Microsoft never fails to disappoint
Huh. I guess Microsoft and I have that in common.
🥁
Lol! Be like GitLab instead:
1 - Be the underdog with good reputation in a market completely monopolized;
2 - Have the incumbent self-destruct by vibecoding its product and pushing AI above every other feature to its customers;
3 - Loudly announce that you are leaving your past good behavior behind, and that you are betting everything on vibecoding and pushing AI to your customers!
Just like Skype getting lapped by Zoom during COVID
If agentic LLMs are the prize, I’d be fine with losing.
That’s Microsoft. They got desktop PCs. They repeatedly failed to get mobile, they repeatedly failed to get portable, they never had embedded, they had fucking Skype at one point. They drink gold and piss nickel, Microsoft.
Don’t forget Vine was basically tiktok and they just binned it for no reason.
Well, I think Vine was too early. The videos were too short, could you imagine trying to put ads or sponsors in 6 second videos? So how do you monetize it?
Have all the code in the world
Create LLM for software development
Try to advertise it
Oops, no budget
Get acquired by Microsoft
Enshittification ensues
Everyone else loots your code repos
Microsoft tries to put your coding tool in everything
Coding tool injected into Excel
Into Word
Into Teams Chat
Nobody knows what this is even supposed to do anymore
Copilot now synonymous with Clippy
Yeah, can’t even begin to imagine how this happened.
And the ONE useful feature (summarizing meeting transcripts) is behind a paywall corporate doesn’t want to touch.
“What do you mean this 4 hour meeting could be summed up in a single, 100 word paragraph without losing any important context or decision???” - higher ups seeing the summarized transcript, probably
It is truly, deeply amazing how bad Microsoft is. Proton on Linux is FASTER than the actual directX it’s emulating is on windows. They got beat at their own instruction layer.
Proton (and Wine, what it’s based on) are not emulators. They are compatibility layers, it translates Windows system calls to native Linux system calls.
Or simply put: Wine Is Not an Emulator
WNE?
Ah, WINAE.
And they had Skype, which was practically a genericized trademark for “video call–” until first Apple’s FaceTime and then Zoom utterly took them apart.
And they had Office, which defined the product category so completely that it’s called “office software–” but then Google Docs took them apart on a molecular level.
Microsoft is the king of snatching defeat from the clutching jaws of victory.
Microsoft acquired Skype, did not create it. Then destryed it with its own hands.
They acquired practically everything they have. They haven’t created anything truly new since the mid-90s.
Very like Google, in that regard.
but then Google Docs took them apart
Tapping the breaks on that one.
Google Docs is very lightweight, but it’s also very stripped down. Word remains the first choice in word processors for 90% of the market. It (and Excel) are a big reason offices haven’t seriously begun abandoning Microsoft.
Not being able to paste a jpg of a screenshot into an Excel sheet embedded in a Word document is a feature.
I posit that the vast majority of users of Office would be just fine with any of the lightweight web app equivalents.
I think we’ll eventually see folks migrate to Jupiter Notebook style data entry and management. But they’re relatively new and not well-integrated into modern workflows.
For the time being, people are brought into offices and trained on Excel, get comfortable with Excel, and continue to use Excel because that’s how they spend the bulk of their hours. You’ve got networking effect and priors cementing these apps as the go-to for an entire generation.
100%
Excel is the one actual critical application because it deals with data (and formulae), data which is only useful when you maintain its integrity (hopefully you’re not storing dates).
Word is just a shitty application for text. Needs that can usually be adequately addressed by a plain text file (or plain text email). It thinks it’s a desktop publishing application (goodbye MS Publisher). Any tool that can do rudimentary text processing will suffice for the vast majority of use cases. One might have footnotes and some meta data that might be important, other apps do that well. Even markdown can do that.
PowerPoint, likewise, is a shitty slide show application. Any equivalent will suffice.
There’s quite a few other apps, I forget those.
Word is just a shitty application for text.
It’s fine. People love to shit on the app because Microsoft Bad. But it’s living at the rough midpoint of application quality, at least in it’s modern incarnation.
PowerPoint, likewise, is a shitty slide show application.
As a slideshow app, it’s another perfectly fine piece of software.
