Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof OPINION It's been another shabby week for Microsoft, and a shabbier one for its users. We learnt that Windows 11's epic habit of trying to corral customers into paid-for Microsoft services just got worse with a low-rent trick. Remote Desktop got a bit more secure, which is good, but in a way that suggests not too much user …
No hyperbole, no sensational remarks, no snark.
Just the cold, hard truth. One that, increasingly, it appears that all people in position of power intend to ignore.
Well you can ignore the truth for a while, but it will come back and bite you in the ass. And the higher up you are, the harder the bite will be.
The pigeons are coming home to roost, Redmond, and it ain't gonna be pretty.
And you deserve all the shit you're going to get.
Yes, and wasn't it about ten years ago that MSFT got some contract for a "mission critical military software", and within a few weeks, it actually lost that contract, because all the
other smarter and more careful software companies got together and proved that the One Microsoft Way was a dIsaster for anything that JUST HAS TO WORK.
That's how I remember this. If I am wrong, please tell me.
Mostly I remember renting a Ford on 2 different occasions with some truly horrendous MS music/entertainment software (Sync). Basically never managed to play my phone‘s music, despite connecting.
One which got canned by Ford years later, but not before noticeably driving down sales on the cars equipped with it.
Quite frankly I don't see why any of this would surprise anyone. This was always going to happen when MICROS~1 acquired Github. Before the acquisition they had little or nothing to do with Github. Github was only used by developers of FOSS products that competed with Redmond's strangely expensive offerings. From the moment Redmond got its claws into Github, Github was doomed.
I could include a long list of products and businesses here that MICROS~1 acquired and then either killed instantly or let die slowly, but we all know them, so I won't bore you with redundancy. Github is simply the last in that list.
Worse still, TFA doesn't mention the incident whereby a Github patch labelled commits as being co-authored by Coprolite irrespective of whether that was the case as not. It was only fixed after being caught by the usual MS beta testers - the users. In the meantime a stack of commits are left as being wrongly claimed.
They are trying to shove unwanted stuff down your throat and then will require you to pay to get rid of what you do not want.Then, when you think you can control it, they will again take all your behavioural data and train an LLM with your procedural working where the opt-out is hidden under three layers of legalese and uses so many layered negations that any answer will be opt-in. Meanwhile, they will add more unwanted stuff you need to pay for to get rid of.
This is not about providing a service. It is about vendor lock-in, extraction of money with least effort and a middle finger you get for free(*).
(*) but if you actually look at the finger you'll receive an invoice for picturesque services rendered
In all of this you have to ask yourself what a modern Large Language Model AI actually is?
The best guess is that it is the social and intellectual reaction-space of a bunch of humans, averaged out into one product and pickled at one moment in time. It shows how this collection of humans would respond in text online to a set range of questions and when you start going beyond these questions the responses become ever more unreliable whilst remaining grammatically correct and eloquent.
There is a failure mode in most humans which is that an opinion or reply expressed neatly, calmly and seemingly confidently is often taken to be true and correct even when it is obviously completely bogus and erroneous. LLM systems have been inadvertently designed to be very, very convincing for humans even when the LLM output is demonstrably bogus. This belief in confidently expressed opinions combined with positive "convincer" relies is how the historical American Big Con confidence tricksters operated: provide a convincing scenario to the mark and demonstrate the operation of what you say will happen a few times before and pretty much any human will believe the tale told and risk large amounts of wealth on the con.
LLM AIs are con-men that we ourselves have developed for ourselves. I do hope that a few more people get badly burned by these systems, since it will discredit the damn things forever.
Not quite. There was an hilarious article in the Telegrope about a Spitfire fighter jet. Given that half of its readership are still fighting WW2 it didn't go down well. The obvious conclusion was the article had been AI slopped. Spitfire is a fighter plane and almost all fighter planes are jets leads to the high correlation in the LLM training data and the mistake made.
LLM's ability to deal with unexpected low or negatively correlated concepts maybe is one of its Achilles heels.
I momentarily misread that as pate† of foul old Ron of Ankh·Morpork's Canting Crew - the pong would be not be too dissimilar I imagine.
The comparision between Microsoft's cramming its customers AI slop and the production of a paste of diseased steatotic goose liver - foie gras shorn of the affectation of Quirmian avec - is a disgustingly appropriate analogy.
† head; particularly the crown.
Satya might need to trim a couple of feet off the overall length of his new yacht at this rate.
