Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

After I've consented... right.... right guys!?

I really worry that the financial incentives for this are all wrong. MSFT has a massive incentive to obstinately push AI interference into every element of their products. They must show traction to justify the continued exuberance around AI in the stock market. But a tool like this just has so much scope to make the user experience worse. I know what I want to do on my computer, do I need some AI clippy to ask if I need help.

Windows has been on a strong downward trajectory for a while now - and that's been a conscious decision. In the last week I can remember my computer - unprompted - telling me the pollen count, a football score, 10 teas to sip for international tea day. That the FTSE Auto Index is down 3.24% (just go that now). None of that information is useful to me, I feel a strong sense of hatred towards windows now and I will be dumping this computer as soon as possible.

But that's me, the user, I'm not who Satya Nadella cares about, Satya cares about saying "300% annual growth rate of AI usage" so that their numbers go up and to the right and I think it's going to drive me away from MSFT products completely.

View on HN

I am not a Microsoft-hater per sé, but the amount of times I had to repeatedly tell them No on a question they had asked me before is staggering.

E.g. I know I don't want to use Edge, yet it feels like one of those nightmares where you fight a thing that won't die. It keeps coming back and this is just one of those things.

Since I now played Fallout 4 without crashes on my Ubuntu system, I can't help but wonder if my future will be completely Windows-free at some point.

Microsoft's AI chatbot will recall everything you do.

Except if it's a pattern that doesn't match what's perceived to be in the incredibly short term interests of Microsoft's shareholders.

Gmail pushes chrome as a default browser repeatedly too. No way to turn that off. The system knows you don't want it (having already said no 15 times) its just hoping the 16th time you will accidentally click yes. I suspect as search evolves AI will no doubt be better at sneaking in less accurate but more lucrative results.

At least Chrome doesn't come with unwanted shopping bars that bug you about coupons.

>No way to turn that off

At least you can hide those with a uBlock filter. You can't do shit if its baked into your operating system. (Aside from deleting the whole thing and installing an OS that respects your freedoms)

Thank you for this tip!

Yes/No became Yes / Please ask me later, and thank you very much (in a semi-hidden button in a totally unexpected position that doesn’t even look clickable)

And a few months later, it’ll toggle to “yes” automatically, due to a “bug”.

> repeatedly tell them No on a question

And you can't even tell it "No", it's typically "Maybe later" or "Not now". When will "modern UX experts" understand that "No means No".

We need to start shaming the actual UX experts and engineers who build these systems, rather than letting them hide behind the ranks of the giant evil megacorps they empower.

You should also shame the developers who implement what said UX experts design, the managers who force the developers to implement said designs, the product owners who ask the UX designers to come up with ideas that end up with those designs, the finance gremlins who create these incentives for the owners of these ideas, etc and at the end of this recursive floodfill blame algorithm you'll probably end up covering most of the giant evil megacorp in question.

Honestly i don't think you can put blame on any single individual - including the CEO - and have things change, this isn't a single player (or even single corporation, considering Microsoft isn't the only one doing these shady things) game.

> Honestly i don't think you can put blame on any single individual...

IMHO this is actually the biggest problem with modern application development, no accountability at all and everybody hiding behind somebody else instead of admitting failure, so all one can hope for is a poor compromise that's the average of many opinions (each single one of them even probably good, but not when mixed with random other opinions).

Funny enough, it's the same problem, everybody weaseling around a clear "No" ;)

that's the whole point of the ceo, to have somebody to blame.

And then the CEO gets replaced (with a fat bonus and an offer to work on another company a couple years later - if not right away) and the machine keeps on going.

Yes we can, and that's the only way things can change. I don't care whether that single individual was only a cog, because it was an essential cog to bring garbage over our heads. A cog with a name. Have you watched "Zone of interest"? It applies everywhere, unfortunately: regular people don't care that much about the evil they do.

It is not always a practical response, but just not using things that we do not like is also a way to make things change. Too often, as consumers, we accept bad behavior just because we expect it. It just teaches the companies (individuals, politicians, etc.) that they can keep pushing the things they want over what the consumer wants.

