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Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

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Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#182
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't do any training on your data. Telemetry is largely for feature use tracking (eg we should really do better around this component, everyone is using it). There is absolutely no ads overlap at all. Literally none. Disclosure: I work at Azure but not on VS Code

What people want to hear is there is none, and there never will be. Even that isn’t enough, but at least there is some legal recourse.

We need to stop relying on the assertions Big Tech make about themselves, and work towards regulation.

What most viewers saw during the Facebook congressional hearing was woefully out of touch, forgive me for using this phrase “old white guys” questioning Mark with many facepalm-able moments. But the house hearing, which includes 40 representatives from the Millennial generation, who grew up on tech, asked much better questions. It just got swallowed up by the news cycle because the Manafort Raid was happening at the same time as hearing about the Cambridge Analytica scandal was occuring.

All of this is still new. Banking, Finance, Real Estate, those are all well regulated at this point and arguably much more sophisticated or complex. The situation we have now with the Googles, Amazons, Microsoft, Facebooks of the world packaging up our metadata, combining it with other third party data, training AI, etc is all new, and those who are knowledgeable about it are just now making it into congress, so I am optimistic we will start to see real regulation on these shameful business practices soon.

Roger McNamee had an excellent conversation on the Sam Harris podcast recently about all of this. It was a very good conversation and one I highly recommend listening to.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is telemetry built into VS Code that you can turn off, but it is turned on by default. There is no way to know how they're using that data. Microsoft also collects data on Office365 platform and even local Office 2019 installs. I was trying was to make a tongue in cheek point, rather than specifically digging into exact methods of how they collect data. You may be right but it is besides the core issue we are d…

Whew! For a second I thought MS might be selling information on what type of variable names I use to advertisers.

Nah, it's more like automating you away once significant part of your coding process is replicated by AI in the future and then selling your replacement/virtual clone to your employer at a lower cost :-P I guess at some point there will be a replacement/clone store and any company could add 'mhermher'-style coding to their own projects by purchasing clone there. Internally ranked and price exponentially rising the more capable replacement is (e.g. ACM ICPC winning replacements will cost millions).

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm both wary of and hopeful about Microsoft and Google. "Trust but verify" and all that.

I’ve always found this phrase an oxymoron.

It is, but also carries a clear message; I think that dichotomy is why it's been such an enduring phrase.

The term became well known in the US during the cold war, in the context of arms treaties. The US and Russia were making agreements that relied on at least the appearance of, and some degree of actual, trust. Meanwhile they were undertaking extensive efforts to check if the other party was actually following their obligations.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#185
post #19
post #2

Satya has done a tremendous job turning around Microsoft. It was headed in the direction of becoming a slowly sinking behemoth under Ballmer, but he's turned it around. Sundar, on the other hand, is just content collecting $$ and showing more ads.

In what way was MS sinking under Ballmer? Maybe they were not exciting but they were super profitable every year. I think it's more about better PR. Not everything is golden at MS now either. I am working on creating a platform for our medical software on Windows 10 and it really makes me want to switch to Linux or iOS. Windows is a big mess of old and new code and attempts of sandboxing like iOS but only half-hearte…

I mostly agree, I’ve been a .net developer for over a decade and the current state of things is very wonky. For the past couple years I’ve been unsure where to focus my efforts to make sure I don’t wind up in another situation where I get very good at Silverlight just to have it all thrown away. At this point with Microsoft half backing away from UWP and half continuing to push it, I don’t know if it’s better for me to make the jump or not. Also it’s more clear now that .net Core the future, but for a while it’s been very confusing and it’s still not 100% clear if it’s going to encompass all the scenarios I need or if I’m going to have to keep abreast of both sides. Rather than staying at the bleeding edge of .net like I used to, I’ve been finding it safer to just give it space and wait for things to solidify. All in all, developing for the Microsoft platform has become very confusing over the past several years.

Still better than trying to keep up to date on the NodeJS or frontend development world though :-P

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where humans are involved, mistakes will happen. Trusting someone but verifying their work is a safe and sane pairing.

How is verifying everything because you don't trust people not to make a mistake operationally different from verifying everything because you suspect bad faith? To the supposed trusted party, the result is the same: you not taking them at their word and instead checking whatever they do. Even if you're being honest about only verifying to avoid mistakes, you can never prove it. This definition of "trust but verify"…

The trust part is me trusting you to want to do the right thing. The verify part is me checking that nothing went wrong - either through a mistake on your part, a misunderstanding on mine, or just the signal loss from the fact that human communication is imperfect.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is verifying everything because you don't trust people not to make a mistake operationally different from verifying everything because you suspect bad faith? To the supposed trusted party, the result is the same: you not taking them at their word and instead checking whatever they do. Even if you're being honest about only verifying to avoid mistakes, you can never prove it. This definition of "trust but verify"…

The trust part is me trusting you to want to do the right thing. The verify part is me checking that nothing went wrong - either through a mistake on your part, a misunderstanding on mine, or just the signal loss from the fact that human communication is imperfect.

You've just restated the original post and ignored my question. Again: how does this definition of supposed trust differ from distrust in any verifiable way?

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#189
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nadellaissance doesn't work at all and its breaking my soul, fuck off pithy headlines. Care to explain? Do you work there? "doesn't work at all" meaning he's lazy?

I think parent means the contrived term "Nadallaissance" as a headline gimmick.

I read it as "Nadella-nuissance".

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where humans are involved, mistakes will happen. Trusting someone but verifying their work is a safe and sane pairing.

How is verifying everything because you don't trust people not to make a mistake operationally different from verifying everything because you suspect bad faith? To the supposed trusted party, the result is the same: you not taking them at their word and instead checking whatever they do. Even if you're being honest about only verifying to avoid mistakes, you can never prove it. This definition of "trust but verify"…

There are different kinds and levels of trust. "Trust but verify" doesn't mean you should give strangers your SSN.

I agree that this nuance is lost within the turn-of-phrase, but omitting the trust part doesn't seem to me like a good way to build a collaborative society. Companies are just people.

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