Shit flows downwards and inevitably lands on those in the lower parts of the pyramid.
I've been wondering for a few years what else M$ can do to totally and completely piss users off to the point at which some of the bigger corporations will start to migrate away from Win / MS products. MS appear to have recognised a growing level of dissatisfaction but what they are actually going to do about it in practice in not clear. And getting rid of the sort of people who are capable of improving the software is definitely not going to work even if MS think they can replace software engineers with AI slop.
Is there any site providing a full mirror of public GitHub repositories?
Of course, anyone could choose to mirror (privately or publicly) a set of (public) repositories from GitHub. But I wondered if any project is attempting to keep everything available for when Microsoft decide to close GitHub (or just trim it by removing repositories)?
I don't know about full mirrors of GitHub, but it's interesting to observe that the world seems to be forgetting what Git actually does. From the article:
The second course is less than gourmet. GitHub is turning up late and cold. One of GitHub's biggest fans, Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto, says that the platform is now so unreliable due to daily outages it can't be considered as safe for production. This is much more significant than it seems on the surface. Hashimoto is a five star code chef, serving up unusual yet delicious dishes in unlikely genres, such as terminal software with elegant and useful innovations.
GitHub, nor any other third-part hosted service like GitLab, probably shouldn't be part of one's production environment anyway. And of course, with Git, one can move one's repos anywhere and everywhere with ease. But what doesn't travel is things like the issue-handling & build sides of these tools, and it's these that are perhaps as important to owning / developing a software product as the source code is. So something like GitHub becomes production-critical only because its where one's issues, build, etc. are.
Actual source code - the whole history - is trivially portable and with care about submodules those too can be harvested and re-hosted too.
So, whilst Git itself solved the problem of repository failure / resiliency by making it simple for everyone to have their own copy of the repository and makes merging of separate copies a sane (or at least, semi-sane) task, the other problems remain.
A question then is: is it possible to build in an issue-tracking feature directly into Git, and make that mergable in a sane way? The answer is probably yes (with some work). Sorta like making Git-Bug a standard part of Git. [I'd not heard of Git-Bug until in writing this thinking to search to see if such a thing existed. And, it does! Git-Bug is quite intruiging]
How about some of the other features of sites like Github? What about user rights, e.g. you have your own copy of someone else's repo, you can make your own branches but Git won't let you merge into main in your own copy (because you've not got the keys). That's leading up to, could Git itself have a means by which pull requests are accepted remotely? E.g. you've sent a patch to the originator of the software as a form of "pull request" email, and they send back some key or other that is their acceptance of that. You apply that key to your own copy of the repo, and your branch can now be merged into main, and the two separate repos still agree on what main is. From what I can see from a quick search, all such user control is currently implemented by a server of some sort (GitHub, BitBucket, etc).
It would also be cool if Git could incorporate a standardised approach to build too. I'm not talking about just shoving a collection of vagrant* files into a repo. Quite often such things end up being local-network specific and meaningless somewhere else. I'm thinking more along the lines of something that is shaped in general terms and Git gets a description of the local environment from your local git configuration and can build you a build / dev / test / prod environment accordingly. That might be, "build Ansible into Git", though I'm not sure.
This is probably all some sort of pipe dream; there's loads more involved in "software development". It's just a pity that Git's universality as a means of everyone having a copy of the repo isn't matched by a unversality of how other aspects of software development are done. A lot of the rest of it is done in ways that amount to Walled Gardens, again.
*other environment specification systems are available
Microsoft has laid off it's ENTIRE QA workforce.
it now has AI-generated patches, and the QA is done by the AI itself (marking your own homework), which is why there are so many bugs in window 11, some severe enough to require a full OS reinstall.
Or as Sadarse Nutella put it "we are not an operating system company anymore, we are an AI company"
I wanted to stick with Mercurial and, fortunately, Heptapod does this using GitLab: the code stays open source and I don't have the headache of managing a server.
Microsoft's purchase of GitHub was all about the supposed network effects. Give them credit, this was also the idea behind buying Skype, which about 10 revisions later and being grafted onto SharePoint, has morphed into MS Teams, and is finally starting to dominate the video conference market for businesses.
ROTFL!
Really,
ROTFL!!!
Such a sentence shows why IT - the whole IT - is so bad now, far worse than it was thirty years ago.