Blaming a cog (for something the machine wants anyway) is tantamount to scapegoating. The machine will change out the part for one that more or less serves the same purpose.

Let's not forget that the one doesn't preclude the other. There can be external pressure from customers, and internal pressure from cogs less and less enthusiastic about dark patterns. And at some point maybe maybe some regulation would step in, it's not unheard of.

If you blame a single "cog", the cog will become the scapegoat for your very specific blame and get replaced while all the other cogs, screws and levers will keep on having the same incentives and the machine will keeps on moving forward all the same.

Okay, imagine your computer downloads an update to, say, official MS Weather app. You launch it, and suddenly, there it is, a goatse, right on the main screen, as backdrop to the current weather. A quick search on-line tells you that you were not hacked, but this is, in fact, an official UI change from the last update.

Who do you think should be shamed for this? The developers who put it there? The UI experts who said where to put it? The UX experts that came up with this particular image as a way to maximize engagement? The product owners who told the team to add some extremely gross visual shock image to the app to boost engagement, and who approved that particular choice? The QA team that let it through? I'd say: yes, all of them.

You definitely can't put blame on a single individual here. There's lot of blame to be put on many individuals across the organizational structure. I picked an extreme hypothetical example to work like a contrast agent, to make it easier to see that there are parts of the org that are directly involved with some wrongdoing (vs. indirectly involved by e.g. setting incentives), and it's not absurd to want to put blame on all of them.

I think you should read the entirety of my message because what you wrote is basically what i wrote. You can't blame a single individual - or even a few people - you can only blame some amorphous blob of humans, like the entire company. But by doing that the blame is so diffused that unless it is something as egregious as the extreme example you gave, it wont mean anything (and in practice the only reason it might mean something is because it might become news and affect some shares value or whatever - i.e. things wont change because the people that make up the organization you blamed are all convinced it is bad to put goatse in MS Weather but because of the indirect effect your blame had - and the people in there can always go and add goatse-like stuff in other products, perhaps in other companies).

I did say "and engineers who build these systems"; and if you want to also blame managers, I'm all for that! I don't think your point about product owners merely asking for ideas (unless they asked for evil ideas) makes as much sense, though, and I don't even know who these "finance gremlins" are really supposed to be, but I am more than willing to believe some blame might fall on them as well.

Regardless, though: at the end of the day blame must fall on an actual people, as it is people who make decisions and it is people who take actions and it is only people who can stop any of it. It is utterly ridiculous that even if we were to create a law that said it was illegal to create a dialog box that said "maybe later", somehow we would merely fine Microsoft and hope that disincentivizes the behavior while all the people who push on the law and continually test its boundaries in new products don't really have to worry about it themselves.

FWIW, I actually will say I am more than a bit sympathetic to the argument that we should just blame everyone vaguely involved to the point where if we meet someone who works for these companies we should look at them with some side eye... but, the reality is that some people at whatever company we are talking about (here: Microsoft) are obviously more to blame for whatever evil decision we are dealing with than others, and so your attempt to pitch a tent so big that anyone not just merely vaguely involved with a decision but somehow in the entire industry should somehow be deserving of equal shame--and so we should oh-so-conveniently just not blame anyone at all--feels like a disingenuous attempt at distraction.

My point is that blame wont do anything, if you blame one or a few people they'll become skapegoats and the company will keep on going and if you blame too many people the blame will become so diffused it wont matter.

What needs to be done is to address the incentives that cause the above.

Honestly, shaming these people might be the only way things do change. Make it utterly embarassing to work for a company that does evil or questionable things, so that those who prioritise money and power over doing the right thing in life actually have to live with the consequences of that.

The fact is, too many awful things occur because people are happy to hide behind companies and organisations and say they "had no choice". The idea of "just following orders", which has been a sad human tendency for millennia.

You'd first need to convince them they're not doing the right thing in life and people have a tendency to not learn when doing things right comes in conflict with their income. And you also have to deal with people becoming skapegoats for blame when even CEOs get hired just for that.

