Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. This works well in sane times, less so when "but it's both" is the default. Apply it to Microsoft's decision to make bug reports include not only a working example but a video of the same, and the meter oscillates wildly. What were they thinking? What did …
To read out a one minute fix is not helping the cause of productivity in the west.
I suspect it's related to the decrease of facts/minute in modern TV "documentaries". Another demonstration of how to fil 60 minutes with 15 minutes of facts. Anyone who remembers "Horizon" from the 70s will know what I mean.
is only slow when the consumers of TV are so used to everything being solved in 42 minutes of programming and lots of guns, car chases and explosions.
Bring back the Potters Wheel instead of endless ads for chemically enhanced washing crap (smells so fresh that it must be nice), funeral plans and shampoo.
Give me a Guiness Toucan ad everytime.
I've nothing against slow TV, but you have to watch Horizon (broadcast on BBC with no ads) to really appreciate their hypnagogic approach to delivering facts. It's a constant tease that leaves you unsatisfied and disoriented after 60 long minutes. Reach for a Quanta magazine article and you'll learn more in 1/10th the time
Glad you said "Modern Horizon" !!!
Old style 'Horizon' was much better and had more content.
Go back further to old 'Panorama', "This Week' and similar and the assumption made was that the viewer/listener was capable of understanding English spoken at a normal speed and could retain facts for at least 1 hour.
The 'Idiot Box' in the corner is now really here as the Idiots the majority & like it !!!
:)
Oh, do not get me started on modern Panorama. "This week we've discovered newsagents selling penny chews for 2 pence. 'Mrs McNeil.. are you selling penny sweets at a huge mark-up? *noise of mic boom bumping against people during unnecessarily chaotic planned ambush* Why won't you answer our questions? Are you ripping off children? Why are you walking away? *turns to camera* Well, as you can see Mrs McNeil refused to give us any answers, so we went undercover in her shop..."
Occasionally Panorma still breaks great stories, I am glad this kind of journalism exists, but can't stand to watch the senseless sensationalism. I think the problem is once there's a successful show-brand they feel the need to formularise it and that necessarily sucks the creativity away and takes agency away from the people who know what they're actually talking about. There are still good documentary formats on BBC like Storyville which, because of it's subject matter, can't be controlled so tightly. And the consequence of that we saw with the BBC's recent Gaza docu which got pulled because one of the main narrators was a Hamas relative. So you can see why they play safe 99% of the time. It's like music, you have to work hard to find the good stuff because the mainstream stuff gets ruined by the perverse influence of the mainstream audience.
Hey, couldn't you include some pointless establishing shots and emotional clips in your analysis? Maybe a montage of 1970s living rooms and studious kids? I don't think I can follow your arguments otherwise…
… right back from the break and we're reviewing Jimmy's terse analysis. What we've learned so far is that he likes beige and, to be honest, is a bit of a swot. But what does this tell us about the modern media?
to fil 60 minutes with 15 minutes of facts. Anyone who remembers "Horizon" from the 70s will know what I mean.
This, and the general dumbing down in the presentation and content was why I gave up TV 21 years ago.
Unfortunately, BBC Radio has caught on to the same ruse, at the expense of facts. The current fad is to have comedians sugar coating factual programming to get the message across
I might be prejudiced, but I interpret this article as a veiled comparison of the Orange Wave of Destruction with Brexit, UK edition.
Brexit caused a growth reduction of only 5%. It remains to be seen whether Brexit 2.0, the US edition, will stop at this high level.
The floor for the fall in Brexit 2.0 could very well be Ameristan.
Will be that we are percieved as being isolationist just like Trumpistan and therefore untrustworthy.
With Starmer and his band of idiots seemingly determined to decimate all government services just like his dear leader Donald 'The Orange Jesus' Trump we will be in a race with the USA over who becomes a 4th world country first.
Because of the lead weight around many in the USA that is no health insurance and/or crippling medical debit, the USA is slightly ahead of us despite our 5 year lead.
It is amazing how much damage can be done to an economy by so few in such a short time.
We will win the race if by some catastrophe we elect Farage as PM. He licks Trump's (and by implication Putin's) boots.
"It is amazing how much damage can be done to an economy by so few in such a short time."