The issue is not only MS - the whole IT landscape is enshittified beyond hope. But the Pangloss-like attitude around open source tries hard to hide it, despite the evidences.
Moreover, any free service will decay in time - more users, more expenses, less will to feed freetards.... if revenues no longer come from exploiting them.
It is hard to be overly optimisitic about the OS that runs most of the Internet. OTOH the Pangloss-like quality is more evident today among the proprietary enshittifiers.
Free services that rely on sponsorship and donations tend to endure OK, for as long as the service is worth having. "You are the product" is a lousy way to encourage such community solidarity.
Other than that, you are dead right.
I am making my way through Bullshit Jobs, a book which should be required reading at every business school. In it, David Graebel highlights the rise of "managerialism," which is the growth of the useless layer of managers at the expense of people doing work, which has come to permeate both public and private organizations which grow to a substantial size. It now strikes me that the rise of bullshit jobs is a precursor to enshittification: when the management class and their associated toadies, flunkies, and brutes exceed the people doing useful work, enshittification ensues.
This post has been deleted by its author
Sure; but some of the remainder, and those gullible enough to hire on after that, managed to develop enough understanding to keep MacroSlop limping along until now.
It's sort of what happened with the run-up to WWI and the appearance of the "Spanish Flu," which after a century was recapitulated by the financial disasters of the last decade and the appearance of COVID; just as the world didn't learn how to handle financial fraud and the principles of social health management, MacroSlop hasn't learned by its experience with the internet's rise how to avoid shitting itself and its customers/victims.
All this was obvious ten years ago. This was all predictable and predicted (except how instrumental AI would be). And now especially since it's gotten this shitty and there's no end in sight. It's only going to get worse as long as Slopya's in charge.
So just move to Gitlab or equivalent. Or you could (gasp) host it yourself. Of course you won't get all the cool associated stuff on a website, but at a previous job we did just fine with 10 people using TortoiseGit and a git server I set up (with appropriate backup, including off-site encrypted of course). We had builds and auto-test with Jenkins, Redmine for bug tracking. You could also use Gitlab self-hosted, JetBrains YouTrack - and either of those would give you tighter integration again and are even free for small teams. There are lots of options for on-premise only.
Of course I realize that the problem, as usual, is probably the incompetent f@#$wits in your management and executive suites. Nothing you can do about that, and sorry.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, Github was intended, like the software it's designed to support, to be an open-source repository system, originally for maintenance of Linux, not a corporate-owned system. Whether or not a user chooses to run it as a local repository or one hosted in the cloud is not relevant to what MacroShaft has done to it.
In the real world there always is a central, golden repository.
For example, the one that Linus Torvalds pushes to.
The genius of distributed version control is that everyone who wants to can have a copy of that golden one. That means it can vanish and a new one set up, and all it costs is a few seconds pointing your local copy towards the new shiny. No data will be lost.
This is of course why GitHub et al added those extra things around git - the PR and issues discussions, wiki, Actions etc. Those are the things that keep projects trapped in fluffy handcuffs.
> Git was designed from the start as a distributed system. I'm probably missing something, but the whole idea of a centralized repository seems like missing the point entirely.
Yes, any git repository is the entire repository. So the one on my laptop is just as complete as the one on Github or Gitlab. But like @Richard 12 said, the one you point people at is 'the' repository.
And with Github/Gitlab it's also where you point to downloads, have the bug tracking, make announcements, etc. etc.
People are just not wired for complete decentralization, they want a place to go.
It's just the Microsoft way. Excellence is not on the menu. Dependency is the goal.
On a slight tangent: The more decoupled we become from the creation of our tools (software, for example), the less in control we become. This would lead to a kind of "Idiocracy", and eventually being passengers watching the word go by. And by "we" I mean humanity.
Installing FoD from an offline source can break Windows Update.
Only way to resolve is in place upgrade.
UUP was supposed to resolve this irrespective of the use of WSUS or WU. But then WSUS is deprecated so the resolution will never happen.
The secure boot certificate update also seems like a “you’re on your own” experience.
Change this registry setting but you might get bitlocker screens. Or you can rely on MS CFR (Controlled Feature Rollout) which won’t update a device unless there is “high confidence”.
It’s poor decisions again and again. The issue is vendor lock in. So much software requires Windows.
Can Windows 12 just be enterprise only and built for speed? That would be the dream. Every organisation is still going to be paying for E3/E5/E7 etc so why is it such an issue to have an OS that is stable and fast?
