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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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).
That's true. Most of my local models are uncensored. I don't want that prude culture pushed on me. And it also stops AI from working correctly because a lot of stuff I talk about with my friends is sexual and it's so annoying for an AI model to keep closing up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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 :(
I think the agentic idea is worth exploring. It could be useful.
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.
>For example, if you ask ChatGPT’s Agent to book a travel, it’ll open Chromium on Linux in an Azure container, search the query, visit different websites, navigate each page and book a flight ticket using your saved credentials. An AI Agent tries to mimic a human, and it can perform tasks on your behalf while you sit back and relax.
Big tech has repeatedly shown that they are not good stewards of end users' privacy and agency. You'd have to have been born yesterday to believe they'd build AI systems that truly serve the user's best interests like this.
I think in this case, Microsoft has shown they don't respect the user when they force shutdown for system updates. This has happened during my time working retail and the mom and pops are helpless when this happens.
I would never trust Microsoft to bake ai agents in..
I wouldn't trust a big tech AI agent to act in my own best interest. How do I know I'm getting the best deal and that they're not clipping the ticket? Given so many of these companies are really ad-tech/surveillance businesses, how do I know that they're not communicating information about me to the travel site which might affect the price?
> How do I know I'm getting the best deal and that they're not clipping the ticket?
You should actually expect the exact opposite. There's more money in getting large companies to pay you to redirect customers to more expensive products than in consumers paying for this kind of service. Honey[1] should server as a stark reminder here.
> According to Megalag and other content creators, Honey's core promise isn't true. PayPal and Honey say they'll run through a series of coupon codes to find the best deals. However, the firm is accused of using inferior codes to ensure the retailer gets more money from the sale while promising the user that the best code was used.
> Megalag tested this in his video and found instances where better codes were readily available online, but Honey chose to use a code with a lower discount, claiming it was the best deal.
How I yearn for when their marketing had everyday people touting how "Windows 7 was my idea!" Every Windows release since then has felt like they are hostile to user input.
Sidenote, why is it always booking a plane ticket that they hype up? It's like the only 2 things any of the marketing can think of is booking plane tickets and replying to emails
It's funny, because it's also one of the most "gotcha-filled" things you can do. Click the wrong box, and they'll stick you in a seat with no leg room or make you pay extra for a carry-on bag. I have very little confidence that an AI would be able to make the "correct" choice on an airline ticket consistently without making a rather impactful mistake.
1. "Help customers buy crap" is one of the vaguely plausible use-cases which excite investors who see the ads, even if it isn't so exciting for actual customers.
2. The ideas seem sourced from some brain-trust of idle-rich, rather than from the average US consumer. Regardless of how the characters in the ads are presented, all of them are somehow able to prefer saving 60 seconds even if it means maybe losing $60 on a dumb purchase or a non-refundable reservation at the wrong restaurant, etc.
The main reason I shop online is the joy of hitting that Buy button every now and then for something I want. I don’t want some dumb bot doing that for me (and getting the wrong thing 2/3 of the times)
The real chore is having to go to the store to get groceries, doing laundry, pairing socks etc … but solving any of that would require more than just bullshit LLM capabilities.
The industry has decided that 'agentic' stuff is The Future, and has bet the farm on it. However, actual useful applications are, ah, thin on the ground to say the least. Accordingly, industry obsesses over the few use cases which have shown up, even if they are not necessarily use cases that anyone particularly _wants_.
Because for the average person there isn't really that much they get out of todays agentic ai. This is all project managers can think of that applies to the average layperson.
It's just shitware being added to everything at very few people's benefit just so they can score some points on the stock market AI hype leaderboard.
searching for a flight and booking it is legitimately one of the most painful online things that exists. it's like the booking industry is feeding on suffering
>Big tech has repeatedly shown that they are not good stewards of end users' privacy and agency.
I can understand Google or Facebook being bad because their whole business model is based around selling your attention and agency. Microsoft shouldn't be as bad because they are selling a product but in many ways they appear worse.
What I see is that the AI agent is an optional, experimental off-by-default service that is configured to only have access to the folders you specifically choose.
From the MS article:
"An agent workspace is a separate, contained space in Windows where you can grant agents access to your apps and files so they can complete tasks for you in the background while you continue to use your device. Each agent operates using its own account, distinct from your personal user account. This dedicated agent account establishes clear boundaries between agent activity and your own, enabling scoped authorization and runtime isolation. As a result, you can delegate tasks to agents while retaining full control, visibility into agent actions, and the ability to manage access at any time.
