology before this ran/runs without anyone knowing. Consider VLC, or XBMC.

To quote your quote:

I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.

I think the author just independently rediscovered “middle management”. Indeed, when you delegate the gruntwork under your responsibility, those same people are who you go to when addressing bugs and new requirements. It’s not on you to effect repairs: it’s on your team. I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. The idea that relying on AI to do nuanced work like this and arrive at the exact correct answer to the problem, is naive at best. I’d be sweating too.

65: Kids are out of the house, you have some money to fix a broken door, but you’re just too damn tired to go breaking things or screaming about it. Also, the reason for the tantrum happened 30 years ago. So you tell your family a pointless, rambling, mind-numbingly boring story about it at Thanksgiving, instead.

In a small, anecdotal way, I can say with confidence that the level of fiber trenching that happened (in a major metro area) from late 1999 through 2002 was on a whole other level.

Ooh, I did not consider the possibility of a military court case on this. That could be a game-changer.

just go loony in the heat.

You won’t just go loony. I’m pretty sure those conditions are ripe for permanent brain damage. Stay safe out there.

I’ll take it one step further and say that if you absolutely must use Office, O365 works in a browser on any operating system. You literally don’t need Windows anymore for that.

My prediction is that they’ll go full SaaS and make the non-pro version “free”, with a whole raft of features “cloud only” behind a Azure/O365 subscription.

4. Move the goalposts on “rape” and “pedophilia” because that’s kinda/sorta where they’ve been headed this whole time. It would also get a number of conservative politicians off the hook that aren’t even in the files. Basically like some kind of perverted Overton Window.

There’s stuff out there now about how to poison content scrapers that are training AI, so this is absolutely doable on some scale. There are already what I like to call “golden tokens” that produce freaky reliable and stable results every time, and so I think it likely there are counterparts that trigger reliably bad output too. They’re just not documented yet.

In a sane world, commercial AI would have legally required watermarks and other quirks that give content away as artificial, every time. Em-dash is probably the closest we have to this right now for text, and likewise for the occasional impossible backdrop or extra fingers on images. You can’t stop a lone ranger with a home-rolled or Chinese model, but it would be a start.

It’s a fine line to walk, but I see what you’re getting at here. I wouldn’t want to come across as incompetent either, lest it reflect on the company. Your follow-up remark is brilliant. Delivery is everything, I suppose.

I appreciate the use of a good old-fashioned shibboleth like this. Thanks.

, he’s reading off the bottom of his screen.

Aw fuck.

I’m gonna have to ask absolutely bullshit questions in interviews now, aren’t I? Do you have any other strategies for how to spot this? I really don’t want to drag in remote exam-taking software to invade the applicant’s system in order to be assured no other tools are in play.

Dear Microsoft CEO and C-suite people.

Push back on your investors now before it’s too late. AI features are ruining your product and its image.

A lot of companies are tied in up this AI bubble and Microsoft is not too big to fail in this regard. Your customer-base has gotten by just fine without AI and invasive screen-capture technology used to support it, for decades at this point. Most people see your product as an operating system: a product designed to support other products. They do not want more capabilities from it, and have come to rely on good support for hardware compatibility, stability updates, performance updates, and most importantly, security updates. It is the darling of OEM PC installs, and government and commercial enterprise continue to renew their site licenses because of it. These are the core features that will continue to bring value and keep people on your platform, not AI.

If you firmly believe that agentic AI is the future, make it an optional installable product or a completely distinct operating system altogether. This is strategic since it has radically different marketing needs than Windows or Windows Professional, and supports a distinct subset of your overall install base. Foisting this feature set on your existing users is doing nothing more than artificially inflate adoption numbers, and you’re risking the entire enterprise to think your investors don’t already know this. It’s not smart, it’s not even brinksmanship or a bold technology decision. It’s reckless.

Yup. I’m guessing that seasonal affective disorder and social isolation are a very dangerous combo.

I mean, there’s no actual dogs there, so nothing’s stopping that from happening. They’ll get there eventually, assuming this isn’t the real point.

Oh, that’s easy to explain. They dared to give people “not like Greg Abbott” a leg up.

punishing retaliation but not the action

I’m missing something. Are you suggesting that by retaliating outside the moment - attacking outta nowhere the next day - you were somehow punished differently? Perhaps less so?

This has always been my contention with this policy. It’s one thing to prohibit physical violence. It’s another thing entirely to create an environment where everyone escalates to verbal abuse (bullying) and other forms of assault, yet have no ‘zero tolerance’ policy for those things.

When the project contains decades-old legacy code, but it still works in modern environments.