> We need to start shaming the actual [individuals/regular people/employees]

Yes, do call out bad practice when you see it. But please don't be hostile to (any/some of) the employees "who build these systems". They're doing their job/s. They're not responsible for the giant evil megacorp that employs them. They don't "empower" the corporation. It's obviously not that simple.

What is simple is that Microsoft doesn't treat Windows users like vermin because some random UX guy said to. It's the other way around. The UX guy got told what to do. The engineers got told what to do. They all got told what the software was supposed to do and they tried to make the software to do what it was supposed to do, because that's what their job is.

And for this one example, the imaginary UX guy actually made a more correct choice. The "maybe later" button is likely the best design given the constraints. The user isn't allowed to truly say "no, never", so presenting the negative option as "no" and then showing the dialog again a bit later would be a worse UX than the "maybe later" button which at least does what it says.

Speaking of giant evil megacorps, maybe direct your hostilities towards them instead. Your issue is with them, the company. It's their software/behaviour.

> They're not responsible for the giant evil megacorp that employs them.

Of course they are! People aren't magically born hired to some giant company... they choose to--hell: they even fight to!--work there because they like making more money than they could at another job, in no small part as these jobs involve doing some evil things that extract more value from the world.

> They all got told what the software was supposed to do and they tried to make the software to do what it was supposed to do, because that's what their job is.

First off: who is telling them? Microsoft isn't some AI: it can't tell anyone what to do as it has no agency of its own... people had to make every single decision and take every single action that you are attributing to "Microsoft". They can't "all" be told what the software is supposed to do: someone--often someone low in the org chart, fascinatingly, but this sometimes could actually be someone high up--had to come up with the idea and do the telling.

Second: no... just because "that's your job" isn't an excuse to just do whatever your boss wants you to do, even when you disagree with it; that is a ridiculous level of blame shifting. If you don't want to be held responsible and you somehow can't quit then you should at least be helping in protest of whatever you are finding yourself doing.

> The user isn't allowed to truly say "no, never"...

I mean, why not? Well, because someone, somewhere--a person, with a name, whether they were high or low in the ranks--decided it was more profitable to take agency from users, and then a scant handful of other people were willing to go along with that decision in exchange for everyone being paid their share of the spoils.

(BTW: I would totally accept an argument that this button is a silly example to care deeply about. I'm not attached to the example myself: I was replying to someone else who cared about this and so am adopting this frame. There are much much worse decisions being made by Apple and Google these days.)

> I would totally accept an argument that this button is a silly example to care deeply about.

I'm not trying to make an argument about that feature. I think it's a good, overt example of Microsoft's attitude towards Windows users. There are many others like it and many are more and less offensive.

> I mean, why not?

You seem to have missed my point here (my bad). In the hypothetical scenario (the key points of which you are repeating) the imaginary UX team did their job well, by making the outcome of each choice more clear than they would/could have been and possibly even giving the user more than zero choice in the first place.

> Of course they are! [responsible for the company that employs them]

Of course they're not! It's obviously not that simple.

You seem to be making/repeating a "no one is holding a gun to their head" argument. There's not really any way to argue with that, because it's such an extreme point of view to hold. So I'll just say:

Yes, people make choices. I thought we all knew that. I also thought that we all knew that there are any number of complicating factors involved in any one of those choices. I think you should consider that not everyone has the power or opportunity to do whatever they want to at any point in time.

Here is a good, related article I think you should read.

https://emersion.fr/blog/2020/saying-no-to-unethical-tasks/

Thanks, I have read that before and skimmed through it again just now. It's a good article. Was there a specific point from it you wanted to highlight?

Your comment seemed to convey that employees are powerless over their own actions in the context of a large corporation when given unethical tasks, such as fulfilling the requirement of "the user is not allowed to say no".

People should not do things they believe to be unethical. You do, as an employee, have the autonomy to say no to unethical tasks. You are therefore not blameless when you perform unethical tasks, because you chose not to say no.

