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The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

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Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#461

Post by parkersweb »

roboyoshi wrote: post #434
gloosx wrote: post #432

Day 1357 watching Microsoft not give a fuck about their customers, thankfully I was not brainwashed into being their product from the childhood.

So you are using Google or what? I feel like in Enterprise Environments you don't have much choice between bad and worse.

… except that Google took this as permission to make their previously optional AI bolt-on mandatory and hiked the price for every user in exactly the same way.

Complaining to their support was an utterly miserable fruitless exercise that has me wondering what alternatives there are to this madness for SMEs…

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#463

Post by mananaysiempre »

grepfru_it wrote: post #23
whalesalad wrote: post #13

I don't think Microsoft has created a single novel or useful thing in the last 30 years, with the exception of vscode.

Windows 2000 was pretty revolutionary

Compared to 9x? Sure, but it’s not like it was born in a vacuum. Compared to NT 4? Not really, I think. There were significant new things (MMC, Windows Installer, a first-party USB stack). I think there was a grand total of one headline new feature for developers (COM+, a continuation of MTS, a non-partition-tolerant distributed transactions thing). It’s not nothing, surely, but I don’t really see anything that deserves being called “revolutionary”.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#464

Post by conartist6 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #344
dividedbyzero wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That researcher probably wouldn't have an army of SWEs at his or her disposal but be out of a job like the SWEs. If they get AI to a point where it can be a safe and competent senior SWE, it'll be able to fill a huge breadth of other roles as well. Human creativity isn't looking like quite the moat it was supposed to be. Our societies are not in any way equipped to deal with putting what may well be a sizable majorit…

> Our societies are not in any way equipped to deal with putting what may well be a sizable majority of working-age people out of work Our societies were built before there was a technology that could replace its smartest people with machines that never tire? I don't get why people keep trying to imagine current society + super-intelligent AI: by definition it won't be our current society if we can actually get there…

I don't think it's that simple. For one thing, AI isn't a democratizing force. If it's as good as you think it will be, it will be less like having a good education and more like having an indentured servant. Some people will have whole fleets of such servants doing their bidding, while others will have none.

For another, research isn't an end unto itself. As you note, for some people an already-unfathomable level of societal knowledge has resulted in nothing but continued poverty. Benefit from scientific knowledge requires a stable economy full of consumers who can and will purchase high-tech items. Where will that wealth come from once the value of human intellectual labor has been so undercut by cheap AI intellectual labor? Without the capitol to make AIs work for us, most if not many people will be left to live their life as servants to AIs so that those AIs are able to have autonomy in the real world.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#465

Post by nashashmi »

Good point: I still cannot use CoPilot. I frequently try to figure out if MS365 Business accounts in the US have copilot yet. I used it for my family account and dont see any availability to use Copilot in that software either.

So far this launch has not worked out right.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#466

Post by sensanaty »

ogogmad wrote: post #454
edm0nd wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I feel like Microsoft's whole thing with Windows 11 has been "just force the users to do what we want them to do, we know better than they do" My biggest gripe about Win11 is they stole from us the ability to move the task bar. It can ONLY be pinned to the bottom of the screen now. For the longest time, I was a top of the screen taskbar user. From what I've read, they have no plans to implement or change this "featu…

This seems extremely niche. Maybe even petty? Why do you care where the taskbar is? Remember that every change breaks someone's workflow : https://xkcd.com/1172/

It's been a feature of Windows for a decade+, why on earth would they remove it? I've had mine aligned to the top of the screen for as long as I can remember, and there's even 3rd party tools that restore this basic ass behavior in Win11 (not that I'll ever use that bloatware willingly again). M$ has no excuse, other than them being a completely incompetent entity of course.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#467

Post by ogogmad »

sensanaty wrote: post #466
ogogmad wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems extremely niche. Maybe even petty? Why do you care where the taskbar is? Remember that every change breaks someone's workflow : https://xkcd.com/1172/

It's been a feature of Windows for a decade+, why on earth would they remove it? I've had mine aligned to the top of the screen for as long as I can remember, and there's even 3rd party tools that restore this basic ass behavior in Win11 (not that I'll ever use that bloatware willingly again). M$ has no excuse, other than them being a completely incompetent entity of course.

