The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

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> But can you explain why this feature is/was so important?

1) It's a line in the sand between decades of customization versus "my way or the highway [third party tools, some of which get banned for 'hacking' to implement their features, all of which are generally banned in things like corporate environments]".

2) It's a customization feature that has existed since Windows 95. Removing that feature broke decades of user habits.

3) At least one of the third-party tools has been briefly banned by Microsoft Defender for "hacking"/"reverse engineering" Windows. Most of them can be accused of that. The existence of third party tools today does not imply the continued existence of third party tools.

4) It's often compared to how Apple prefers a lack of configuration for "strong opinions". It's an especially funny comparison because Apple has almost always allowed you to move the macOS Dock to different screen edges.

5) It's a great waste of space on Widescreen monitors, and especially Ultrawide monitors. I've been using a right-hand side taskbar since square CRTs, because I felt even in 4:3 that horizontal real estate is at a much higher premium than vertical space. As a user of widescreens, including ultrawide, I especially feel like horizontal real estate is much useful to me as additional app space than vertical space.

6) Microsoft knows how much real estate is spent on a bottom taskbar. They know that's a valuable band of real estate. They've been selling selling ads on it, and assuming things like Copilot can go directly on it without user opt-in because they seem to feel they've got all the space they want and "own" that space. It's not the user's to own anymore.

It's a marginal feature in the number of users that used it, but those that did use it, used it for decades in many cases (myself included), and taking it away is a message that Windows belongs less to the users and User Customization is less important in today's Windows than yesterday's. It's emblematic of so many other problems in Windows 11. As a modest feature, it feels so much like a synecdoche, a part that resembles the whole, a part (of the problem) that represents the whole (problem).

“The Solarians specialized in the construction of robots, which they exported to the other Spacer Worlds.”

Thanks for this, but Solarians have an economy that sells robots to other planets. Earth has no such luxury.

If they don't pan out we won't even reach 500 billion dollars actually invested and tbe bubble will pop. And it'll take many many many trillions before AI is even close to the biggest reason climate change is killing people.

People tend to take different pieces of mutually exclusive end states. Like my comment is speaking to a fantasy like outcome where again, we have AI that puts all researchers out of jobs.

If it can do that (which I don't think it will, but if we're dreaming it), let it boil oceans, let them abuse it, you can become unfathomably wealthy by solving world hunger.

Let them force countries to take out loans that practically put then in OpenAI's permanent debt to access the advancements they come up with.

It's still better than the alternative, and it still allows room for them to be as evil as they want.

I mean either way countries are going to become indebted to companies eventually if we keep down the current path. I don't see how the ultra wealthy can't use mass upheaval and desperation to secure extremely cheap labor and solidfy their power even without AI.

At least now, even if it's for their own personal gain and amusement, they can trivially solve

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It's like we're talking about someone potentially developing a cure for all cancer, but everyone is worried because the company behind it is evil and will hoard it for themselves while charging $1B per dose: let's still get to that cure if it can be developed.

It'll be a truly miserable and awful world watching people we know die while there's a cure, and watching them die because they're not able to pay this villain... but today there's no cure, no proof one can exist, no hints on how to get one.

It's better to have the cure and no clue how to fix the broken situation that it creates, than to have no cure and no clue how to fix cancer, because one is a problem of people/power/ethics and the other is a problem of unknown proportions and guaranteed ongoing suffering not more damaging than having a cure, no matter how inequitable access to it is.

How about "If it gets sentenced to prison time" instead because corporations routinely get sued in court only to be charged a small percentage of the profit they make through criminal activity and that isn't "liability" it's just paying the justice system a cut of the action as a cost of doing business.