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Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

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Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#121

Post by bunderbunder »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #106

Microsoft has constantly been bragging about AI writing all their code. And they push out more bugs than features these days.

I don’t know if that’s strictly true. But one thing I’ve seen since AI coding has taken over is that the additional features that do get built are all the lower-value ideas that would previously been left on the cutting room floor.

I’m not convinced that’s a positive. Users don’t necessarily even perceive those lower-value changes as features, so much as unnecessary bloat.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#122

Post by tombert »

layer8 wrote: post #101
tombert wrote: post #80

Every time I see one of these articles I will, very briefly, get optimistic that people will move to an operating system that isn't terrible, and then realize that most people will literally just forget about the bullshit they put up with Windows. I don't know what kind of reality distortion field Microsoft generates, but for reasons that are still unclear to me, people will literally simply forget every single awful…

Don’t project your parents on every Windows user. :)

I'm not. It seems to be something that affects nearly every person who uses Windows by choice. It's actually kind of a testament to Microsoft's marketing that they can continue to release terrible, broken products and people still keep purchasing them.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#123

Post by userbinator »

karp773 wrote: post #43

My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with the login window broken. Literally, it was impossible to log in. I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.

I don't think anything tops this one from 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139

"Windows 10 October 2018 Update no longer deletes your data"

There's plenty blaming AI here, but IMHO the rot was already there long ago, and AI only accelerated it.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#124

Post by nicbou »

bunderbunder wrote: post #118
dgarciaf18 wrote: post #32

Do they even have automated testing? This should have been detected not only in one layer of the release process, but in serveral ones.

So there’s an argument to be made that when the same person designs, implements and tests the change, any purported defense in depth is largely illusory. Once upon a time I disagreed with this argument, insofar as I believed it wasn’t necessarily true as long as you had good peer review every step of the way. But the shift to AI coding has made good peer review a heck of a lot harder to pull off.

It can create tests to make sure that things keep working.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#125

Post by TacticalCoder »

srmatto wrote: post #51
karp773 wrote: post #43

My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with the login window broken. Literally, it was impossible to log in. I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.

I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.

> I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on.

For me it's worse: I grew up on stuff like the C64 and then the Amiga. Switching to DOS was a serious step backwards.

> I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things?

Never: they've always been mediocre.

> As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back.

I switched to Linux in the early Slackware days (then Debian 1.1). Most of the world followed and now tens of billions of devices are running Linux, not Windows.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#126

Post by Dylan16807 »

userbinator wrote: post #123
karp773 wrote: post #43

My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with the login window broken. Literally, it was impossible to log in. I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.

I don't think anything tops this one from 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139 "Windows 10 October 2018 Update no longer deletes your data" There's plenty blaming AI here, but IMHO the rot was already there long ago, and AI only accelerated it.

In 2014 they got rid of the bulk of QA. That's probably the biggest turning point.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#127

Post by CamperBob2 »

maccard wrote: post #79
karp773 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember them being so bad. Windows 7, 8 were great. Visual Studio 6 was good. Excel was top quality for a long time. What used to be annoying to me was that Microsoft ignored the common Unix conventions for no good reason and tended to reinvent stuff. It was like smart nerds were tasked to come up with stuff without any awareness of prior art, or as if Bill G snd Steve B were trying to lock in customers into…

The internet revolted against 8 and stuck on 7 until it was EOL’ed and went straight to 10. I don’t recall 10 being positively received, but the hate has moved to windows 11. I’m happy to be corrected though.

The problem with 10 was that it was pushed as a "security update" on Windows Update. It was force-fed to unwitting/unwilling Windows 7 users like caged geese at a foie-gras farm.

That betrayal was arguably the first step towards the near-total enshittification of Windows that we see today, if you don't count the introduction of product activation with Windows XP.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#128

Post by kenhwang »

ahartmetz wrote: post #71
dcrazy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m saying that compiling Wi-Fi drivers from source is still representative of trying to run Linux on consumer hardware. Desktop Linux is like a kit plane. You can pay to have someone assemble it for you, but you still need to know how to get in there and fix it.

It's compile drivers or research your hardware before you buy it. The latter is highly recommended. If you go against the common advice, it's kinda your problem. If you bought the hardware before installing Linux or it was given to you, well, that sucks. That said, driver problems, especially important ones, aren't that common anymore.

Nailed it. My Linux machine was built from the retired parts from my main desktop, so it very much is stuff that served me well for several years under Windows.

But the advice is still very much to research the hardware or buy a prebuilt with vendor support.

Compared to a decade ago, more stuff just works; especially noticeable with graphics drivers. But when things hiccup, which they still do, it still requires quite a lot of tech savviness to solve.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#129

Post by globalnode »

nicce wrote: post #93
srmatto wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.

> I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS. I am happy to tell that gaming is in pretty good state in Linux these days.

Games I cant play on Linux are kernel level anti-cheat shooters. Anti cheat should be handled on the server anyway, no one should be installing that on their machines. Everything else works great!

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#130

Post by ThrowawayB7 »

mikestew wrote: post #24
xvxvx wrote: post #3

Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.

it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move. (FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in t…

Lay the blame where it belongs: it was one of Satya Nadella's early decisions to eliminate the SDET role at Microsoft. Everybody praised him at the time as some kind of wunderkind for juicing the stock but now Microsoft and users are facing the consequences. Hopefully history will correctly attach responsibility to Nadella for it.
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