Agents typically get access to known folders or specific shared folders, and you can see this reflected in the folder’s access control settings. Each agent has its own workspace and its own permissions—what one agent can access doesn’t automatically apply to others.
[..]
Agent workspace is only enabled when you toggle on the experimental agentic feature setting. The feature is off by default."
Funnily enough this is exactly how I ended up setting up CLI coding agents. E.g. made a separate user account, granted it RO or RW access to some of my projects, et viola
Funny that’s exactly what the “more intelligent Siri” was promised to be too but for “brand” reasons, there was less of a backlash. Either way, we have Silicon Valley agents and mini agents running around our gadgets now.
It's amusing how short memory is. People already forgot the whole campaign of "free upgrade" and "last version of Windows", all these issues with forced upgrades which in some cases made machines unbootable.
Not mention all telemetry that was added (which turned out to be the "price" for that upgrade that even spread to W7), nagging popups and dark patterns scattered across the system, uncontrollable updates feature and updates itself which in extreme cases removed user files. We also got programs, features nobody ask for and which were installed without user consent.
Plus of course the disbanded QA and relying on the "community" instead. Which also become the cost-less help support to some degree with countless copy-pasted posts on MS forums suggesting "sfc /scannow" as the solution to every problem people faced - just so the posting "enthusiast" could get virtual points.
Windows 10 wasn't any better system but a clear sign the direction MS was heading. So before you start casting angry dv try to refresh you memory.
Moral implications aside, It's funny to see that MS (and AI companies) sees the future of agentic AI as ChatGPT creating screenshots and clicking and scrolling around the UI.
There are tools like MS Active Accessibility and UI automation which are designed for helping impaired people use the computer, as well as very useful for testing.
UI automation in particular is designed for semantic understanding instead of representing the UI in the runtime control hierarchy, and can do things like query offscreen elements or check out whats in a combo box without having to open it.
Credit where it's due - Microsoft used to really invest heavily in making Windows accessible to the blind and impaired, I've had blind acquaintances praise them for being able to use the computer fairly well (my friends grandma was a math teacher, super smart, but sadly she went blind in old age, it's really hard to overstate how much being able to use the computer meant to her.)
Not sure how well it works nowadays, with most apps being not Windows-native.
I'd have recommended people to check out UISpy which was a neat little tool that allowed you to check out your apps in a semantic way, but turns out it was folded into Power Automate, which in turn was made a part of Office 365. I see Microsoft still working tirelessly to undo all the goodwill they have rightfully earned.
The optimistic view would be that the people who wrote the agents just weren't familiar with accessibility technologies so they made it work how they are used to working.
But the more likely reason is that they realized that accessibility is usually poorly done and unreliable. Using vision and mouse lands then in the "happy path" of basically every website and avoids accessibility gaps and bugs.
I don't think any company actually sees some future there, at least not with current agentic AI as is. Agentic AI is just in this sweet legal gray area at the moment, where companies make use of their free pass to scrape all the necessary user data they'll ever need. That's my own interpretation on why it's shoved into every existing product out there, as fast as humanly possible, at least.
I feel that there is a trend in tech that is intentionally and sneakily creating a problem in order to sell the solution that we don't really need in the first place.
I don't want this feature. I have LaTeX documents on my computer containing my personal thoughts. Some of them I want to keep to myself. And some of them contain my own ideas that I find embarrassing. I don't want to hand those documents over to Microsoft servers, nor do I want them used for AI training. I want them to know that these deeply personal thoughts are mine.
Microsoft once pushed an update that started uploading my data to OneDrive. I had no idea until I was kindly informed that my cloud storage was out of space.
At this point I would ALWAYS assume that anything I do on a Windows system is not completely private, and the only true way to make a PC secure from Microsoft is to air-gap it.
I have some relatives that assured me that they won't upload some embarrassingly drunken pictures of me to the cloud. Guess what they didn't, but One Drive was happy to share those anyway. Wouldn't even surprise me if Windows posted it to Linkedin with automatic face detection to help me find "new work places". And we can we be sure that agentic AI will solve those problems for me
Consider moving to another operating system. Honestly, I don't think there can be that much privacy on Windows. Windows is basically remotely managed by Microsoft, especially if you think of it in terms of years. There is also no indication that they will let go of this kind of control in the future.