It's a great read, and honestly I wish something like that (or an Ethics class) was required in order to graduate with a CompSci degree. We all have agency and the ability to say "no" to implementing bad ideas, but if you suggest that on HN, they look at you like you have antlers growing out of your head.

I've quit jobs where I believed the project I was asked to work on were unethical, and that I had no other choice at the company. My first job out of university, I was asked to write code to cheat on an industry benchmark. I was 19 years old but I still somehow conjured up the courage to tell my manager that I would not feel comfortable working on that.

But you see senior engineers here with 20 years of experience just shrugging and saying "Well, boss told me to do it so I have no choice!"

Just my experience, but I absolutely had to take an ethics class to get my CS degree. Not just any ethics class either, but one focused specifically on real-world implications of the work software engineers do, with breakout labs to discuss various case studies and evaluate different choices based on established ethical frameworks. The textbook used was 'Computers, Ethics, and Society,' and I reflect on that course more than most courses I completed in college

> Your comment seemed to convey that employees are powerless over their own actions

The main point I was making is in the first paragraph. I was responding to what was essentially a call for random individuals to be identified and harassed because of their potential connection to some user-hostile software. I politely recommended/requested to not take such actions. I think if you have an opinion or concerns about a software/product/design/practice you should try to turn it into a meaningful contribution and express your thoughts in some way that you deem appropriate and helpful. If your preferred method of expressing your thoughts is shaming and harassing people, or other generally violent and harmful acts then you should keep your thoughts to yourself. The same applies to calling for others to act in such a manner.

> People should not do things they believe to be unethical. You do, as an employee, have the autonomy to say no to unethical tasks. You are therefore not blameless when you perform unethical tasks, because you chose not to say no.

You're not really disagreeing with anything I said (other than in intensity) but I'll respond to this directly.

People generally don't go out of their way to do things they believe to be wrong ("unethical"). People do tend to cross their own boundaries more easily when under pressure.

Different people have different levels of autonomy in life and at work. It's normal to find it difficult to say no to your manager.

Playing a part in some project does assign some responsibility to you. The smaller the part, the smaller the responsibility. Blaming an individual contributor for systemic problems with a project is unfair and a bad way to fix the problems.

Scale and context is important. Many/most things are issues of degrees. Applying your extremely rigid framework to a scenario with the scale of a single employee at Microsoft is bizarre/comedic.

Um, I didn't find that very informative. Did the feature get implemented anyway? Should everyone expect the same kindness from their management?

> They're doing their job/s. They're not responsible for the giant evil megacorp that employs them.

That sounds an awful lot like "I was just following orders" :/

I am sure they are more likely to listen to the person / company paying their wages.

It was bad enough during the Win10 upgrade cycle that these sorts of memes were going around a lot: https://img.devrant.com/devrant/rant/r_13598_vFV77.jpg

It has since become even worse. Forcing users onto cloud accounts, installing Zynga-tier crapware as part of routine updates and generally morphing into an advertising platform with a vestigial program loader attached.

You think UX experts decide these things? Everybody with a brain knows that these are awful anti-patterns - they are in the final product because it is intentional.

Unfortunely only when management stops having engagement KPIs mapped to their employees career path.

Your blame is misplaced on these (imaginary) "modern UX experts". Yes, there are a lot of posts on medium about "UX" (by people with job titles like "UX guru, copy writer") that amount to "draw the rest of the \S+ app". I have never seen one that says "screwing users over at every opportunity is good UX", though.

The thing about the "maybe later" option is that it at least indicates what is going to happen when you click it. By the time that dialog was being designed, the 'aggressively recommend the new, worse Edge browser' "feature" was already set in stone.

I don't think it's believable that any number of these UX experts at Microsoft would have the power to change something as big as how the new, worse Edge browser is to be "recommended" to users.

I could believe an employee with a UX-related job title strongly recommended that all such choices are worded to explain what they do.

Like you, I also wonder the same. Main reason for me to use Windows was the (almost) it just works. But it is starting to become annoying enough that the tinkering on Linux is the lesser problem of the two.

