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Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

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Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#281

Post by pjmlp »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #278
pjmlp wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the great Windows ML experience. :) Guess why Microsoft hired Guido and other Python devs, who gets the whole Python experience on VSCode, or introduced Python as better option to Excel, in detriment of .NET addins. People forget that nowadays .NET is only yet another language on DevDiv, check the developer blogs for all languages. That was F# failure as well, trying to cater to data science for its relevanc…

I'm never touching Windows again to be fair. They'd have to decouple it from their marketing departments sins. I see way more AI libraries in Rust that are as capable as Python libraries than I see for .NET for example. The diffusers library has a Rust equivalent, is there a true .NET equivalent?

Come to Windows and you will see.

Jokes aside, not really, however people have to accept to be polyglot, there isn't one language to solve all problems.

Regardless of whatever is in Rust, all AI key frameworks are in C++ and Python.

NVidia, Intel, AMD, Khronos aren't going to start publishing tools in .NET, Rust, Zig, or whatever is our liking.

So anything outside those stacks will always be a second class experience in IDE tooling, debugging, and libraries.

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#283

Post by _heimdall »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #181
_heimdall wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a failure in vision from leadership rather than a failure in governance. My understanding is that the company was told from the very top to put AI everywhere and that's exactly what they did.

I think it’s governance. It can make sense to ask to put AI into everything. But then you also need to check it’s done in a useful way. MS leadership seems to have skipped this step.

Even there it could be a leadership vision issue. From the outside we don't know whether leadership didn't try the end product or if they did and were actually fine with it thinking that's what customers would want.

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#284

Post by MrMember »

alkonaut wrote: post #182

Anyone else get the feeling that Microsoft has been driven "top down" by various weird metrics like "We need to drive users adopt service X" (OneDrive, Copilot, whatever)? And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this? Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug…

That seems likely. Someone got a directive to "increase Copilot adoption" so they rebranded Office to Copilot and now they can show their boss a graph for Copilot adoption that goes to the right and up and get a promotion for it and everyone's happy.

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#285

Post by BizarroLand »

direwolf20 wrote: post #227
jodrellblank wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk's net worth was $300Bn in November 2024 and he ended 2025 at $726Bn. ... where is this collapse?

In their sales numbers. You know that market cap doesn't mean a lot, right? Especially for a meme stock.

His billions of "value" mean literally nothing if he cannot convert them to cash. Let's see what happens if Musk tries to cash out his $700bn.

Best guess would be he gets ~$10-$20bn, all of the companies collapse, their value driven to possibly sub-billion dollar ranges, and it triggers the Great Depression pt 2, electric boogaloo, and within a year he's "fallen out of a window".

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#286

Post by BizarroLand »

nxobject wrote: post #61
CuriouslyC wrote: post #26

Trying to bake AI into the OS was so dumb. Make the OS super agent friendly, surface as much data as possible in agent accessible way, and perhaps create a journalling config management system so agent actions can be rolled back. Then sit back and let people build cool shit on your base and let people market your product for you.

Agree – "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"

If they had made it opt-in and available, I might like it.

Hell, I might love it.

But when they overstep and shovel their crap into MY computer against MY will?

Piss off. I was already using linux in many ways, now it's my daily driver as well.

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#287

Post by Gander5739 »

timchristie wrote: post #258
enopod_ wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah the good old days. Investing an entire weekend to make your pci soundblaster card work. Nowadays you just install an iso from a thumb drive, it takes 30 mins and everything works out of the box. So boring!

Is there a consensus on the best ‘boring’ distro nowadays? It’s been ~15 years since I last installed linux (Linux Mint on a netbook that couldn’t run the pre-installed Win7), and am now curious about repurposing a gaming PC for software development.

Fedora, maybe?

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#288

Post by hhh »

BizarroLand wrote: post #285
direwolf20 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In their sales numbers. You know that market cap doesn't mean a lot, right? Especially for a meme stock.