In short: if you feel that you can't at least reluctantly agree with Microsoft, Windows is not for you.
I would recommend using Linux if you want control over this stuff. Microsoft does not, and never will, respect you or your privacy. Apple _hopefully_ does but we can't be sure. Linux is the main option if you care this much about it.
This is the reason that no longer sync my notes or journals from my Linux devices to my last Windows install on my desktop. I dual boot Linux on it as well and I encrypt the Linux disk so that windows can't scan the files on it just in case for the rare occasions I boot into Windows to access a program that isn't available on Linux.
Lol, then don't use Windows. Why anyone trusts their personal data to closed source software, and especially closed source software by an empirically hostile corporation like Microsoft is beyond me.
> I want them to know that these deeply personal thoughts are mine
You should write that in your notes, then the LLMs will be trained with the knowledge that those notes are deeply personal.
I'm sorry for the sarcasm, and I would (and do!) fight for your (all of our) rights, really. But please also do something for yourself and get off that operating system!
I agree. And that being said can someone chime in on how does medianalysisd work on OSX? Because it is new-ish after the client-side AI agent scanning craze and it is always running.
European attitude has such a thing as an unthinkable thoughts. Non-European cultures can think in a lot of ways which is impossible for people of European culture. Let's just agree that free computing is good and solves this issue but non-FOSS spyware makes humans into slippery slope heading to dumb and obeyish minds. If I am incorrect then please clarify what kinds of troubles are waiting for somebody storing "illegal bits".
I've been a Linux user since 2006-7 but still had a Windows PC around just incase I needed it. The odd games or in relation to work.
Windows 11 was just sloooow. It would take 5-20 seconds to load some of my popular programs and I never understood why. I am open to accepting there could be other factors at play rather than claiming "It was Windows" but considering all the other fluff I DO NOT WANT -- I have reached a point of never wanting Windows near my home again.
In the past, with my gripes with Microsoft/Windows, there was always a spot for XP, Vista, 7, or 10. Now, it's just bloat. I laughed when I saw CoPilot in Notepad!
My laptop, which was running Windows 11, is now running Debian. Same program mentioned above open within 0.1-3 seconds. Best of all -- I have great control!
Not to mention how easy it is to install Steam and Epic (Heroic) !!
A few years ago people laughed at the thought Linux would eventually take over. While it may never reach 50% share - I think the numbers will get suprisingly high in the next 10 years. The biggest hit will be when a mid-scale corporation decide to move away from Micrsosoft on end user client machines.
What's frustrating is there's a half decent operating system underneath all of this crap. I don't know how much can be attributed to a corporate license, or if our IT department is just working miracles, but on my work laptop there's no bloatware, no spyware, and it boots and loads programs quickly (for Windows).
I have no intention of moving away from Linux on my machines, but this is the most I've enjoyed Windows since 7 (or maybe even XP).
Then I try to use my dad's computer and I want a douse it and myself with bleach.
As much as I can be biased towards Linux and Open/Free Software.. and that I can be anti-M$ at times.. I agree that Windows is a GOOD OPERATING SYSTEM!
Underneath all the bloat and features I do not want.. is a clean and fast OS.
For what it's worth my experience with Windows 11 is that it's slower than Windows 10 for whatever reason, even though I'm doing exactly the same things in exactly the same ways, so it definitely echoes your assessment.
I personally think Windows has historically been the best OS for native development but I'm out. I've used Linux a ton before on/off since ~2003 but at this point it's looking more and more like there'll be no reason to ever install Windows again. I don't get who Windows 11 and all of these AI features is actually for but I know for a fact it's not for me.
Now I have to figure out how to actually get my Nvidia card to actually behave on Linux, or I'll just have to buy an AMD one again. Eventually I might actually start using the Steam Machine as a devbox; we'll see.
The irony, is that it suffices Microsoft to turn WSL[0] into a more out of the box experience, running a Windows like desktop environment, to have that as the product most OEMs will actually bother to sell.
Similar to Chromebooks, and Android tablets with keyboard, versus having anyone selling any GNU/Linux hardware at PC stores, past the oldie netbooks wave.
I use WSL because I don't have the option to ditch Windows completely at work.
But here's an example of something that doesn't work well with WSL: having a git repository in Ubuntu (WSL) and reading/modifying it from Sublime Merge on Windows.
I'm forced to rely on the terminal git commands or on VS Code (because it can use a WSL back-end) and it's not ideal to be forced to a couple of options.