Note that both contenders have effectively two party rule. Whenever one party controls government, there is no stopping the damage that can be done. It is questionable whether coalition governments could be as effective. Although there are counter examples.
As a sidenote, the coup d'etat in the USA has been in the making for four decades. Republican politicians have been tirelessly and dedicatedly working on undermining democracy since Reagan came to power.
Yea, the Weimar Republic had PR in 1933. You'd like to think it's the exception that proves the rule, that so many different parties could never be so naive nowadays but.. who knows. Still it can't be worse than the Hobson's choice of voting for the orange crim because you saw on TV he's better at making deals than a woman, or however the US centrists justified their enabling votes.
The one good thing about Nige' is he's pro-PR and electoral reform. Sadly he's about the least trustworthy person to follow through something so important and would surely find some way to either U-turn on it or twist it to advantage if Reform were the biggest party. I really only trust a collection of perennially-small parties as king-makers to ensure such a thing is done well.
I mean Italy and Germany are shining examples of how wonderful PR is, decisions being made are absolutely and totally in the best interest of the country and not the minority party founded by a single issue group of people who absolutely must have their project funded at all costs.
Italy has changed its electoral system four times just in the time I was alive. I have personally shifted opinion between being in favor of PR and against it. Right now, I'm mostly in favor of PR, but I'm absolutely fine with recognizing that it has shortcomings. I just think that majority rule is somewhat worse overall. But, ultimately, if the people want an asshole, they'll get an asshole, no matter what system is used.
I've also made my peace with the notion that the point of democracy isn't to have the best ruler, but just to avoid having the worst for too long.
"democracy isn't to have the best ruler, but just to avoid having the worst for too long."
The point of Democracy is that you can fire the leader. All other systems require the death of the leader, or his banishment, for a change of government.
Neither Putin, nor any of the Kind can simply retire.
I am pretty sure that the current US administration will not leave office peacefully. They are already busy stripping most Americans from their voting rights.
The point of elections is to convince the losers that they've lost, so now they need to go along with the other side for at least a few years.
As Trump proved, however, this isn't automatic - all it takes is one leader who doesn't give a single stinking shit about his country, and they can keep on denying they lost and thus undermine the entire point of having elections at all.
One can also look at examples of where it *does* seem to work, such as Ireland?
I don't know what it is about Irish politcs, but they navigated their property bust and 2008 financial crisis with seemingly good sense and grace as a nation.
Makes the rest of us look a but childish by comparison!
Is Starmer really doing worse than the clowns he took over from? Or his would-be replacement on the other side of the dispatch box at PMQs?
Sooner or later someone is going to have to tell the British electorate that, for public services to be improved, some taxes are going to have to go up. The Economist suggested this in the autumn and that, with the huge majority in the Commons, it would be better to do this sooner rather than later. There are a lot of their policy recommendations that I wouldn't agree with, but I think I'd be with them an Macchiavelli on this one.
Many of the current inefficiencies are the direct result of a lack of investment: long hospital waiting lists will lead to conditions being more severe when they are eventually treated; the lack of capacity in the NHS can, to some degree, be offset by contracting the private sector, but the unit cost is far higher, etc.
Politically, the government needs to set priorities, explain the strategy and show how it will be paid for. Failing to do so is just setting up the next swing.
If I recall the breakdown of the votes correctly, collectively you didn't. Labour actually lost votes, just not as badly as the conservatives while the lib Dems gained a few due to strategic voting.
The only party that experienced natural growth was Reform, which I suspect means you'll have more terrible governments in the near future.
Labour were up in vote share vs 2019, but not very much. Lib Dems ditto. They both had an overt tactic of heavily targetting winnable constituencies, and Reform helped them with that by aiming for overall vote share and splitting the lean-Tory vote. Reform were absolutely the worst at voter efficiency, and SNP - the previous party of voter efficiency - fell off a cliff, largely benefitting Labour. All parties had differing motives. Except maybe the Tories, who seemed to lack any strategy or obvious motive at all other than eating themselves.
All this to say that nobody really has a f*ing clue what the British electorate want until we have PR because then a) parties won't employ perverse electoral strategies that harm their national vote share in order to win more seats, or vice-versa, b) the electorate won't tactically vote in mysterious ways that pollsters will debate for decades thereafter.
