Hey now! They’re also the world’s foremost bloatware packager. No one will ever take that away from them.
I am stuck with Windows 10 & 11 at work, on multiple various machines. Also some versions of Windows Server.
It honestly feels hostile towards the user now. For myriad reasons. It’s a constant battle for me to turn pointless crap off that it keeps turning back on with the next big update.
It honestly feels hostile
Very well put. I have the same feeling and it gets worse with every iteration.
Reading stories in which MS shoots itself in the foot, I am so glad there are 0 Windows 11 installations at home and Windows 10 installations are old (up to date but every install is at least 1 year old) so they don’t become enshittified.
Linux is waiting for you. You know you want it.
Windows 11 is beyond fucked and I am sure whatever is following will be even more creep.
Linux is the solution, most just don’t realize it yet.
I realize gaming on Linux is already very doable (I have a steam deck), but for me specifically, I need the majority of the mod developers to have shifted over to Linux gaming before I can switch. I primarily play games that tend to be heavily modded and it’s really common to need to run some sort of 3rd party tool to mod. One that is often not Linux compatible. I realize there are utilities that can sometimes help with this, but between extremely spotty mod documentation and my own lack of familiarity with Linux, that kind a tricky ask for me to accomplish. I’ve pretty much given up on playing modded games on my steam deck for now. I hope someday most of the gaming world will switch, but until then I feel somewhat chained to Windows if I want to enjoy my hobby.
Use Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC until it lasts (~2027 iirc). And pray that Linux gets enough first-party support from hardware vendors till then, otherwise we’re properly fucked.
I’m not using Linux in any enterprise capacity, but the compatibility improvements I’ve seen since the last time I tried out a distro for fun are immense.
So immense infact that I’m migrating all my home studio and gaming stuff over to Linux and making it my official daily driver via Nobara.
I’m honestly amazed by how well music production software and hardware works on Linux now. I’m so relieved because I thought this whole Windows enshittification thing was just another part of my life where I seemingly have no control over being made into a product and having all of my data sold constantly.
A recent migration to GrapheneOS and this new discovery of Linux’s amazing capabilities for my use case are such a breath of fresh air. I now have the choice to reject the exploitative practices of these tech companies that have zero respect for people and that makes me happy.
The more we use and recommend Linux the more of a chance we get of first party support in the future!
And judging by the recent Claude Sonnet 3.5 results, OpenAI may not even be the top AI company anymore.
All of big tech is really worried about this.
- Apple is worried about its own science output, with many of their office heavily employing data scientists. A lot of people slate Siri, but Apple’s scientists put out a lot of solid research.
- Amazon is plugging GenAI into practically everything to appease their execs, because it’s the only way to get funding. Moonshot ideas are dead, and all that remains is layoffs, PIP, and pumping AI into shit where it doesn’t belong to make shareholders happy. The innovation died, and AI replaced it.
- Google has let AI divisions take over both search and big parts of ads. Both are reporting worse experiences for users, but don’t worry, any engineer worth anything was laid off and there are no opportunities in other divisions for you either. If there are, they probably got offshored…
- Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go, but they’re still plugging AI shite in places no one asked for it, with many divisions now severely down in headcount.
If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there’s a real concern that they’ll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn’t sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.
Monopolies don’t care about the user experience, only profit. The AI doesnt understand the former, only the latter. The continued degredation of the user experience is a likely indicator of an increase in revenue as function of successful application of AI.
The AI doesnt understand the former, only the latter.
Do you possibly mean “The AI evangelists” or something similar?
Like, I could totally understand it in the “software will also include the biases of those who wrote it” kind of way (a la Amazon’s failed attempt at automating job candidate search). If the only incentive you’re given as a programmer is “make it make money”, then yeah, your AI is going to bias towards that end.
Just couldn’t tell on first reading
I’m not actually asking for good faith answers to these questions. Asking seems the best way to illustrate the concept.
Does the programmer fully control the extents of human meaning as the computation progresses, or is the value in leveraging ignorance of what the software will choose?
Shall we replace our judges with an AI?
Does the software understand the human meaning in what it does?