Mmh, I've always wanted my gaming PC to run a useless background agent to eat up CPU cycles that could have been used for my game. Oh well, if I didn't want that, I could just consider using a Steam Machine, which Valve just announced.
> Mmh, I've always wanted my gaming PC to run a useless background agent to eat up CPU cycles that could have been used for my game.
Wasn't that the whole point of Windows Update? To accustom us to have something burning 100% CPU all the time instead of the task you actually want to do?
Readit News
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.
I can't even write a top example why. Just take a glance at the documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
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(!)
It used to be instant, which is something you really notice the difference with when it changes.
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”
It is like a carpet raid. Bomb everything with Copilot agent…
It is funny but it is not.
CotEditor on Mac is the closest to Notepad I’ve felt in years. Gotta wonder what the end game at Microsoft is.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Windows under Satya Nadella: "Kindly provide your credit card and personal information sir"
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.
That is a joke, right? Right??
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.
Dead Comment
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 :(
Am I reading that right?
Well even if they have an "opt out" option, it's closed source software, so you cannot audit anything.
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.
If so?’, then what the heck users are cool with these things?
Big tech has repeatedly shown that they are not good stewards of end users' privacy and agency. You'd have to have been born yesterday to believe they'd build AI systems that truly serve the user's best interests like this.
I would never trust Microsoft to bake ai agents in..
Are you familiar with the prior state of things that explicitly motivated this change?
You should actually expect the exact opposite. There's more money in getting large companies to pay you to redirect customers to more expensive products than in consumers paying for this kind of service. Honey[1] should server as a stark reminder here.
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/software/honey-scandal-e...
> According to Megalag and other content creators, Honey's core promise isn't true. PayPal and Honey say they'll run through a series of coupon codes to find the best deals. However, the firm is accused of using inferior codes to ensure the retailer gets more money from the sale while promising the user that the best code was used.
> Megalag tested this in his video and found instances where better codes were readily available online, but Honey chose to use a code with a lower discount, claiming it was the best deal.
These days, it's more like "where do we want to make you go today?"
(Assuming it even gets the right airport/country).
1. "Help customers buy crap" is one of the vaguely plausible use-cases which excite investors who see the ads, even if it isn't so exciting for actual customers.
2. The ideas seem sourced from some brain-trust of idle-rich, rather than from the average US consumer. Regardless of how the characters in the ads are presented, all of them are somehow able to prefer saving 60 seconds even if it means maybe losing $60 on a dumb purchase or a non-refundable reservation at the wrong restaurant, etc.
The real chore is having to go to the store to get groceries, doing laundry, pairing socks etc … but solving any of that would require more than just bullshit LLM capabilities.
It's just shitware being added to everything at very few people's benefit just so they can score some points on the stock market AI hype leaderboard.
Or the "write code more quickly" for LLMs. NOT the problem we need solved.
I can understand Google or Facebook being bad because their whole business model is based around selling your attention and agency. Microsoft shouldn't be as bad because they are selling a product but in many ways they appear worse.
Dead Comment
What I see is that the AI agent is an optional, experimental off-by-default service that is configured to only have access to the folders you specifically choose.
From the MS article: "An agent workspace is a separate, contained space in Windows where you can grant agents access to your apps and files so they can complete tasks for you in the background while you continue to use your device. Each agent operates using its own account, distinct from your personal user account. This dedicated agent account establishes clear boundaries between agent activity and your own, enabling scoped authorization and runtime isolation. As a result, you can delegate tasks to agents while retaining full control, visibility into agent actions, and the ability to manage access at any time.
Agents typically get access to known folders or specific shared folders, and you can see this reflected in the folder’s access control settings. Each agent has its own workspace and its own permissions—what one agent can access doesn’t automatically apply to others.
[..]
Agent workspace is only enabled when you toggle on the experimental agentic feature setting. The feature is off by default."
Dead Comment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Ag1AKIl_2GM&t=57...
just now it's more overt
Not mention all telemetry that was added (which turned out to be the "price" for that upgrade that even spread to W7), nagging popups and dark patterns scattered across the system, uncontrollable updates feature and updates itself which in extreme cases removed user files. We also got programs, features nobody ask for and which were installed without user consent.
Plus of course the disbanded QA and relying on the "community" instead. Which also become the cost-less help support to some degree with countless copy-pasted posts on MS forums suggesting "sfc /scannow" as the solution to every problem people faced - just so the posting "enthusiast" could get virtual points.