Do you live in the UK? Our council tax has just gone up, but I can tell you, without blinking, that we'll almost certainly see absolutely no difference to the services we get.
Roads will continue with potholes, dog poo all over the pavements (which are crumbling), and our local police station that's unmanned.
It's weird to think that the country is going down the swan, yet immigration is up. Why? Surely you'd pick a nice place to go to...
The majority of any council's budget comes from government grants. Council taxes were poorly but deliberately designed to align voters against councils. Instead of giving residents a share of tax (choose from the many), a banded property tax was introduced with no mechanism for adjusting to inflation other than either raising the rate or rebanding properties.
I've said on other forums that America is repeating Brexit on a wider scale with its juche mandate and supply chain breaks.
Greater damage was done to the UK by the reduction in sterling of 25% courtesy of Brexit. Currencies can hold up well even if you lose a war, but everything is traded in dollars and making everyone in the UK 25% poorer (more if you add the other costs) initiated an inflationary spiral, strikes, broke sectors like care homes and hospitality and set in motion persistent decline. Switching welfare payments to warfare to please Trump with NATO payments (rather than switching to smarter warfare) is the final nail in the coffin. If the UK had stayed in the EU, given the state of Germany (energy) and France (politics), the UK would be running it now and it would be more stable. Instead, they politicised and demonised migrant labour, which the UK economy has been dependent upon for decades. There is no alternative. They can try workfare, but forced labour is crap labour. There is no way back to the economy the UK had. The UK has been broken beyond the point at which it can be fixed, and will just feel increasingly third world as Long Brexit rolls out.
Those supplying bug reports to MS, if MS put them off, can probably earn more supplying them to the competition - miscreants who will use them. And they won't ask them to sing and dance in front of a camera.
But then, like the UK government, I doubt any part of MS works well or gives a toss.
I'm slightlly worried that the usual trolls haven't taken up your challenge yet with their usual "facts" as to how well Brexit is going, despite it not being done "properly".
Still, while Europe follows the agreement and insists that all products conform to EU standards, the UK continues unilaterally not to do the same. This couldn't possibly because: firstly, it doesn't have sufficient personnel to this; secondly, no sane government wants vans full of refrigerated produce waiting even longer and supertmarket shelves even emptier of stuff that Britain doesn't product? No, it can't be that, surely.
""facts" as to how well Brexit is going, despite it not being done "properly"."
What I read and hear is that even the English do not believe in the "marvels of Brexit" anymore. But they seem to accept it as the new reality and want to go on making the best of what's left. They do realize that they cannot go back into the EU on short notice anyway.
A sizeable fraction of the English seem to follow the Farrage Piper in doubling down on a new "more Brexit than Brexit" adventure. This is not surprising as people rarely want to admit they were wrong and some would rather bet their life in double or nothing stakes than admit to being wrong.
Brexit caused a growth reduction of only 5%
Judged against what? The hypothetical case where the Brexit process itself didn't happen, but everything else remained the same?
Because the thing about Brexit is one of the things that we were warned would happen if it went ahead- that it would suck the air out of the room for years to come.
And it *did* go ahead, and that's exactly what happened. It wasn't just that Brexit was damaging in itself, it's that the prolonged distraction and uncertainty which Brexit caused were also damaging.
How much time and attention was wasted on planning for that pointless event? Time and attention that could, likely would and certainly *should* have been used for more productive planning for the future?
How much investment was delayed or simply didn't happen because no-one could sure where they stood? There had never been anything remotely resembling an agreed plan for how *anything* related to Brexit would work- beyond the blindingly obvious idea that the UK would leave the EU- or what shape it would take.
So there were years wasted in limbo and uncertainty, with the likes of (e.g.) moral coward Boris Johnson running down the self-imposed date for a deal/no-deal situation to the very last minute. (Then complaining that he didn't like deal he and Frost had backed themselves into a corner over and threatening to tear it up).
Even if Brexit was reversed tomorrow, the UK would still have pointlessly squandered years on it, just to get back to where it started.
Well, except that it isn't, because time didn't stand still while the UK was obsessed with that self-inflicted, backward-looking Tory fiasco instead of better planning for the future. And the rest of the world has moved on- for better or worse- while the UK has simply stagnated further instead of being better-equipped to deal with that.