The problem with the majority of the AI projects I’ve seen (in rejecting many offers) is that the stakeholders believe they’ve significantly more influence over the human meaning of the results than exists in the quality and nature of the data they’ve access to. A scope of data limits a resultant scope of information, which limits a scope of meaning. Stakeholders want to break the rules with “AI voodoo”. Then, someone comes along and sells the suckers their snake oil.
You’re off on a tangent.
All AI lacks the context of human experience. It doesn’t understand anything but means of computation of data. And, sometimes it doesn’t even understand that, doesn’t understand how it is deriving or derived the answer. Most of our scaled profit maximizing applications are as such: Humans blindly implemented an AI conclusion that nothing and no one understands.
I’m an expert, quit the big boys and went rogue. If you want, ask a better question.
But that’s also a path for them to no longer be a monopoly, if the right competitor makes the right moves.
We’re living in a late stage capitalistic hellhole and you’re advocating faith in the free market.
What. The. Fuck.
I don’t remember anything ever in history undermining faith in the free - from regulation, but not from jailing crooks, - market.
It’s not as if anything lefties claim to be that were free. And when one talks about what is needed to make it free, one can hear screeching of the “reeeeeee useful idiots for capitalism reeeeee you just want poor people to die reeeeee we should all vote for 8 hour work week and peace on Earth reeeeee what do you mean it’s not enough to vote reeeee” kind.
Even Ponzi schemes are usually about everyone being conscious it’s a scheme, but thinking they are very smart and will fool some other suckers, and those suckers think the same in turn. That is covered by the “jailing crooks” part.
And various cartels and trusts and such usually make government regulation their instrument. They benefit from it.
I mean, all this has been said and proven many times.
I’m saying it’s happened before. AOL. Palm. Yahoo. Blackberry. A company with an effective monopoly gets complacent and fails to serve their users. They get replaced.
its a function of paying their employees less for more work relatively speaking and extracting more profit from consumers through ads and enshitification in general
No. They are still capable of pressure typical for oligopoly (censoring out mentions of their competition, tactically buying out things which could help that competition and shutting them down, defamation, lobbying for laws directed against their competition).
Unless that happens too fast for them to realize.
slate
slag?
Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go,
or more like their user experience was already so garbage, adding AI to it doesn’t make any noticeable change lol
I don’t use a single Meta product on purpose. I’m sure they scrape my data despite my best efforts to not be tracked online.
I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience, use Windows for gaming and at work, and occasionally use Google search with heavy boolean search, custom search engines, and browser extensions for filtering out the garbage. I also still use Google Maps and I have an Android based tv where I occasionally watch SmartTube.
Hell I even get Netflix included with my T-Mobile subscription. My wife watches that.
And for now, I have an iPhone SE until it dies and I make the switch to a Google phone or something.
Typing this out makes me wonder what I’m waiting for to find alternatives for this FAANG garbage, but I have no idea how Facebook still exists.
I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience
It turned out that it’s incredible easy to order as guest at other sides
Yes but I don’t want to type my billing details every time I need some thing. I don’t want to wait 6 weeks. I don’t know if other sites are reputable. I don’t want to pay shipping. I like being able to wishlist stuff or store stuff in my cart for later and read lots of reviews on products (I’m aware many are fake).
There’s also the fact that nearly every website runs on AWS, so even if I boycott Amazon (I’m sure they’ll miss my $100 a month in purchases), I’m still providing them money by visiting the sites that are hosted on AWS. Pretty hard to completely avoid them in this day and age.
Amazon for me has been utter garbage in the last 10 years. Fake products, stuff that is supposedly coming next day comes in 3+ days, customer service is some copy/paste canned answers etc
We order a lot of baby stuff on there. They’ve accepted returns on everything that didn’t work or wasn’t what we anticipated. We can walk to a UPS store from our house and drop it off. Anecdotally, they also have the best deals about 50% of the time on PCPartPicker.
It does take longer to fulfill some orders for us. But others show up a day or three early even though we don’t pay for Prime. I used to work for the post office before they switched to their own delivery, and they would drop off their pallets to us in the mornings to be taken out for the last mile by our carriers. It seemed like that was a better experience. It has definitely enshittified somewhat since their golden days.