What’s disgusting about PowerPoint isn’t the app but the LinkedIn psychos who use it
They had Skype! It was the verb for video calling for god’s sake! How do you LOSE so BADLY so CONSISTENTLY and STILL have investors.
Sometimes I miss Microsoft Lync, but not often.
I made this comment as a joke but I actually do miss that chats could be in separate windows. s far as I know most major corporate (and non corporate, looking at you Discord) chat platforms don’t let you pop out windows.Edit: Okay, it’s just Discord that’s the problem then. It sort of supports it in that it will open the chat in your web browser, but then it does weird things like play the notification sound twice.
invent copilotRebrand ChatGPT
Ftfy
Naah, the initial GitHub copilot was something else.
I was on the Github Copilot Technical Preview (invite in my mailbox says July 16th 2021) and it was GPT-3 (not to be confused with ChatGPT which was introduced with GPT-4)
ChatGPT was built on top of GPT-3.5 which was GPT3 with the new deep reinforcement learning to make it more “conversational”, launched 2022. GPT 4 launched in 2023 and before the official launch there was “I have been a good Bing. 😊” Which was… checks notes… microsoft messing something up again
I see this as proof of how bad LLMs actually are. You have an AI trained on essentially humanity’s collective programming library. Languages of machines and computers. The result should be ungodly and near perfection. If there was any semblance of understanding in AI, it should be revealed in it’s capability to produce code.
Although… I can definitely see Microsoft thinking that their code is the example of perfection and training copilot on that rather than github.
should be ungodly and near perfection
Counterpoint: garbage in, garbage out
Your proof of how bad LLMs are is the fact that there are a bunch of other companies producing way better coding agents and coding models than Microsoft is? I’m not sure how that follows. Those other agents are good, that’s the point of this.
I would (probably not literally) wager that by “this” they meant *looks around at entire world*…
this
It’s wild to me that people are constantly complaining how “bad” LLMs are, because what, it can make mistakes or it’s not orders of magnitude smarter than the smartest humans???
It makes mistakes with an alarming frequency, all with the same confident tone of writing as when it says anything else. It’s wrong so often that you’d need to use another source of information just to confirm it, which defeats the point in using AI in the first place!
It’s not smarter than the smartest humans, or even AS smart as them, or even as smart as REGULAR humans. It’s not even smart. It’s a magic eight ball that sometimes has the correct answer by pure chance. No intellect. No reasoning. Just probability.
Also: It steals from just about everyone; it encourages suicides and mass shootings; it’s frequently racist in its outputs; it’s burning, boiling and polluting the planet; it’s being forced on people who don’t want it; and billionares are using it to manipulate people. Probably some other stuff I forgot to mention.
Just in case you weren’t sure why AI is bad.
Eh, no. If you think you can offload your mental burdens onto any single source, then that’s a you problem, not an AI problem. LLMs are still getting better, but I don’t think we should hold our breaths to them getting to a point where no verification is needed. If you asked a human subject matter expert an important question, would you verify or would you just assume not only that they’re right, but also that you understood them correctly?
But your post really embodies everything that is off with AI “critique” on Lemmy. One paragraph: LLMs are just random (unlike true intellect which somehow presumably don’t emerge from probabilistic phenomena?). Next paragraph: LLMs are racist.
To be clear, the way AI is being pushed is bad in many different ways, and you didn’t even mention the worst examples which in my mind would be how AIs are currently being used to kill people, for example it is likely that it helped the US to murder 170 children in Minab. But again, that’s not a technology issue, it’s an issue with how humans interact with technology.
LLMs are random. Its weighted randomness that frequently values racist outputs like whitewashing a crowd or calling black people monkies (to name two recent examples), but it is still random. That’s why you can ask it the same question twice and get two different answers.
Ever notice how AI defenders try to pretend the technology is better than it is, and brush past the countless failings and ethical failures inherent to the technology by condemning humanity? A bad toolsmith blames the worker, I guess. At a certain point, if the technology is only doing bad things, or doing things badly, it might just be bad technology.
Fucking linux nerds (that was for someone I just met on here). Anyway, yea, my company got three licenses for it, biggest waste of budget ever. I dunno what they clamped on top of open AI, but it’s just terrible. It can’t even parse a spreadsheet correctly.