While I don't agree with the requirement, having read some truly lazy bug reports in my time I suspect it's an attempt to force a sort of step-by-step mindset on those submitting and provide extra clues to what they're talking about. "The thing is broke, when I click this it errors" is easier to interpret when you see a video of the 'thing' in question, the 'this' which is clicked and the actual 'error'. A picture paints a thousand words.
But for sure it shouldn't come in the form of a tax on those who do submit good written reports, that's counter-productive. It'll make those higher-quality reports lazier or turn them away entirely. My tolerance for filling in any form displaying stupidity is very low. Life is short, there are too many time demands, and once you see one inefficiency you know there'll be more after clicking 'Next' a few times, so you cut your losses as early as possible.
> it's an attempt to [...] provide extra clues to what they're talking about
As someone who spends a lot of time working on bug fixes, I had to admit that I'm on Microsoft's side on this one.
The system I support is complex, and there's often several ways to do the same thing. It's also heavily tailored on a per-customer basis, and the vast majority of people using it are non-technical.
As such, even relatively clear and detailed bug reports can often omit vital information, which then leads to some poor schmuck like myself going down a dead end.
Having a video which shows exactly who is doing the action, where they're doing the action, and how they're doing the action is often a major blessing!
OK software writers have shot themselves in the foot here. It is so easy using RAD to set up multiple ways to do the same thing e.g., onclick, keyboard shortcuts etc. Has each method of entering that event been tested? I would think not, the number of combinations is just too high. It could be argued that so long as the procedure call is tested, that's fine, but maybe the difference in coming from a modal vs non-modal form could defeat something important from happening, for example.
The number of times I come across situations where similar things can be done in similar, but not exact ways, is frustrating. Sometimes it's just a case of the amount of baggage accumulated by going in in a particular way that is infuriating, such as the alternatives to ncpa.cpl, for example.
What I think is ideal is generating a meaningful log from applications I write. Anything generated by MS makes my eyes glaze over. (I can recall Silverlight being particularly bad in this respect).
most of the time a poor schmuck can't duplicate what i've described it's because they didn't read the document. Web page with 2 buttons, one red and one green with an explanation on each. described the colors and what was written next to each button and which one to click on. Kept clicking on the wrong button and sent me the error code, replied that meant he was clicking on the wrong button. he wrote back "Oh, you need to click on the button that says '...'". Checked my email and i had told him exactly what was written on each button and which one to use. obviously he was color blind, but i hadn't just described the color but the text also. happens all the time, sometimes i suspect we are using different languages even though if it say "free beer" they all suddenly do know what i said.
I expect the problem the video is intended to fix is to help stop the flood of bogus AI generated "bug reports" which are flooding everyone with prominent projects.
People running AI systems are running their LLMs over projects and creating automated bug reports about non-existent problems. These AI systems can generate very plausible sounding reports which someone must spend considerable time investigating before finding out that the "bug" being reported does not exist. The people responsible for these AI bug systems are not checking their output before they send them in, they are just running the software in auto mode and firing off large volumes of whatever comes out.
A video would be a barrier to these sorts of reports because there is as yet no publicly available compendium of video bug reports which people can use to train their AI systems on to generate new ones.
Basically, the video requirement is a sort of spam filter, with AI generated bug reports being viewed as little more than spam in terms of their usefulness.
As to why people are creating these AI generated bug reports, I suspect that at least some of them targeting open source projects (I don't know the situation is for Microsoft) are using them to fine tune their AI models for use as coding assistants. A bug report is an ideal means of training. A known AI generated report is turned into a precisely known output in terms of code. You then feed that back into the model as very high quality training data and continue in a never ending feedback loop. False reports get rejected, and those rejections are also feed back into the model. If the overwhelming majority of reports are bogus, that doesn't matter because a negative report is also useful data to be fed into the model.
If the people behind the AI model had to do this themselves it would cost a lot of money to hire people to review AI output, see if they are real bugs, provide fixes to feed into the model, and turn them into training data. However, by using public bug reporting systems all of the very expensive labour for this is provided free of charge to the AI company. The costs are borne entirely by the people running the bug reporting system, who get flooded with huge volumes of AI generated reports they have to spend an inordinate amount of time sifting through before they can reject them.