But can you explain why this feature is/was so important? The fact that there are 3rd party tools that can restore it makes it even more marginal. There are gazillions of UI changes in every app we use, it seems strange that this very marginal one should get someone up in arms.

> M$ has no excuse, other than them being a completely incompetent entity of course.

No, it's because "M$" doesn't think it's an important feature. There's no incompetence. Do you actually believe what you said?

Is this some form of OCD or hypersensitivity? Because I struggle to understand the type of mind that cares at all about this. And how do such people go through life, especially working in software, where things change constantly?

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#468

Post by sensanaty »

BoorishBears wrote: post #359
dividedbyzero wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media could have been utopian, too, yet those apps are algorithmic manipulation hellscapes that threaten to bring down even the most robust democracies. The same people who make it so are poised to be the ones in control of these AIs. I don't think they want the kind of utopia you imagine.

What I described doesn't have to be utopian in an absolute sense, just significantly better than where we're currently headed. I think a lot of the unchecked pessimism around super-intelligent AI is just people being a bit naive or shut off from the reality of just how terrible things are going to be over the next century. We're waging 25% tariffs over planefuls of people, what's going to happen when it's 100 million…

And you think the tools that are, as we speak, boiling rivers and lakes in order to power the insanely resource-hungry AIs is the solution to any of those problems, such as famine and rising temperatures? If anything, they're accelerating us towards these issues.

There's about to be 500 billion dollars invested in generating even more electricity for these monstrosities, instead of literally anything else actually useful today that we could be putting towards climate research or renewable energy. Nope, we're just gonna generate even more spam and bullshit while spinning up nuclear reactors to power it all.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#469

Post by lolinder »

9dev wrote: post #413
johnnyanmac wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products." - Steve Jobs. 1996 I guess some things never truly change. And thst kind of" culture" is how you amass a cult following (it's in the word, "cult" ure). Ou…

Well, that's not quite fair. NT is a very interesting and definitely original kernel design, for example; NTFS is a file system with unique properties, and AJAX was an API devised at Microsoft (that one absolutely lacks taste, but at least it's an original idea). That being said, I agree that the company and the brand evoke nothing but negative emotions in me, and I don't know anyone that would have anything better t…

Those are all technical implementation details, not product features that everyday users can develop an emotional attachment.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#470

Post by sensanaty »

ogogmad wrote: post #467
sensanaty wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a feature of Windows for a decade+, why on earth would they remove it? I've had mine aligned to the top of the screen for as long as I can remember, and there's even 3rd party tools that restore this basic ass behavior in Win11 (not that I'll ever use that bloatware willingly again). M$ has no excuse, other than them being a completely incompetent entity of course.

But can you explain why this feature is/was so important? The fact that there are 3rd party tools that can restore it makes it even more marginal. There are gazillions of UI changes in every app we use, it seems strange that this very marginal one should get someone up in arms. > M$ has no excuse, other than them being a completely incompetent entity of course. No, it's because "M$" doesn't think it's an important fe…

Do you actually not understand why customization is something people want out of the operating system they use for upwards of 8+ hours a day, every single day? Should we disallow changing background images? Should we let people set color accents as they can right now? Should we even let them choose where they want their desktop icons to be, or which desktop icons they can have there? Or should we disable choosing which applications can be locked in the taskbar? Are all of these equally incomprehensible as the choice of where the giant-ass taskbar that permanently fills up a non-negligible percentage of your screen real estate sits to you?

Would you also defend any of the above?

Also, this has been a feature since the XP days, people have built muscle memories around it, and then for literally no reason M$ decides to remove it, requiring 3rd party devs to do their job for them and restore this basic functionality that has been there forever.

> There are gazillions of UI changes in every app we use

And this is a good thing to you somehow? I don't want my OS switching up on me at random every day of the week, I want to login the next day and have everything be where I last placed it, not have some troglodyte PM at M$ trying to suckle on the promotional teet decide where my icons go for me.

> "M$"

Are you perhaps one of the aforementioned troglodyte PMs over there? I've noticed that M$ employees get pretty bothered about that little dollar sign in the name.

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