I’m not sure there could be any sort of legitimate threat to them, but I could definitely see a Netflix situation playing out. That is a popular upstart temporarily seems poised to take over, but then suffers from extreme levels of interference from bigger players who artificially hold the upstart down while they desperately catch up and then ultimately come at least equal while the Netflix equivalent is mostly a shell of what it could’ve been.
Never underestimate how much buckets and buckets of cash reserves can overcome even incredibly out of touch laziness when it comes to competing with any start ups. Apple in particular could probably afford to let competitors get a decade ahead and still be able to come back based on the ridiculous amount of cash they have to float their business along with.
No shocked pikachu?
It could be that microsoft was just the bootloader to closedAI
Microsoft is having its IBM moment
Paywall
Some Microsoft insiders worry the company’s AI strategy has become too focused on its partnership with OpenAI.
A few even grumble that the software giant has turned into a glorified IT department for the hot startup. These comments were part of a recent exclusive story from Business Insider in which Microsoft insiders shared candid views on the company’s AI future and its new Copilot tools.
The group at the center of this is Microsoft’s AI Platform team, run by Eric Boyd. This sits within Scott Guthrie’s Cloud + AI organization.
Insiders say Microsoft is focused less on the internal services that previously made up Azure AI Services and more on the Azure OpenAI service.
One former executive who left as a result of the changes said products like Azure Cognitive Search, Azure AI Bot Service, and Kinect DK are practically gone. Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said these services exist in some form but either aren’t part of the Azure AI org, have been renamed, or have been bundled with other products.
“The former Azure AI is basically just tech support for OpenAI,” a former Microsoft executive said. "Eric Boyd is effectively maintaining the OpenAI service. It’s less of an innovation engine
I work at a big EU company, MS top partner / strategic account etc. We wanted to implement MS Dynamics CRM in one of our newer business lines, we barely got a reply to our official emails.
After some informal discussions, we were told that salespeople are now only incentivized to sell Copilot, so they don’t really bother with the rest.
If MS is overinvesting to ride the AI hype as a middle man, while letting their core business capabilities (Windows and Office) decline, they will be in trouble in the long term.
Wow you just shined a ton of light on a problem my company had. We wanted to implement a medical imaging system from one of their subsidiaries, and it took an average of 3 months for the salesperson to respond to EACH of our emails
Windows actually aren’t a very big share of their revenue, but Office is yeah.
It’s kind of crazy to me that their AI product is already 50% of the revenue of their OS product. The thing that a stupidly high amount of computers require to even function for most people.
TBH if it weren’t for windows I don’t think anybody would be dumb enough to use a Mac computer. Microsoft really wasting potential in the OS market, though, I agree.
The chart shows revenue, not profit. I wouldn’t be surprised if Copilot is not profitable.
They are purposely enshittifying windows already, they don’t give a shit about making a functional OS anymore and are in the milking their products for all their worth phase and right now Ai is the hot seller.
Hopefully they will be so shortsighted and suffocate themselves with this Ai hype.
Hopefully they will be so shortsighted and suffocate themselves with this Ai hype.
waves from over in the linux corner seize the day, and microsoft’s throat :P
They see the post-PC world, and Windows Phone never panned out.
Just installed Linux Mint the first time last month. Been very much enjoying the experience of a M$ free OS.
Well, maybe it’s good they’ll die finally.
If MS is overinvesting to ride the AI hype as a middle man, while letting their core business capabilities (Windows and Office) decline, they will be in trouble in the long term.
They aren’t just overinesting in AI, they are foreclosing the future of programming and software design as a prestigious, respectable and valuable career.
It doesn’t matter if the AI works or not, it just matters that programmers sat there and took it because they thought they were special and the ruling class would never betray their trade.
Well here we are kids if you want a realistic career that will pay the bills dont follow your heart and go into programming and computers, that is a passionate hobby you shouldnt expect to be highly paid for it. Go into the trades, anywhere else, programming as a career is fucked (and again it has nothing to do with whether AI works or not).
To be fair, you can be their Platinum Ultra Tier Level Partner or whatever, and they’ll still not reply to you for a week. And when you get the reply it looks like it was written by ChatGPT anyway, and says nothing.
How do I short MS, hm