This is one of the "benefits" of AI which society is having to deal with these days. Just like spam email became ubiquitous because of the low cost of sending out automated emails, many, many, other forms of communication will in future suffer the same fate due to AI, and bug reports are a form of communication. It's simple economics.
Having dealt with bug bounty reporting systems, the flood of low-quality submissions in several ways is a major problem, but a video would almost never help.
There are always a lot of terrible submissions when the possibility of money is on the line. I would get things along the lines of "your web server is running Nginx, Nginx has this CVE", which often was a different version or we had already patched it, but even when it wasn't, you don't get credit for discovering something someone else discovered. Maybe if it was something we had failed to update in a while, but if the CVE came out yesterday and we haven't patched yet, that doesn't count. Or we'd get something like "If you enter a bunch of junk in a query parameter, the page looks weird" which would count as insufficient input validation in the client-side script on that page, but that isn't a security issue and a lot of people would argue that it's not a bug worth solving. Crucially, those people are the people I'd have to go to with it and I have actual security problems to shout about.
In none of these cases would making them submit a video help. Someone in the hopes of a payout who doesn't understand what counts will have no problem showing the output of curl -I to say "look, Nginx, just like I said". They will find it easy to record their screen to show how typing gibberish into their browser causes the UI to go wrong. Neither video provides any more information than a proper report would. I suggested trying to reduce this by adding a box for possible consequences of exploitation, but AI can easily generate a few generic paragraphs on that topic, so that probably won't work either. At the end, there's little that can be done other than have someone do the boring slog through the submissions to find if there are legitimate ones in there, and if you're unwilling to do it, just take away the payment commitment; that will drop a lot of quantity right away.
While tariffs do act as a tax on consumption, businesses can usually adapt and implement them quickly and pass the cost onto consumers. A much bigger bugbear, and what this article describes are what are generally known as "non-tariff" barriers, which are usually related to compliance with various regulations, because instead of simply being a cost, you have to fill out forms, that can change at any time, and have to be checked by the importer.
Much fun is made of EU regulation – straight cucumbers, et al – but it's generally acknowledged that the drive for standardisation of product norms has helped cross-border trade enoumously in the last few decades. And the Brussels effect describes not only the adoption of such norms by other countries keen on selling to the EU, but for their own markets as example of not having to reinvent the wheel.
When the Daily Heil and their insipid counterparts refer to these "straight cucumbers" type rules (thought it was bananas), or "elf n safety gawn mad) are usually completely wrong, made up or deliberately designed to sell papers and distract people from the real shitty things that are wrong in the world (corporate greed, billionaire tax evaders, cronism).
"Straight banana laws are mad". The reason you don't see super curly bananas is because the supermarkets won't stock them, because the supermarkets conditioned you into not wanting them, because the supermarket realises they take up too much space.
The H&S bollocks 99.99% of the time is nothing to do with the law, more to do with insurance or the fact someone can't be arsed to do their job.
"Nobody at Microsoft has read The Good Soldier Švejk, quite possibly ... because none of them can read."
Although the contemporary antics of Microsoft and the Nation that produced it could have been scripted by Alfred Jarry.
"Post-literate?"
I suspect illiterate is more accurate. One doesn't usually describe mediaeval serfs as post-literate nor the Greek peasants listening to a recitation of the Odyssey following the late Bronze Age collapse.
Equally though, through the quantum pataphysics of time, where the past is the future, one might describe their exsitence as taking place in a pre truth, pre empathy, pre literate, and even pre Nazi population, enthusiastic to continuously re-engage in prior abominations, circularly, without having to care for their atrocious consequences, demonstrated in the actual former past of current reality (before rethorical railroading and self-service brainwash).
Futuro-passéiste reactionary regressivism frees the mind of such burdensome considerations, enabling "new" seeds of proto-fascism to take root, again, for the benefit of medieval obscurantists and torture-thirsty closet genocidal maniacs (imho).
How hard is it to just run a screen recorder when running through your check that the bug report is valid? Win+G > Win+Alt+R > Run through issue > Win+Alt+R.
Much quicker than throwing a hissy fit.
It helps to filter out bad reports and also helps when people do not have English as their first language as the Microsoft checker can see what was meant if the text is unclear.