For what it's worth; since the Steam Deck came out the vast majority of my gaming library has become playable on my Linux desktop. The Windows partition was removed shortly after I got a Deck and realised Valve have done such an incredible job with Proton to make games playable on Linux. With my library of games, at least, I've not had any major issues that linger in the memory.

I switched my personal desktop to Linux a couple years ago from an MS "feature" of ads in the start menu search on insiders. My MIL has been using Pop for about 4 months now without issue after a phishing attempt.

My SO after seeing me watching a video on this feature is now ready to switch her laptop and desktop over after checking that the two games she plays regularly are supported.

And for some folks like myself that actually like Windows, and were even into the WinRT (the COM evolution not marketing term) bandwagon, the kind of decisions that leaves me shaking my head how management keeps torpedoing engineering.

Don't get me wrong. I have Windows 11 and I like most of what they did there, especially with powertoys and similar initiatives.

BUT. And that is a big "but": the first thing that greeted me on the joy of my new computer was a screen trying to gaslight me into creating a microsoft account. There was no visible option to just use a local account and I had to google a bit in order to invoke a terminal in order to get a local account.

I like windows for many things, including it's crazy good backward compatibility, especially when it comes to hardware. But shit like this makes it unreasonable to put a lot of trust into them for the long term.

And before we have to discuss the specifics here: this is just one example out of many where they don't treat users at eye-level, but like marks that you need to trick into liking you.

How about setting some positive incentives by showing me three really cool things that I couldn't do before if I use one of those microsoft accounts? Who knows, I might even make one.

But Microsoft seems to have forgotten how to use anything but bullying, monopolism and gaslighting to convince people to use their product.

> I can't help but wonder if my future will be completely Windows-free at some point.

Probably yes. :)

This is what free software is all about (to me).

> E.g. I know I don't want to use Edge

They know too. The fact that they "ask"[0] you what you want (sometimes) and won't accept your answer is disrespectful, to say the least. They know what you want and they are constantly and actively working against you, to manipulate or con you into changing your answer. And that's when they don't just force something upon you outright.

Of course, they never intended to accept your choice. The software is acting on behalf of the vendor, not the user. Other software that does this is often called malware.

[0] Calling what Microsoft does "asking" is being extremely generous...

Unity/Unreal engine is still subpar on Linux, Adobe suite doesn't exist, and IDE's... well, I pay for Jetbrains and it's great. But for other creatives, I don't see the jump happening anytime soon.

But sure, assuming minimal Wine wonkiness (nor pray not, some interference on WINE deveoplment by MSFT), I'm sure many gamers can transition to Linux and keep their library intact.

I'm guessing that Adobe may rely more on server/web hosted tooling in the future for photos, maybe not video anytime soon. I do wish there were better competing options, or at least closer options.

Game support via Proton has been relatively good though.

Microsoft doesn’t care about user consent. You can say “yes” or “not now”.

“No” is not a vocabulary word in Microsoft anymore.

The EU cares about user consent. So just like with Teams and Edge defaults, we're likely to see similar pushbacks on EU versions of windows.

It's how I still don't have copilot on my Windows install despite the update bringing it to windows came to the US months ago. Or how certain employee tracking features in Azure/Office 365 are not available in EU.

Where "not now" could be a euphemism for "I don't want to, but there always a hope that they will change their minds later and won't force me", or perhaps it means "I want to wait until everyone else has caved, and my laptop no longer functional".

I only continue to use Windows for work because it is mandated. All new work laptops come with at least one day of entertainment called "setting up". Where the myriad options are explored for the possibility of duplicity, breaking data collection and plain old contrarianism.

Probably wouldn't fly for a work laptop, but I've been setting up Windows VMs recently using the "AtlasOS" thing and it seems to strip out all of the MS crap properly:

https://atlasos.net

Not a long term user of those VMs though, so I have no clue how they behave over a period of months (etc).