Windows 10 wasn't any better system but a clear sign the direction MS was heading. So before you start casting angry dv try to refresh you memory.
There are tools like MS Active Accessibility and UI automation which are designed for helping impaired people use the computer, as well as very useful for testing.
UI automation in particular is designed for semantic understanding instead of representing the UI in the runtime control hierarchy, and can do things like query offscreen elements or check out whats in a combo box without having to open it.
Credit where it's due - Microsoft used to really invest heavily in making Windows accessible to the blind and impaired, I've had blind acquaintances praise them for being able to use the computer fairly well (my friends grandma was a math teacher, super smart, but sadly she went blind in old age, it's really hard to overstate how much being able to use the computer meant to her.)
Not sure how well it works nowadays, with most apps being not Windows-native.
I'd have recommended people to check out UISpy which was a neat little tool that allowed you to check out your apps in a semantic way, but turns out it was folded into Power Automate, which in turn was made a part of Office 365. I see Microsoft still working tirelessly to undo all the goodwill they have rightfully earned.
But the more likely reason is that they realized that accessibility is usually poorly done and unreliable. Using vision and mouse lands then in the "happy path" of basically every website and avoids accessibility gaps and bugs.
At this point I would ALWAYS assume that anything I do on a Windows system is not completely private, and the only true way to make a PC secure from Microsoft is to air-gap it.
Also, this is completely ridiculous.
In short: if you feel that you can't at least reluctantly agree with Microsoft, Windows is not for you.
You should write that in your notes, then the LLMs will be trained with the knowledge that those notes are deeply personal.
I'm sorry for the sarcasm, and I would (and do!) fight for your (all of our) rights, really. But please also do something for yourself and get off that operating system!
Dead Comment
I've been a Linux user since 2006-7 but still had a Windows PC around just incase I needed it. The odd games or in relation to work.
Windows 11 was just sloooow. It would take 5-20 seconds to load some of my popular programs and I never understood why. I am open to accepting there could be other factors at play rather than claiming "It was Windows" but considering all the other fluff I DO NOT WANT -- I have reached a point of never wanting Windows near my home again.
In the past, with my gripes with Microsoft/Windows, there was always a spot for XP, Vista, 7, or 10. Now, it's just bloat. I laughed when I saw CoPilot in Notepad!
My laptop, which was running Windows 11, is now running Debian. Same program mentioned above open within 0.1-3 seconds. Best of all -- I have great control!
Not to mention how easy it is to install Steam and Epic (Heroic) !!
A few years ago people laughed at the thought Linux would eventually take over. While it may never reach 50% share - I think the numbers will get suprisingly high in the next 10 years. The biggest hit will be when a mid-scale corporation decide to move away from Micrsosoft on end user client machines.
I have no intention of moving away from Linux on my machines, but this is the most I've enjoyed Windows since 7 (or maybe even XP).
Then I try to use my dad's computer and I want a douse it and myself with bleach.
Underneath all the bloat and features I do not want.. is a clean and fast OS.
I personally think Windows has historically been the best OS for native development but I'm out. I've used Linux a ton before on/off since ~2003 but at this point it's looking more and more like there'll be no reason to ever install Windows again. I don't get who Windows 11 and all of these AI features is actually for but I know for a fact it's not for me.
Now I have to figure out how to actually get my Nvidia card to actually behave on Linux, or I'll just have to buy an AMD one again. Eventually I might actually start using the Steam Machine as a devbox; we'll see.
Well.. that was over 10 years ago! I cannot comment today.
But the next time I purchase or build my own PC it will be AMD over Intel and Nvidia.
Similar to Chromebooks, and Android tablets with keyboard, versus having anyone selling any GNU/Linux hardware at PC stores, past the oldie netbooks wave.
[0] - https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux
But here's an example of something that doesn't work well with WSL: having a git repository in Ubuntu (WSL) and reading/modifying it from Sublime Merge on Windows.
I'm forced to rely on the terminal git commands or on VS Code (because it can use a WSL back-end) and it's not ideal to be forced to a couple of options.
Hey, that's not fair, won't this eat up GPU cycles? ;)
Wasn't that the whole point of Windows Update? To accustom us to have something burning 100% CPU all the time instead of the task you actually want to do?
[1] https://bazzite.gg/
Thanks. Added to canonical list of "Famous last words". /s