Bug: When a serial device is connected over USB and sends a certain string, data can be injected into protected memory. This probably allows command injection, but so far, all I've achieved is causing a kernel-level crash.
Video through screen recorder: The video shows the desktop, then cuts out because the kernel crashed. How useful is that?
Video through external camera: It shows me plug in a USB cable, then the BSOD appears. How useful is that? For example, if I'm wrong and it's not what the device sent but a driver is wrong, how would the video help you identify this?
String to be submitted through serial port: You can test it for yourself and see whether it works and what conditions apply.
This was just one case. Many cases of security vulnerabilities either have no significant results that a video demonstrates or the video would just show the user doing obvious things already shown in their report. There is a reason why most bug reports have reproduction steps in them. A video could be useful in cases where reproduction steps are complicated, where the case requires things the person checking doesn't have, or when the results are hard to explain. If these conditions apply, the reporter may provide a video for extra data or the reviewer may have a good reason to request one in a follow-up. If those don't apply, making the video wastes the time of the reporter and the reviewer.
Looks like Recall ( https://www.pcgamer.com/software/windows/windows-ai-feature-takes-screenshots-of-your-desktop-every-few-seconds-and-i-cant-imagine-wanting-that/ ) v2.0 will continuously video capture the screen and keyboard, so create a last 10 minute video "crash dump", which Windows automatically uploads to MS...
Microsoft are currently the main marketers of this idea, and it would be rather an admission of weakness for them to not accept AI generated bug reports as we're told it can do everything. If it can, it should be perfectly good to do this mundane task. So let's see them add AI bug reporting into Windows, to demonstrate appetite for their own dog food.
I propose an addition to Copilot, so if a user experiences a problem they simply have to say "Computer not work! Make computer work!". As Copilot snoops on everything you do, it can then put together a detailed bug report and send it straight to the bug fixing team. Hell, the thing is supposed to be a coding whizz too, so they could ditch the bug fixing team and get the AI to fix the bug too! Why haven't they thought about this and done it themselves yet? It would be lovely to get them to admit that AI is not up tp the job.......
I don't think 'send detailed crash logs to Microsoft' is too far away from this, though the AI is on their side. It's just weird they want the crash logs for the (usually memory unsafe) code I wrote that crashed because of my dumb mistake I'm seconds away from fixing. What are they gonna do with that?
You may be more demotivated by the pointlessness of the demand, in which case Microsoft can expect fewer bug reports, an odd way to make software better. You may find more profitable ways to exploit your vuln-sniffing skills. If there are problems with poor quality bug reports, then teach people to do them better, improving productivity, instead of imposing a blanket tax.
This assumes that the actual motivation behind the change was to get better bug reports. Whereas the more cynical amongst us might say that it was intended to get fewer bug reports. I know which of those two categories I find more plausible.
"This assumes that the actual motivation behind the change was to get better bug reports."
Is there anyone who thinks MS is really interested in receiving more and better unscheduled bug reports?
I do not know of any upside of bug reports for MS' quarterly profits. Hence, I know of no reason for MS to actually want to receive unscheduled bug reports.
>Perhaps there are just too many submissions and this is an attempt to raise the barrier to entry.<
Perhaps there are too many bugs and UI "improvements" for users to accomplish their tasks.
Users unable and/or unwilling to write a clear bug report are unlikely to send in anything but a wiggly blurred video recorded on their smartphone - with the most important data out of focus and unreadable.
While I'm fully in agreement with the thoughts behind the article, I'd like to point out an error in the analogy, one that also seems lost on some of our highest political figures here in the US.
Tariffs are not paid by the exporter or supplier -- they are paid by the importer. If, in this case, Microsoft had required its own staff to generate a video of the bug report, that would be a sort of tariff.
The video requirement is more akin to the sometimes voluminous customs forms an exporter has to fill in to send something across a border or, in the case of Brexit, erecting a border where there previously was none.
It's adding unnessary friction to what should be a largely frictionless process.
It depends where we're drawing the line, but very occasionally. Generally, I think it's where the thing being demonstrated is in something very complex but is a small task, bypassing most of the complex stuff. For example, to show you how to get to and replace one component in something with a lot of them. You could do the same with a very long sequence of steps and diagrams showing each part of the process, but that could be harder to follow than watching someone perform the action. Someone intending to learn everything about the process would be better served by a manual, but someone trying to accomplish the one task might find the video more useful.