Not just Microsoft, but all of Silicon Valley has a huge problem with end-user consent. If "The Software Industry" was a nightclub, it would be full of creepy guys hitting on women with "Do you want to dance? [Yes | Ask Me Again Later]"

> But that's me, the user, I'm not who Satya Nadella cares about, Satya cares about saying "300% annual growth rate of AI usage" so that their numbers go up and to the right and I think it's going to drive me away from MSFT products completely.

You might be surprised. Satya reads Hacker News and there is an internal Microsoft initiative to promote Microsoft tech here[0]:

> In fact this morning I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress. In some sense that at least basically said that we’re neck to neck with Amazon when it comes to even elite developers as represented in that community.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/events/fy-2019/earn...

Maybe just all this AI stuff pushes users towards Linux and we all can finally have "The year of Linux"

Are you talking about the same year when Linux will finally suceeed on the Desktop? :-)

Been waiting for 25 years now. Next year will be the one.

I just hit 4 years of using Linux as my daily driver and gaming on it. If you want to switch you can.

I don't want it. I rather like my Mac :)

Well, it'll never be the Year of Linux for you then, and that's ok. :)

Been using linux for decades, became the main OS on my desktop a couple years ago... and now my SO, after seeing this "feature" is switching even.

On an optimistic note, I think Linux will keep pace with LLM integration, because LLMs have a high coolness-to-code-required-ratio. Linux UI has always been half text-based terminals anyway. Also, if we get an open LLM that users can run on their own computers, it's just over, there's not much room for Windows to improve over that, and the incentive are very strong for Windows to be worse.

> After I've consented

Well LLMs have already stolen everything you ever wrote or posted online.

We told y'all to advocate for a very strict regulation of these things.

But no.

Instead: It's amazing. It's world changing.

Yes. It's going to change the world. For much worse. If you thought Citizens United damaged democracy just wait. Elections will be won by those with the most compute aka the most money everywhere.

People will die of this bullshit. I can't foretell how but they will. I mean, I haven't foreseen AI generated mushroom books but I am absolute certain this technology is deadly. Just wait.

Everything AI generated should come with an unskippable, extremely obvious huge warning of being AI generated and free of facts. If the AI companies won't add these then we should force them by regulation. But no. Hype instead.

> Well LLMs have already stolen everything you ever wrote or posted online.

I kind of expected that someone will steal something I write or post online, so this doesn’t particularly bother me.

How can anything you put online be "stolen" anyways? Its a 30 year old truth that you shouldn't put anything online you dont want anyone else to use... Long before LLMs were a reality. Why the fuzz now?

I do not recall any such truth.

It's a truism the Internet doesn't forget.

But copyright is copyright and copying some work just because it's published on the Internet is illegal, it always was and still is.

A law is only relevant if you are able to enforce it. I suspect if you arent a huge corporation, you'll likely have a hard time enforcing your copyright. So, the truth for individuals still stands. Dont put it online if you dont want it to be pirated. And huge corporations have a legal department protecting its interests, so tzhey dont need support from the public....

there are reddit and twitter for y'all to peddle snarky holier-than-thou soapboxing about le current thing

> We told y'all to advocate for a very strict regulation of these things.

> But no.

Simply legislation doesn't work that fast. Building up consensus about what needs legislation and how it needs legislation takes time.

> Instead: It's amazing. It's world changing.

People don't all think with a single mind. The people who find it amazing are not necessarily the same who complains about it.

Switch to Linux. It's long time overdue.

How much abuse can users take. Microsoft knows it's unlimited. Users have no alternatives. In the places where it is used, Windows still has no significant competition.

> After I've consented... right.... right guys!?

My two cents: no, the refusing option will be deep in the UI and surely you will need to use a combination of CTRL, ALTs, etc to make it visible before you check it out.

Many times it is more difficult to (securely, optimally, etc) configure a Microsoft Windows desktop than a Microsoft Server with Active Directory, and MS Exchange.

I think they dropped the bomb now so they could test the waters. If there's enough pushback, they'll slow down, make it opt-in, etc., but the goal is still even more spying.

Data mining the users of the most popular desktop operating system is a too huge profit opportunity to miss for ethical reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com