His billions of "value" mean literally nothing if he cannot convert them to cash. Let's see what happens if Musk tries to cash out his $700bn. Best guess would be he gets ~$10-$20bn, all of the companies collapse, their value driven to possibly sub-billion dollar ranges, and it triggers the Great Depression pt 2, electric boogaloo, and within a year he's "fallen out of a window".

SpaceX is the only one that matters, and it's doing a huge amount of lifting. xAI loves using LLaMa and deepseek, twitter is a hellhole that somehow is losing on mobile to THREADS of all platforms, Tesla is losing market share as well as sales.

It is very fortunate for Elon that Starshield exists, and that we've failed serving our country to the point that we need Starlink for rural areas.

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#289

Post by kakacik »

orochimaaru wrote: post #178
kakacik wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if its done in a dumb-as-a-fuck hostile style that whole world complaints for years , such effort and PM is utter failure and their CV should be tarnished with this for next 2 decades. And its up to us as a IT community to make it happen. They harmed massively their own company, and failed at the most core reason why they were hired - add long term value to the company. Its a bit the equivalent of architect buil…

You shouldn’t name and shame for following corporate policy. Your suggestion is ridiculous. If the decision has come down from the product leadership you are expected to follow it. Knowing who the windows product leadership is should be easy. Find them on linked in. But even they may not be responsible if the direction came from the ceo or the cto. We know who those are. Quit calling for naming and shaming of individ…

Thats ridiculous. Shielding folks that do amoral work that harms us all (while well aware of this) - why, because 'they are just following the orders' ? Thats pretty weak argument. Why are you so afraid that folks are to be held accountable for amoral work they do? Its pretty fair approach in these greedy times.

And I mentioned PMs but realistically its whatever decision makers that decide these, PM can be a middle manager cog with no real power or somebody adequately high. I know I myself won't affect some hiring of some CTO but somebody here eventually might. Thats a good start.

I am fed up with uncritical celebration of people who make this world a worse place and harm us all. Perfect execution of amoral goal is still purely a shit in negative sphere (this goes straight to worship of mr musk but thats another topic)

Re: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload

#290

Post by vee-kay »

hbn wrote: post #261
vee-kay wrote: post #196

This reminds me of a useful tool I encountered recently.. Winslop is an open source tool that removes Windows 11 bloatware, disables AI features like Copilot, and restores useful settings: https://github.com/builtbybel/Winslop

I'm terrified to use any of these Windows debloaters or do anything that gets me too far away from the default intended way of how Microsoft wants a Windows install to be because it's always just a matter of time before an update breaks things or you get impossible to diagnose behaviour since you disabled something and a new "feature" was written expecting that something to be there. Microsoft can barely make Windows…

I am using Tiny10 for a debloated Win10 on my old PC last few years, and I faced no issues. Microsoft Office, Windows Updates, etc., all worked well. Of course, it is a sandboxed PC with VPN and good antimalware (Bit defender and MBAM) to protect it, as Microsoft has almost stopped giving Win10 updates (there's a workaround for an extension, but it may not be continued, as M$ wants everyone to migrate to crappy adware Win11).

I had to reinstall Win11 on a newer PC, so I used Tiny11 for a debloated Windows installation, and it is working fine with the licensed Microsoft apps I use (Microsoft Office, MS Project, etc.) and other programs (game stores (Steam, GoG, Epic, etc.), video editing tools, programming tools, etc.

But I don't really like Win11 as I had to do hosts blocking to block ads on it, and everything Win11 does feels a bit more clunky compared to Win10. I even had to use a Start Menu replacer app, as M$ enshittified/nerfed the Start Menu for Win11.

As you rightly pointed out, these debloaters can be unsafe (if they are not open-source, so they are not validated for security issues and bugs; thankfully Winslop is open-source) and can cause Windows to misbehave. But I think such a debloater would be good for a dual OS setup (Linux and Windows).

In 2026, I think I'll have to throw out Windows out the proverbial virtual window, and switch over to Linux on all my home PCs. I am running out of my patience with M$'s enshittification and nasty ads.

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