In most cases, the video is much less useful, even when it actually shows someone doing a task. When it's a video of someone reading instructions, it's often entirely useless even when the instructions are not.
If there is no shared vocabulary for the specific task in question, then a video can be better. Eg:
Move the ovoid thing with a wire, while it touches the desk, anf keep doing this until the white triangle-with-a-tail on the glowing surface is inside the rectangle around the word "OK" on the glowing surface, then place some weight on this part of the left-hand side of the ovoid using your finger until a sharp "tap" sound is heard and or felt
Once there is that shared vocabulary, you just say "left-click on the OK button with the mouse".
So I do sometimes appreciate videos explaining things that are way outside my experience.
One would, however, hope that Microsoft are employing people who understand what a terminal window is.
I had the occasion to make a warranty claim on my laptop with Lenovo. The cooling fans were sounding like something between Clarkson's fart and an F16 on takeoff.
Only a video would adequately demonstrate the sound. I included a quick shot of the serial number just to validate my claim.
Can't make a text description of that. Or can you?
If I was a security researcher, I'd so comply.
Sure here is my video, explaining how it is exploited in terms so easy, anyone could follow the video and recreate the issue. Just click this link to my public YouTube post to watch it.
It's the one titled "How to take over a Windows machine using an unpatched exploit"
Yes both Microsoft's video demands and Brexit are self destructive but they're not the same.
Brexit was an ideological choice, the possibility of damage was known, no one sane believed the politicians when they said post brexit would be a land of milk and honey but they voted for it anyway.
There are videos of little old ladies saying that they didn't care that Brexit would damage the economy.
One suspects that Microsoft's choice to demand bug vids was not ideologically driven but a choice of a junior exec who dislikes reading things.
The shame of this is that there isn't a credible alternative to M$ for many people and organisations.
M$ can continue to foist inferior bug ridden and insecure software on the masses without any real business or financial penalties.
I use Linux (Mint) in preference to Windows but many of my customers are totally wedded and locked in to M$ products. I'm not getting into the Linux good / Windows Bad / Mac Nasty debate, but even Mac users are running M$ apps.
It would be really nice if there was a genuine alternative to M$ crapware and MacOS prison but the Linux community is too fragmented for many less computer literate users to use as a genuine alternative to Win/MacOS. Most (non-computer savvy) people just want it to work out of the box and do whatever they want whether that be games, word processing, internet surfing or their accounts.
M$ will continue to produce crapware until there is a genuine and cost competitive alternative.
Ai is very good at translating between languages.
UK has a huge advantage from speaking English and AI will undoubtedly _reduce_ that advantage.
Human written code is written in more or less English. So are code docs, blogs and manuals. Aí written code does not require native English input. Understanding and correcting /debugging aí written code is easier than writing it.
Not sure the English hemegomony it it will last much longer. Especially if the Chinese are forced to develop on their own.
> Ai is very good at translating between languages.
This is the stuff that was quietly doing good work until someone decided to slap the “AI” moniker on anything that involved statistics.
Ie. There is no such thing as “AI”, it’s just a label for a huge field of differing programming techniques.
So nothing to do with the half-baked "negotiations" and a "deal" that meant Boris Johnson had to take the conditions demanded by Brussels or Labour. the Lib Dems, the Greens and a few Tories would vote it through regardless of the fact it stank worse than three-year-old dodgy fish?
Nothing to do with the (apparently) trivial matter of a global pandemic that killed millions and drove many businesses under?
Things were not great under the Tories, but how many more times can Starmer and his underlings plunder the Tory playbook and claim they dreamed up all these ideas they voted against when the Tories proposed them? Renaming Austerity doesn't stop Rachel from PR (or did you all forget she never actually worked in the Accounts team?) taking things further than the last lot managed, or Heathrow's third runway, or the Lower Thames crossing... And then there's the freebies like sporting and concert tickets
And isn't it funny that a Tory MP informs Parliament that the Office of Budgetary Responsibility has found no evidence for, and plenty of evidence against, Starmer's fabled "£220billion Black Hole" but the Mainstream Media seems to have conveniently missed that?
Brexit did not destroy the UK economy.
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