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Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?
171–180 of 280 posts
Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unstoppable Use a PiHole?
This is trivial for Microsoft to bypass. They've already been consolidating and moving server addresses. Unless you block all internet traffic, you have no idea what's getting through. They can update the opaque code at any time. This is not a solution.
Blockers are going to have to switch to whitelisted IP addresses instead, I bet.
Annoying!
Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?
#173This is a dumb take. They're both equally untrustworthy. VSCode has an insane amount of telemetry turned on, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type, and GitHub was abused to train a LLM. Microsoft and Google have both shown they would sell your data in a heartbeat to make a quick buck.
That's a really bad take.
Think about Google what you want but Google is never selling your data, it's far too valuable to sell. Advertisers never get to see any of it.
The decision which ad is seen by whom is handled entirely inside Google and your data never leaves them.
Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to take this paid option, but for some reason the official YouTube app on my Google Pixel is broken - the screen overlay never goes away, I can't see comments on videos, and trying to go to a channel takes me to "An error occurred RETRY" screen. Unfortunately, I don't think Google does any kind of support for their YouTube app on their phones. Casual googling brought me to some forum posts that didn't seem h…
If your phone is otherwise normal, clearing the app's cache and data is usually a good way to get things working again for cases like "this app obviously must not be doing this on other people's phones"
Clearing the storage actually worked!!! Thanks so much!!
Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?
#175I love VSCode, I use Google Workspace for my domain, run a Mac and an iPhone (and use iCloud), a Surface Go 2 with Linux (quite workable), I host on all sorts of stuff. Uncritically associating "trust" with a brand is a mistake. Microsoft are no more on the side of the angels than anyone else (and are very clearly on the other side in some of the legal positions they stake out, such as their amicus brief in support o…
You nailed it 100%.
Tech people are pretty gullible. Satya has a good PR operation and many people fall for the “wow it’s the new Microsoft”.
I negotiate with them. They are way more difficult and hard nosed to deal with than in the Ballmer era. The salespeople work under a sword and while they aren’t Oracle, they are in that path.
Trust doesn’t mean much with companies of this scale. You need to understand your contracts and the KPIs that drive decisions at the deal desk.
If you are an individual, why are they giving you this bounty? With Google, their motivations are very clear, and they quickly course correct (ie kill the product) when their objectives aren’t met.
Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's valuable to Microsoft, but why would anybody else want to pay for data about the usage of a Microsoft product? And why would Microsoft sell it? Like would you want to sell information like "X% of users can't figure out how to change the code formatting settings"? Or if you did learn something cool and useful, why would you sell it to the potential competition?
A lot of tech companies would pay for that vast trove of user data. There are possibly no better sources on usage for mass consumer software than what Microsoft has from the past few decades (Office and Windows in particular; the next best would be browsers and or various Apple software). Why would anybody pay for customer traffic/browsing/shopping data for inside of a Walmart store? Nearly every retailer would pay f…
Data isn't intrinsically valuable, useful data is.
I can't imagine a lot of cases where telemetry would be on sale.
On one hand, telemetry is specific to a specific product. Knowing how often people use the File menu in Visual Studio doesn't help me with my own application that much.
On the other hand, telemetry is potentially a boon to the competition. Can you imagine if say, the LibreOffice project could buy MS Office telemetry to better decide what features to implement, or just to embarrass Microsoft by revealing how much something crashes?
For me, pretty much all telemetry seems to fall into one of those two boxes -- either useless because I'm not working on a clone, or useful and MS would be nuts to sell the info to me because I am working on a clone.
> Why would anybody pay for customer traffic/browsing/shopping data for inside of a Walmart store? Nearly every retailer would pay for access to that, assuming the cost is reasonable. Vendors desperately want access to it.
But Walmart would be crazy to sell it as-is, because why would they help their competition optimize their store layouts/warehousing? At best, I think Walmart might want to sell a derived service, like a slow trickle of recommendations to improve sales. Not the actual underlying data.
Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
GitHub has always said that they only train on public repos. I don’t see why they’d lie about that - including private repos would only add a relatively small amount of data to the corpus and would risk alienating all their corporate customers. > GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilo...
When copilot was originally released, I was able to get it to generate verbatim my extremely niche and poorly written code from a completely private repo. It was identifiable by the bad variable names that I used. I cant say they traines it on all pricate repos, but they definitely trained it on my private repos.
Did you reach out to any tech press figures or publicize this in any way? It would have been a fairly important story and should have been pretty easy for somebody else to reproduce by generating the same completions and comparing them to your commit history.
I don’t mean to be dismissive but unless you did something like that or documented it in some way it’s hard to give too much weight to a “source: trust me” comment from a brand-new HN account.
Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?
#178I love VSCode, I use Google Workspace for my domain, run a Mac and an iPhone (and use iCloud), a Surface Go 2 with Linux (quite workable), I host on all sorts of stuff. Uncritically associating "trust" with a brand is a mistake. Microsoft are no more on the side of the angels than anyone else (and are very clearly on the other side in some of the legal positions they stake out, such as their amicus brief in support o…
Trust doesn’t mean I think they’re angels. I think MS is an awful company that tries to win by destroying the competition using all sorts of legal and illegal tricks to do so. At the same time, it MS starts a new product, I would trust them to support it for a reasonable amount of time and give a reasonable amount of transition time if they did decide to wind it down based entirely on their history. OTOH, 4 years ago…
"On the side of the angels" !== "angels". Just means tending to have the right motives.
But at any rate the hosted product and the open source code are orthogonal, right?
You can't use one to guide your opinion of the other. This is the point I am making: we are interchangeable consumers, and yet we invest emotional energy in the pretence that we are not.
Nobody in their right mind would believe that Coca-Cola would prefer you on some emotional level not to be a Pepsi drinker. And yet we, as consumers, allow brand interpretations (Coca-Cola is classic and Christmas, Pepsi's logo looks like an obese person's belly) to gain emotional strength; we extend our personal identities with brand loyalty.
I am slightly late to this party; I perhaps used to think that brand loyalty in customers was something that was meaningfully measured and acted on, and I suspect until the mid-eighties it was, to some extent. But companies are beholden so completely to the whims of their shareholders, or worse their private equity owners, that it's impossible to believe that the continued happiness of customers matters much.
(Nothing to me underscores this more than people overexerting themselves to find positive things to say about Apple's Vision Pro launch, which was so terrifyingly dystopian and anti-human that it made me feel physically sick as a long-term Apple customer, and yet I type this on a Macbook that I would generally say is an object I emotionally value using!)
Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?
#179microsoft has been trying to remake their public image to court the os devs they previously shunned
google hasn't needed to market themselves like that
feeling any sort of 'trust' towards either, outside the context of something like a legitimate business contract, seems to me like a media literacy problem
Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?
#180This is a dumb take. They're both equally untrustworthy. VSCode has an insane amount of telemetry turned on, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type, and GitHub was abused to train a LLM. Microsoft and Google have both shown they would sell your data in a heartbeat to make a quick buck.
Meanwhile the development world has more or less shrugged its shoulders. The mass exodus of Github never happened, and aside from the dogmatic, VS Code seems to have a firm grasp on mindshare.
As a daily vscode user, I can report that it doesn’t have my mindshare, I’ve just adopted a realism wrt Microsoft’s state sanctioned monopoly and need to get work done. It’s convenient only because msft can make it inconvenient not to use it. My feeling is more Stockholm Syndrome than one of msft earning my “mindshare.”